Mark 4:1-20 – Wisdom for Those Who Will Hear It – 2026 Oct 22
The Lord Jesus at this point in His ministry on Earth introduces parables as a teaching tool. The meaning of the English noun is: a comparison; a similitude; specifically, a short fictitious narrative of something which might really occur in life or nature, by means of which a moral is drawn. It is described in more than one dictionary entry as a didactic tool, meaning a tool used for teaching or instruction.
The parables of Christ seem to be of such a nature that those who are truly His can learn from them, and the rest of the world runs around searching for their meaning but never quite arriving at it. The inside baseball of the Holy Spirit living in the real believer is what makes the difference here. This is slightly in advance of our Lord sending His Holy Spirit (He is called the Spirit of Christ in Rom. 8:9, Phil. 1:19, and 1 Pet. 1:11) to indwell us and be our guide and guarantee of a future hope, so our Lord still has to explain the meaning of the parable to His disciples. However, they DO get the point, as much as they can before the Spirit indwells them.
For those who reject Christ, no amount of searching of knowledge will ever help the individual to arrive at the truth of the Scriptures. Such an individual would be “ever learning and never coming to the knowledge of the truth,” as it says in 2 Tim. 3:7. It reminds me of how Wiley Coyote runs off the cliff and his legs are running but he’s not going anywhere but down. Don’t be Wiley Coyote.
Instead of simply spinning your wheels, turn to Christ in repentance and faith. If you do that, God will send the Holy Spirit to indwell YOU and save you from His coming wrath. With that said, I broke down the text as follows. I titled the chapter:
KV9: Wisdom for those whom Will Hear It
9: And He was saying, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”
1-9: The Parable of the Sower
10-12: The Point of All Parables
13-20: The Parable of the Sower Explained
The key to this text is the understanding that Jesus has now begun to reject those who have already rejected Him as the Messiah by saying things in such a way as only those to whom the message is addressed will truly understand His message. Those who reject Him, He will reject in kind unless they repent and believe in Him as the Saviour of the world. An example of this is Saul of Tarsus. He was on the road to Damascus in Acts 9, breathing out all kinds of threats of violence and doom toward followers of Jesus, and then Jesus met him, knocking him off his theological horse, so to speak. He repented of His sins during his subsequent blindness when a follower of Jesus named Ananias laid hands on him and the scales literally fell from his eyes. From that time on, he preached Christ crucified as the Messiah, believing in His resurrection. Saul of Tarsus at some point began to be known by his Roman name of Paul, and his apostleship became evident by his works of Power through his humble acts of service to Jesus. (Contrast the fake apostles of today who claim they raise the dead and heal the lame, but no one, in a time where everyone carries a high-definition recording device in their pockets, ever seems to get any proof on video. This is a matter of fact, not a matter of so-called “faith,” by which they mean credulity.) Come on guys, we are all waiting…show us the proof…oh, that’s right, you can’t. Well then, repent and believe the real gospel about the real Jesus, who we are studying this evening. Let’s get into the text.
KV9: Wisdom for those whom Will Hear It
9: And He was saying, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”
This what I mean. There is a principle here, and it is that Jesus can speak to just His people whenever He wants, right in front of the people who are against Him, or His own enemies, and not have those enemies understand Him. We are among those who He has foreknown, foreordained (predestined, same Greek word), called, justified and glorified, all in the past tense because it is already accomplished in His view (cf. Rom. 8:29-30). He relates His teachings to us through His Word in plain language, and no enemy seems to be able to break His “code.” For those who DO have the ears to hear Him, He says, “Listen!” Let’s look at the text and find out what God means when He says that.
1-9: The Parable of the Sower
As we mentioned a bit earlier, the Lord Jesus is introducing this teaching tool called a parable. He is doing so so that He may make good analogies for teaching, may teach those who are truly His directly, and keep those who have actively rejected Him in the dark about what He has told His people. We will come to explanations in our final paragraph and more detail on some of the reasonings for this later (I don’t think I know them all). Here we go into the verses of the text.
