ARVE

I’m going to call back an important verse from a couple of studies back, which is verse Mark 4:22: “For nothing is hidden, except to be revealed; nor has anything been secret, but that it would come to light.” The point the Lord was making to His disciples at that time was that there is no “secret knowledge.” If it exists in the form of knowledge, it is for men to discover it, and for God to reveal it to those whom He chooses, and those who will receive it. These words may have included a warning about spiritual hypocrisy and its existence. In the parable of the soils, the Lord Jesus talked about two different kinds of people (remember, the soil was analogous to their hearts) and how they responded to His gospel; these were the shallow ground and the thorny ground, that would initially respond with interest, and time would reveal them as those who had other priorities that were more important to them than the very Creator who made them. Jesus was also telling His disciples that false converts would exist, but that given enough time, the truth would be demonstrated by their own actions and words. Why? I think it was because it was not the disciples’ task to “qualify” people as believers, that was the task of God Himself; they were just supposed to share Christ and His gospel with everyone they met as per Matthew 28:19, “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 is not just a story about how all of us are to share the Gospel with everyone, although that is a direct implication. This is a story about God’s Sovereign Election in the salvation of a soul, and how regeneration precedes conversion. Remonstrants will probably be angered at this, but the text says what Jesus said, and this theology is formed on scriptures from one end of the bible to the other, some of which we will look at. The previous parable (the Sower) emphasizes human responsibility in the process, and how the Gospel will only bear fruit when a heart (the soil) responds favourably. For some, this creates the illusion that it depends solely on human choice, but this parable lays that fallacy to rest. Spiritual growth of any kind does not rely on human effort, because it does not depend on the sower of the seed, though that is a human responsibility, given to us by God. It means that the outcome of the presentation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ does not depend on the one speaking it. I will probably be called a Gnostic for some of this, but to such assertions, I will give the only answer I can: Prove it. You made the accusation, the onus is on you to show receipts. In the meantime, leave me alone, I’ve got a bible study to preach.

That said, I broke the text down as follows into four thought units.

KV27: The Parable of the Seed

27: and he goes to bed at night and gets up by day, and the seed sprouts and grows—how, he himself does not know.

26: The Man Who Casts the Seed

27: The Activities of the Farmer

28: The Soil that Produces the Crop

29: The Harvest Is Reaped In Season

This parable addresses a critical tension in Reformed thought. It perfectly balances human responsibility with divine sovereignty. The parable of the Sower deals with the human responsibility in the Gospel; it will only bear good fruit when the heart in which the seed of the Word is planted responds favourably despite what mitigations may stand in the way (shallow ground or the cares of life). The parable itself corrects any notion of how spiritual growth relies on any human effort. Because the outcome does not depend on the sower of the seed, it yields a profound assurance to the believer that their salvation is guaranteed, being a choice—but God’s choice, not their own—and because it is His choice to begin with, it is eternally secure.

All that said, let’s look at the text.

KV27: The Parable of the Seed

27: and he goes to bed at night and gets up by day, and the seed sprouts and grows—how, he himself does not know.

This parable teaches that faithful procamation of God’s Word, the human responsibility in all of this, is combined somehow with God’s sovereign power to guarantee the results God wants. The analogy Jesus uses of a farmer planting his crops avoids both the concepts of passivity in evangelism and works-righteousness as the basis for human salvation. The farmer goes about his routine and performs his apparently assigned or designated activities, and it is the ground that produces the crops, without any knowledge of or by the farmer.

That is a big relief to me, in a way, because I realize that for all of my God-given intelligence and abilities, I am still not the sharpest tool in the shed, and God uses me anyway. This is not a proud statement, this is an acknowledgement that I am in myself unworthy, but that it is God who both qualifies me and makes me adequate. Let’s get into the text.

26: The Man Who Casts the Seed

The farmer is just a man that God has given his seed (the Word of God) to cast upon the soil (the hearts of those who will hear the Word). He’s me. He’s you. He is whoever God appoints to scatter the seed. Let’s look at the verse.

26: And He was saying, “The kingdom of God is like a man who casts seed upon the soil;

Something should be said here, in that this parable is unique to Mark. It seems to take the place of the parable of the leaven from Matthew 13:33, “He spoke another parable to them, ‘The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three pecks of flour until it was all leavened.’” For our study, we will take this as a completely different parable, and we will treat it at the appropriate time in Matthew’s Gospel account.

