Again he began to teach by the seaside. A great multitude was gathered to him, so that he entered into a boat in the sea, and sat down. All the multitude were on the land by the sea.
Parallel Translations
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Again he began to teach by the seaside. A great multitude was gathered to him, so that he entered into a boat in the sea, and sat down. All the multitude were on the land by the sea.
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And he began agayne to teache by the seesyde. And there gadered to gedder vnto him moche people so greatly that he entred into a ship and sate in the see and all the people was by the seeside on the shoore.
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And hee began againe to teache by the sea side, and there gathered vnto him a great multitude, so that hee entred into a shippe, and sate in the sea, and all the people was by the sea side on the land.
Cross-references (5)
Passages linked to Mark 4:1 in the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge, ordered by reader-vote popularity; verse text shown in World English Bible.
- Mark 2:13 He went out again by the seaside. All the multitude came to him, and he taught them.
- Luke 5:1-3 Now while the multitude pressed on him and heard the word of God, he was standing by the lake of Gennesaret. He saw two boats standing by the lake, but the fishermen had gone out of them, and were washing their nets. He entered into one of the boats, which was Simon’s, and asked him to put out a little from the land. He sat down and taught the multitudes from the boat.
- Luke 8:4-10 When a great multitude came together, and people from every city were coming to him, he spoke by a parable. “The farmer went out to sow his seed. As he sowed, some fell along the road, and it was trampled under foot, and the birds of the sky devoured it. Other seed fell on the rock, and as soon as it grew, it withered away, because it had no moisture. Other fell amid the thorns, and the thorns grew with it, and choked it. Other fell into the good ground, and grew, and produced one hundred times as much fruit.” As he said these things, he called out, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear!” Then his disciples asked him, “What does this parable mean?” He said, “To you it is given to know the mysteries of God’s Kingdom, but to the rest in parables; that ‘seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand.’
- Matthew 13:1-15 On that day Jesus went out of the house, and sat by the seaside. Great multitudes gathered to him, so that he entered into a boat, and sat, and all the multitude stood on the beach. He spoke to them many things in parables, saying, “Behold, a farmer went out to sow. As he sowed, some seeds fell by the roadside, and the birds came and devoured them. Others fell on rocky ground, where they didn’t have much soil, and immediately they sprang up, because they had no depth of earth. When the sun had risen, they were scorched. Because they had no root, they withered away. Others fell among thorns. The thorns grew up and choked them. Others fell on good soil, and yielded fruit: some one hundred times as much, some sixty, and some thirty. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” The disciples came, and said to him, “Why do you speak to them in parables?” He answered them, “To you it is given to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven, but it is not given to them. For whoever has, to him will be given, and he will have abundance, but whoever doesn’t have, from him will be taken away even that which he has. Therefore I speak to them in parables, because seeing they don’t see, and hearing, they don’t hear, neither do they understand. In them the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled, which says, ‘By hearing you will hear, and will in no way understand; Seeing you will see, and will in no way perceive: for this people’s heart has grown callous, their ears are dull of hearing, they have closed their eyes; or else perhaps they might perceive with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their heart, and would turn again; and I would heal them.’
- Mark 3:7 Jesus withdrew to the sea with his disciples, and a great multitude followed him from Galilee, from Judea,
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Geneva Bible translators 1599 · Public Domain Seaside of Tiberias.
Seaside of Tiberias.
In a ship which was launched into the sea.
Geneva Bible (1599) marginal notes — public domain.
John Trapp 1656 · Public Domain 1 And he began again to teach by the…
1 And he began again to teach by the sea side: and there was gathered unto him a great multitude, so that he entered into a ship, and sat in the sea; and the whole multitude was by the sea on the land.
Ver. 1. And he began again, &c.] sc. The self-same day wherein he had that busy bout with the blasphemous Pharisees. {See Trapp on "Mat 13:1"}
John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Matthew Poole 1685 · Public Domain We may observe that our Saviour often preached by…
We may observe that our Saviour often preached by the seaside, the reason of which was, doubtless, he had there the convenience by a boat or ship to quit himself of the inconvenience of the people’s pressing upon him: he was now in Galilee, which bordered upon the sea.
And he taught them many things by parables, and said unto them in his doctrine. Some of those things which our Lord taught his people by earthly similitudes are afterwards expressed, but probably he taught them many more things than the evangelists have left us upon record.
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And said unto them in his doctrine: that may be understood in a double sense; either understanding by doctrine his way of teaching which he affected, and made much use of, viz. by similitudes; or else thus, that he intermixed with the doctrine which he taught them several parables, some of which here follow.
Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible (1683–1685) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
William Burkitt 1703 · Public Domain The foregoing chapter acquainted us with the blasphemous slander…
The foregoing chapter acquainted us with the blasphemous slander which the scribes and Pharisees cast upon our blessed Saviour, accusing him of casting out devils by the help of the devil. This they did, no doubt, to discredit his person, and hinder his ministry; yet for all this the people follow him in great multitudes, more than ever, to hear him and be instructed by him.
Thence learn, 1. That all the power and malice of Satan and wicked men shall not be able to suppress the gospel, or hinder the free course of it; yea, the more it is opposed, the more it shall prevail: the more the scribes and Pharisees disgraced our Saviour, and vilified his doctrine, the more the people followed him in troops, to be partakers of his ministry.
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Observe, 2. The place where our Lord now preached; in a ship. Not that he declined the temple, or the synagogue, when he had the opportunity; but in the want of them Christ thought an house, a mountain, a ship, no unmeet place to preach in. It is not the place that sanctifies the ordinance, but the ordinance that sanctifies the place.
Observe, 3. Our Saviour’s gestures in preaching; he sat, it being the custom of the Jewish church so to do, The scribes and Pharisees sit in Moses’ chair, Mat 23:2
Learn thence, That in indifferent rites and orders, touching the outward worship of God, we are to conform ourselves to the laudable custom and practice of the church in which we live, and whereof we are members. This did our Saviour, and so ought we.
Observe, 4. The manner of our Lord’s preaching, it was by parables and similitudes, which was an ancient way of instructing among the Jews, and a very convincing way; working upon men’s minds, memories, and affections, all at once, making the mind attentive, the memory retentive, and the auditors inquisitive after the interpretation of the parable. Some are of opinion our Saviour’s parables were suited to his hearers’ employments: and accordingly many of his hearers being husbandmen, he resembles his doctrine to seed sown in the field. For thus he speaks: See Mar 4:3
William Burkitt's Expository Notes on the New Testament (1700–1703) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Matthew Henry 1710 · Public Domain The foregoing chapter began with Christ's entering into the…
The foregoing chapter began with Christ's entering into the synagogue (Mar 4:1); this chapter begins with Christ's teaching again by the sea side. Thus he changed his method, that if possible all might be reached and wrought upon. To gratify the nice and more genteel sort of people that had seats, chief seats, in the synagogue, and did not care for hearing a sermon any where else, he did not preach always by the sea side, but, having liberty, went often into the synagogue, and taught there; yet, to gratify the poor, the mob, that could not get room in the synagogue, he did not always preach there, but began again to teach by the sea side, where they could come within hearing. Thus are we debtors both to the wise and to the unwise, Rom 1:14.
Here seems to be a new convenience found out, which had not been used before, though he had before preached by the sea side (Mar 2:13), and that was - his standing in a ship, while his hearers stood upon the land; and that inland sea of Tiberias having no tide, there was no ebbing and flowing of the waters to disturb them. Methinks Christ's carrying his doctrine into a ship, and preaching it thence, was a presage of his sending the gospel to the isles of the Gentiles, and the shipping off of the kingdom of God (that rich cargo) from the Jewish nation, to be sent to a people that would bring forth more of the fruits of it. Now observe here,
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I. The way of teaching that Christ used with the multitude (Mar 4:2); He taught them many things, but it was by parables or similitudes, which would tempt them to hear; for people love to be spoken to in their own language, and careless hearers will catch at a plain comparison borrowed from common things, and will retain and repeat that, when they have lost, or perhaps never took, the truth which it was designed to explain and illustrate: but unless they would take pains to search into it, it would but amuse them; seeing they would see, and not perceive (Mar 4:12); and so, while it gratified their curiosity, it was the punishment of their stupidity; they wilfully shut their eyes against the light, and therefore justly did Christ put it into the dark lantern of a parable, which had a bright side toward those who applied it to themselves, and were willing to be guided by it; but to those who were only willing for a season to play with it, it only gave a flash of light now and then, but sent them away in the dark. It is just with God to say of those that will not see, that they shall not see, and to hide from their eyes, who only look about them with a great deal of carelessness, and never look before them with any concern upon the things that belong to their peace.
II. The way of expounding that he used with his disciples; When he was alone by himself, not only the twelve, but others that were about him with the twelve, took the opportunity to ask him the meaning of the parables, Mar 4:10. They found it good to be about Christ; the nearer him the better; good to be with the twelve, to be conversant with those that are intimate with him. And he told them what a distinguishing favour it was to them, that they were made acquainted with the mystery of the kingdom of God, Mar 4:11. The secret of the Lord was with them. That instructed them, which others were only amused with, and they were made to increase in knowledge by every parable, and understood more of the way and method in which Christ designed to set up his kingdom in the world, while others were dismissed, never the wiser. Note, Those who know the mystery of the kingdom of heaven, must acknowledge that it is given to them; they receive both the light and the sight from Jesus Christ, who, after his resurrection, both opened the scriptures, and opened the understanding, Luk 24:27, Luk 24:45.
In particular, we have here,
1. The parable of the sower, as we had it, Mat 13:3, etc. He begins (Mar 4:3), with, Hearken, and concludes (Mar 4:9) with, He that hath ears to hear, let him hear. Note, The words of Christ demand attention, and those who speak from him, may command it, and should stir it up; even that which as yet we do not thoroughly understand, or not rightly, we must carefully attend to, believing it to be both intelligible and weighty, that at length we may understand it; we shall find more in Christ's sayings than at first there seemed to be.
2. The exposition of it to the disciples. Here is a question Christ put to them before he expounded it, which we had not in Matthew (Mar 4:13); "Know ye not this parable? Know ye not the meaning of it? How then will ye know all parables?" (1.) "If ye know not this, which is so plain, how will ye understand other parables, which will be more dark and obscure? If ye are gravelled and run aground with this, which bespeaks so plainly the different success of the word preached upon those that hear it, which ye yourselves may see easily, how will ye understand the parables which hereafter will speak of the rejection of the Jews, and the calling of the Gentiles, which is a thing ye have no idea of?" Note, This should quicken us both to prayer and pains that we may get knowledge, that there are a great many things which we are concerned to know; and if we understand not the plain truths of the gospel, how shall we master those that are more difficult? Vita brevis, ars longa - Life is short, art is long. If we have run with the footmen, and they have wearied us, and run us down, then how shall we contend with horses? Jer 12:5. (2.) "If ye know not this, which is intended for your direction in hearing the word, that ye may profit by it; how shall ye profit by what ye are further to hear? This parable is to teach you to be attentive to the word, and affected with it, that you may understand it. If ye receive not this, ye will not know how to use the key by which ye must be let into all the rest." If we understand not the rules we are to observe in order to our profiting by the word, how shall we profit by any other rule? Observe, Before Christ expounds the parable, [1.] He shows them how sad their case was, who were not let into the meaning of the doctrine of Christ; To you it is given, but not to them. Note, It will help us to put a value upon the privileges we enjoy as disciples of Christ, to consider the deplorable state of those who want such privileges, especially that they are out of the ordinary way of conversion; lest they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them. Mar 4:12. Those only who are converted, have their sins forgiven them: and it is the misery of unconverted souls, that they lie under unpardoned guilt. [2.] He shows them what a shame it was, that they needed such particular explanations of the word they heard, and did not apprehend it at first. Those that would improve in knowledge, must be made sensible of their ignorance.
Having thus prepared them for it, he gives them the interpretation of the parable of the sower, as we had it before in Matthew. Let us only observe here,
First, That in the great field of the church, the word of God is dispensed to all promiscuously; The sower soweth the word (Mar 4:14), sows it at a venture, beside all waters, upon all sorts of ground (Isa 32:20), not knowing where it will light, or what fruit it will bring forth. He scatters it, in order to the increase of it. Christ was awhile sowing himself, when he went about teaching and preaching; now he sends his ministers, and sows by their hand. Ministers are sowers; they have need of the skill and discretion of the husbandman (Isa 28:24-26); they must not observe winds and clouds (Ecc 11:4, Ecc 11:6), and must look up to God, who gives seed to the sower, Co2 9:10.
Secondly, That of the many that hear the word of the gospel, and read it, and are conversant with it, there are, comparatively, but few that receive it, so as to bring forth the fruits of it; here is but one in four, that comes to good. It is sad to think, how much of the precious seed of the word of God is lost, and sown in vain; but there is a day coming when lost sermons must be accounted for. Many that have heard Christ himself preach in their streets, will hereafter be bidden to depart from him; those therefore who place all their religion in hearing, as if that alone would save them, do but deceive themselves, and build their hope upon the sand, Jam 1:22.
Thirdly, Many are much affected with the word for the present, who yet receive no abiding benefit by it. The motions of soul they have, answerable to what they hear, are but a mere flash, like the crackling of thorns under a pot. We read of hypocrites, that they delight to know God's ways (Isa 58:2); of Herod, that he heard John gladly (Mar 6:20); of others, that they rejoiced in his light (Joh 5:35); of those to whom Ezekiel was a lovely song (Eze 33:32); and those represented here by the stony ground, received the word with gladness, and yet came to nothing.
Fourthly, The reason why the word doth not leave commanding, abiding, impressions upon the minds of the people, is, because their hearts are not duly disposed and prepared to receive it; the fault is in themselves, not in the word; some are careless forgetful hearers, and these get no good at all by the word; it comes in at one ear, and goes out at the other; others have their convictions overpowered by their corruptions, and they lose the good impressions the word has made upon them, so that they get no abiding good by it.
Fifthly, The devil is very busy about loose, careless hearers, as the fowls of the air go about the seed that lies above ground; when the heart, like the highway, is unploughed, unhumbled, when it lies common, to be trodden on by every passenger, as theirs that are great company-keepers, then the devil is like the fowls; he comes swiftly, and carries away the word ere we are aware. When therefore these fowls come down upon the sacrifices, we should take care, as Abram did, to drive them away (Gen 15:11); that, though we cannot keep them from hovering over our heads, we may not let them nestle in our hearts.
Sixthly, Many that are not openly scandalized, so as to throw off their profession, as they on the stony ground did, yet have the efficacy of it secretly choked and stifled, so that it comes to nothing; they continue in a barren, hypocritical profession, which brings nothing to pass, and so go down as certainly, though more plausibly, to hell.
Seventhly, Impressions that are not keep, will not be durable, but will wear off in suffering, trying times; like footsteps on the sand of the sea, which are gone the next high tide of persecution; when that iniquity doth abound, the love of many to the ways of God waxeth cold; many that keep their profession in fair days, lose it in a storm; and do as those that go to sea only for pleasure, come back again when the wind arises. It is the ruin of hypocrites, that they have no root; they do not act from a living fixed principle; they do not mind heart-work, and without that religion is nothing; for he is the Christian, that is one inwardly.
Eighthly, Many are hindered from profiting by the word of God, by their abundance of the world. Many a good lesson of humility, charity, self-denial, and heavenly-mindedness, is choked and lost by that prevailing complacency in the world, which they are apt to have, on whom it smiles. Thus many professors, that otherwise might have come to something, prove like Pharaoh's lean kine and thin ears.
Ninthly, Those that are not encumbered with the cares of the world, and the deceitfulness of riches, may yet lose the benefit of their profession by the lusts of other things; this is added here in Mark; by the desires which are about other things (so Dr. Hammond), an inordinate appetite toward those things that are pleasing to sense or to the fancy. Those that have but little of the world, may yet be ruined by an indulgence of the body.
Tenthly, Fruit is the thing that God expects and requires from those that enjoy the gospel: fruit according to the seed; a temper of mind, and a course of life, agreeable to the gospel; Christian graces daily exercised, Christian duties duly performed. This is fruit, and it will abound to our account.
Lastly, No good fruit is to be expected but from good seed. If the seed be sown on good ground, if the heart be humble, and holy, and heavenly, there will be good fruit, and it will abound sometimes even to a hundred fold, such a crop as Isaac reaped, Gen 26:12.
Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible (1708–1710) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Wesley 1765 · Public Domain Matt. xiii, 1; Luke viii, 4.
Matt. xiii, 1; Luke viii, 4.
John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the Whole Bible (1754–1765) — public domain. Text via the GEBible commentary corpus.
Adam Clarke 1810 · Public Domain The parable of the sower, 1-9.
CHAPTER IV.
The parable of the sower, 1-9.
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Its interpretation, 10-20.
The use we should make of the instructions we receive, 21-26.
The parable of the progressively growing seed, 26-29.
Of the mustard seed, 30-34.
Christ and his disciples are overtaken by a storm, 35-38.
He rebukes the wind and the sea, and produces fair weather,
39-41.
NOTES ON CHAP. IV.
Verse 2. He taught them many things by parables] See every part of this parable of the sower explained on Mt 13:1, &c.
Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Bible (1810–1826) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Joseph Benson 1811 · Public Domain Mar 4:1-9. And he began to teach by the…
Mar 4:1-9. And he began to teach by the seaside — See notes on Mat 13:1-17. He taught them many things by parables — After the usual manner of the eastern nations, to make his instructions more agreeable to them, and to impress them the more upon attentive hearers. A parable signifies not only a simile, or comparison, and sometimes a proverb, but any kind of instructive speech, wherein spiritual things are explained and illustrated by natural. Pro 1:6, To understand a proverb and the interpretation. The proverb is the literal sense, the interpretation is the spiritual; resting in the literal sense killeth, but the spiritual giveth life. Hearken — This word he probably spoke with a loud voice, to stop the noise and hurry of the people.