1: He began to teach again by the sea. And such a very large crowd gathered to Him that He got into a boat in the sea and sat down; and the whole crowd was by the sea on the land.
As before, Jesus is by the freshwater lake of Galilee, also known as the Sea of Tiberias, the Lake of Gennesaret, and the Sea of Chinnereth (Chinneroth). It is a freshwater lake that nurtured a strong fishery on its shores. Several disciples were involved in the commercial fishing trade, notably the pair of brothers, Peter and Andrew, and James and John (the sons of Zebedee). This time, he was teaching on its shore.
That lesson drew what is described by Mark as ὄχλος ⸀πλεῖστος, or “crowd very large.” Possibly as a defense against the press of the crowd, our Lord entered a boat and had it push out a bit from shore.
Something I can tell you growing up on a farm that had some beachfront property, is that on the shore, from the water, sound carries a long way. This may have also been a bit of an impromptu lecture theater for the Lord. Hey, He invented the physics, not me. I’m just trying (poorly) to explain it. Either way, He taught while sitting in a boat just offshore while the crowd was on the shore, but on land. Next verse.
2: And He was teaching them many things in parables, and was saying to them in His teaching,
This was Jesus’ ministry, not the miracles He performed that attested to His power and authority, but the teachings He gave to the people around Him. He used parables, short didactic stories to make His points. They were always analogies that someone could relate to, and sit and think about or recall at a later and more appropriate time. This is one of the parables that He taught us while He was here the first time. Next verse.
3: “Listen to this! Behold, the sower went out to sow;
The Greek word He began with is “Ἀκούετε,” the present-tense active verb, spoken in the second person plural of an imperative or command. He is saying, “You all, listen up!” He’s getting everyone’s attention because the lesson is about to begin. His chosen topic? A sower going out to sow his seed. Next verse.
4: as he was sowing, some seed fell beside the road, and the birds came and ate it up.
Here, the Lord begins to describe the activity of the sower, and the events that are related to where his seed fell. This will be the same through verse 8.
The sower sowed his seed back in the day using a handful-scatter method. A handful of seed was grasped in the hand, and then tossed out and away from the sower in a sweeping motion with the arm. The seed, propelled out of the hand by the centrifugal force produced by the motion, travelled through the air as far as it could overcome gravity, where it fell to the ground. No attempt was made to cover it, it had to bloom where it was planted, so to speak.
In this case, the seeds that left the hand fell on the hard path where people walked and where the ground was not broken up. Under such conditions, the seed would be left exposed on the hard ground and the predation of a multitude of granivores, that is they eat primarily seeds. The Lord tells us that this is exactly what happened. Birds came and ate those seeds. We will leave off the meanings here, because the Lord will explain to His disciples in a moment, and we’ll save it until then like He did. Next verse.
5: “Other seed fell on the rocky ground where it did not have much soil; and immediately it sprang up because it had no depth of soil.
Other seeds fell from that scattering approach near the path, but among the rocks that would have lined the field. Hey, I said I grew up on a farm. You had to put the rocks somewhere, and they were heavy, so you carried them as small a distance as possible. Especially if you were 11 years old, like I was at the time. I think it might have been the adults’ way of keeping me out of trouble while letting me be involved, but that’s a different sermon series.
The characteristic of the rocky ground that our Lord specifically pointed out is that there was not a lot of soil. What I can tell you is that the heat of shallow ground will cause rapid germination of a plant. We ran experiments on this in our first year course of plants form and function. We tested the effect of varying depths on plant growth, and if the seed was covered but shallow, it sprang up fast. We used some fast growing legume (corn? peas? I have some difficulty here) if I remember it right (it was 40 years ago). However, if the roots had not much ground to penetrate, they spread out as far as they could. In a confined space, there is not a lot of room to do that, and the plant did live, but because of the lack of resources caused by the small space, the growth was stunted in shallower plants. You should see what we did to plants by shorting them nutrients later in the year. Next verse.
