"He told them, “The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables" Mark 4:12
So, now, Jesus is back at the lake. We left him last time, sat on the floor, with a crowd sitting all around him and he’d been talking to them in parables, Mark told us (3:23).
Now he’s at the lake and there’s a crowd again. And Jesus wants to teach them again.
The crowd was very large, so Mark says in verse 1, ‘he got into a boat and sat out on the lake, while all the people were along the shore at the water’s edge’.
Can’t have been easy, but that’s how Jesus did it.
And Mark specifically says, ‘He taught them many things by parables’ (v.3).
Not For Clarity
You’ve probably heard the old Sunday school definition of a parable – ‘an earthly story with a heavenly meaning’. Have you heard that? Well, that’s ok, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.
That definition makes it sound like the parable is a helpful aid to understanding. But that isn’t Jesus’ intention behind teaching in parable form, is it?
He tells his disciples the reason for his parabolic approach in verse 11. ‘He told them, “The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables [here’s why] so that, “they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!”’
Jesus says to his disciples, ‘you have received the secret of the kingdom, but - by contrast - those on the outside haven’t received the secret’.
They hadn’t because Jesus wrapped the secret up in parables.
That’s what the parable is for. It is designed to conceal the secret of the kingdom from certain people.
So that, even though they hear the parable containing the secret they don’t understand the secret.
In other words, there are people in this crowd who he does not want to be forgiven.
If that weren’t the case, he wouldn’t tell the secret in parables.
There were people in the crowd who were so anti the good news of Jesus; so, rejecting of God’s messiah - we saw them back in chapter 3 attributing the work of the Holy Spirit in Jesus to the work of Satan - that he didn’t want them to understand and turn and be forgiven.
Even though Jesus came to save the lost and he didn’t come to judge - against the hardest of Israel, Jesus spoke in such a way that they couldn’t access the secret of the kingdom of God.
That is to say, they couldn’t access forgiveness.
Forgiveness is what the secret is. Verse 12 makes it clear.
What don’t they perceive? What don’t they understand? Answer: the secret of the kingdom. But if they did - perceive and understand - they might turn and access it. They might turn and be forgiven.
So, Jesus isn’t using earthly stories with heavenly meanings to bring clarity here. He’s using them to bring confusion.
The question then this morning is going to be: have you received the secret of the kingdom of God?
Or, to put it another way, have you received forgiveness through Jesus?
And to answer that, we need to engage with Jesus’ parable. But not justhis parable! His explanation of the parable too.
To us he has seen fit to give the meaning of the parable too!
The Difference Between Hearing and Not
Before we go there though, there’s another question: It’s this: What makes the difference between hearing and understanding?
Or to put it another way: What makes the difference between seeingand perceiving?
I’m getting both of those from verse 12.
Or to put a third way: What makes the difference between turning and not turning?
Receiving forgiveness and not receiving it?
Because, Jesus is really saying there are two types of people - insiders who have been given the secret, and outsiders who haven’t.
If we say that it’s the application of the mind that makes the difference, because verse 12 says, ‘though hearing they do not understand’ - so it’s the understanding that makes the difference. Then, I think we miss the point.
Look at verse 9. ‘Then Jesus said, whoever has ears to hear, let them hear’.
Evidently these ears are not deaf ears - they are, after all, ‘ears tohear’.
So, then you’re like, ‘well of course Jesus: ears that hear will hear. Why say, ‘let them hear’?’
And the answer is because he means us to understand by ‘let them hear’ something more than the bones knocking against each other, sending the signal to the brain to process the sounds.
What he has in mind by ‘let them hear’ is something that’s going on in the soul. He means, let them hear with the ears of their soul.
He means let them believe what they hear.
‘Whoever has ears on their head, let them believe what they hear with their hearts!’ is what he means.
So, the difference between seeing and perceiving is whole-hearted belief.
The difference between hearing and understanding, is faith!
The difference between turning away and turning towards, is the soul being mesmerized with Jesus.
The difference between being forgiven and not being forgiven, is the soul cleaving, and clinging, and heartily welcoming Jesus as Lord, and Saviour and Prize! That’s the kind of hearing Jesus has in mind.