Joseph Benson's Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1811–1818) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Albert Barnes 1834 · Public Domain See the parable of the sower explained in the…
See the parable of the sower explained in the notes at Mat 13:1-9.
See the parable of the sower explained in the notes at Mat 13:1-9.
Albert Barnes' Notes on the Bible (1834–1885) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Haydock's Catholic Bible Commentary 1859 · Public Domain If we examine St. Matthew on this point, we…
If we examine St. Matthew on this point, we shall discover that this discourse was made on the same day as the preceding discourse; for St. Matthew informs us, that having finished this exhortation, he the same day went and taught by the sea. (Ven. Bede)
George Leo Haydock (1774–1849), Haydock's Catholic Family Bible and Commentary, 1859 edition — public domain. Excludes Psalms (Douay-Rheims chapter numbering differs from Protestant) and Deuterocanonical books (Catholic canon only).
John Nelson Darby 1862 · Public Domain Mark Chapter 4
Mark Chapter 4
This introduces the true character and result of His own service, and all the history of the service that should be accomplished unto a far distant future; as well as the responsibility of His disciples, with regard to the share they would have in it, and the quietness of one who trusted in God while thus labouring; the storms also that should occur, that should exercise faith while Jesus apparently took no notice of them; and the just confidence of faith, as well as the power that sustained it.
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The whole character of the work at that moment, and until the Lord’s return, is described in this fourth chapter.
The Lord resumes in it His habitual work of instruction, but in connection with the development that had just taken place of His relationship with the Jews. He sows. Fruit He no longer sought in His vineyard. In Mar 4:11 we see that the distinction between the Jews and His disciples is marked. To the latter it was given to know the mystery of the kingdom, but to those that were without all these things were done in parables. I do not repeat the remarks I made in speaking of the contents of this parable in Matthew. But that which follows in Mar 4:21 belongs essentially to the Gospel by Mark. We have seen that the Lord was occupied in preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and He committed the preaching of this gospel to others also. He was a sower, and He sowed the word. That was His service, and it was theirs likewise. But is a candle lit to be hidden? Moreover nothing should be hidden. If man did not manifest the truth he had received, God would manifest all things. Let every one take heed to it.
In Mar 4:24 He applies this principle to His disciples. They must take heed to what they heard, for God would act towards them according to their fidelity in the administration of the word committed to them. The love of God sent the word of grace and of the kingdom unto men. That it should reach their conscience was the object of the service committed to the disciples. Christ communicated it to them; they were to make it known to others in all its fulness. According to the measure with which they gave free course to this testimony of love (conformably to the gift they had received), so should it be measured unto them in the government of God. If they hearkened unto that which He communicated to them, they should receive more; for, as a general principle, he who made that which reached him his own should have yet more, and from him who did not truly make it his own it should be taken away.
The Lord then shews them how it should be with regard to Himself. He had sown, and, even as the seed springs up and grows without any act on the sower’s part, so would Christ allow the gospel to spread in the world without interposing in any apparent way, it being the peculiar character of the kingdom that the King was not there. But, when harvest time comes, the sower has again to-do with it. So should it be with Jesus: He would return to look after the harvest. He was personally engaged in the sowing and in the harvest. In the interval, all went on apparently as if left to itself, really without the interference of the Lord in Person.
The Lord makes use of another similitude to describe the character of the kingdom. The small seed that He sowed should become a great system, highly exalted in the earth, capable of affording temporal protection to those that took shelter in it. Thus we have the work of preaching the word; the responsibility of the labourers to whom the Lord would entrust it during His absence; His own action at the beginning and at the end, at seed-time and at harvest, Himself remaining at a distance during the interval; and the formation of a great earthly power as the result of the truth which He preached, and which created a little nucleus around Himself. One part of the history of His followers was yet to be shewn. They should find most serious difficulties in their way. The enemy would raise up a storm against them. Apparently Christ took no notice of their situation. They call upon Him, and awake Him by cries, which He answers in grace. He speaks to the wind and the sea, and there is a great calm. At the same time He rebukes their unbelief. They should have counted on Him and on His divine power, and not have thought that He was going to be swallowed up by the waves. They should have remembered their own connection with Him-that, by grace, they were associated with Him. What tranquillity was His! the storm does not disturb Him. Devoted to His work, He took His rest at the moment when service did not require His activity. He rested during the passage. His service only afforded Him those moments snatched by circumstances from labour. His divine tranquillity, which knew no distrust, allowed Him to sleep during the storm. It was not so with the disciples; and, forgetful of His power, unaware of the glory of Him who was with them, they think only of themselves, as though Jesus had forgotten them. One word on His part displays in Him the Lord of creation. This is the real state of the disciples when Israel is set aside. The storm arises. Jesus appears to take no heed. Now faith would have recognised that they were in the same ship with Him. That is to say, if Jesus leaves the seed He has sown to grow until the harvest, He is, none the less, in the same vessel; He shares, not the less truly, the lot of His followers, or rather they share His. The dangers are the danger He and His work are in. That is, there is really none. And how great is the foolishness of unbelief. Think of their supposing, when the Son of God is come into the world to accomplish redemption and the settled purposes of God, that by, to man’s eye, an accidental storm, He and all His work should be unexpectedly sunk in the lake! We are, blessed be His name, in the same boat with Him. If the Son of God does not sink, neither shall we.
John Nelson Darby — Synopsis of the Books of the Bible: the New Testament (c. 1857–1862) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Lange's Commentary on the Holy Scriptures 1864 · Public Domain 3. Our Lord’s Conflict with the carnal Unbelief of…
3. Our Lord’s Conflict with the carnal Unbelief of the People in the Delivery of His Parables, and His Triumph over Human Narrowness. (Mar_4:1-34)
(Parallels: Mat_13:1-23; Mar_4:31-35; Luk_8:4-18)
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1And he began again to teach by the sea-side: and there was gathered1 unto him a great multitude, so that he entered into a [the] ship, and sat in the sea; and the whole multitude was by the sea on the land. 2And he taught them many things by parables, 3and said unto them in his doctrine, Hearken: behold, there went out a sower to sow: 4And it came to pass, as he sowed, some fell by the way-side, and the fowls [birds] of 5the air2 came and devoured it up. And some3 fell on stony ground, where it had not 6much earth; and immediately it sprang up, because it had no depth of earth: But when the sun was up, 4 it was scorched; and, because it had no root, it withered away. 7And some fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no fruit.8And other fell on good ground, and did yield fruit that sprang up and increased, and brought forth, some thirty, and some sixty and some an hundred. 9And he said unto them, He that hath ears to hear, let him hear. 10And when he was alone [apart], they that were about him with the twelve asked of him the parable. 5 11And he said unto them, Unto you it is given to know6 the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables: 12That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them. 13And he said unto 14them, Know ye not this parable? and how then will ye know all parables? The sower soweth the word. 15And these are they by the way-side, where the word is sown; but [and] when they have heard, Satan cometh immediately, and taketh away the word 16that was sown in their hearts. And these7 are they likewise which are sown on stony ground; who, when they have heard the word, immediately receive it with gladness; 17And have no [not] root in themselves, and so endure but for a time [but are transient]: afterward, when affliction or persecution ariseth for the word’s sake, immediately they are offended. 18And these are they which are sown among thorns; such as hear the word, 19And the cares of this8 world, and the deceitfulness of riches, and the lusts of other 20[remaining] things entering in, choke the word, and it becometh unfruitful. And these9 are they which are sown on good ground; such as hear the word, and receive it, and bring forth fruit, some thirty-fold, some sixty, and some an hundred. 21And he said unto them, Is a candle [the lamp] brought to be put under a bushel [the measure], or under a [the] bed? ,and not to be set on a candlestick [the lamp-stand]? 22For there is nothing hid, which shall not10 be manifested; neither was anything kept secret, but that it should come abroad. 23If any man have ears to hear, let him hear. 24And he saith unto them, Take heed what ye hear: with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you; and unto you that hear11 shall more be given. 25For he that hath, to him shall be given; and he that hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he hath. 26And he said, So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast [the] seed into [upon] the ground; 27And should sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed should 28spring [sprout] and grow up [elongate], he knoweth not how. For12 the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself [automatically]; first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear. 29But when the fruit is brought forth [yields], immediately he putteth in the sickle, because the harvest is [has] come. 30And he said, “Whereunto shall we liken the 31kingdom of God? or with what comparison shall we compare it? 13 It is like a grain of mustard-seed, which, when it is sown in the earth, is less than all the seeds that be in the earth: 32But when it is sown, it groweth up, and becometh greater than all herbs, and shooteth out [makes] great branches; so that the fowls [birds] of the air may lodge under the shadow of it. 33And with many such parables spake he the word unto them, as they were able to hear it. 34But without a parable spake he not unto them: and when they were alone, he expounded all things to his disciples14.
EXEGETICAL AND CRITICAL
See on the parallels.—Matthew gives us a collection of seven parables; Mark, of three. Thus it is a round sacred number in both. Here also the individual parables are combined into one collective view of the kingdom of God. In Matthew, we see the chronological development of the kingdom of God in its historical periods; here, we have a picture of its development in space (statistically) according to its immanent principles of gradual expansion. The first parable depicts the kingdom of God in its universally difficult foundation; the second (a precious addition to the treasury of parables, in Mark alone), its certain and natural development; the third, its wonderful and glorious spread and consummation. It is probable that these three parables formed originally one single connected discourse; furnishing the basis of a later historical representation of the kingdom in the seven parables. The beginning of the parabolic discourses, however, had an earlier position than Mark indicates. His purpose is to connect them with the transference of Jesus’ teaching to the sea-side; but he has also a motive arising out of the nature of the events for placing these parables here. They form a crisis in the conflict of Christ with unbelief in Galilee, and mark His conflict with the specially sensuous unbelief of the people. Hence, in Mar_4:12, he has the well-known strong ἵνα (βλέποντες βλέπωσι καὶ μὴ ἵδωσι); while Matthew has the ὅτι. He also quotes in a very suggestive manner, Mar_4:21-23, the words of Christ which we find in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, Mar_5:15, and in the instructions to the Apostles, Mar_10:26, and which in Luke, Mar_8:16, are connected with the parable of the sower. There is nothing improbable in the supposition that our Lord used these figures in various connections. Here the figure of the candle is designed to teach that the parables have it for their positive purpose to enlighten; that is, that the disciples should at the right season discover the spiritual meaning of the parables; and the figure of the measure, that the disciples were to measure out instruction liberally in hope.
Mar_4:1. And He began again to teach by the sea-side.—Another emphatic reference to the contrast of this with His customary course of teaching; and as an expression of His decided breach with the Pharisees.
Mar_4:2. In His doctrine.—In His doctrinal instructions. “Of the many things (πολλά), Mark makes some particular things prominent.” Meyer.
Mar_4:8. Fruit that sprang up and increased.—We understand the former, of strong and vigorous upward growth; but the latter, the αὐξανόμενον, of the seed-corn’s spreading out into a number of stalks, as is the case with prosperous increase. Meyer also understands the καρπός as meaning the stalks in contradistinction to the grains, these not being mentioned till later; “some,” etc. But the idea of the fruit is thus artificially weakened. The actual and excellent growth is described; but under the point of view of its fruit, this and the luxuriant stalk being embraced in one. It is better to understand the springing up and increasing of the fruit as meaning the springing up of the ears of grain with the stems.
Mar_4:10. They that were about Him, with the Twelve.—The specific company of Christ’s disciples, independent of and with the Twelve. Euthym. Zig.: The Seventy. But these were not distinguished from the rest until later.
Mar_4:11. Unto you is given to know the mystery.—Significant; and to be explained in accordance with Matthew and Luke. The mystery is given through the knowledge of it.—But unto them that are without, οἱ ἔξω: in later phraseology, all non-Christians (1Co_5:12); with the Talmudists, all who were not Jews; but also the uninstructed and uninitiated Jews. Here, however, it is doubtless a hint of the germ of the opposition between the old and the new community, which in the word ἐκκλησία Mat_16:18) came somewhat later into full use.
Mar_4:12. They may see.—The ἵνα is not to be softened, as if ita ut, as Rosenmüller and others assert. We must maintain that this hard utterance was based upon Isa_6:9 seq., and therefore that it must be interpreted in the meaning of that passage: not as an absolute sentence, but as a deserved, economical, and pedagogical visitation. See on Matthew.
Mar_4:13. Know ye not this parable?—The first parable of the kingdom is the basis of all the rest. If they understood not this, they could not understand any that followed. If they had the explanation of this, they had the key for the understanding of all others. According to De Wette, these are rebuking words; according to Meyer, they are a mere recurrence to the question of Mar_4:10. But it is certainly, at the same time, an intimation of the connection of all the parables in the idea of the kingdom of heaven; so that with the explanation of this one, all were explained.
Mar_4:15. These are they by the way-side, where the word is sown.—Through the whole parable we must embrace in one view the field with the seed on it. In Luke, the idea of seed predominates; in Mark, the idea of ground sown over; in Matthew, there is an alternation. In the first instance, the view of the ground sown predominates; in the last, the view of the seed scattered.
Mar_4:16. Which are sown.—Mark the change of tense in Mark: σπειρόμενοι, Mar_4:16; Mar_4:18, and σπαρέντες in Mar_4:20.
Mar_4:18. Who have heard the word.—Hearers preëminently. Diligent hearers, but not doers; ἀκούσαντες instead of ἀκούοντες: B., C, D., L., ∆., Tischendorf. Mark gives the most vivid picture of them.
Mar_4:21. Is a candle brought to be put.—Not an exhortation to virtue, as Theophylact and others thought, but a statement of the end for which He confided to them the mystery of the kingdom in parables. According to Erasmus: “Do not suppose that what I now commit to you in secret, I would have concealed for ever; the light is kindled by Me in you, that by your ministry it may disperse the darkness of the whole world.”
Mar_4:22. For there is nothing hid.—The concealed is in its very nature destined to be revealed in its time. A thing absolutely and forever concealed would not be concealed; it would as such have no meaning. There is this design in all the concealments of the kingdom of God. Thus the clause forms the complement of the ἵνα above, Mar_4:12.
Mar_4:24. With what measure ye mete.—De Wette (after Euthym. Zig.): “According to the measure of your ability and diligence (as hearers, see the preceding verse), ye will receive instruction.” But it seems more obvious, in the process of the thought, to say, According to the measure of your diligence in teaching will your Master add to your knowledge (docendo discimus, especially in the kingdom of God). For the mere hearing and receiving cannot well be described as a measuring out.
Mar_4:25. For he that hath.—The proverb has, here, more reference to zeal in the teaching function. The living treasure of knowledge will always, by its own nature, go on increasing. We may compare the words concerning the spiritual life springing up within, Joh_4:14; Joh_7:38; for living knowledge is never separable from internal spiritual life.
Mar_4:26-29 are a continuation of the parabolic instruction addressed to the people. Meyer: Observe the Aorist βάλη, and then the following Presents: has cast, and then does sleep.
Mar_4:29. When the fruit is brought forth.—But the παραδῷ is not intransitive: When the fruit shall have yielded itself. This relative spontaneousness of the fruit is as if it did not suffer premature cutting before its full ripeness.
Mar_4:30. Or with what comparison.—Meyer: The hearers are now formally addressed in the discourse, as the omission of αὐτοῖς with ἔλεγεν shows.
Mar_4:33. And with many such parables.—Manifestly, Mark knew of other parables of our Lord, which he passes over. As they were able.—This does not refer to their worthiness (Grotius), but to their ability to apprehend (Theophylact, De Wette). It also includes, however, their being able to bear without being offended. Thus it is not a mere literal ἀκούειν in the sense of being able to receive, as Meyer thinks.
DOCTRINAL AND ETHICAL
1. See on the parallels.—On the ἵνα, Mar_4:12, see the notes above.
2. The parable of Mar_4:26-29 teaches, in the figure of the relative independence of nature in the regular development of the seed through an internal energy of growth (αὐτομάτη), the higher relative independence and regular development of the growth of the kingdom of God, or the establishment of Christianity and the Church in the world down to its consummation for the final manifestation of the kingdom of God. (The reapers: the angels, Mat_13:39) The proper point of comparison is the seed’s impulse of growth from within outwardly, as if by an internal energy of its own, whence follow the apparent spontaneousness, regularity, gradualness, progressiveness, security, and perfection of the development. Thus the naturalness of nature, so to speak, the “metamorphosis of plants,” becomes a symbol of the development of the divine life from the seed of the divine word or regeneration. The germinant energy of growth is here the actual freedom of the new divine-human (not abstractly human, but also not abstractly divine) energy of life in humanity; whether in the regeneration and sanctification of the believing community, or in that of the individual Christian. Here also the development proceeds from within, from the conscious internal being: independent or free (not from God, but in God), naturally and regularly legitimate, gradual, progressive, down to certain and decisive consummation. But it is assumed that human nature in its essence bears the same relation to the word of God, and has as much in common with it, as the earth to the seed-corn. And as the earth only by culture, and tillage, and sowing, overcomes its tendency to wildness, and the bringing forth of thorns and thistles, so also the human heart is set free from its wicked bias, and its thorns and thistles, only by the culture of grace and the seed of the word of God. Meyer: The spontaneousness here set forth does not negate the divine energies of grace; but the end of the parable is not to make the latter prominent, but the former. De Wette: The parable teaches patience, as that of the tares forbearance.—The period of the New Testament Church presents the natural development of the kingdom of God, yet not without the Lord’s overruling, and not without the constant energy of His Spirit. The miraculous seed has become a new nature, from which at the Lord’s appearance new fruits will grow.