6: “And after the sun had risen, it was scorched; and because it had no root, it withered away.
The same thing happened to this seed. It sprouted fast, and because the confined space limited it as to nutrients and water, when the sun came out, the plant wilted and withered. Ultimately it died, and it doesn’t look like it had a good time doing so. And there are other places that the seed landed.
7: “Other seed fell among the thorns, and the thorns came up and choked it, and it yielded no crop.
Next to the rocks on the edge of the garden, one would find the high grass no one bothered to cut and things like thistles, a thorny plant that somehow became the national flower of Scotland. A Scottish Comedian named “Danny Bhoy” did a whole routine about it, I’m sure you can find it on YouTube. It was a laugh riot when I saw it.
The specific attribute the Lord has mentioned here is that the thorns choked out the seed. This is something that actively stole its resources. I will leave it at that, because the issue of choice is once again more than peripherally involved, and it we will see this in the Lord’s explanation to His disciples. Moving on.
8: “Other seeds fell into the good soil, and as they grew up and increased, they yielded a crop and produced thirty, sixty, and a hundredfold.”
We should not find it remarkable that we finally arrive at the good ground. It is where if there is any purpose or aim at all in the method of scattering seed in this fashion, most of it will fall in the good ground.
Our Lord specifically mentions that the plants here grew up, and even increased to the point where they yielded the intended crop, just like the garden on our farm. We always planted things like potatoes and cucumbers, and tomatoes, and because we had a very BIG garden, we had enough to carry us through in times of no money. I admit that’s a little harder to do in the city. The Lord is good, but I still have a mortgage to pay. That too is from the Lord, and He is teaching me to be content, so praise the Lord.
That’s the basic parable, but the Lord isn’t quite finished with the lesson to the public, he has one more thing to say.
9: And He was saying, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”
This is a common biblical phrase, used several times by our Lord Himself. The phrase occurs 17 times in some form in the Scriptures, 2 in the Old Testament, both spoken by God, and 7 times outside of Revelation, 6 by our Lord and once in Romans by Paul, quoting the first use of it in the Old Testament in Rom. 11:8. That makes 8 uses in Revelation itself, one for each of the 7 letters to the churches in chapters 2 and 3, and once in Rev. 13:9.
This is a transition point to the next paragraph, but just before we do that, we should consider that the Lord knows that we all have physical ears. I doubt that is what He is speaking about. I’m not a big John Piper fan, but he hits on a very interesting spiritual truth that must be mentioned. He says, “There is a spiritual ear, or a heart-ear. There is an ear that hears, in the preaching of the Word, more than mere words. There is a beauty and a truth and a power that these ears hear as compelling and transforming and preserving. That’s the kind of hearing Jesus is calling for.” (This comes from a book of over 1200 sermons of his; the sermon is titled, “Take Care How You Listen, Part 1.” He’s talking about this parable from Luke 8:4-18, by the way. I can’t give page number’s I have it in one of my bible programs.)
It is those spiritual ears that are needed to understand the parable, and this set of ears only develops by intentional cultivation of one’s on heart with repeated exposure to the Word of God. It’s a part of discernment, and it’s a part of solid discipleship. Anyone who tells you different is selling bad theology.
10-12: The Point of All Parables
Jesus did not use parables at the beginning of His ministry. It is thought by many theologians that he instituted their use in His second year of ministry, especially once the Jewish Leadership of the Pharisees and others had rejected Him as the Messiah, which has clearly happened here. Instead, the Parable in Jesus use became a kind of multipurpose “encounter vehicle” (Andreas J. Köstenberger and Richard D. Patterson, Invitation to Biblical Interpretation: Exploring the Hermeneutical Triad of History, Literature, and Theology, Invitation to Theological Studies Series (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic & Professional, 2011), 429.) That allowed the listener to remain neutral, while seizing their attention and forcing interaction with the presence and principles of the kingdom of God, which they would react to either positively or negatively. I have more to say about this, that will come out in the text, so let’s proceed.
