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Journal Entries

Mark 4:1-9--The Parable of the Sower

6/24/2023

 
Mark 4:1-9
English Standard Version

The Parable of the Sower
4 Again he began to teach beside the sea. And a very large crowd gathered about him, so that he got into a boat and sat in it on the sea, and the whole crowd was beside the sea on the land. 2 And he was teaching them many things in parables, and in his teaching he said to them: 3 “Listen! Behold, a sower went out to sow. 4 And as he sowed, some seed fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured it. 5 Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and immediately it sprang up, since it had no depth of soil. 6 And when the sun rose, it was scorched, and since it had no root, it withered away. 7 Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain. 8 And other seeds fell into good soil and produced grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirtyfold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold.” 9 And he said, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

This is one of the most famous of Jesus' parables that He used to explain a spiritual truth to the listeners by means of telling them a story that they could connect with.  In this agrarian society, they would have been familiar with buying and scattering (sowing) seed, but they would have found this story odd that the farmer did nothing to prepare the ground to be ready to accept the seed--he didn't remove the rocks, he didn't check the depth of the soil to see if more top soil needed to be added, he didn't remove the weeds ,and he didn't plow to make furrows for the seed (usually you carefully plant in straight lines so that the plants are a certain distance apart).  All of this would be odd to the listener as they knew how plant their crops and they would think ,"This person is doing it all wrong," but Jesus had their attention.  They knew that under such circumstances very little of the seed that was sown would fall on "good soil" that would produce a crop.  Some of it would fall on the hard soil of the path where the birds would eat it or it would get trampled underfoot and destroyed, others seed fell on "shallow," rocky soil that let the seed take root, so it died quickly when it couldn't get water and other nutrients through its roots, and other seed fell among the thorns and weeds that took all the nutrients from the soil and robbed the good seed of access to sunlight and choked the life out of it.  Only a small portion of the seed was "fruitful" and yielded 30, 60, or even 100 times what was planted (part of the process of the fruit growing is that it makes more seeds that will produce more plants, and so on).

We'll talk about the interpretation of this parable next time as that's how the ESV separates it (I don't like separating the interpretation from the parable so much as many take license to only read the parable and then come up with their own interpretation, so I encourage you to read ahead and see what interpretation Jesus gave).  It's important to see that Jesus only gave the interpretation of the parable to the apostles--though the teaching was given to the multitudes, only a select few had the teaching explained to them so that Jesus was sure they understood it.  Those few men were the ones entrusted with the teachings of Jesus not only to write them down for us, but to teach them to faithful men who would in turn teach them to faithful men.  Jesus is demonstrating His parable at work here as the seed was spread over the multitudes, but only a few men understood it and received it (even among the Twelve, there was at least one that rejected it).

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    Daniel Westfall

    I will mostly use this space for recording my "journal" from my daily devotions as I hope to encourage others to read the Bible along with me and to leave a legacy for others.

    Occasionally, I'll also post some true blog/opinion pieces focused on what the Bible has to say about current events or the importance of a particular spiritual discipline, or something more topic-related to orthodoxy (right belief) or orthopraxy (right living).  You can also find those blogs over at Faith and Culture.

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  • Home
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