HOMILETICAL AND PRACTICAL
See on the parallels.—Christ teaching in the ship a parable itself of the kingdom of heaven: 1. A figure of the form of that kingdom: a. of the evangelical ministry, b. of the church, c. of missions; 2. a figure of its condition: a. small beginnings, b. poverty, c. mobility, freedom.—Christ in conflict with the sensuous unbelief of the world.—Christ the deliverer of the people from the bonds of ignorance, of carnal notions, and sensuous narrowness.—The teaching wisdom of Christ, as it speaks in parables, a seal of His divine power (of His love as of His wisdom).—He that hath ears to hear, let him hear!—The parables of Jesus as signs of the divine judgments: 1. Figuring the judicial concealments and symbols of truth in the spiritual life of mankind, a. in the Gentile world, b. in the people of Israel, c. in the Christian, specially the medieval Church; 2. figuring their scope and purpose, a. to spare, b. to instruct, and c. to discipline and educate the soul.—The interpretation of the parable of the sower a key to the interpretation of all the rest.—The three parables of our chapter combined, present a figure of the unfolding of the kingdom of heaven, as to its foundation, progress, and completion.—The parable of Mar_4:26-29. Nature, in its normal development from within, a representation of human freedom, and its development in the kingdom of grace.—The word of life in the figure of a grain of wheat: 1. Its internal energy of life; 2. its growth according to laws; 3. its gradualness; 4. its progressive stages; 5. the certainty of its development.—The work of grace, its normal unfolding, in the Church and in individuals.—In the kingdom of grace we must learn not to misapprehend even the immature forms of development (not counting the green stalk as common grass, etc.).—The seed of divine grace requires patient waiting for its maturity.—The human heart may become one with the word of God (in consequence of its original relation to it) through faith; and then there is unfolded in it a divine energy of new life.—For him who rightly cares for the seed, the fruit gradually ripens, although he himself may not know it.—Even in unconscious life, the divine word goes on maturing. (Narratives of the feeble-minded, in whom it gradually was developed. The action of the mind in going to sleep continues in sleep.)—Influences upon the seed of the kingdom of nature analogous to those of the kingdom of grace: the mysterious operation and movement of the Holy Spirit are the sunshine and rain in the kingdom of grace.—The seed, with all its certainty of development, under the necessary condition of sunshine and rain. Application of this to the work of divine grace in the soul of the believer.
Starke:—Quesnel:—An imperfect church, an unworthy pulpit, and poor hearers, may nevertheless form a true, church, accepted of God.—Cramer:—Jesus makes the little ship His pulpit: if we do not diligently hear and obey, He removes Himself with His little ship and pulpit.—Canstein:—Tilling the land is the oldest work of men’s hands, and the most pleasing to God; therefore Christ took His parables so willingly from that occupation.—God’s word is a living seed, by which the spiritually dead hearts of men are made living and fruitful.—Hedinger:—Unchanging seed, variable hearts.—Osiander:—If men did not harden themselves, they would not fall into the danger of reprobation.—Hedinger:—We must not look at the mere shell, but at the kernel of Holy Scripture (on Mar_4:13).—Quesnel:—The knowl edge of divine mysteries is of God, and not of man.—The wisdom of God has not always remained secret, but at the right season has been made manifest to men, 1Co_2:7.—All things must come to light, whether after a longer or a shorter time.—Faithful pastors and diligent hearers obtain from day to day a larger measure of light and grace.—A faithful and diligent soul has a great treasure—its riches extend to eternity; but an idle soul becomes every day poorer, until at last it loses all.—Oh, how far should we have advanced in the way of salvation, if we had only always used aright the means of grace!—By the sleeping is signified an expectation of blessing, which leaves all care to God; as one may say, I sleep, but my heart wakes.—Majus:—God’s servants should not be impatient when they do not at once see the fruits of their labors.—We must do our work sincerely, and commit to God the result; He will make His true servants rejoice in the day of harvest.—God conceals from His ministers some of the fruits of their diligence, to keep them in humility.—Hope in God, who will not neglect his work in thee.—Christians must aim high, and strive after perfection.—Where God’s word is rightly sown and received, it is never long without fruits of salvation.—Osiander:—We must not expect at once perfect trees of righteousness in the paradise of the Christian Church; time is required for rooting, growing, and bringing forth fruit.
Gerlach:—The longer man retains and studies any one divine truth, the more manifest it becomes, and itself brings all others to light.—Braune:—The unostentatious development of the divine word and the kingdom of God in the heart of man.—As the husbandman hardly distinguishes seeds, so is it with the results of the seed of the word. Learn patience.—Schleiermacher:—(He observes that Christ was not misled by the flocking of multitudes around Himself, but perfectly penetrated His whole auditory—four kinds of soils; but that at the same time He was not angered by this character of His auditory.) If the divine word is received and retained, it is changed into the life of the man; and then in a natural manner his acts are like his words, and become more and more the expression of thy divine word.—The fruit is that which is to be detached again from the plant, itself to be again sown, and from which new life is to arise.—The Redeemer says truly, that there is no other power be which the kingdom of God prospers than this power of the seed, this power of the divine word; that is, in relation to the office and work of the human sower.—The preparatory work, the tilling of the land, must be distinguished from the sowing.—Gossner:—On Mar_4:23. Him who made the ear, man will not hear.—If we mete out with the measure of Christ, it shall be meted to us again with the same.
Footnotes:
[1]Mar_4:1.—Συνάγεται instead of συνήχθη: Lachmann, Tischendorf, after B., C., L.
[2]Mar_4:4.—“Fowls of heaven.” Τοῦ οὐρανοῦ has only D. of the uncial MSS. in its favor. Probably added from Luk_8:5.
[3]Mar_4:5.—Καὶ ἄλλο instead of ἄλλο δέ: Lachmann and Tischendorf, after the best MSS.
[4]Mar_4:6.—Lachmann and Tischendorf, after B., C., D., L., Δ., Vulgate, read καὶ ὅτε ἀνέτειλεν ὁ ἥλιος, instead of ἡλίου δὲ ἀνατείλαντος.
[5]Mar_4:10.—Τὰς παραβολάς instead of τὴν παραβολήν: Tischendorf, after B., C., L., Δ. The parable just delivered gave them occasion to ask about the design of parables generally.
[6]Mar_4:11.—The γνῶναι is wanting in A., B., C.* So Lachmann, Tischendorf.
[7]Mar_4:18.—Καὶ ἄλλοι εἰσί instead of καὶ οὖτοί εἰσιν: Griesbach, Lachmann, Tischendorf, after B., C.*, D., Vulgate, &c.
[8]Mar_4:19.—Τούτου is wanting in the best MSS., and rejected by Griesbach, Fritzsche, Lachmann, and Tischendorf.
[9]Mar_4:20.—’Εκεῖνοι instead of οὖτοι: Tischendorf, after B., C., L., Δ.
[10]Mar_4:22.—’Εὰν μή, the most difficult and best authenticated reading (A., B., C., Tischendorf). [Meyer thinks that the ὃ is an addition, and would explain by comparison with Mar_10:30. He denies the assertion of Fritzsche and De Wette that ἐὰν μή is absurdly used here, and contends that it contains a logical analysis of the thought.—Ed.]
[11]Mar_4:24.—Τοῖς ἀκούουσιν, omitted in Lachmann and Tischendorf, after B., C., D., G., L.
[12]Mar_4:28.—The γὰρ must be given up. Πλήρης σῖτος instead of πλήρη σῖτον: B., Lachmann, Tischendorf.
[13]Mar_4:30.—Πῶς instead of τίνι: Tischendorf, after B., C., L., Δ., Versions. ’Εν τίνι αὐτὴν παραβολῇ θῶμεν instead of ἐν ποίᾳ παραβολῇ παραβάλωμεν αὐτήν: Tischendorf, Lachmann, after B., C.*, L., Δ.
[14]Mar_4:31.—Κόκκῳ: Elzevir, Fritzsche, Tischendorf, Meyer; κόκκον: Griesbach, Scholz, Lachmann.
Lange's Commentary on the Holy Scriptures (Critical, Doctrinal, and Homiletical), ed. John Peter Lange, English translation edited by Philip Schaff (1864–1880) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Daniel D. Whedon 1874 · Public Domain 1. Sat in the sea — That is, he…
1. Sat in the sea — That is, he sat in the boat, and the boat was in the sea. Here our Lord delivered the great series of parabolic discourses of which a sketch is given in Matthew 13.
Daniel D. Whedon (gen. ed.), Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1874–1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges 1878 · Public Domain Ch. Mar_4:1-9. The Parable of the Sower
Ch. Mar_4:1-9. The Parable of the Sower
1. by the sea side] The scenery round the Lake doubtless suggested many of the details of the Parables now delivered. (1) On the shore was the vast multitude gathered “out of every city” (Luk_8:4); (2) from the fishing-boat the eye of the Divine Speaker would rest on (a) patches of undulating corn-fields with the trodden pathway running through them, the rocky ground of the hill-side protruding here and there, the large bushes of thorn growing in the very midst of the waving wheat, the deep loam of the good rich soil which distinguishes the whole of the Plain of Gennesaret descending close to the water’s edge; (b) the mustard-tree, which grows especially on the shores of the Lake; (c) the fishermen connected with the great fisheries, which once made the fame of Gennesaret, plying amidst its marvellous shoals of fish, the drag-net or hauling-net (Mat_13:47-48), the casting-net (Mat_4:18; Mar_1:16), the bag-net and basket-net (Luk_5:4-9); (d) the women and children employed in picking out from the wheat the tall green stalks, called by the Arabs, Zuwân = the Greek Zizania = the Lollia of the Vulgate, the tares of our Version; (e) the countless flocks of birds, aquatic fowls by the lake-side, partridges and pigeons hovering over the rich plain. See Stanley’s Sinai and Palestine, pp. 425–427; Thomson’s Land and the Book, p. 402; Tristram’s Land of Israel, p. 431.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (gen. ed. J. J. S. Perowne; Cambridge University Press, 1878–1918) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers 1878 · Public Domain (1-20) He began.—See Notes on Mat_13:1-23.
IV.
(1-20) He began.—See Notes on Mat_13:1-23.
A Bible Commentary for English Readers, edited by Charles John Ellicott (1878–1897) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Pulpit Commentary 1880 · Public Domain And again he began to teach by the seaside.…
And again he began to teach by the seaside. This return to the seaside is mentioned by St. Mark only. From this time our Lord"s teaching began to be more public. The room and the little courtyard no longer sufficed for the multitudes that came to him. The Authorized Version says that "a great multitude was gathered unto him." The Greek adjective, according to the most approved reading, is pleistov the superlative of poluv , and should be rendered "a very great" multitude. They bad probably been waiting for him in the neighborhood of Capernaum. He entered into a boat probably the boat mentioned at Mar 3:9and sat in the sea, i.e. in the boat afloat on the water, so as to be relieved of the pressure of the vast multitude (pleistov oclov) gathered on the shore.
Vers. 1-20. Spiritual sowing.
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It is a picturesque and memorable sight. Multitudes of people, of all classes and from every part of the land, have assembled on the western shore of the Galilean lake, where Jesus is daily occupied in teaching and in healing. To protect himself from the pressure of the crowd, and the better to command his audience, Jesus steps into a boat, and pushes off a few yards from the beach. There, with the fair landscape before him, corn-fields covering the slopes, the birds of the air above, winging their flight over the still waters, the great Teacher addresses the people. His language is figurative, drawn from the processes of nature and the employments of husbandry, probably at the very moment apparent to his eye. How natural that, at this moment and in this scene, our Lord should introduce a new style of teaching, should enter upon a new phase of ministry! The parable, as a vehicle for spiritual truth, had indeed been employed by Jewish teachers and prophets; but it was our Lord himself who carried this style of spiritual instruction to perfection.
I THE SOWER. Every man, and especially every teacher, is a sower intellectual, moral, or both. Christ is emphatically the Sower. He was such in his ministry on earth; in his death, when the corn of wheat fell into the ground and died, he was both the Sower and the Seed; in the gospel dispensation he continues to be the Divine Sower. His apostles and all his ministers have been sowing through the long centuries, or rather he has been sowing by their hands. How wise, liberal, diligent, unwearied, is Christ in this beneficent work!
II THE SEED. This is the Word of God. All truth is spiritual seed; the truth relating to God his will and grace is "the seed of the kingdom." Like the seed, the gospel is comparatively small and insignificant; it has within it inherent vitality, a living germ; it is seemingly thrown away and hidden; its nature is to grow and to increase and multiply; it is tender and depends upon the treatment it meets with whether it lives or dies.
III THE SORE. The human heart is adapted to receive and to cherish the spiritual seed. But as on the surface of the earth some ground is fertile and some is barren, some ground is adapted to one crop and other ground to a crop of different kind, so it is in the spiritual husbandry. Whilst all hearts are created to receive the heavenly seed, and only fulfill their end when they bear spiritual fruit, we cannot but recognize the marvellous diversity of soil into which the gospel is deposited. Yet we must not so interpret the parable as to countenance the doctrine of fatalism.
IV THE SOWING. Was the sower in the parable guided, in the manner and measure of his sowing, by the likelihood or otherwise that the land would prove fruitful? No; neither should the gospel sower reckon probabilities: his Master did not. The sower should be liberal and indiscriminate, should sow beside all waters," should remember that he "knows not which shall prosper, this or that." It is for him to do his work diligently and faithfully, and leave results to God; e.g. the mother and the child, the teacher and the class, the master and the pupil or apprentice, the preacher and the congregation, the author and the reader.
V THE GROWTH. This is not universal; for, as the parable reminds us, it comes to pass, both in the natural and the spiritual sowing, that in some cases the seed disappears and comes to nought. Yet the redemption of Christ proclaimed, and the grace of the Holy Spirit vouchsafed, co-operate oftentimes to most blessed results, even as in nature seed and soil, showers and sunshine, produce a vigorous growth.
VI THE HARVEST. What is the end of sowing and tilling, of culture and toil? It is fruit. And, in the spiritual kingdom, what is the aim and recompense of the Divine and of all human sowers? It is fruit of holiness, obedience, love, joy, peace, eternal life. It shall not be wanting. "My word shall not return unto me void;" "They that sow in tears shall reap in joy;" "They shall bring their sheaves with them;" it may be "after many days." There is a harvest in time, and a richer, riper harvest in eternity.
PRACTICAL LESSONS.
1. One of encouragement for all gospel sowers; they are doing the Master"s work, they are following the Master"s example, they are assured of the Master"s support.
2. One of admonition to all to whom the Word is preached. Take heed what and how you hear. The seed is heavenly; is the soil kindly, prepared, grateful, fruitful?
HOMILIES BY A.F. MUIR Vers. 1, 2. The nature-preaching of Christ.
I CIRCUMSTANCES OCCASIONING IT. The order of Matthew and Mark preferable and explanatory. Various considerations led him to adopt this method of teaching.
1. A reasonable prudence. His enemies were busy, and scarcely suffered a single opportunity to pass without spying or planning means by which to destroy him. Out of doors he would be able to keep the crowd at a greater remove, and so hostile listeners would be under better observation.
2. Sympathy for those who were "without. " In the small country cottages, where for the most part he resided, there was no accommodation for the numbers that thronged to his ministry. Stifling heat and inconvenient jostling would ill accord with the dignity of his message. Multitudes were unable to hear or see him, and he had compassion on their souls. A different class of people, too, might be reached by this new method.
3. The charm of nature. There are abundant evidences of Christ"s poetic and artistic sense of nature. He would be drawn forth from the heat and squalor of the small cottage to the spaciousness, grandeur, and ever-varying phenomena of the outside world. It was his own world. He was present when "the morning stars sang together" at its birth, "and without him was not anything made that was made.
II ADVANTAGES OF THIS MODE OF TEACHING.
1. It linked the ideas of the spiritual world with the real world of everyday experience.
2. By its associating the common life of men with the Divine and eternal, the former was refined and elevated. The many were thus addressed, and a certain general benefit received by them.
3. The inner meaning of such teaching could only be discerned by the spiritual and devout, and thus his safety was secured. His enemies were baffled and kept in ignorance.
4. This teaching was attractive to all.
III WHAT IT SUGGESTED AS TO THE SPHERE AND FUNCTION OF THE "KINGDOM OF GOD.
1. That it was coextensive with the universe.
2. That the heavenly element is to penetrate and include the earthly element in God"s world.
3. That the senses, if rightly used, are aids to the spirit. M.
HOMILIES BY A. ROWLAND Ver. 1. Divine teaching from the fisherman"s boat.
Matthew gives us, in the thirteenth chapter of his Gospel, a series of seven parables, which correspond with the three which Mark records here. They all illustrate the nature and the progress of the kingdom of God which Christ sought to establish. The parable of the sower describes the founding of the kingdom, and the various difficulties with which it would meet; the parable of the seed growing secretly teaches us that its progress would be natural, unostentatious, and certain; while the parable of the mustard seed declares that in its final consummation it would have wide-reaching influence. The second of these is peculiar to Mark. We propose to consider, not the parables themselves, but the circumstances under which they were uttered, which also suggest and illustrate truths concerning the kingdom. Our Lord"s teaching from the fisherman"s boat suggests the following thoughts:
I THAT HOSTILITY MAY CHANGE OUR METHOD, BUT MUST NOT BE ALLOWED TO PREVENT OUR WORK. The Pharisees had become openly antagonistic to our Lord. Their spies followed him everywhere. Their controversial champions argued with him and misrepresented him in the synagogues. This hostility drove the Lord from the sanctuaries of his people. He would not suffer his Father"s house to be desecrated by such tactics. Accordingly, he no longer, as a rule, was found in the synagogues, but in the fields and streets, in the homes of the people, or in the fishing-boats that rocked on the Sea of Galilee. He thus acted on the principle he laid down for his disciples when he said to them, "If they persecute you in one city, flee to another." And that principle still holds good, and may have the widest application. St. Paul acted on it when he adapted himself, under varying circumstances, to the conditions of his hearers. If he addressed the people of Lystra, he did not argue from the Old Testament, of which they knew nothing, but pointed to the mountains and fields, and spoke of the God who gave them "fruitful seasons." If he was surrounded by Athenians in their beautiful city, he referred to the temples which crowned the Acropolis, and to the statues which adorned the Agora. If he was in the synagogue at Antioch, in Pisidia, he argued from the sacred Scriptures, the authority of which his hearers acknowledged. He became "all things to all men, if by any means he might win some;" and in this he followed in the footsteps of the great Teacher, who, when refused a fair hearing in the synagogue, preached beside the open sea. Thus, with the utmost flexibility and freedom, Christian workers should alter their methods to meet the changing circumstances in which they find themselves; never for a moment losing sight of the object they have set before themselves, but seeking to attain that by the most suitable means. This may be applied to those who preach or teach, whether amongst the sceptical or the indifferent, among the children or the cultured.