10: As soon as He was alone, His followers, along with the twelve, began asking Him about the parables.
The first thing to notice here is that Jesus is alone with His followers, including His disciples, so He had at this point only a friendly audience. This does mean that His inner circle so-called is bigger than just the Apostles and Iscariot. We can actually link this back to those seated around Him in Mark 3:34 from last time.
All of them were confused by the parable. In my thinking, and you may call me overly literal here, but I still look at the text this way, this was during a time before the crucifixion and resurrection and the subsequent sending of the paraclete to indwell His followers, so Jesus had a couple of options, both of which He used a different times, and those were either explaining what He meant, as He will do here, or temporarily graning them the Holy Spirit, as He did in John 20:19-22, which you can look up on your own, but it was on the very day of His resurrection, and still before the coming of the Holy Spirit. That means that His followers were filled with Him on day one. Whether that was temporary until the day of Pentecost or became permanent to the Apostles immediately for our purposes here is irrelevant because Pentecost still happened 50 days later, and Jesus was with them for 40 more days from that point.
At any rate, Jesus uses His explaining to them the reality behind the parable is the option He uses here. Next verse.
11: And He was saying to them, “To you has been given the mystery of the kingdom of God, but those who are outside get everything in parables,
This is where we learn a couple of things. The first thing we see is that this kind of “sorting” done by the “encounter mechanism” of the parable discriminates between hearers. Jesus even states this later in this chapter in Mark 4:25: “For whoever has, to him more shall be given; and whoever does not have, even what he has shall be taken away from him.” In the case of Jesus’ followers, more shall be given, by way of the coming explanation.
Another thing we see from the Greek text itself is the phrase: τὸ μυστήριον δέδοται, or “the mystery has been given.” The noun (mystery) in Greek is singular, and this suggests ONE SECRET, that is, the kingdom is arriving in Jesus Himself, which is more than just a set of hidden teachings. The verb “has been given” is past perfect, meaning it has been done and still remains that way, and is in the divine passive, meaning it is God who has given it. This points to Jesus revealing Himself to His followers as God in the person of Messiah. Only His followers will be truly able to grasp the details of the kingdom and of the Word of God. Those outside the kingdom will not be able to understand it. More than that, those who reject it can never realize it unless they repent and then accept what they had previously rejected. There is no stated limit to that, but I get the impression that even as patient as God is, a person can run out of time. “Turn to Him now,” is my thought here. Look at the next verse for what happens to those who ultimately reject Jesus and God the Son, the Messiah.
12: so that WHILE SEEING, THEY MAY SEE AND NOT PERCEIVE, AND WHILE HEARING, THEY MAY HEAR AND NOT UNDERSTAND, OTHERWISE THEY MIGHT RETURN AND BE FORGIVEN.”
Those who have been with us for a time will know that this is an Old Testament quotation. When such a thing is found in the mouth of Jesus, He is about to use it in the way HE meant it, so we should pay attention. The OT quote here is from four separate places (Isa. 6:9-10, 43:8, Jer. 5:21, Eze. 12:2), but we will look at it in the first place, Isaiah 6:9–10, which says, “He said, “Go, and tell this people: ‘Keep on listening, but do not perceive; Keep on looking, but do not understand. Render the hearts of this people insensitive, Their ears dull, And their eyes dim, Otherwise they might see with their eyes, Hear with their ears, Understand with their hearts, And return and be healed.’” As an aside, it is important to note that where Isaiah says “be healed,” Jesus said, “be forgiven.” That healing is of the sin nature, not a physical healing, as people in the NAR or Charismatic bunch would have us believe. Call that a “hanful on purpose.”