It is important to note that the “man” in the verse is what the Lord Jesus directly compares to the kingdom of God. Douglas Magnum, in his commentary on this verse of Mark, says, “The parable of the growing seed explains that the kingdom of God grows in a soul (and at large) because of God’s working, and people cannot explain it (John 3:8). It is a parable about sanctification and makes several points about it…Jesus once again uses the illustration of seed, and the parable of the soils’ function as a master parable (4:13) leads the reader to understand this parable as a further description of the good soil and its productivity. It is speaking of a Christian’s sanctification.” (Douglas Mangum, ed., Lexham Context Commentary: New Testament, Lexham Context Commentary (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2020), Mk 4:26-29.) In fact, in Beeke and Smalley’s Reformed Sytematic Theology, it is stated that God’s power (His kingdom is the manifestation of His power) works through people, not merely in them in isolation. (Joel R. Beeke and Paul M. Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology: Church and Last Things, Reformed Systematic Theology (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2024), 4:122–123.) The implication of this is that these individuals collectively represent the church on Earth, and in that church, the the kingdom of God is the powerful activity of his free grace working invisibly in and through people, like a seed growing into a large, fruitful plant. (Ibid., 4:122)

In this way, the kingdom of God, which we can now see as a reference to the sphere of salvation through and by means of the church procaiming the gospel, is directly compared to this man that casts seed upon the soil. We can directly see this as the church evangelist proclaiming the good news that Jesus has come and died to rescue us from this present evil world and redeem us from the sin that makes the world, and us, evil in the first place. Next paragraph.

27: The Activities of the Farmer

I’ve identified the man from the last verse as a farmer, because that’s what a farmer does. Kepp it in the back of your mind that this is what evangelists and pastoer/reachers do in and through the church. Let’s look at the verse:

27: and he goes to bed at night and gets up by day, and the seed sprouts and grows—how, he himself does not know.

I think it is fair to say that the man from the previous verse, our “holy farmer,” simply goes about his daily tasks and dities, and pays no attention to the results of the planting at all. He does not feel the need to dwell on methods of “increasing his crop yield,” that is to say, the evangelist should feel no need to “make his message more effective.” It is the Word of God itself that does the work, and it should be left to do so. I am somewhat familiar with this as a pulpit supply pastor, at present. Because I am not in the congregation as their regular pastor, I do not always know the nuances that come from the specific community, nor can I be involved in more than a cursory way most of the time. I simply prepare my sermon, and I preach it, the best way I can. I must trust the Lord with the results, especially if it is a place I will only be once in a great while.

The farmer does not need to understand the means or methods that will cause growth to occur, because that will happen without him, or even his presence, just as God designed. The details of God’s kingdom growth will escape our ability to understand or control it, because it is the dominion of our sovereign God. All our “farmer” does is cast the seed into the ground (of the heart who listens) and waits. God causes growth, not man. The seed develops into a plant, it would seem, all by itself. (We know it is God causing this.) In fact, even though the farmer did not understand the actual process of growth, his ignorance does not stop it from happening. This parable illustrates how the kingdom of God grows in individual souls by God’s divine handiwork. It operates through mechanisms that even the smartest of us cannot fully understand. The growth itself occurs at two levels (which are, as we would expect, completely interconnected). Like the foundational anchors of the faith in Acts 2, they happen at an individual and personal level, and they happen at a corporate level. The gospel was designed to take hold of an individual, and attract others to it and then take hold of those individuals, and they told two friends, and so on, and so on, you get the idea. The gospel started with 12 men. In a period of around all of 300 years, it became the dominant belief system of the world, all while being illegal and persecuted when found. How does THAT happen? I confess, without the Holy Spirit helping those believers, I do not know. Moving on.

28: The Soil that Produces the Crop

Are we saying that the Soil represnts God, then? No, it represents the human heart. Now before you take me to task for that, let’s remember the Doctrines of Grace and their implications for this subject. The “soil” of the human heart will produce the exact crop that the sovereign Lord chooses for it to produce.

We have to bear in mind that a parable is an analogy. This particular one deals with what will happen after the seed is sown, that is the gospel of Jesus Christ is preached. Hendriksen and Kistemaker, their commentary on Mark, state that because of God’s will, the spiritual seed of the gospel will exert and increasingly powerful influence upon the human heart (and society thereby). (William Hendriksen and Simon J. Kistemaker, Exposition of the Gospel According to Mark, New Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1953–2001), 10:166.) This isn’t something that humans can engineer or accelerate through their own efforts, in fact that’s probably the best way to mess it up. It posesses an inherent effective power that will unfold exactly how God wants it to unfold, all without violating the will of the creature. (Everyone gets what they want.) Let’s look at the text.

28: “The soil produces crops by itself; first the blade, then the head, then the mature grain in the head.

In His work title Predestination, Fred Zaspel says, “Most fundamentally for the biblical writers, predestination is a necessary entailment of monotheism. The God who created all things rules over and directs those things to his intended ends. (Fred G. Zaspel, “Predestination,” in Lexham Survey of Theology, ed. Mark Ward et al. (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2018).) It says in the text that “The Soil produces crops by itself…” This has the meaning of “without visible cause.” Such a usage of the word occurs in Acts 12:10’ where it tells us, “When they had passed the first and second guard, they came to the iron gate that leads into the city, which opened for them by itself; and they went out and went along one street, and immediately the angel departed from him.” I make this point because there are those (and from my degree program of Biology, I have met a lot of them) who will say that it is a simple and natural process. This understanding implies that the growth is happening “without visible cause” because God alone produces it actively, not because it is an independent process, not even one He may have set in motion.