II THAT THERE IS NO PLACE WHERE GOD"S WORK MAY NOT BE DONE. The change in method, indicated by the text, did not trouble our Lord as it would have troubled any one to whom place and mode seem everything in worship. All the earth was holy in his eyes. The heavenly Father was near him everywhere. The rippling of the sea or the rustling of the corn would be more grateful to him than the murmured repetitions of formal prayers by the mechanical and unspiritual worshippers in the synagogue. Apart from persecution, he would often have chosen, from preference, such a sphere of work as this, as indeed he did when he preached the sermon on the mount. Read his teaching to the woman of Samaria, (Joh_4:20, Joh_4:21) and see how acceptable to God is spiritual worship wherever it may be offered. Study the parable that immediately follows our text, and you will notice that the sower threw out his seed broadcast upon all kinds of soil. Our Lord would preach in a Pharisee"s house, or on a mountain, or from a boat, as readily as in a synagogue or in the temple; for "Holiness to the Lord" (Zec_14:20) was written everywhere, and he accounted "nothing common or unclean". (Act_10:15) Too often Christian workers select their little sphere for service, and strictly confine themselves to it, contented that multitudes should be left untouched who might easily be brought under their influence. The true sower is willing to scatter his seed broadcast.
III THAT THE MODE OF OUR LORD"S TEACHING MADE HIS UTTERANCES MORE WIDELY ACCEPTABLE. This was not only true of his own day, but of ours. Publicans, lepers, and outcasts, excluded from the synagogue, could hear him on the beach; and all "the common people heard him gladly," for he spake "as one having authority, and not as the scribes." It is well for us also that it was so. There is wonderfully little local colouring about his words; a marvellous freedom from such theological technicalities as the rabbis were wont to use; and his teaching, therefore, comes home to us as it never would have done if couched in the phraseology currently used for the interpretation of the Law. His utterances are fragrant with the fresh air, and they ring with a pleasant freedom, for which we cannot be too thankful; for what might have been Jewish is human, and the words of him who called himself, not "the Son of David," but the "Son of man," are so simple and natural, that there is not a fisherman on our coasts, not a merchant in our streets, not a housewife in our homes, not a sower in our fields, who may not know something of the meaning and beauty of the doctrine of the great Teacher who has come from God.
IV THAT OUR LORD"S POSITION IN THE FISHING-BOAT IS A SIGN OF THE TRANSIENT NATURE OF ABUSED PRIVILEGES. Christ in the boat has often been regarded as an emblem of Christ in his Church. From both he preaches to the world. The Church, in comparison with the world it seeks to influence, is small, as the boat with the few in it was small compared with the crowds listening upon the beach; and her comparative poverty may be represented by that fisherman"s barque, which had about it, we may be sure, no costly adornment. But small and poor as the Church may seem, and the Christ who is in it, she is free as the Master was, who could in a moment leave those who were hostile or unreceptive, and pass over to the other side. (Luk_8:37) There are yet to be found amongst us the impenitent and foolhardy, to whom he will have to say, "Because I have called, and ye refused; I have stretched out my hand, and no man regarded; but ye have set at nought all my counsel, and would none of my reproof: I will also laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your fear cometh. A.R.
HOMILIES BY R. GREEN Vers. 1-25. The duty of faithfully hearing the Word.
H e who taught by every act of his life, and who had already given many most important lessons with his lips, now, after the interruptions just recorded, "began to teach" more formally. It was "by the seaside," the multitude standing "by the sea on the land," and he "entered into a boat, and sat in the sea." "He taught them many things in parables." The first of these and one of the chief of the parables and the chiefest of all on the subject of the Word," is, with its explanation, the key to many others. The lesson of the whole is summed up in the words of Ver. 24, "Heed what ye hear." It was not without purpose that he spoke of hearing. All depends upon it. Noah, Moses, Paul, Jesus himself, will preach in vain if men hear not with care. The parable teaches
I THE ESPECIAL, EVILS AGAINST WHICH MEN GUARD IN HEARING THE WORD.
1. The first evil is losing the Word before faith has made it fruitful. "The parable is this: the seed is the Word of God." The kingdom of heaven grows from this seed only. By it alone is conviction of sin wrought; by it is faith begotten; by it Christ is revealed; by it regeneration is effects; by it the way of life is defined; by it are men sanctified; by it hope, and patience, and charity, and all graces are strengthened. This great lesson is, by both preachers and hearers, to be pondered. But the Word, by whomsoever sown, may be lost before it is fruitful. It may be taken out of the heart, out of the memory, from the understanding. "When they have heard, straightway cometh Satan, and taketh away the Word which hath been sown in them.
2. A second danger is from a mere temporary faith. There is "no deepness of earth," "no root in themselves." They "endure for a while." A little thing turns them away from that which they received "straightway with joy," but without counting the cost.
3. A third evil is the fruitlessness of the Word through the "cares of the world, and the deceitfulness of riches, and the lusts of other things," especially "the pleasures of this life." The ground is good; the seed is good; it is well received and kept in the heart; yet is it choked. Yea, even God"s good Word sown in the heart by Christ"s own hand may be choked. This is a danger to which every believer is exposed. It is allowing other growths to sap this, other things to take up the time and attention, to absorb the interest, to steal the affections. The poor are in danger from "the cares of the world;" the rich from "the deceitfulness of riches." The parable teaches
II THE REWARD OF FAITHFUL HEARING. "He that hath, to him shall be given." To him that hath as the fruit of his diligence, not simply what was given to him all had this to him shall be added the Lord"s increase, over and above the natural consequences of his carefulness. He who so uses Divine truth as to be the better for it is in more favorable circumstances to receive and understand. Such know the truth, for "the mystery of the kingdom of God is given" to them. Every step in the ascent makes the next step possible. Truth grows to its perfection (that is to say, the character which is the product of truth) when it is "heard" and held fast in "an honest and good heart;" a heart inwardly good and outwardly honest; a heart honestly desiring the Word and acting honestly by it. To such there is "fruit, thirtyfold, and sixtyfold, and a hundredfold." This is the truly prepared ground ploughed, as could not be said of "the wayside" or the "stony ground." The parable further teaches
III THE CONDEMNATION OF HIM WHO HEARETH NOT TO PROFIT.
1. "He that hath not," i.e. hath not any fruit of his careful hearing, hath nothing more than was first given to him; "even that which he hath that which was given to him be taken away." Disregarded truth becomes disliked truth, and by him who does not use his understanding about it, it is naturally forgotten. So the condemnation takes the form of a removal of the truth.
2. In carelessness he puts the truth away from him. His measure is small, so he metes it to himself.
3. To hear is a duty; to neglect brings God"s condemnation.
4. He who does not so receive God"s truth as to become a true subject of the kingdom of heaven, is in the kingdom of evil, and continued disobedience leaves the man further and further from God.
5. So truth assumes the form of a parable to him. His eye is dimmed. He sees only the outward word; of the inward meaning, which is experimental, he knows nothing. Even Christ, his work and his gospel, may be to men a mere parable. They know not "the things" which are spoken. Thus is to be seen:
(1) The terrible and to-be-dreaded consequence of not heeding the Word. It becomes a parable, a dark saying, a riddle. "If they hear not Moses," etc.
(2) The mercifulness of him who would hide truth in a beautiful parable, to tempt the careless to inquire that they may be roused to effort and be saved.
(3) The great lesson, "to hear the Word," "to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest the same, that by patience and comfort of the Scriptures we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which is given to us in our Saviour Jesus Christ. G.
HOMILIES BY E. JOHNSON Vers. 1-20. The process of truth in the soul.
"Word" in the parable stands for truth in general. It is the Greek logos, which contains everything relating to ideas and the reception of them.
I THE RELATION OF TRUTH TO THE SOUL. It is mysterious, because in it the secret of life lies. We know certain things about the seed; we know certain things about the soil; we know that their contact is necessary that germination and growth may take place. Sight, experience, teach us this. But the relation itself is unseen and defies the grasp of thought. Well may the poet say of the "flower in the crannied wall" that he has plucked and holds in his hand, could he know its mystery, he should know "man and God and all things." Piety lacks root without reverence; and reverence is begotten of mystery, i.e. of the sense that God is present in every fact of life, in every act of thought.
II THE RECEPTION OF TRUTH IN THE SOUL. The parable clearly teaches that the whole intelligence and will are closely concerned in this.
1. There must be attention. The frivolous listener lets the sound of instruction "go in at one ear and out at the other." Pictures of life and duty, which need to be seized and fixed in conduct so soon as they arise in the inner chambers of imagery, melt away like dissolving views.
2. There must be retention. Memory depends on attention: "Therefore we ought to give earnest heed to the things we have heard, lest at any time they should slip by us." Memory is a talent of which some have more, some less; but in every case it may be increased. Truth does not strike all minds in the same way; the important thing is to seize the truth which does strike us, and which we know to be truth by the way in which it strikes us. If conscious of the frailty of our memory, let a few things be constantly brought before our thoughts. Non multa, sod multum.
3. There must be simplicity of choice. Truth is jealous, and admits no rival. We must be true to her, for she alone gives freedom. Passions, cares, excitements of the imagination these cannot be avoided in our active life in the world. For a time they may overcloud our ideal, cause us to lose sight of our goal. But the cloud will lift again, and directness of purpose will dispel these mists and cause the weight of the merimnai biwtikai (see "Ecce Homo!" p. 221) to fall. Christ sympathizes with our life-difficulties, but implies that we may overcome them.
III THE PROGRESS OF TRUTH IN THE SOUL.
1. It follows the analogy of plant-growth. We can hardly think of spiritual growth under any other image. Herein the need of some knowledge of natural science to the theologian. There lie some of his best instructions and illustrations. It is the Divine counterpart in nature of the ideal truth of spirit.
2. There is diversity in spiritual as in natural growth. Here the corn only is used as an analogy. But we may generalize. The differences in kind as well as degree of produce are not less numerous than in the immense plant-world. The world of souls is as varied as a garden as a tropical forest. "Tis a universe of variety. God spiritually unfolding himself in endless forms of beauty and of strength, delicacy and vigor. "He that hath ears to hear, let him hear." For the parable is in fact a sketch-picture of the ideal world of God"s kingdom of the invisible and eternal. We are in this world to be acted upon by him, that we may react upon him in all the devout activities of a fruitful life. J.
HOMILIES BY J.J. GIVEN Vers. 1-20. Parallel passages: Mat_13:1-23 Luk_8:4-18. Parabolic teaching.
I THE PARABLE OF THE SOWER.
1. Benefit of acquaintance with Scripture topography. To the right comprehension of Scripture acquaintance with Scripture topography is indispensable. This is easily obtainable at the present day from several books of travels now accessible to all. Much may be gained in this way even by those who have not had any opportunity of visiting Bible lands.
2. Peculiarities in this parable. Here several things are peculiar, and only such as are to be met with in the East. First, the sower went forth (exhlyen) from his homestead, for his fields evidently lay at a considerable distance from his dwelling. In the next place, the different kinds of soil are represented in close proximity. Further, the seed is scattered on the highway as well as on the ordinary and proper ground. The produce likewise in one case appears unusually large. Now, on turning to Stanley"s book on "Palestine," or to Thomson"s "The Land and the Book," we get a glimpse at the state of things in the East, which proves all this to be clear, correct, and consistent. From those interesting records of Eastern travel, with their graphic sketches of Eastern scenes, we learn that the sower has to go forth frequently a distance of some miles from his home in order to deposit his seed in the ground. On reaching the corn-land, he finds it devoid of fences, a pathway passing through it, thorn bushes growing in clumps together, with rocks here and there peering through the surface of sparse and scanty soil, while not far off are patches of exceeding fertility; the produce at the same time amounting to the high figure of a hundredfold, but reckoned in the following peculiar fashion: Of three bushels sown one is lost by the birds, particularly the crows; another third is destroyed by mice and insects, but out of the one remaining bushel one hundred bushels are reaped.
3. Confirmatory facts. Speaking of the verification of the parable with respect to the different kinds of ground, Thomson, in his entertaining manner, proceeds thus: "Now, here we have the whole four within a dozen rods of us. Our horses are actually trampling down some seeds which have fallen by the wayside, and larks and sparrows are busy picking them up. That man, with his mattock, is digging about places where the rock is too near the surface for the plough; and much that is sown there will wither away, because it has no deepness of earth. And not a few seeds have fallen among the bellan, and will be effectually choked by this most tangled of thorn bushes. But a large portion, after all, fails into really good ground, and four months hence will exhibit every variety of crop, up to the richest and heaviest." Stanley"s account, though quite independent, is remarkably similar and confirmatory of the foregoing in all the main particulars. The following extract contains the substance of it: Referring to the plain of Gennesaret, he says, "There was the undulating corn-field descending to the water"s edge. There was the trodden pathway running through the midst of it, with no fence or hedge to prevent the seed from falling here and there on either side of it or upon it; itself hard with the constant tramp of horse and mule and human feet. There was the "good," rich soil, which distinguishes the whole of that plain and its neighborhood. There was the rocky ground of the hillside protruding here and there through the cornfields. There were the large bushes of thorn, the "nabk," that kind of which tradition says that the crown of thorns was woven, springing up in the very midst of the waving wheat;" while in a note he adds, "I observed that the same mixture of corn-field, pathway, rock, and thorn extended through the whole of this part of the shores of the lake.
4. Naturalness of our Lord"s imagery. The comparisons employed by our Lord are every way appropriate, not only suitable to the comprehension and habitudes of the persons addressed, but springing naturally out of the circumstances in which he and they find themselves placed, or the scenery by which they are surrounded. His eye rests on a rich pasture-ground of Southern Palestine, where a flock of many sheep is grazing amid green herbage or reposing by still waters; or perhaps he sees them following the shepherd, with whose kindly voice they are so familiar, as he goes before them, in Oriental fashion, and gently leads them along the hillside or down in the deep valley; or they are returning to the shelter of the fold on the sunny slope, and passing through the wicket gate under the friendly shepherd"s care; immediately and naturally the scene suggests the illustration, "He that entereth in by the door is the shepherd of the sheep .... I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture .... I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep. And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one flock, and one shepherd." Again, among the many once vine-clad hills of Judah, he stands beside the steep side of the terraced hill that bears the vine; or he is passing along the street of one of its towns or cities, and he sees the vine climbing up the wall or spreading its branches along the trellis-work beside the door of a dwelling, or standing by itself alone at the house-side; at once the thought is present to his mind and finds utterance by his lips, "I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman. Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away: and every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit." Again, in Northern Palestine he gazes on the fertile plain of Gennesaret, with its luxuriant vegetation, its rich corn-ground carefully tilled if not highly cultivated, and waving in harvest-time with its heavy masses of ripened grain; and thence he draws his parables of the sower going forth to sow his precious seed and again returning laden, bearing his sheaves and rejoicing by the way; of the tares; and the secret growth of the seed; perhaps also that of the mustard tree. When he surveyed the blue waters of the Sea of Galilee and contemplated its calm expanse, while its waves came gently rippling to the beach or slumbered in silence at his feet; or when the hum of its busy industry sounded in his ears, and his attention was turned to the variety of vessels that ploughed its surface, and its numerous fishing craft; he thence derived the illustration, which is found embodied in the parable of the draw-net with its great length and extensive reach, gathering within its folds of every kind both bad and good the valuable and the vile alike. Once more, when he gazed on the city of Capernaum, "his own city," so highly exalted in religious privilege, and the riches of its merchandise, and the resources of its commerce; the merchantman with his goodly pearls or with his carefully hoarded and cautiously hidden treasures was naturally suggested to his mind.
5. Variety in the independent records. In that chapter of parables, the thirteenth of St. Matthew"s Gospel, no fewer than seven parables are recorded; in the parallel passage of St. Mark four are recorded; and by St. Luke in the corresponding section only two. Of the seven parables in St. Matthew"s record, two are also recorded by St. Mark, with two additional; of the four in St. Mark"s record, two are recorded by St. Luke. But all three relate the parable of the sower contained in this chapter. Accordingly, the seven parables of the chapter of St. Matthew"s Gospel referred to are the sower, the tares, the mustard seed, the leaven, the hidden treasure, the pearl, and the draw-net; of these parables, the first teaches the production or founding of the kingdom; the second and seventh, the persons commingling in it or its mixture; the third and fourth, its progress; and the fifth and sixth, its preciousness. In the corresponding section of St. Mark are the four parables-the sower, the mustard seed, the secret growth of the seed, and the candle set on a candlestick, if we may properly call it a parable; in the corresponding portion of St. Luke we find the parable of the sower and that of the candle on a candlestick.
II COLLATION OF THE THREE RECORDS.
1. A complete whole. By comparing the three gospel narratives and piecing them together, as it were, we obtain a complete whole. It is often of much importance and always of great interest thus to consolidate the narrative by a comparison, if not a combination, of the text.