I am reminded of 2 Peter 2:9, which tell us, “…then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from temptation, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment for the day of judgment…” Jesus is doing more than just imparting information to His followers, although He is doing that. He is also spiritually fixing the worldview or changing it according to His will for every specific individual. A striaghtforward reading of the text shows “…so that they may not see and not perceive…lest they turn and be forgiven.” This can be taken in three ways, and all of them have some measure of truth in my opinion. The first of these is that the first word of the vers (ἵνα) is a shorthand of fulfillment “so that the Scriptures may be fulfilled.” The parallel passage in Matthew 13:13 softens it to “because” instead of “in order that.” The Second is based on Jeremiah’s use of an Aramaic word that means “unless,” making the whole thing conditional (at least on the part of humanity); maybe that is true from the human view. God’s sovereign grace is extended to all, but there is a requirement for people to obey His call. Can one deny that? For some, the answer may be “no.” Different traditions have different ways of viewing that. Suffice it to say, if you DO see it as an offer you cannot refuse, then by all means, repent, believe, and take it. The third and final thing to see is that this can also be seen as a judicial hardening, as per the original quote. Think of it like how the Lord seemed to treat Pharaoh in Egypt. He kept hardening His heart, the Lord knew that would be his response, and ultimately, a judicial hardening happened and God gave him over to what was in His heart. All of these at some level are true in my thinking. The difficult is thinking through it clearly, because it is more complex theologically to me than just a this way/or that.
This dispensing of truth/withholding of truth dynamic through parables does in fact function as a judgment of sorts on the Pharisees and those like them. However, as is usual with the Lord, there is merciful grace in His judgments. This witholding of knowledge saves the hearers in such cases from the responsibility of knowing and thus rejecting His truth—and from profaning it, which is worse. As such, parables make up interesting paradoxes that simultaneously reveal truth to those who can and will receive it and conceal it from those who resist or deny it. This allows our Lord to continue preaching the kingdom while still respecting the hardened resistance of His opponents. (Alfred Plummer, “PARABLE,” in A Dictionary of the Bible: Dealing with Its Language, Literature, and Contents Including the Biblical Theology, ed. James Hastings et al. (New York; Edinburgh: Charles Scribner’s Sons; T. & T. Clark, 1911–1912), 3:663.)
God give us mercy and not pass us over with His grace, knowledge of the divine, and understanding and wisdome that comes from walking with Him. Let’s look at the meaning of the parable now, according to Jesus, the bodily manifestation of the Word of God.
13-20: The Parable of the Sower Explained
In high school, it was common to hear rumours about people all the time. Some were about things people had done. Sometimes with or to other people. An example of this was something like, “Hey, Mike M. punched Brinkman out!” While there was some truth to it, there was more to the story. (Yes, Mike did punch me out, but I gave as good and I got, and I’m the one who drew blood. He never made me quit. Later, he quit school, he ended up buying himself a skidder (a piece of logging equipment to tow large trees) and went into business for himself. He sometimes dropped by the farm, and we became pretty good friends. My point behind this very limited analogy is tha there is always more to the story. In this final paragraph of the evening, Jesus Himself is going to tell us what He meant by the parable He used. Let’s see.
13: And He said to them, “Do you not understand this parable? How will you understand all the parables?
When I read this the first time, I thought Jesus was scolding His followers for not understanding what He said. This was a long time before I was a Christian, so I suppose I can be forgiven for that, but I think the Lord Jesus is saying something to make a point here. He often did this. Another example of this is when He was dying on the cross, he said, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabacthani?” He wasn’t wondering why God had forsaken Him, He was in on the plan from the beginning. He was quoting Psalm 22:1 , which says, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me? Far from my deliverance are the words of my groaning.” What He was saying here was that He knew that His followers did not understand the parable, and more, He was possibly indicating that this parable was a kind of key for the interpretation of all His other parables (John MacArthur, Mark 1–8, MacArthur New Testament Commentary (Chicago, IL: Moody Publishers, 2015), 199.). Some teachers group this with the above paragraph, and I have chosen not to because I understand this as little chunks of time somhow, as opposed to just literature. In the next verse, our Lord will begin His interpretation of the parable, and we may directly read what He meant when He said it, which is a bit of a rarity for us, especially since some of you were here from our fist series in Galatians.