If you’ve got that kind of hearing you’re going to hear the parable of Jesus with your ears, and you’re going to embrace it with your heart – you’re going to believe it.
So that’s huge as we turn our attention to the parable because, Jesus prefaces the parable with an command to us: ‘Listen!’ (Verse 3).
And Jesus postscripts the parable with ‘whoever has ears to hear, let them hear’ (verse 9).
And all the way through the parable the emphasis is going to be on the impact that listening has on the destiny of every human being.
If you were profoundly deaf this morning - which there is one person here who is - it makes no difference so far as Jesus in concerned! What counts to him is hearing with the heart – faith. It’s not about hearing with the head!
Ground That Receives, But Does It Respond?
So, let’s go to the parable and pray God, we hear aright. There is some sense in which this parable of the sower - or we might say, ‘of the soils’ - is a basic one.
Jesus says to the disciples, ‘Don’t you understand this parable, how then will you understand any parable’. So, Jesus shows us, in some sense, how his parables work in the explanation of this parable to his disciples.
In the parable then, there’s a farmer - who, for the immediate audience is Jesus. And the farmer sows his seed, which according to verse 14 is the Word of God.
We’ve got to see that. The seed is the Word.
As the seed - the Word of God - gets scattered, it falls in various places. It falls on a hard path; it falls on shallow or rocky soil; it falls among thorns or brambles; and it falls on good ground.
Now according to Jesus’ interpretation, each type of ground represents a type of person.
Jesus had in mind 4 types of people, upon which the same seed of God’s Word falls.
And how does it fall on them all? It falls on them by them hearing it. God’s Word is full of words, and you hear them. At least in their oral culture they would hear them. We tend to read them. It doesn’t matter the point is the same.
The question is: how will God’s word be received by each type of person?
The hard ground doesn’t receive seed at all, it just sits there on top and the birds swoop down and eat it. Jesus interprets, saying, verse 14, ‘As soon as they hear it [that is, the Word], Satan comes [he’s like the birds] and takes the Word away that is sown in them’.
Notice, that the word is sown in these people. It’s not on the outside, it’s on the inside. The word is landing on the soul of this person.
But for this type of person there’s no penetration. The Word goes in but has no effect. No sooner is it heard with the ears of the head, than Satan comes and snatches it away so that it has no effect on the heart.
To put it in the terms of verse 12, there is no faith and therefore there is no forgiveness.
The second type of person is like shallow ground or rocky places.
The seed of the word lands on them too. And according to Jesus in verse 16 there is an effect here. The seed doesn’t sit on the surface this time, it goes in.
Jesus says the soul responds to the Word of God ‘with joy’. The soul says, ‘yes, I love this - what I’m hearing is precious to me’.
But there’s a snag. Verse 17, Jesus says, ‘since they have no root, they last only a short time’. A shallow plant gets scorched by the sun.
And a person with a superficial appreciation of God and his messiah Jesus - as they are revealed in the Word – as they encounter trials, wither away.
Persecution and trouble ‘on account of the word’, Jesus says.
On account of the Word with all of its narrow ideas and counter-cultural demands.
Demands like, ‘Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which you must be saved’. That’s narrow!
And, counting the cost that following Jesus brings, they fizzle out.
Then there’s the third kind of person who is like weedy ground. The seed of the Word falls on them. And it also goes in. It even grows according to verse 7. But the brambles grow up around the plant and serve to choke it to death.
Jesus interprets his own picture for us. The brambles are threefold: verse 19 - ‘the worries of life’; ‘the deceitfulness of wealth’; and the ‘desire for other things’. And the result is fruitlessness.
The fourth soil is good: deep, fertile ground. The Word takes root in this kind of person. It isn’t choked, it isn’t scorched, and it isn’t eaten by birds. The plant grows up, healthy, and produces abundant fruit.
In fact, it’s a farmer’s yield - a return on his investment. ‘Thirty, sixty or a hundred times what was sown’, Jesus says in verse 20.