2. The seed by the wayside. In the narrative of the seed sown by the wayside, St. Matthew and St. Mark both tell us of the fowls, or winged creatures, of the heaven devouring it; while St. Luke states in addition the fact that it was trodden down. In the interpretation which our Lord gives of this same portion of the parable, all three agree in informing us that the Word that was sown in the hearers" hearts is taken away by the devil, or Satan, or the wicked one, as they severally designate him; while St. Matthew gives us the additional information that this occurs in the case of persons hearing the Word and not understanding it, and that he snatcheth it away; and St. Luke subjoins the object for which it is thus taken away, "lest they should believe and be saved.
3. The seed on stony ground. In the narrative of the seed sown on stony ground, or on the rock according to St. Luke, all three tell us that it withered away; but St. Matthew and St. Mark add that, before withering, it was scorched, after the sun had risen, from want of root, and that owing to lack of soil; while St. Luke states simply that the withering was due to lack of moisture. In the explanation, again, all three tell us that those sown on stony ground receive the word with joy, but that they have no root, and that they endure or believe for a while; St. Matthew and St. Mark further state that when "affliction or persecution ariseth because of the Word, immediately they are offended," or stumble; but St. Luke speaks of such a season more generally as a time of trial, and intimates that they then stand aloof, or apostatize altogether.
4. The seed among thorns. In the narrative of that sown among thorns, all three inform us that the thorns choked it; but St. Luke further informs us that the thorns grew up simultaneously with it; and St. Mark adds, what in these circumstances might be expected, that it yielded no fruit. In the explanation, all three acquaint us with the fact that it is choked and becomes unfruitful; they trace the unfruitfulness to its being choked; St. Luke says, by cares and riches and the pleasures of this life, as men go on their way in it; St. Mark uses a more comprehensive expression than the "pleasures of this life," which St. Matthew altogether omits, namely, "the lusts of other things;" while both St. Matthew and St. Mark qualify riches by an expressive term, addling "the deceitfulness of riches.
5. The seed sown on good ground. In the narrative of the seed sown on good ground, we are informed by all three that it bore fruit, but on a graduated scale a hundredfold, sixtyfold, and thirtyfold, according to St. Matthew; but in reverse order according to St. Mark; while St. Luke merely specifies the maximum at a hundredfold, as if he had in view Gen_26:12, "Then Isaac sowed in that land, and received in the same year a hundredfold, and the Lord blessed him." Here again, in the explanation, all three coincide in the matter of fruitfulness. St. Matthew tells that "they understand the Word," St. Mark that "they receive it," St. Luke that "having heard it in an honest and good heart, they keep it, and bring forth fruit with perseverance.
6. A gradation. Thus the seed by the wayside did not even spring up at all; that on the rock did indeed spring up, but withered; that among thorns sprang up and grew, but being choked yielded no fruit; only that on good ground sprang up, grew, and brought forth fruit to perfection.
III INTERPRETATION OF THE SEED.
1. The seed is the Word of God. The seed is that Word of which, as has been well said, "Truth is the substance, salvation the end, and God the author." The seed is that Scripture all of which "is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness; that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works." The signature to a will or other document does not need to be rewritten or repeated from time to time; nor does the seal to such an instrument need to be restamped once and again; so with those miracles which were the sign manual of God to the truth of his Word, and the seal affixed to it in attestation of its Divine authorship. Once wrought, as those miracles were, according to the record of the most authentic history in the world and no facts of history were ever more fully or more clearly testified, or more carefully and critically scrutinized they remain to the present hour the signature of the Divine Author; and not only that, but his seal to the reality of the Divine origin of Scripture. Thus Heaven has stamped approval on the document with its own seal and signature; while these proofs, authenticated by the most unexceptionable witnesses, remain permanent and powerful as ever.
2. Proof from prophecy. But view Scripture again in the light of prophecy. The Messianic prophecies, for example, were delivered by different persons, in different places, at different times, under different circumstances, and on different occasions; yet these prophecies, when carefully and correctly put together, portray unmistakably Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah the Christ of God. Suppose a painting executed in a somewhat similar way the head painted in Berlin, the hands in Boston, the arms in Paris, the trunk in St. Petersburg, the legs in Vienna, and the feet in Rome; suppose these different parts all brought to London and placed together, each in its proper position, and that, when thus put together, they present the exact picture of Christ which is seen in the famous "Descent from the Cross" as painted by Rembrandt, or by Rubens, or even by Jouvenet: what conclusion would we, or should we, come to from such a phenomenon? Would it not be that some great master painter had presided over and prepared the whole, guiding in some way every hand, directing every brush, and inspiring every head so that one of the finest specimens of pictorial art was thus wondrously brought into existence? In like manner, let the Old Testament prophets who foresaw and foretold the sufferings of Christ as well as the glory that should follow let Moses and Malachi, David and Daniel, Isaiah and Micah, Jeremiah and Zechariah, be brought together round the cross of Calvary, and let their pictures and prophecies meet together there, and they will unite in perfect harmony, and present the exact picture of him whose hands and whose feet were pierced with nails, who "was wounded for our transgressions, and bruised for our iniquities," and on whom "the chastisement of our peace was laid," and in whose riven side was opened that cleansing" fountain for sin and for uncleanness." Though the portions contributed, the prophets themselves, the periods at which they lived, the plans they pursued, the predictions they delivered, were all different, yet one Spirit testified in them, one God inspired them, one unseen but almighty hand superintended them all; and the picture, brought together from so many different quarters and composed of so many different parts, is one.
3. Practical proof. But let us take a still plainer and more practical test. See you venerable patriarch whose locks are silvered with years; he resides in a remote hamlet, he dwells in a humble cottage. Observe with what reverence he takes down the ancestral Bible, and with what grace he reads its sacred page at the hour of morning or evening worship. He has never read, perhaps never heard of, any of the great writers on the evidences Butler, or Paley, or Lardner, or Leslie, or Leland, or Watson; and yet, if you ask him how he knows that volume, which he reads so dutifully and devoutly, to be the Word of God, he will at once and unhesitatingly reply that he knows it must be the Word of God, for he has felt its power to be Divine, bringing, as it has done, pardon to his soul, peace to his conscience, light to his feet and a lamp to his path, joy to his heart, and the "sure and certain hope" of eternal life and immortal glory to his never-dying spirit. Wherever we find a man of that stamp, whether he lives in town or country, in city or village; whether he is the peer that owns a castle or the peasant that is only a tenant in a cottage; whether he be a native of merry England, or broad Scotland, or green Ireland, or gay France, or proud Spain, or the German Fatherland, or classic Italy; whatever be his caste, or calling, or country, or clime, that man, having God"s truth in his heart, the grace of God in his soul, and the Spirit of God to guide his feet in the path of peace that man, whoever he is, or in whatever rank he is found, is a living witness that the seed, of which the Saviour speaks in this parable, is the Word of God and the abiding seed of holiness, for "being born of God he doth not commit sin; for his seed remaineth in him: and he cannot sin, because he is born of God.
4. The seed is the Word of the kingdom. The seed is also called, and so explained to be, the Word of the kingdom. The King of the country to which we travel has issued this Word as a Guide-book to every pilgrim who is travelling to the kingdom of glory. It is the Law of him who is anointed to be a King for ever who is enthroned as King upon the holy hill of Zion, yea, who is seated at the right band of the Majesty on high. It is the Word of that kingdom which at its first beginnings is as a little stone hewn out of the mountain without hands, but which afterwards becomes a great mountain and fills the whole earth. It is the Law of that King whose kingdom is to be without bounds, and whose reign is to be without end. Of his kingdom it is the Statute-book. From that kingdom it comes and to that kingdom it conducts, translating the sinner out of the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light, out of the kingdom of sin into the kingdom of grace, out of the kingdom of Satan into the kingdom of God. And no sooner has any traveler set his face and turned his feet from the City of Destruction towards the city of the great King, than, like Bunyan"s pilgrim, he is observed with this Book in his hand, and at every progressive step in his pilgrimage his eye is on the Book, and thus he reads and walks, and walks and reads, ever reading as he goes. Like David, "his delight is in the Law of the Lord, and in that Law he meditates day and night." In reference to this Law it was said of Israel, "What nation is there so great that hath statutes and judgments so righteous as all this Law which I have set before you this day?" We, with Law and Gospel in our hands, are surely bound to be grateful, and to feel"How greatly blessed the people are The joyful sound that know!
5. Our duty in relation to the Word of the kingdom. The statutes of an earthly kingdom are carefully studied as well as frequently perused. How much more ought the Word of the kingdom, that is, the statutes of the kingdom of heaven, to be daily and diligently read and consulted! If the King of heaven condescends to be at pains to teach us his statutes and his judgments, surely the least that we, who are "of the earth, earthy creatures of a day, worms of the dust, should do, is to be at pains to learn those statutes of the Lord that are right, "rejoicing the heart." Again, where the word of a king is there is power, consequently the Word of him who is King of kings and Lord of lords should come home to our hearts, not in word only, "but in power, and in the Holy Ghost, and in much assurance." When the word or law of an earthly king is transgressed, such transgression is usually visited with pains and penalties proportionate to the transgression. Can we reasonably expect, then, that the transgressors of Heaven"s Law shall escape with impunity? The King who rules in Zion will, we are assured, rule also in the midst of his enemies. If we refuse to touch the scepter of his mercy, or if we reject the Word of his grace, then assuredly we shall be broken with a rod of iron and dashed in pieces like a potter"s vessel. The Word of the kingdom is the Word of the King of glory; if we follow its directions they will conduct us on the way to glory. It is the Word of him whose kingdom is not of this world; if we walk according to its instructions, then shall our conversation, or citizenship, even now be in heaven.
6. This seed is absolutely neces s ary for salvation. It is, as we have seen, the Word of God and the Word of the kingdom, but it is still the seed; and what the seed is in the natural world, the Word of God, or of the kingdom, is in the spiritual world. Without seed there can be no vegetation neither root nor fruit, neither bud nor blossom, neither leaf nor flower, neither stalk nor plant. The soil may be as rich as that of the primeval forest when it is cleared, or as that of the virgin prairie when it is for the first time opened by the ploughshare; there may be gentle showers and genial sunshine, reviving heat and refreshing dews. The seasons may be most propitious; they may follow each other with successive and suitable blessings the purifying winds of winter, the freshness of spring, the sultriness of summer, the maturity of autumn; but notwithstanding all this, if the seed be wanting, there cannot be a single stalk of grain nor plant of any kind neither "grass for the cattle nor herb for the service of man." So spiritually, the Word of God is seed of regenerating power; for are we born again? Then it is "not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the Word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever." Thus the Word of God is seed the seed of grace in this world, and of glory in the next; the seed of holiness in time, and of heaven through eternity.
7. The seed needs quickening. We have seen that without the seed of God"s Word there is neither grace nor glory, neither holiness nor heaven; and therefore as much as justifies the inference that all that is good and gracious, all that is really noble and truly Christian, every grace and every good work, all spring from the seed of the Word. In the economy of nature, the vigorous stem, and green leafage, and lovely blossom, and abundant fruit are all owing to the seed, and could not possibly exist without it; so in the economy of grace, strong faith, lively hope, and ever-advancing holiness, all spring out of the seed which is the Word of God. But granting all this, the seed only contains the material of life it is the means of life; but it is dependent on the quickening, vivifying, life-giving Spirit of God. By his Spirit he fructifies the seed; by his Spirit he vivifies his Word. The Word of God, the Son of God, and the Spirit of God must all go together in the salvation of every human soul. The Son of God brings salvation, the Word of God reveals it, and the Spirit of God applies it.
8. There is vitality in every verse as well as in the whole volume. Even where the Bible is not found collectively and in all its component parts, fragments of it may exist in the shape of single books, or chapters, or verses. And wherever it is thus met with even in dispersed portions, there is seed, there is the germ of life, and, by the blessing of God and the operation of his Spirit, there will in due time be the full development of life and fruitfulness. While it is a blessed privilege to possess the whole of God"s Word, and sufficient means of understanding it, and abundant material for its enforcement; still persons not so privileged, but having in possession some small portion of God"s Word, are not without the means of safety and salvation. Paragraphs of the Bible, verses of the Bible, sentiments of the Bible, are often blended with the religious compositions of human authors; yet still they retain their vitality, and only want the Spirit of God to quicken them into living power.
IV THE WAYSIDE HEARERS.
1. Nature of the wayside. By this we may understand a highway, or byway, or bridle-way, or ordinary footpath; but whether the way be broad or narrow, whether it be a well-constructed road or merely a beaten pad, whether it be a public road or pathway, two notions attach to it. We connect with it, first, the idea of a passage, along which people walk, or ride, or drive, or along which traffic is conveyed. But a second idea attached to it, and one which is the consequence of the first, is that of hardness, because of the constant resort along it. Both ideas characterize the hearts of wayside hearers. Just as the highway is that along which people travel on foot, or horseback, or in vehicles of whatever kind, and that too along which their goods are conveyed and their commerce carried on along which, in fact, their merchandise is transported; so the heart of the wayside hearer is a highway for the passage of worldly thoughts. Such thoughts are constantly passing to and fro along it. Temporal things make it their thoroughfare; unchecked, unhindered, unimpeded, and uninterrupted, they pass and repass. Earthly, or sensual and sinful, objects are constantly found on the highway of that carnal heart. Passion and pride, avarice and ambition, luxury and lust are ever traversing that highway or the byways that diverge from it. Memories of the past, anticipations of the future, present reflections on worldly things, earthly joys or sorrows, worldly cares and anxieties, schemes of wealth and thoughts of indulgence, or hopes of worldly aggrandizement, all find free passage along the wayside heater"s heart. No foot, however unhallowed, is forbidden to enter there. Now, these hearers come to the house of God and seem to hear his Word: "They come unto thee as the people cometh, and they sit before thee as my people, and they hear thy words, but they will not do them. And, lo, thou art unto them as a very lovely song of one that hath a pleasant voice, and can play well on an instrument: for they hear thy words, but they do them not." With this free and constant passage of thousands of earthly, temporal, worldly, and sinful thoughts along the open thoroughfare of the wayside bearer"s heart there is small space for thoughts of God. They come "to hear of heaven and learn the way," but their heart is preoccupied, and their thoughts engaged with other objects. Besides, from this constant traffic along it, the heart becomes hard as the wayside, and like the common highway. When thoughts of what is good or gracious do enter, they pass over it, going out as they came in. They never settle on it or sink into it. Any good impressions or gracious influences are merely transient.
2. The wayside hearers understand it not. They hear the Word, but they understand it not. How could they? Understanding requires attention, but worldly thoughts engross the attention that should be given to thoughts of God. Not only so, the heart has become so hard by the constant traffic upon it that such thoughts, when they do enter, cannot penetrate the surface so as to find lodgment in the understanding. What with the crowding together and crushing along of worldly thoughts, and the consequent hardness of heart, the understanding remains untouched. Instead of minds enlightened by the Spirit of God, such hearers come with hearts hardened by the deceitfulness of sin and like a common highway; and so any serious notions that do force an entrance are lost amid the host of other thoughts, and lie on the hard surface. Any truths or facts not duly attended to cannot be properly understood; when only partially, or imperfectly, or perhaps not at all understood, they cannot be retained in the memory. So the wayside hearer neither takes heed to the Word nor keeps hold of it, and therefore gets no benefit from it. But another circumstance increases the culpability of the hearer and claims our notice.
3. It is trodden down. M any a precious seed of gospel truth has been thus treated. Many a time have the truths of God"s Word been trodden down. Many an assurance of Christ"s ability and readiness "to save to the uttermost" has been trodden down. Many an offer of grace and salvation has been trodden down. Many an exceeding great and precious promise" by which the hearer might be made partaker of a Divine nature has been trodden down. Many a Scripture picturing the joys of heaven, inviting and even urging us to make those joys our own, has been trodden down. Many a faithful wanning of the sinner to forsake his ways and flee from present wrath and eternal ruin has been trodden down. Thus the Word of God has been despised and despite done to the Spirit of grace. The pure precepts of that Word as well as its precious promises, its earnest entreaties as well as its solemn exhortations, its faithful reproofs as well as its friendly remonstrances, its gracious invitations as well as its many warnings, have all been trodden down, and so treated with carelessness, indifference, and even contempt.
4. Satan snatches it away. The fowls of the air came and devoured it up." Here again we should notice the verisimilitude of our Lord"s representation. "In the countless birds of all kinds aquatic fowls by the lake-side, partridges and pigeons hovering, as on the Nile-bank, over the rich plain of Gennesaret, we may still see," says Stanley, "the "birds of the air" which came and devoured the seed by the wayside," or which took refuge in the spreading branches of the mustard tree." " Again he observes, "The flocks of birds in the neighborhood of Gennesaret have been already observed. Their number, their beauty, their contrast with the busy stir of sowing and reaping and putting into barns visible in the plains below (whether of Hattin or Gennesaret), must have always courted observation." Never did a bird of the air rush with greater swiftness on its prey than Satan rushes to take away the Word of God as it lies unheeded and despised trodden down, in fact, on the sinner"s heart. Never did the birds that in such multitudes frequent the lake and plain of Gennesaret, whether pigeons, or partridges, or aquatic fowls, hasten with greater eagerness to pick up the seeds let fall by the sower on the pathway running through the corn-land in the plain of Gennesaret, than Satan hurries to take away the seed of truth out of the wayside heater"s heart. The wayside was not meant for cultivation nor intended to be sown; so there are hearers who come to hear the Word from custom, or fashion, or from conformity to a respectable observance, or for sake of appearance, or perhaps from a slight twitching of conscience, but not out of a sense of duty, or feeling of privilege, or any earnest desire to get good from it or profit by it. When they do come, their minds detach themselves, as it were, from their bodies and wander miles away; their thoughts wander on the mountains of vanity, or are absorbed in their worldly plans, or prospects, or purposes. Thus the seed lies on the beaten pathway, and is trodden down. Satan is "the prince of the power of the air," and multiplies himself in his emissaries, here represented by fowls, or winged creatures (peteina), of the air. He turns away their thoughts from the truth that is being proclaimed and engrosses them with some worldly object; he amuses them, it may be, with some peculiarity of the preacher, or engages their attention with some article of a neighbor"s dress; he prejudices their minds against the truth, or preoccupies them with thoughts widely different from those that should be suggested by the subject in hand; he may rob them of the seed by an after-sermon critic, or by the sarcasm of some worthless witling, or the sneer of a sceptically inclined friend. He has thousands of little birds of the air to carry away any thoughts of God, of the soul, of sin, of salvation, of heaven, of hell, of death, of judgment, of eternity, that might lie as seeds of truth on the heart.