14: “The sower sows the word.
Well, that almost clears that up. The seed sown is the Word. The part that remains foggy to some is who the sower is. I can tell you that John tells us in his general epistles. 1 John 3:9 names Him: “No one who is born of God practices sin, because His seed abides in him; and he cannot sin, because he is born of God.” It is God who is the sower. After all, where did the Word of God come from? Ultimately, it came from God. John 1:1 tells us, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” It is a direct connection in my thinking. Why make it more complicated than it has to be, right? Usually here is where I mutter something about Occam’s Razor, and move on, and that’s what we are going to do.
The sower is the one who walks the path, so he would symbolize Christ, His Apostles, and all who will go forth in His name and with His authority. Matthew 28:18–19 tells us about what they do: “And Jesus came up and spoke to them, saying, “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit,”
15: “These are the ones who are beside the road where the word is sown; and when they hear, immediately Satan comes and takes away the word which has been sown in them.
“These…” is the subject of the sentence and refers to the seeds being sown. From the rest of the sentence, they fall on the hard ground of the road where the word is sown. The road itself, I see as an analogy for the state of the individual’s heart. Here, the ground is hard, and no seed is able to sink into the soil. People will walk on it and crush it, or Satan will IMMEDIATELY take away the word (see? Word. Gk., λόγον, word or message) which has been sown in them. The word “immediately” is Jesus’ word. It is the Greek εὐθὺς, which means “at once.” This may be because the heart is so jaded to the truth that it cannot even hear it, or it is not yet time for this heart to respond, but these are speculation on my part. However, it does seem to me that the hard ground simply cannot or does not receive the seed, or truth of the gospel.
16: “In a similar way these are the ones on whom seed was sown on the rocky places, who, when they hear the word, immediately receive it with joy;
“In a similar way…” is a statement meant to be a statement that is akin to something said previously. That would be the hard path above, so this is more bad news, but it’s even worse in a way. Listen to what this commentator said: “The great truth here taught is that hearts superficially impressed are apt to receive the truth with readiness, and even with joy (Luk 8:13); but the heat of tribulation or persecution because of the word, or the trials which their new profession brings upon them quickly dries up their relish for the truth, and withers all the hasty promise of fruit which they showed.” (Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset, and David Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible, vol. 2 (Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc., 1997), 68.)
The lesson here is that this is the same as the hard soil, but because there is a bit of soil, their hardness of heart is not immediately obvious. It is the heat of the day that reveals it, and this is almost universally seen as the heat of trials and tribulations, especially persecutions. These not only give some kind of mental assent to the gospel, but are even filled with joy, but when the resources run out, for them (because they were not getting their resources from Christ), the weight of their faith (which is substantial) falls over and collapses under the weight of harsh reality. The thought is’t finished, it finishes in the next verse.
17: and they have no firm root in themselves, but are only temporary; then, when affliction or persecution arises because of the word, immediately they fall away.
They acknowledged the truth, and because the seed of the word had no room to put down the deep roots required for growth, one of two things arise and take them out. The first of these is affliction, the Greek word θλίψεως, which is the genetive, singular, feminine noun form of θλῖψις, means a pressure that inflicts distress, affliction, oppression, and/or tribulation. The heat of the day, so to speak. All of the seeds in all of the grounds will experience it, and that’s the way a hard heart is exposed. This can be seen as “shallow emotionalism” (MacArthur). The soil is shallow, they have great joy. Like a lady known as Heidi Baker that is so “filled with the Spirit” (no, she isn’t), she appears to be drunk. That isn’t what being filled with the Spirit means, it is the very opposite of that.