Three Empty Grounds and One Fruitful Ground
Now what conclusions should we draw?
In order to answer that question, we need to look at this story from the point of view of the farmer.
What is it a farmer is looking for?
Well, he’s looking for produce right? He’s looking for yield. He’s looking for fruitfulness.
No farmer goes out scattering seed, hoping that equal measures will fall on these four types of ground. He wants 100% of his seed to fall on ground that produces - that is, on good ground.
He would be mad if he thought the other three grounds had some meritto offer.
Hard ground produces no plant whatsoever. Before there’s even a seedling, the birds have eaten his good seed - no fruit.
Shallow ground produces plants with no root that die in the heat of the sun - no fruit.
Weedy ground produces plants that get choked up, wither and die - again, no fruit.
If the farmer allows three quarters of his seed to land on these three grounds, he’s going to be bankrupt.
In that case he will sow more seed than the yield from the one quarter seed that falls on the good ground and produces fruit.
Therefore, Jesus is in no way telling us that there is any merit in any of the three types of heart that do not finally produce a crop.
On the contrary, he’s telling us that such unfruitful people are the kind who are ever seeing but never perceiving. The kind that are ever hearing but never understanding. The kind that never turn. In short, the kind that are never forgiven.
The only type of person who is forgiven is the type who does what verse 20 says. They ‘hear the word, accept the word, and produce a crop from the word’.
‘Hearing’ happens with the ears of the head.
‘Accepting it’ happens with ears of the heart and means: embracing it, believing it, rejoicing over it.
And ‘producing a crop’ refers to the effect that the Word has on that person.
The effect starts with forgiveness through Jesus for sure, but then it produces ongoing transformation into the likeness of Jesus. It means that over time the Word shapes a person in terms of righteousness and holiness.
The farmer - Jesus - is looking for his glory to be displayed in the world, through his people.
As they hear and believe the Word, they become more and more conformed to him in the attitude of their minds, in their behaviours, in their desires, in their speech, in every faculty of their being. And they shine for Jesus in the world.
That’s the fruit he’s looking for.
Which Kind of Soil Are We?
Now clearly, with so much at stake, we surely want to know which kind of soil we are.
It would be no good thinking we were the good soil when in reality we were the shallow soil.
Or thinking we were the good soil when we were the weedy soil.
The results of that kind of misconception would be disastrous - eternallydisastrous.
The fact that a heart can be so easily deceived is grounds for sobernessin all of us and I think that is what Jesus is teaching us.
He graciously warns us like the other New Testament writers warn us. Warnings like this: Hebrews 2:1, ‘We must pay the most careful attention therefore to what we have heard so that we do not drift away’.
And Hebrews 6:4-6 ‘it is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness of the Word of God and the powers of the coming age and who have fallen away, to be brought back to repentance’.
In both those passages the Word of God is addressed in the context of falling away.
Hebrews 6 is saying that the Word of God is so precious (like the farmer’s precious seed) that someone who drifts away from Jesus, having received it, can’t be brought back. Their condemnation is their exposure to the goodness of God’s word.
And Hebrews 2 is saying that the Word of God is how a person avoidsdrifting away from Jesus in the first place.
And that’s exactly what Jesus is saying in his parable. The person who produces no fruit in spite of the good Word that falls on them, will not be forgiven.
And he’s saying, the person who appears to be growing up like a fruitful plant, remains that way and produces a crop by hearing and believingthe Word.
So, here’s the challenge for all of us who profess Jesus. We can so learn to rely on our profession that we subtly and inadvertently leave off reliance on Jesus altogether.
And if that happens, we are in deadly peril.
No one ever got saved by their profession. Everyone who ever was finally saved was saved by their perseverance in faith until the very end - by their never drifting away.
It’s simply terrifying to think how many will go to the grave only to find their faith scorched by the trials and tribulations of life.
Terrifying to think how many will go to the grave to find their faith choked by the pleasures of life.
And when they stand before Jesus - not in a boat, but in his full glory and majesty - saying ‘Lord, Lord’, he will say to them, ‘I never knew you’.