5. The immediateness of his arrival. St. Mark draws attention to this point by the word euyewv , which occurs so often in his Gospel; but much the same thing is implied by the word which St. Matthew employs to represent Satan"s method of taking away the seed. It is not airei , equivalent to "taketh it away," used by both the other evangelists who record the parable; but arpazei , equivalent to "snatcheth it away" in hot haste, and in the eagerness of his desire to prevent any possibility, however remote, of its growth. This is a very remarkable feature in the narrative. Was it not enough that, from the continuous stream of other thoughts passing through the mind, and the myriad multitude of such, the seed had been neglected? Was it not enough that it was let lie on the surface of a heart that had contracted a sort of highway hardness? Was it not enough at least that it was trodden underfoot, trampled on, and despised? Strange that all this was not sufficient for Satan"s purpose! But Satan knows too well the living energy of the Divine Word; and, however neglected or jostled aside, however trodden down or trampled on it may be, however hard and impervious that wayside bearer"s heart may be, Satan, fully alive to the vitality of the seed of Divine truth, apprehends danger from its presence to his own sovereignty over his subjects. If he allowed the seed some time to lie on the heart it might, after all, recover from the trampling and root itself downward, and in the end bear fruit upward. He therefore comes immediately. And though he came immediately, still the seed had been already trodden down; and we therefore infer that the seed had no sooner fallen on the heart than it was instantly trodden down.
6. Satan"s object in all this. This object is plainly stated in the words, "lest they should believe and be saved," or, as the Revised Version renders them, "that they may not believe and be saved." Here we have the whole plan of salvation in the briefest form; here we have the system of Divine grace for saving the souls of men. Here, too, we have the subject, the object, the instrument, and the result. The subject is every one on whose heart the seed of Divine truth is sown; the object to be accepted by faith is that truth; that faith, again, is the instrument; while salvation is the grand result. The object offered for our belief is the Word of God; the means by which we embrace that Word is faith; and the final and blessed end is salvation. Reader, this Word is now presented to you, and even pressed on your acceptance; if you prefer remaining in ignorance of it, or refuse to believe it, or neglect to apply it, and so fail to feel its saving efficacy, and obey, and enjoy it; then do you judge yourself unworthy of everlasting life, reject the offer of mercy, and put away from you the means the only means of salvation. If when the truth of God, with its sanctifying and saving influences, is sown on your heart, you allow Satan to snatch it away, or, what amounts to the same thing, to occupy your mind with other topics, or divert your attention from it, or perhaps provoke your hostility against it, then will the end which should be the salvation of your soul remain unattained!
V PRACTICAL LESSONS.
1. We learn from all this the great sin of carelessness, heedlessness, and thoughtlessness, or rather thinking of other things, when the Word of God is being read or preached.
2. We learn the necessity of careful preparation for Divine ordinances. If we would hear the Word of God with profit, we must supplicate the Spirit of God to prepare our hearts to receive the Word, and to enlighten our minds to understand it, and to bring it home to our souls in demonstration and power.
3. We learn the importance of withdrawment from worldly thoughts as well as worldly business, of spending the morning of the sabbath in religious exercises and hallowed engagements, of avoiding idle gossip and all trifling conversation, and also of watchfulness against vain thoughts and wandering thoughts and sinful thoughts when in the house of God, so that Satan may neither hinder the work of God in, nor snatch the Word of God out of, our hearts.
4. Three processes are thus indispensable breaking up the fallow ground by previous preparation, covering the seed sown by subsequent meditation and faithful pleading for the dews of Divine grace to water the seed sown, as well as taking earnest heed that we do not let it slip.
VI THE STONY-GROUND HEARERS.
1. Their shallowness. The first characteristic of such is their shallowness. This is better expressed by rocky (petrwdev), than stony ground. The first class of hearers had no receptivity in consequence of their heart being so hard, and the traffic along its thoroughfare so continuous. The seed falling on its surface lay there, was instantly trodden down, and immediately taken away by the evil one himself or some of his numerous emissaries. Now, this second class of hearers is so far superior to the former that they possess receptivity, but only to a limited extent. The surface of this soil is soft, it is true, but shallow. A soil may be stony in the proper sense; the stones may be small and loose; they may be tolerably close together or considerably apart. In either case the plant makes way in the inter-spaces, and roots itself where there is sufficient depth of earth. The present case is different. The ground is in the strict sense rocky; the rock the limestone rock which prevails so extensively in Palestine reaches the surface and comes fully into view, or is only covered and concealed from the eye by a sparse and shallow sprinkling of earth. Seed sown on such soil soon springs up, quickened into vegetation and warmed into life by the heat of an Eastern clime; and all the more so as the plant, when impeded in its development downward, would, by curious plant-instinct, the more rapidly propagate itself upward. But the very heat that helps the rapid springing of the seed upward out of that thin, shallow soil, soon becomes hurtful because of that very shallowness of soil, where the root has no room for healthy development, and finds no moisture to invigorate its growth and counteract the excess of heat. Soon as the plant has sprung up and the sun has risen upon it, it is scorched. The sun"s heat, so beneficial to a strongly rooted plant, is thus most prejudicial to that of which the root is not sufficiently developed. The whole is a correct representation of those shallow, impulsive creatures who at once fall in with any current excitement, or are carried away by some shallow sensationalism.
2. Immediate and joyful reception of the Word. This is the first particular which our Lord, in his exposition of this portion of the parable, specifics. Those who hear the Word in this way are in advance of that large portion of the population, sometimes called the lapsed masses, who never enter the house of God, nor wait at the posts of wisdom"s doors to hear what God the Lord will say to their souls. They are also in advance of those who do indeed frequent the house of God, but who, like the wayside hearers, from carelessness, heedlessness, difference, inattention, and the indulgence of vain, wandering, and sinful thoughts, are entirely irreceptive, never admitting the Word into their understanding or minds at all. They are in advance of those too who, though they attend the public worship of God, do so only as a matter of form, and regard it as a piece of decent drudgery, to which the force of public opinion, or compliance with the wishes of friends, or a notion of respectability, obliges them to submit. The persons referred to hear the Word with a large amount of satisfaction, and so far they are considerably ahead of multitudes of mankind and of many of their neighbors; yet they fail miserably at the end, and fall short of heaven. They receive it anon, at once, and without hesitancy or delay; but they are somewhat precipitate in their reception of it; they do not take time to "mark, learn, and inwardly digest" it. They receive it readily, neither "proving all things" nor" holding fast that which is good." They receive it with pleasure, but without profit. They receive it as an intellectual treat or literary enjoyment, but there its influence is at an end. They receive it with mental approbation, but, though gratified with it, they are neither guided nor governed by it. They receive it with eagerness as the good Word of God, and it is sweet to their taste; but it does not check their beloved lusts and besetting sins, nor change their evil habits and ungodly lives. Or, if it do produce any change, that change is merely transient. Their goodness is like the morning cloud, now careering it in the vault of heaven, and for a short time visible as a rain-cloud, then vanishing without the promised shower a moment seen, then gone for ever; or like the early dew-drops scattered as pearls upon the grass, and sparkling in the morning sun, but brushed away by the foot of the passing traveler before it reaches the earth to moisten its surface or fructify its soil. But how or why is this? How is it possible that persons may receive the Word with gravity and solemnity, with frequency and apparent fervor, with eagerness and gladness, and yet without any beneficial effect or abiding result? Because they do not receive it with faith, and therefore "the Word does not profit, not being mixed with faith in them that hear it?
3. They want root. The secret of unsuccess here is want of root; "they have no root in themselves," and so they "endure but for a time," or last only for a season (proskairoi). The seed falling on the surface soon penetrates the thin layer of soil, but when it has pierced through that shallow covering, it comes upon the hard, impenetrable rock. It can go no further; it can neither go round that stratum of rock nor enter it. So with the seed of the Divine Word when sown on rocky hearts. It has no real root in them, and so it dies away and is soon gone; it has no root in the judgment, and so there can be no fixed principles of life or action; it has no root in the understanding, and so there are no clear conceptions of truth nor correct apprehensions of duty; it has no root in the will, and so the will remains without proper restraint and right direction; it has no root in the affections, and so no habits of goodness are properly formed or of permanent continuance; it has no root in the conscience, and so no regulative force is exercised over that vicegerent of God in the heart of man; it has no root in the memory, and, as a matter of course, it is either consigned to oblivion or is only remembered as the sound of a pleasant song. The tender plant cannot penetrate the hard rock nor root itself in the unyielding limestone; it is no wonder, then, that the rootless plant cannot in any case exist for long, much less resist for any considerable time the scorching rays of the midday sun. There is
(1) no fixity in the root and no firmness in the stem. See the languishing aspect of that lovely floweret which has been uprooted from the genial soil of its parent earth; how soon it droops and dies! Compare it with the plant, or shrub, or tree fast rooted in the earth. Look at you old oak tree deep moored in the rifted rock; it is subjected to every blast; it is assailed by every storm, fretted by every gust of heaven, and exposed to every wind that blows. The wind has bent it, but never broken it; the storm has shaken it, but could never uproot it; the tempest assailed it, but it has withstood the shock. Centuries have rolled over its aged top and widespread branches, but time has only left it sturdier than ever deeper rooted than before. "Woodman, spare that tree," for the strength of wind and the stress of weather have proved its deep-rooted stability firm as the rock in which it is rooted, and immovable as the everlasting hill of which that rock is a part. May the Word of the eternal God take root in our hearts, and, when so rooted, may it gradually attain a greater depth of soil; and may the Spirit of the living God enable us, by meditation, prayer, self-examination, and closer communion with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, to maintain to the end such deep-rooted strength and Christian stability! But the root serves another purpose, for not only does it give fixity and firmness to the plant, it is
(2) the means of conveying nourishment to the plant; it is the channel of communication between the seed and the soil. Plants need nourishment as well as animals, and accordingly they are furnished with the apparatus necessary for receiving such nourishment. At the extremity of each fibre of a root there is a spongiole, or small sponge, to suck up nutriment from the soil. The substances required for the nourishment of plants must be in a state of solution dissolved in many times their own bulk of water; otherwise they could not pass through the exceedingly minute apertures or pores of the spongioles. Now, it is obvious that there are two ways in which we may make a plant to perish either by withdrawing the moisture from the soil, and the inorganic substances by which the plant is fed cannot be made available; or by destroying the root and those vessels through which the small particles of matter in solution are absorbed by the plant. In the former case the nourishment designed to sustain life is altogether withheld, or, if present, cannot be utilized; in the latter case that very nourishment tends to accelerate disorganization, for when moisture remains stagnant in the sponges they are soon saturated, and disease and putrefaction ensue. Now, in the case which the parable supposes, both the nourishment is wanting, and the means of receiving it are absent both moisture and root are deficient, or rather entirely lacking. Where then, or how, can the plant draw the supply of nourishment which it requires? Now, the channel of communication, as well as the means of connection, between the spiritual seed and the spiritual soil the Divine Word and the human heart is faith. When, therefore, that which is the medium of communication and means of life is absent, how or whence can spiritual life, not to speak of growth or health, be maintained? The seed and the soil have no means of contact; the root of faith that should bring thegn into vital union is deficient; and so there is no nourishment, no development of vitality in a word, no spiritual life.
4. A temporary semblance of life. For a while they believe," or for a season they endure. We have seen a young twig sprout seemingly verdant and vigorous from the lifeless trunk; and so for a while a plant may appear to have life, while it is virtually dead. For a while it may seem even to flourish, where the root is dying or already dead, and where the source of life and vigor, as well as the means of communicating it, are wanting. Just so is it in things spiritual: men may for a while have a name to live, while yet they are dead; the blade of profession may be green, while the root of grace may be withered or wanting; men may profess much and seem to practice what they profess, while that profession is hollow and that practice heartless; there may be a beautiful blossom and a fair flower, and yet no fruit ever come to maturity or even come forth at all. Without the power of life in the root there is no vital principle, no genuine practice, and therefore no final perseverance. But to put the case more practically, there may be both conviction and confession of sin, and yet no conversion. Felix trembled when St. Paul "reasoned of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come;" but yet to St, Paul, after his powerful sowing of the heavenly seed, the answer was, "Go thy way for this time; when I have a convenient season, I will call for thee." There may be a commendable disposition to hear God"s Word and so receive the seed; there may be many good resolutions formed, and yet the result may be the same as in the case of Agrippa, when he said to St. Paul, "Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian;" still the almost Christian, as the old divines used quaintly yet truly to say, is only almost saved. Men may not only wait on the ordinances of religion with satisfaction, listen to the gospel with pleasure, and receive the preached Word with gratification and gladness, but also reform much in life and conduct, just as it is written of Herod, that he" feared John, knowing that he was a just man and a holy, and observed him; and when he heard him he did many things, and heard him gladly;" and yet the end may be no better than that of that wicked and unhappy monarch.
5. The testing-time. A time of temptation or trial cometh or persecution ariseth because of the Word." Here we have the genus and the species very clearly set before us; the trial in general and its specific kinds. The trial is of a hostile kind and the two sorts of it are distinctly stated, namely, personal affliction within, and persecution without. The affliction or painful pressure is such as comes upon us in connec tion with our own individual circumstances, and may affect us in soul, body, or estate. The persecution is that which assails us from without. But why is this? Why does this persecution arise? "Because of the Word." The world hates God"s Word, because the holy doctrines of that Word are opposed to and condemn the unholy principles of the world, and because the pure precepts of that Word are contrary to and rebuke the unrighteous practices of the world. The carnal mind hates the Word, for that Word exposes and reprobates its sinful and shocking enmity to God. The flesh hates the Word, because that Word denounces "those fleshly lusts that war against the soul," and commands men to "crucify the flesh with its affections and lusts." The sinner hates the Word, for the principles of that Word are the means which the Spirit employs to reprove him, as well as "convince him of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment." Every unrenewed heart and every unregenerate soul hates the Word, because the Law of God, which it contains, is holy and just and good exceeding "spiritual," and its "commandments are exceeding broad." Satan hates the Word, because it is "the sword of the Spirit" by which he is vanquished, by which souls are rescued from his grasp, and the destroyer deprived of his prey. Hell hates the Word, for where that Word is unknown, or unread, or unpractised, hell enlarges itself beyond measure. Hence it is that tribulation and persecution arise because of the Word.
6. Their failure in the day of trial. Immediately they are offended scandalized; that is to say, a stumbling-block is laid in their way, and they fall over it. After a season of special privileges and gracious influences, a time of trial may be expected to come, in order to prove the sincerity of professors and the genuineness of their religion. After such a period a testing-time may be looked for, and then it is seen who in reality have the root of the matter in them. Persecution is like the heat of the sun"s rays, and this indeed is the figure which our Lord himself employs in this parable. If the plant be well rooted, the heat of the sun exercises a genial influence on it, promoting its growth and bringing it to maturity. Once the Word of God has struck deep root and become firmly rooted in our hearts, the clouds of adversity may roll over us, the tempest of persecution rage around us, and the storms of temptation beat at our feet; yet the firmness of our attitude shall defy the storm, and the fixity of our root shall be strengthened instead of shaken. The tree rooted in the rock may be uptorn, the grey rock of centuries may itself be upheaved by the earthquake; the oaks of Bashan may be uprooted, and the cedars of Lebanon may be rent and riven by the lightning of heaven; the mountains may shake with the swelling of the waters, and the solid earth itself be removed from its deep foundations; yet, with the seed of truth fast rooted in the heart, and the heart itself grounded in love, the believer stands unmoved, unterrified, and unhurt. He stands like the spectator on the high summit of a lofty mountain that seems to pierce the clouds; he hears the hoarse and dreadful roarings of the storm far below him; he sees the broad and vivid flashes of the lightning glare beneath him; and listens to the "live thunder as it leaps far along from peak to peak among the rattling crags." The eminence he occupies elevates him above the storm; the firmness of his position secures him against its fury; the storms of an angry world may rage, but he is rooted. How different it is with plants where there is no deepness or depth of earth, where there is lack of moisture, and where the root is deficient or defective! The sun"s heat scorches them, and they wither. Thus it ever is: the Word of God is either "the savor of life unto life," or "of death unto death;" Christ crucified is to "the Jews a stumbling-block, and unto the Greeks foolishness; but unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God." So is it with trial, whether tribulation or persecution; while it only confirms the faithful and leaves them more firmly rooted, it becomes an occasion of stumbling and even of final apostasy to the unfaithful who have no root in themselves. The trials, that help the believer onward to an "exceeding and eternal weight of glory," are such a hindrance in the way of the barren professor that he is offended and falls away. "The same fire," says Augustine, "turns straw into ashes, and takes away the dross from gold.
7. Final apostasy. They fall away. How sad this statement! "They fall away," that is finally. Such is the closing scene! Many a one runs well for a time, but something hinders him, and then he stumbles and finally falls! Many a one, who bade fair to be the Lord"s in the great "day when he maketh up his jewels," thus falls away and sinks into apostasy! Many a one, who appeared to be so running that he might obtain the incorruptible crown in company with the pure and holy, falls away from these high hopes and glorious prospects, and perishes for ever! Alas! how dreadful the thought of having a reward so rich in prospect, a diadem so bright in anticipation, an inheritance so incorruptible to look forward to, and yet of finally and for ever falling away and forfeiting all!