The Apostle Paul talks about this being used to judge the works of all Christians in 1 Corinthians 3:12–13 which tells us, “Now if any man builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw, each man’s work will become evident; for the day will show it because it is to be revealed with fire, and the fire itself will test the quality of each man’s work.” This trial that comes by the heat of the day seems to me to be this revealing heat in small scale.
The second of these is a specific kind of trouble that the Lord Himself calls “persecution.” The Greek word for that in the text is διωγμοῦ, and it means “a program or process designed to harass and oppress someone. (William Arndt et al., A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 253.) (BDAG) The Lord told us this would happen to us. Regardless of how “religious” a false convert may be, they hate Him, and He said if they hated Him, they were going to hate us.
The Apostle John said this was a part of the faith of the saints. Revelation 13:7–10 tells us, “It was also given to him [the Antichrist beast] to make war with the saints and to overcome them, and authority over every tribe and people and tongue and nation was given to him. All who dwell on the earth will worship him, everyone whose name has not been written from the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb who has been slain. If anyone has an ear, let him hear. If anyone is destined for captivity, to captivity he goes; if anyone kills with the sword, with the sword he must be killed. Here is the perseverance and the faith of the saints.” A real saint will see the persecution and stand firm in the faith of Christ. This is not the indignat so-called “Christian Nationalist” of today, who are pushing for confrontation that will lead to insurrection (they hope) and an establishment of some for of Christian theocracy. John says that the enemy will OVERCOME the saints. It isn’t “loser theology” to acknowledge that the Word says we will lose to the enemy at a certain point. It isn’t the end, and this will not be the last battle. Just a little earlier in the book it tells us something a little different: Revelation 12:11 says, “And they overcame him because of the blood of the Lamb and because of the word of their testimony, and they did not love their life even when faced with death.” The job of the disciple is to live for Christ until he is unable to live any longer, not to foment insurrection. I’m not saying to not get involved in politics, I don’t think a good Christian doesn’t get involved in doing what he thinks best for his fellow man. Just recognize that ultimately it is a losing battle. Sorry for the rabbit trail, but it is related to persecution. There are reasons it will arise, and that is a couple of them. Moving on.
18: “And others are the ones on whom seed was sown among the thorns; these are the ones who have heard the word,
The word “and” at the beginning of the verse is called a conjunction. It is a word meant to join ideas and concepts, not just sentences, and that’s what it does here. I did look, and there is the word καὶ, the Greek word for and. So what is this saying? The seeds that fell among the thorns are likewise doomed, and we will see why in verse 19. What this verse tells us is that these are those who heard they word. They heard it, and that means they are without excuse if they leave this life in the condition of having heard it and done nothing about it. Interestingly, this kind of thorn was the same kind as made Jesus’ crown of thorns. “O, Sacred Head, now wounded, “ indeed. Next verse.
19: but the worries of the world, and the deceitfulness of riches, and the desires for other things enter in and choke the word, and it becomes unfruitful.
The worries spoken of by our Lord here are translated from the Greek word μέριμναι. It is the plural, feminine, nominative nuon for “anxiety.” One commentator translates it as “distracting anxieties,” which, as it were, “cut a man in sunder.” (G. F. Maclear, The Gospel according to St Mark, with Maps, Notes and Introduction, The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1893), 57.) Largely they are seen by most interpreters as pleasures or problems that keep your attention away from your pursuit of Christ. It also adds the “deceit of riches” to that. I am sadly too familiar with that from a former career. I was told as a financial planner that I would make about 400K a year. I bit like a fish at that and opened my own practice, with education, training and support to go with it. I soon realized after the 16- to 18-hour days that it was possible, but I was working way too hard, and that “family-life balance” I was promised was nowhere in that equation. This, too, can keep one away from a solid pursuit of Christ. When it says these things “choke” the word, it is not an exaggeration. I felt like I was being choked a good deal of the time. I tried to jump to other ships, but the situation was only worse anywhere else I would have gone. I’m still financially recovering from that. Suffice it to say that I became unfruitful as regards the faith, and I had to make better choices. All I am saying is that I know what this feels like.