All of that is an important point, because it exactly parallels a Reformed view of salvation. Spiritual growth in believers happens because God is actively working in them, not by their own efforts and understandings. We can see in the analogy itself that the growth proceeds without the understanding or even knowledge and attention of the farmer’s efforts. A direct parallel: Salvation and sanctification both occur through the unseen power of the Holy Spirit, not the sound words of the evangelist, or the good semons or lessons of the pastor/teacher.

Interestingly, this has an order that it occurs, and is described as the visibly seen growth. First the wheat stalk appears as a blade of grass. That gets taller and larger, until a head is seen on the wheat, and then that head develops into mature grain in the head of the plant. Again, this is a direct parallel for a Reformed understanding of salvation: The seed has taken root, and the blade of grass begins to appear. After a profession of salvation, there should be activity in the seed and visible evidence of growth in the individual. This is proof that the “seed of faith” lives! Then, it begins to look like the seed of the planted crop, wheat in this example. (It might look like a tare, too, but that’s a different story that is not dealt with here.) Ultimately, this is a wheat plant, and it will bud into a fully mature stalk of wheat. In a believer, we would see evidence of salvation in the spiritual growth of the individual after justification by faith, then we would see the beginnings of maturity as the believer begins to be santified, and ultimately, they will grow into a harvestable stalk of wheat, ready to be glorified by God in the name of Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit. All of this, from salvation to glorification, happens by divine working and power alone, not by human initiative, effort, merit, or even intent. Last paragraph.

29: The Harvest Is Reaped In Season

The parable even tells us what happens with the mature wheat, the matured believer in this analogy of the seed. Let’s jump right into the text.

29: “But when the crop permits, he immediately puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come.”

This is a direct reference to Joel 3:13: “Put in the sickle, for the harvest is ripe. Come, tread, for the wine press is full; The vats overflow, for their wickedness is great.” This is a refeence to the biblical Day of the Lord at the end of this age of the earth, whatever that might mean. If you would like more theories on it, check out our Revelation series on Rumble on our official page. Fair warning, there are 57 videos. If you prefer to read it instead, go to BereanNation.com and look up our Bible Study Series in Revelation, wher I put all the preaching notes. This serves to solidify the moment for Reformed theolgy, incidentally; it is the moment when God’s purpose reaches its appointed and foretold fulfilment.

The farmer’s reaction here is also central to Reformed soteriology. “When the crop permits,” is when the farmer puts in the sickle, because the time to harvest the crop has arrived. The farmer does not decide when to harvest; it is the readiness of the crop determines that action, and the farmer has NO control over that. It is like being born again/from above. How much control did you have about the timeing of your own birth? What, none, you say? It is the same here. It is a reflection of how God’s chosen ones are all gathered to Him at the appointed time, whether that is at the time of your own death, or at the time of an event in Greek called ἁρπαγησόμεθα ἐν νεφέλαις, our meeting with Jesus in the clouds, whenever that will happen. However you may view that, it is ALL under God’s sovereign orchestration. Humans will participate in the ways we have described, but the outcome depends wholly on God to cause, perform, and complete those actions by mechanisms that only He knows, and only He can operate, because all said mechanisms are beyond our knowledge and understanding as humans.

This parable embodies the Doctrines of Grace. God has given His own Word properties that are built in. Seemingly of its own accord, His Word both converts the unbelieving and santifies those who are His. The parable even talks about how we as mere humans involved in the operations of His workings do not have the ability to understand the spiritual transformation of unbelievers to believers, or the sows’ ears to silk purses, in other words. The processes and methods are beyond human knowledge and understanding, even though we are involved as cogs in the wheel, so to speak. We do the sowing, in that we are to proclaim the good news of Jesus’ vicarious death on teh cross for all of our sins, but it is God alone that can save the individual or compel their growth spiritually.

The relative inaction of the farmer during the growth of the individual, as he just goes about his own routine and business, shows that santification and the increase of His kingdom depend wholly on His working, and not our own. However small or unclear the signs of Jesus’ return may be, there is no doubt that it will come when He says it will come. Without our effrt or understanding, harvest will come at the time appointed for it.

That harvest itself points necessarily to the eschaton—the end times—and the sowing and growing and harvesting will continue right into the time of the judgement of God on all sin. Here is the thing that supports a Reformed theological view: God’s sovereign decree ensures the gospel’s triumph, believers participate faithfully yet humbly, and ultimate vindication belongs to Christ alone. And it is coming. Keep watching, because we are.

That’s what I saw in the text this time.

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