VII PRACTICAL LESSONS.
1. Warned by all this, we are surely called on solemnly to consider how we hear, and carefully examine our motives as well as our manner of hearing.
2. We should ever have in recollection the Scripture admonition in reference to such matters, which says, "Therefore we ought to give the more earnest heed to the things that we have heard, lest at any time we should let them slip.
3. We must not be content with a certain change of conduct and conversation; this may last for a time, but, unless the heart be changed, there is no permanence in the change. Unless there is the root of faith, there can never be the real fruit of righteousness.
4. We are warned to expect trial. "All who wilt live godly in Christ Jesus" must be prepared for it. But, instead of being discouraged thereby or deterred from the path of duty, we must rather rejoice as the apostle directs, saying, "Count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations or trials;" and again, "Blessed is the man that endureth temptation: for when he is tried, he shall receive the crown of life, which the Lord hath promised to them that love him.
5. We must beware of being turned aside from the path of duty, or from the study of God"s Word, or from prayer, or from the worship of the sanctuary, or from religious service of any kind, either by sneers or taunts, or by unkindness or even persecution on the part of the ungodly. By doing so we prove ourselves of those here represented by the rocky ground.
6. What need we have earnestly to seek the aid of the Holy Spirit to preserve us from an evil and hard heart of unbelief, in which the seed of God"s Word can neither take root nor grow!
VIII THE THORNY GROUND.
1. Superiority to the two preceding. "Some fell among thorns." Now, we have, in the descriptions of the several kinds of ground, an ascending climax. In the first the seed lies on the surface, and never enters the soil at all, and by such are understood the unenlightened or unintelligent hearers. In the next the seed finds its way into the soil, but that soil is so shallow and so sparse a mere thin coating on a rock that the progress of the root downward is soon prevented by the hard, opposing, impenetrable rock: by these conditions are represented the superficial hearers or readers of God"s Word. We now enter on a third stage upward. The seed, instead of lying on the surface, or remaining rootless in the layer of mould thinly spread upon a rock, has good soil to sustain it, and takes root therein; but the soil, though of itself good enough sad deep enough, suffers from preoccupation; thorns, or roots of thorns, have found a place in it: by this description worldly hearers are meant.
2. The growth of the thorns. We are not to understand full-grown thorns, but thorn roots that had been left in the ground through defective tillage. Proper culture would have completely eradicated them. On the contrary, these thorns grew up along with the sprouting seed (sumfueisai), and quite choked it. The thorns overtopped the young plant that sprang from the good seed; in this way they over-shadowed it, shutting out at the same time both light and air; while a still worse consequence ensued from their roots absorbing the nourishment furnished by the soil, and withdrawing it from the tender plant. The inevitable result was, by robbing it of the strengthening nutriment afforded by the richness of the soil and moisture, to reduce it to a thing of sickly, stunted growth.
3. The signification of the thorns. Our Lord, in his interpretation of this part of the parable, shows us that by the thorns we are to understand cares and riches, according to the first Gospel; while a third element is added by St. Luke, namely, "the pleasures of life;" and by St. Mark under the still more general expression of "the lusts of other things. " All classes of society are comprehended here; all sides of human life are here exhibited. The poor and rich here, as elsewhere, meet together. The third class, embracing such as are devoted to the pleasures of life, or who are concerned about lustings after other things, may be regarded either as a distinct class, or may be reckoned as a sub-class under either the poor or rich; especially the latter, inasmuch as the poor have often as keen a desire for pleasure, and as much zest in pleasure, as the rich, but without equal means of gratification.
4. How thorny cares choke the seed of God"s Word. The cares referred to are distracting cares anxieties pulling a man like so many cords in different directions. When such harassing cares come into conflict with thoughts about the things of God, the man in whose breast such a struggle is going on must needs be a double-minded man, in the sense of his heart being divided between God and the world. The cares here mentioned are more particularly such as distress the poor. With many the struggle for daily bread is a severe one the battle a hard one. To provide food and raiment, a suitable place of abode, and proper education for the members of a household, with requisite preparation for their business in life or special life-work, whatever it is to be, demands a certain amount of careful attention. Nor is this anywhere forbidden in the Word of God; nay, it is commanded. We are required to "provide things honest in the sight of all men;" to be "not slothful in business, but fervent in spirit, serving the Lord;" while it is added that "if any provide not for his own, and especially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel." Besides such domestic duties, there are social duties, and personal individual duties, which we are bound to discharge as individuals and as members of society, as well as those which belong to us in our family relations. For the faithful and efficient discharge of such duties care and thought must be employed, time and pains expended.
5. Two extremes to be avoided. But, while carelessness about duties of the kind specified is sinful, there is another and opposite extreme, which our Lord deemed it necessary to rebuke by two most beautiful comparisons the fowls of the air and the flowers of the field; the birds which in such multitudes frequented the lake and plain of Gennesaret, and the flowers which in such variety and surpassing loveliness clothed with spring beauty the hillsides of Galilee. It is our heavenly Father who clothes the one and feeds the other, thus caring for both. How much more will he take care of his children by redemption and adoption as well as by creation! "If," says an old divine, in his own plain and pithy way, "our heavenly Father feeds his birds, he will never starve his babes." God will have us cast our care upon him; he will have us feel convinced that he careth for us; he will have us to be "careful that is, anxiously careful nothing, but in everything little as well as great, momentous or minute prayer and supplication... make our requests known unto God." In this way, avoiding either extreme that of criminal carelessness on the one hand, and that of corroding carefulness or over-anxiety on the other, and ever by prayer rolling our burden over on the Lord, we get rid of those thorny cares that choke and strangle the growth of the good seed in our hearts. Worldly objects do claim a due share of attention, worldly duties must not be neglected; but heavenly subjects are of paramount importance, and heavenly interests bear the same ratio to earthly that heaven itself does to earth, or eternity to time. Thorns served for fences, and in some places separated the fields in Palestine, as we infer from Micah, (Mic_7:4) where the prophet uses the comparison of "a thorn hedge." They were useful, therefore, in their own way and in their own place for fences in fields, but most baneful when left to grow up in fields of corn, or grain, or other crops. So with worldly cares; they have their place. Of course, by worldly cares we do not mean those anxieties which are strictly forbidden under all circumstances, but only that amount of attention that is required for the right discharge of the worldly duties that devolve upon us. Anything beyond this is injurious to our best and highest interests. Uneasy, anxious cares, like the thorns among the growing grain, choke the Divine Word and strangle the springing plant of grace. Such cares, when yielded to or indulged in, interfere unduly with those thoughts and feelings and affections that are claimed, and justly claimed, by the lessons of God"s Word. Things present take the place of things everlasting; anxieties about our worldly affairs crush out altogether, or leave little room for, spiritual concerns. The thorns of this parable are represented as encroaching on the good seed, and usurping the place which of right belongs to the useful plant; so these cares of the present world, if allowed, are sure to usurp the place that belongs to the world to come. The thorns took away from the seed-root, and drew to themselves the nourishment of the rich soil; so the concernments of a passing and perishing world take away our thoughts from God and heaven and eternity. The things that are seen and temporal withdraw our attention from things unseen and eternal. The body and its wants take the place of the soul and its necessities. Exertions and energies that should be devoted to higher and spiritual objects are squandered on the trifles of earth and sense. Under such conditions and in such circumstances the seed of the Word sown in the heart necessarily becomes unfruitful. The soil may be excellent, the seed may be carefully sown, the Word faithfully ministered, it may, moreover, take root and grow; but the thorns deprive it of its proper nourishment, its growth is obstructed, the plant becomes weak and sickly; without strength or vigor it can yield no fruit. It may have stem, and leaf, and bud, and blossom, and growth to a certain extent, but it brings no fruit to perfection or maturity (ou pelesforousi). In such hearers of the Word there is no fruit of the Spirit, no Christian grace, no works of faith, or deeds of charity, or labour of love in any direction; "it becometh unfruitful.
6. Another class of thee mental thorns. With the Cares of this world our Lord classes riches, as another division of the thorns of this parable. There is nothing, sinful in riches when honestly acquired or justly inherited, and when at the same time they are rightly used. We read of the father of the faithful himself that he was "rich in cattle, in silver, and in gold." Two circumstances make the possession of riches to be perilous. The circumstances referred to are the love of riches and the abuse of riches. "The love of money," we read, "is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows;" or, according to the Revised Version, "The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil: which some reaching after have been led astray from the faith, and have pierced themselves through with many sorrows;" and hence it is that they occupy the thoughts and engross the affections to the exclusion of the lessons of inspired truth the precepts of the Law and the promises of the gospel. They pierce and pain, moreover, like the pricking of thorns. What sorrow as well as solicitude they occasion! Men set their minds to work, and perplex themselves with plans to obtain them, and minds thus preoccupied have no room-left for better objects and holier pursuits; men torture themselves most unwarrantably in order to increase them and augment their store; men are distressed with restless schemes in order to retain secure possession of them; men, again, are so in love with them that they cannot bear to part with them, or share them with others for the noblest purposes religious, educational, or charitable, nor even for the means of profiting their own souls. When the love of riches thus dominates the heart, and when such plans and projects regulate its thoughts and rule its affections, no wonder that such bushy and prickly thorns choke out (apepnixan), or crushing together suffocate (sumpnigousi) and stifle the seeds or plants in their growth.
7. "The deceitfulness of riches. " Both St. M atthew and St. Mark mention this characteristic of riches. How often does it occur that men rise up early, sit up late, and eat the bread of carefulness with the hope of becoming rich; but the wealth they are in quest of, like some phantom form, eludes their grasp. Wealth, just as the meteor of the marsh, leads them till it leaves them in the quagmire, deluded, deceived, disappointed. They die neither rich in worldly goods, nor rich toward God. Again, men struggle long and hard for many years, and at length succeed in amassing wealth (ploutov , from the root ple entering into the verb "to fill," the noun "multitude," and the word "wealth," in Greek), and in scraping together much of this world"s goods; but scarce has their object been attained, their hopes realized, when, lo! through some untoward event, such as a conflagration, the breaking of a bank, or a robbery, their riches "make to themselves wings and fly away;" and thins they are deceived by a fluctuating, vanishing possession, for the attainment of which they have strained every power of mind and body, to the entire neglect of the soul and spiritual things. Once more, we can well suppose the case of men succeeding in the race for riches, and retaining in security the fruits of their labour. But by this time they are no longer young; desire has failed, the power of enjoyment has ceased; the advance of age, with its accompanying decay and decrepitude, kept pace with the accumulation of wealth; and now in the end, after years of toil, they have no relish for the enjoyments they had anticipated; they have experienced "the deceitfulness of riches," and, what is worse, their heart is now hard, their conscience seared, the seed of truth has been so long stifled, and its instructions so long suffocated by the crowding thoughts of wealth. Further, riches deceive by their promises. They promise happiness, but instead of happiness they often bring miserable apprehensions; they promise peace of mind, but they often prove the chief disturbers of that peace; they promise contentment, but the craving for more produces restlessness and dissatisfaction; they promise to lighten the burdens of life, but they frequently super-add a crushing load of care to all its other burdens; they promise relief from care, but it is as true now as in the poet"s day, that "black care mounts behind the knight." The seed of the Word may be sown on the rich soil of a young, warm heart, it may strike root deeply downward, it may develop a tender stem and green leaf upward, it may struggle for light and air, but in vain! These thorns rob the root of nourishment, and shut out the genial sunlight and healthy atmosphere from the top; and though there may be foliage, there is no fruitage. If, then, poverty distresses with its cares and distracts by its anxieties, riches may divert the mind by their abundance and deceive by their promises; in either case, the Word may be unfruitful, the life barren, heaven missed, salvation lost, and the soul ruined.
8. Other perils to profitable hearing. When we reflect on the dangers to our spiritual life and growth attending both poverty and riches, we may well say with the wise man, "Give me neither poverty nor riches," or give me grace to bear myself discreetly and devoutly in either. But if the poor man is in danger from his poverty, and the rich man in danger because of his wealth, what of the man of pleasure? The word biov differs from both zwh in the classics and in the Scriptures; but the difference thus existing is reversed, so that in Scripture the latter denotes the higher kind of life, and is the word of moral meaning involving moral distinction, while the former is more closely connected with natural life, or that life which we have in common with other animals. Accordingly, we read of "the pride of life" (biou), "the affairs of life," and here "the pleasures of life," with the same word in each. "The pleasures of life," or of this life our versions supplying the pronoun may be the pleasures of sense and sin, such as the apostle enumerates under works of the flesh, when he says, in his Epistle to the Galatians, (Gal_5:19) "Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness,... drunkenness, revellings, and such like." Or the pleasures here referred to may be the less gross and more fashionable pleasures which minister to pride, to pomp, to luxury, and to ambition. These desires about the remaining or other things may refer to gay clothing, costly furniture, rich equipages, stately mansions, works of art, broad acres, wide domains, popular applause, worldly advancement, and whatever else may be comprehended under "the lust of the eye and the pride of life." Even lawful desires inordinately pursued, proper objects too eagerly sought after, right employments and occupations too keenly followed, even natural affections carried to excess, all these, when they are allowed to interfere with or draw away the attention from everlasting verities, the lessons of Scripture, and the concerns of the soul, and are not restrained by the grace of God, become spiritual thorns. They choke the seed, distract and distress the mind, and in the end "make a death-bed difficult." We have read somewhere that when the famous French cardinal Mazarin drew near his end, he caused himself to be dressed, shaved, rouged, and enamelled. Then he had himself rolled in an easy-chair through his picture-gallery, exclaiming at times as he went along, "See that Correggio, this Venus of Titian, that incomparable Caracci! Must I quit them all? Farewell, beloved ones! None can know how my heart bleeds to leave you." He was next wheeled into the promenade, where the feeble hands of the old sinner were actually held up while he joined in a game of cards! And so, it is added, he continued till the papal nuncio came to give him plenary indulgence.
IX PRACTICAL LESSONS.
1. The first lesson here that presents itself to our attention may be expressed in that exhortation of the Apostle John, "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.
2. We are warned so as to beware of the cruel disappointment of going on successfully for a time, and then coming short at the last; of being, in other words, an almost Christian, and so only coming in view of but not reaching salvation. Here the surface was not hard, as in the case of the wayside, nor was the soil shallow, as in the case of the stony ground; on the contrary, there was a soft surface to admit the seed, there was soil neither shallow nor stony to retain it; and yet the seed, though well and deeply rooted, was stifled at the top and suffocated at the root, so that it never reached maturity.
3. With seeming progress there may be real retrogression. In the case of the wayside it is trodden down at once, never penetrating even the surface before Satan snatches it away; in the stony ground the seed finds lodgment in the soil, springs up speedily, but for want of root or depth of earth to maintain the root, it is scorched and withers away; in the thorny ground it enters the surface, roots itself in the soil, springs up and grows, but after all it remains barren and fruitless. The last state, in one point of view, is worse than the preceding, and that, again, than the first; because more progress has been made by the seed among the thorns than by that on the rocky ground, and more by that, again, than by the seed cast on the wayside; and thus to go so far as to take root and grow, and then fall short at last, is more disappointing than the case of the seed which, though it enters the soil, never takes root, and only endures for a time; and still more than that which never penetrates the surface at all.
4. It has been remarked, that the first corresponds to the carelessness of childhood, the second to the shallowness of youth, and the third to the worldliness of age; the first also implying inattention, the second impulsiveness or ardor, and the third indulgent selfishness.
X THE GOOD GROUND.
1. Its character. The chief characteristic of the good ground. is its productiveness; while our Lord, in his explanation, indicates several other interesting particulars. The good ground represents an honest and good heart. Absolute goodness is out of the question, for "the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked;" and so the question comes to be Is it the comparative goodness of the natural heart, or is it the heart of the believer, in reference to whom we read, that "the preparations of the heart in man are from the Lord"? That there are differences in unregenerate men and in the condition of their hearts is, we think, unquestionable. It is so with individuals: as Nathanael, of whom, when coming to Jesus according to Philip"s direction, the Saviour himself said, "Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile;" or as Cornelius, "a devout man, and one that feared God, with all his house;" or as the Ethiopian eunuch, who, while he was returning in his chariot, read carefully and pondered closely "the prophet Esaias." It was so with the members of the Beraean community, who were" more noble than they of Thessalonica, in that they received the Word with all readiness of mind. " Thus even by nature some are more candid, honest, and upright than others; more earnest and desirous of knowing, as well as more ready to receive, the truth. Such natural differences, as well as those made by grace, are due to God, who alone makes men to differ. If the reference is to believers, the meaning is perfectly plain. The heart of such becomes "honest and good" in the highest human sense, when God, by his Holy Spirit, renews the heart and sanctifies the life, having united the soul by faith to the Saviour. Hearts thus quickened and purified are in a condition to receive, and do receive, the Word in simplicity and godly sincerity. Thus receiving it they grow thereby, being nourished and strengthened, and built up in their most holy faith.