I tend to view those caught in this kind of situation like James in James 1:5–8 where he says, “But if any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all generously and without reproach, and it will be given to him. But he must ask in faith without any doubting, for the one who doubts is like the surf of the sea, driven and tossed by the wind. For that man ought not to expect that he will receive anything from the Lord, being a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways.” if the weeds and thorns are choking you out by stealing a most precious resource, your time, I think it is a symptom of divided loyalties. You want to have your love for Jesus, but you also want to have your love for the world, and as He Himself says in Luke 16:13, “No servant can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.” It isn’t a fun choice. You still have to make it in favour of Christ, or you will wither and die. I know. On Nov. 2, 2014, I had a heart attack from the stress from that and some family issues. It can literally kill you. However, God had mercy on me, and I was found by our Good Shepherd and returned to the fold of God. I pray for you, that He will find you too, and He is out looking.
The consequence here is that you become unfruitful. When a tree has grown up, it will produce fruit at a particular time of year. If such a tree were to stop producing fruit, it would be tended by the gardener, fertilized, and left for a year to see what would happen. If it bore fruit again, the tree was healed, and life went on. If it did not, that tree was cut down and burned, the ash used as some form of fertilizer for other crops. The Lord Jesus once cursed a fig tree that did not produce fruit (Mark 11), which we will see in our Mark studies, so we’ll save it for when we get there. Moving on.
20: “And those are the ones on whom seed was sown on the good soil; and they hear the word and accept it and bear fruit, thirty, sixty, and a hundredfold.”
To be fair, this is where we want to be. I think it is where the majority of the seed lands in this method of sowing. These are those like us, where we have not only received the word in a saving way, and we begin to do the works that the Lord has planned for us to obey Him in, and we begin to produce fruit at different levels. The reasons for the differences are multiple, a couple of them might be maturity in Christ, your personal abilities, the differences in personalities, and things like that. This is the easiest to understand, and this is where everything goes right, so there isn’t a lot left to say.
One could understand why our Lord would exclude those who had rejected Him from knowing these things, at least at first. God forbid that they hear the truth and see the realities of the kingdom and how it worked unless they repented. Who but God knows what kind of malfeasance that would have shown up as a result?
Now, remember that this is supposed to all apply to us. I have made personal applications as I went in places because it is not my job to make them for you. Only you can do that.
Do you remember when I referred to Matthew 28:18–19? I’ll read it again: “And Jesus came up and spoke to them, saying, “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit…” This was spoken to His disciples, and that includes anyone who is truly His. These verses form most of what is called “The Great Commission,” and it is our mission critical, given to us directly by the Lord Jesus Christ. All of His followers are supposed to engage in that mission as witnesses to the chaning power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ in their lives. We cannot tamper with the seed, nor are we to cultivate the soil. (I’ve been in seminars that insist that’s how you have to preach the gospel, but we are just to say what we know.) Instead, we are to simply rely on the gospel message itself and know that all responses will fall into one of these categories. Some will reject it outright being hard of heart or hearing. Some will appear to accept it but when their rank emotionalism runs out, so will their commitment to Christ. Some will allow their love of the world to pull them away from Jesus. Some will genuinely receive it. It is our job to declare it as best we can to everyone we meet.
So here is that gospel: God the Son, because of His love for us, became human for the single purpose of living a perfect life and then giving it up as an atoning sacrifice in our place. He did this for us, because we were lost to sin and wrongdoing, evil creatures who were spiritually dead from birth. When He died, he became the perfect atoning sacrifice for all of the sins of the world. All people everywhere are commanded to repent, that is to ask forgiveness from God directly for all of their sins and forsake them, living from that point instead for Him. Then we are to confess that Jesus took our place on the cross vicariously to all men with our words. That is the gospel, and it’s proper response. I will leave it to you as to what kind of ground your heart will be, because it is meant for you to hear. How you respond will be up to you.
And that’s what I saw in the text this time.
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