And it is frightening to think how lackadaisical Christians can be in their striving for righteousness and holiness. As if their love of pleasure and their counting the cost for Jesus mean nothing whatsoever. They don’t! Mean nothing! They mean they’re not what they think they are! Judas, Demas, Simon the Sorcerer – they all looked like good plants, and they all yielded nothing and perished because they loved pleasure and wealth! They were choked to death!
Why don’t Christians hear? Why don’t Christians hear what Jesus says? Perhaps because they haven’t got ears to hear.
He’s telling us, ‘wealth is deceitful - it will have your heart! Don’t give in to its allure’.
He’s telling us, ‘all your worries about life are a sign you’re clinging tolife as your hope, and it will leave you choked to death. Don’t give in to its seduction’.
He’s telling us, ‘all your desire – that’s a treasuring word – desire for other things means your heart treasures corruption - it doesn’t treasure Jesus’.
He’s telling us, ‘beware you’re not self-deceived!’
Did you notice you can be deceived by both trials and pleasures?
Trials subtly tell you he’s not worth it. Pleasure subtly tells you he’s not worth it.
This life whispers to us: ‘Avoid trials and enjoy the comforts of life. Embrace the pleasures of life and avoid the exacting requirements of obedience and pleasing God’.
In short, I don’t think verse 17 means you’ll know if you’ve been scorched or choked because the effects of God’s word will wear off quickly.
I don’t think you can take comfort there.
I mean they might do - maybe.
But they might take a lifetime to wear off.
A lifetime is quick. James says ‘our lives are like mist’ - born in a moment; evaporated a moment later.
Job says, ‘his days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle’.
People who last only a short time may be deceived a lifetime because they saw a shoot spring up that they called a profession.
So, final question then: how do you persevere? How do you produce a crop? How are you not deceived?
Well, number 1, you pray.
That might sound strange given Jesus’ emphasis on the Word. But just think about what Jesus is saying.
He’s saying, ‘you’ve got to hear with your soul. You’ve got to love his Word. You’ve got to embrace it. You’ve got to receive it, with joy. You’ve got to say ‘amen’ to every demanding detail of it. And you’ve got to receive it like that, because you believe that his glory is revealed init, and in your obedience to it’.
And you can’t do one iota of that without him giving you the faith to receive it in that way.
So, we have to start with prayer. We have to begin by asking for the miracle of a hearing heart.
Second, we need intentionality. God works by means, as well as miracles. The hearing heart is a miracle. The picking up of God’s Word is means. The making time for it in your life is means. The ransacking of it for life-changing treasures is means.
All that, takes intentionality. So, you have to have that too. When you come on Sunday morning you have to come to hear.
Third, you’ve got to take God’s Word and measure your life against it.
And what you’ll find when you do that, is lots of messy holes. And some good things worked in you by Jesus already. But as you go on through your life, you keep measuring against God’s word.
This is what the Apostle Paul tells the Corinthians to do in his second letter. He says, ‘Examine yourselves to see whether you are in the faith; test yourselves. Do you not realise that Christ Jesus is in you - unless, of course, you fail the test?’
So, you do this. You go on measuring your life against the Word of God, looking for alignment. And over time looking for growth.
You’re looking for signs that your faith is real and not sham. You’re hearing God’s Word confirm to you, by the Spirt of God, that you are really sons and daughters of God.
So, pray first, act second, test third, and finally rejoice. Even the heart that ends up scorched received the Word with joy. You’ve got to find a way to cultivate joy in God’s word.
And in my experience the way that happens is by pursuing, relentlessly, the glory of God in the revelation of God.
Every time you go to the Word you go with excitement and eager expectation that you will encounter more of God in those pages.
You go there ready to be like Moses - ready to have your face glow with the after-effects of meeting God’s glorious worth in the pages of his book.
And you come away happy in him. More happy than the deepest sadness this world can bring to your door.
God is so excellent and so all-encompassing that you can never exhaust his glory.
That means every time you go to his Word, you can expect to encounter glory and majesty, the likes of which this world cannot offer!
That is the antidote to choking pleasure. And that is the salve for scorching trials.
댓글