2. The reception of the Word by such. Three terms are employed in this regard. St. Mark says, paradecontai , they receive it, with a feeling of inward satisfaction, it may be, or even delight. The stony-ground hearers are represented by the same evangelist and by St. Matthew as receiving it (lambanousi), and by St. Luke (decontai), with joy. The joy with which such hearers received it was a sudden impulse, which soon ceased a quick, joyous emotion, which played on the surface without stirring to any great extent the depths of the heart. But the reception accorded to it by those having an honest and good heart is accompanied by a deep, steady, abiding interest. The usage of this word in the LXX seems to imply a cordial reception; thus, in Isa_42:1 we read, "Israel is my chosen, my soul has accepted (prosedexato) him;" and in Pro_3:12 it is written, "For whom the Lord loves he rebukes, and scourges every son whom he receives (paradecetai)." But whether this shade of meaning be attributable to the context or inherent in the word, certain it is that such hearers receive the Word not wearily nor listlessly, nor as a formal duty, but as a matter of privilege, and in order to be instructed and edified thereby, and that their souls may be satisfied as with marrow and fatness. But, secondly, such hearers understand (suniwn) the Word. The interest we feel in any truth or fact helps us greatly in its right comprehension; once our interest is fully awakened our attention will be excited; we shall examine its bearings more thoughtfully. It is thus especially with the Word of God: we shall study it more carefully, as well as more prayerfully; while the Holy Spirit, promised to them that ask him, will guide us into all truth, even "the truth as it is in Jesus." A third element in this reception of the Word is the retention of it (katecousi , used by St. Luke): they keep it. Having received the truth in the love of it, and having mingled it with faith, it becomes the ingrafted Word ingrafted as a fruitful shoot in the wild unfruitful stock, or implanted in them, at all events, incorporated with their very being. As a natural and necessary consequence, they hold it fast, so that Satan cannot snatch it away, nor vain thoughts crush it down, nor worldly concerns stifle it, nor any evil influence destroy it. It becomes the subject of regular, constant, daily meditation; and so it gets linked with the thoughts and feelings and affections, while it is reduced to practice in the life. The individual so receiving it is "not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the Word," and so blessed in the deed. This corresponds exactly with the apostle"s statement, (1Co_15:2) "By which also ye are saved, if ye keep in memory katecete , literally, hold fast, as here what I preached unto you.
3. Fruititfulness. Fruit is borne in varying proportion, according to the talents bestowed and the surrounding circumstances. This fruit is borne in patience, that is, enduringly and perseveringly, and to the end; and not only the seed itself, but the fruit each grain in every ear in turn becoming seed multiplies itself.
XI PRACTICAL LESSONS.
1. Right way of receiving the Word. There m ust be the exercise of attention, understanding, and memory; as far as possible the attention must be lively and earnest, the understanding active and practical, and the memory retentive.
2. The fruitfulness. The fruit, though it varies in quantity, is a uniform product, evidencing the root of the matter, and ministering at once glory to God and grace to man. J.J.G.
The Pulpit Commentary (1880–1919), ed. H.D.M. Spence-Jones & Joseph S. Exell — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Biblical Illustrator 1887 · Public Domain And He began again to teach by the seaside.
Mar_4:1-2
And He began again to teach by the seaside.
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Christ teaching
I. The place where Christ taught.
1. By the seaside. Opposed to a prevailing notion. This example at present imitated.
2. In a ship. The spread of the gospel prefigured.
II. Those who formed His audience.
1. The general crowd.
2. The apostles and disciples.
III. The manner in which Christ taught.
1. He taught the multitudes in parables. Remarkable for simplicity when understood. Very apt and likely to be misunderstood.
2. He explained His parables to His disciples, but this was accompanied by reproof.
IV. The reason He taught the multitude in parables.
1. As a fulfilment of prophecy (Psa_78:2; Mat_13:34-35).
2. In consequence of the moral state of the Jewish nation (Isa_6:9-10; Mat_13:14-15, and elsewhere).
3. Originally, and as quoted, describes a particular moral state, in which-The Word is not understood, not felt, does not convert, is not heard. This state is ascribed to themselves, to the prophet, to God (Mat_13:14-15; Isa_6:9-10; Joh_12:40). Learn: That the ungodly see and hear without understanding; that in order that a people be left in darkness, it is not necessary that the gospel be removed; that when a faithful ministry is sent to a people, it is not always for their conversion; that the means of converting are also the means of hardening.
V. The reason Christ taught His disciples more directly.
1. A knowledge of the mysteries of the kingdom was a gift to them.
2. Instruction was the mode of conveying it. (Expository Discourses.)
By parables.
The use and abuse of allegorical instruction
Lay down some rules to assist in the interpretation of parables.
1. The first and principal one I shall mention is, the carefully attending to the occasion of them. No one, for instance, can be at a loss to explain the parable of the prodigal son, who considers that our Lord had been discoursing with publicans and sinners, and that the proud and self-righteous Pharisees had taken offence at His conduct. With this key we are let into the true secret of this beautiful parable, and cannot mistake in our comment upon it. Understanding thus from the occasion of the parable what is the grand truth or duty meant to be inculcated.
2. Our attention should be steadily fixed to that object. If we suffer ourselves to be diverted from it by dwelling too minutely upon the circumstances of the parable, the end proposed by Him who spake it will be defeated, and the whole involved in obscurity. For it is much the same here as in considering a fine painting; a comprehensive view of the whole will have a happy and striking effect, but that effect will not be felt if the eye is held to detached parts of the picture without regarding the relation they bear to the rest. Were a man to spend a whole hour on the circumstances of the ring and the robe in the parable just referred to, or on the two mites in that of the good Samaritan, it is highly probable both he and his hearers by the time they got to the close of the discourse, would lose all idea of our Saviours more immediate intent in both those instructive parables.
3. That great caution should be observed in our reasoning from the parables to the peculiar doctrines of Christianity.
(1) An intemperate use of figures tends to sensualise the mind and deprave the taste. Sensible objects engross the attention of mankind, and have an undue influence on their appetites and passions. They walk by sight, not by faith.
(2) The misapplication of figures, whereby false ideas are given the hearer of the things they are made to stand for. It is easy to conceive how mens notions of the other world, invisible spirits, and the blessed God Himself, may in this way be perverted. A licentious imagination has given rise to tenets the most absurd and impious. To this the idolatry of the pagan world may be traced up as its proper source (Rom_1:21-28).
(3) The reasoning injudiciously from types and figures, begets a kind of faith that is precarious and ineffectual. We have clear and positive proofs of the facts the gospel relates, and the important doctrines that are founded thereon. But if, instead of examining these proofs to the bottom, and reasoning with men upon them, we content ourselves with mere analogical evidence, and rest the issue of the question in debate upon fanciful and imaginary grounds, our faith will be continually wavering, and produce no substantial and abiding fruits. An enthusiast, struck with appearances, instantly yields his assent to a proposition, without considering at all the evidence. But as soon as his passions cool, and the false glare upon his imagination subsides, his faith dies away, and the fruit expected from it proves utterly abortive. (S. Stennett, D. D.)
The Biblical Illustrator, edited by Joseph S. Exell (c. 1880s–1900s) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Expositor's Bible 1887 · Public Domain Chapter 4
Chapter 4
CHAPTER 4:1-2, 10-13 (Mar_4:1-2; Mar_4:10-13)
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THE PARABLES
"And again He began to teach by the sea side. And there is gathered unto Him a very great multitude, so that He entered into a boat, and sat in the sea; and all the multitude were by the sea on the land. And He taught them many things in parables, and said unto them in His teaching. . . .
"And when He was alone, they that were about Him with the twelve asked of Him the parables. And He said unto them, Unto you is given the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all things are done in parables: that seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest haply they should turn again, and it should be forgiven them. And He saith unto them, Know ye not this parable? and how shall ye know all the parables?" Mar_4:1-2; Mar_4:10-13 (R.V.)
AS opposition deepened, and to a vulgar ambition, the temptation to retain disciples by all means would have become greater, Jesus began to teach in parables. We know that He had not hitherto done so, both by the surprise of the Twelve, and by the necessity which He found, of giving them a clue to the meaning of such teachings, and so to "all the parables." His own ought to have understood. But He was merciful to the weakness which confessed its failure and asked for instruction.
And yet He foresaw that they which were without would discern no spiritual meaning in such discourse. It was to have, at the same time, a revealing and a baffling effect, and therefore it was peculiarly suitable for the purposes of a Teacher watched by vindictive foes. Thus, when cross-examined about His authority by men who themselves professed to know not whence John's baptism was, He could refuse to be entrapped, and yet tell of One Who sent His own Son, His Beloved, to receive the fruit of the vineyard.
This diverse effect is derived from the very nature of the parables of Jesus. They are not, like some in the Old Testament, mere fables, in which things occur that never happen in real life. Jotham's trees seeking a king, are as incredible as Aesop's fox leaping for grapes. But Jesus never uttered a parable which was not true to nature, the kind of thing which one expects to happen. We cannot say that a rich man in hell actually spoke to Abraham in heaven. But if he could do so, of which we are not competent to judge, we can well believe that he would have spoken just what we read, and that his pathetic cry, "Father Abraham," would have been as gently answered, "Son, remember." There is no ferocity in the skies; neither has the lost soul become a fiend. Everything commends itself to our judgment. And therefore the story not only illustrates, but appeals, enforces, almost proves.
God in nature does not arrange that all seeds should grow: men have patience while the germ slowly fructifies, they know not how; in all things but religion such sacrifices are made, that the merchant sells all to buy one goodly pearl; an earthly father kisses his repentant prodigal; and even a Samaritan can be neighbor to a Jew in his extremity. So the world is constructed: such is even the fallen human heart. Is it not reasonable to believe that the same principles will extend farther; that as God governs the world of matter so He may govern the world of spirits, and that human helpfulness and clemency will not outrun the graces of the Giver of all good?
This is the famous argument from analogy, applied long before the time of Butler, to purposes farther-reaching than his. But there is this remarkable difference, that the analogy is never pressed, men are left to discover it for themselves, or at least, to ask for an explanation, because they are conscious of something beyond the tale, something spiritual, something which they fain would understand.
Now this difference is not a mannerism; it is intended. Butler pressed home his analogies because he was striving to silence gainsayers. His Lord and ours left men to discern or to be blind, because they had already opportunity to become His disciples if they would. The faithful among them ought to be conscious, or at least they should now become conscious, of the God of grace in the God of nature. To them the world should be eloquent of the Father's mind. They should indeed find tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones. He spoke to the sensitive mind, which would understand Him, as a wife reads her husband's secret joys and sorrows by signs no stranger can understand. Even if she fails to comprehend, she knows there is something to ask about. And thus, when they were alone, the Twelve asked Him of the parables. When they were instructed, they gained not only the moral lesson, and the sweet pastoral narrative, the idyllic picture which conveyed it, but also the assurance imparted by recognizing the same mind of God which is revealed in His world, or justified by the best impulses of humanity. Therefore, no parable is sensational. It cannot root itself in the exceptional, the abnormal events on which men do not reckon, which come upon us with a shock. For we do not argue from these to daily life.
But while this mode of teaching was profitable to His disciples, and protected Him against His foes, it had formidable consequences for the frivolous empty followers after a sign. Because they were such they could only find frivolity and lightness in these stories; the deeper meaning lay farther below the surface than such eyes could pierce. Thus the light they had abused was taken from them. And Jesus explained to His disciples that, in acting thus, He pursued the fixed rule of God. The worst penalty of vice is that it loses the knowledge of virtue, and of levity that it cannot appreciate seriousness. He taught in parables, as Isaiah prophesied, "that seeing they may see, and not perceive, and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest haply they should turn again and it should be forgiven them." These last words prove how completely penal, how free from all caprice, was this terrible decision of our gentle Lord, that precautions must be taken against evasion of the consequences of crime. But it is a warning by no means unique. He said, "The things which make for thy peace . . . are hid from thine eyes" (Luk_19:42). And St. Paul said, "If our gospel is veiled, it is veiled in them that are perishing"; and still more to the point, "The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness unto him; and he cannot know them, because they are spiritually discerned" (2Co_4:3; 1Co_2:14). To this law Christ, in speaking by parables, was conscious that He conformed.
But now let it be observed how completely this mode of teaching suited our Lord's habit of mind. If men could finally rid themselves of His Divine claim, they would at once recognize the greatest of the sages; and they would also find in Him the sunniest, sweetest and most accurate discernment of nature, and its more quiet beauties, that ever became a vehicle for moral teaching. The sun and rain bestowed on the evil and the good, the fountain and the trees which regulate the waters and the fruit, the death of the seed by which it buys its increase, the provision for bird and blossom without anxiety of theirs, the preference for a lily over Solomon's gorgeous robes, the meaning of a red sky at sunrise and sunset, the hen gathering her chickens under her wing, the vine and its branches, the sheep and their shepherd, the lightning seen over all the sky, every one of these needed only to be re-set and it would have become a parable.
All the Gospels, including the fourth, are full of proofs of this rich and attractive endowment, this warm sympathy with nature; and this fact is among the evidences that they all drew the same character, and drew it faithfully.
William Robertson Nicoll, ed., The Expositor's Bible (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1887–1910) — public domain. 65 of 66 books (1 Corinthians is not separately keyed, as that volume carries no machine-parseable verse references); section-level commentary keyed to the opening verse. Introductory and overview sections not keyed to a specific passage are excluded.
B. W. Johnson 1891 · Public Domain 1. He began again to teach by the seaside.…
1. He began again to teach by the seaside. This is the first recorded teaching in parables. For notes on the parable of the Sower see Matt. 13:1–23. Compare Luke 8:4–15. Mark's report is nearly that of Matthew, word for word, as well as of the explanation that follows. Matthew gives much the fullest account of this day's teaching, reporting a number of parables not found elsewhere.
B. W. Johnson's The People's New Testament with Notes (1889–1891) — public domain. Electronic text from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (CCEL) ThML edition.
The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary 1892 · Public Domain Mar_4:1. For a description of the surrounding scenery, which…
CRITICAL AND EXEGETICAL NOTES
Mar_4:1. For a description of the surrounding scenery, which doubtless furnished many of the illustrations used in the following parables, see Stanley’s Sinai and Palestine, pp. 425–427; Thomson’s Land and the Book, p. 402; Tristram’s Land of Israel, p. 431.
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Mar_4:11. Unto you, who possess the hearing ear and inquiring heart, is given the mystery or inner secret of the kingdom of God; but unto them that are without, who listen only from curiosity or some even less worthy motive, all the things concerning that kingdom are done in (i.e. take the form of) parables.
Mar_4:12. This veiling of spiritual truth is in mercy to those at present unable to receive it. The time may come when, with softened hearts, they will recall the teaching unheeded now; and then by the help of the parables embedded in their memory, they may rise to an appreciation of the things of the kingdom.
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.—Mar_4:1-20
Popular teaching of Jesus Christ.—Good teaching is always seasonable. It is the first step to the attainment of larger blessing. Real knowledge enlarges the soul’s capacity, and awakens new desire.
I. The particular occasion.—The multitude was great: universal eagerness was aroused to hear the wisdom of this strange Teacher. No private dwelling sufficed to accommodate the crowd. By common instinct they withdrew to the shore of the lake.
1. Outward circumstances are made tributary to the wise designs of Jesus. If the artificial temples reared by men are too narrow for the Divine purpose, material nature will provide a temple of the sublimest kind. Nor is this all. There is no reason why we should not conclude that, at the creation of Gennesaret’s blue lake, this event was foreseen. That shelving, sandy beach had been, for long ages, intended as an auditorium for that human assemblage; and never had its capacity been put to its noblest use till then. Still, human art is not flung away in contempt. The Gracious King deigns to employ human helpers, and to work through human agencies, so far as He Song of Solomon 2. Initial stages of Divine illumination. “He began to teach.” As a human parent, dealing with children, begins with pictures and object-lessons, so deals Jesus Christ with men. He began with parables. To speak of things in the heavenly world as they really are would be to speak a language unintelligible to human auditors. In nature God’s thoughts are projected before human eyes in material objects, and these the Son of God makes His starting-point.
3. A renewed endeavour to do men good. “Again He began.” Full well He knew the dulness of men to apprehend spiritual truth. If He had depended upon immediate and visible results for inspiration of energy to continue His undertaking, hope would soon have expired. But His Divine patience is inexhaustible. “Line upon line, precept upon precept,” is His sketch-plan. No apparent miscarriage daunts Him.
II. The form of the Saviour’s teaching.—“In parables.”
1. This form of teaching readily impresses the imagination. Interest is awakened. Attention is excited. It becomes evident that spiritual truth has vital connexion with visible things. This life is seen to be the groundwork of a nobler.
2. This form of teaching serves as a test of men’s honesty. Some men will yield to the momentary gratification of hearing the parable, but will take no pains to solve its meaning. Or, as soon as they get a glimpse that it implies an unpleasant duty, they dismiss the matter unceremoniously. Herein is a test of their honesty and earnestness. If they will not take the pains to thrash the straw, grind the grain, they must starve. The sweet kernel of truth lies within, but the hard shell must first be broken.
3. Infinite issues hang on receiving aright parabolical teaching. Light comes to men in this form—a from the most suitable: if they reject the light, their darkness becomes their chosen doom. The Emancipator comes in a shape and dress they do not recognise: refusing his offices, their bondage becomes confirmed. A moment of heavenly opportunity occurs, which, if improved, leads on to spiritual fortune; unimproved, ends in curse.
III. The revelation provided for the many: exoteric doctrine.—The destiny of the seed was various.
1. One portion fell on the beaten track, and was at once doomed to fruitlessness. In Palestine pasture and corn-lands are unenclosed. Camels and pedestrians soon make a beaten path from village to village. The greatest expert could not prevent some seeds from falling on this camel track, which lay right across his field. Wild birds soon learnt from experience where to find unburied seed, and were always on the alert to find a meal. In prospect of a harvest such seeds were lost.
2. A second portion fell on stony ground, i.e. on shallow soil. Only the thinnest crust of earth covered the rock. In the first stage of growth all seed finds its nutriment within itself; therefore the first aspect of the young crop is quite as promising in a poor soil as in fattest loam. But the test of a scorching sun soon brings to light good rootage, or slender. The moisture exuding through the pores of the leaf found no continuous supply from the root-source. Hence the green blades soon became languid, faint, shrivelled, sere.
3. A third portion fell among the old roots of former wild growths. As soon as spring, with its revivifying influence, appeared, the old stumps of thorns broke forth into new life. Vigorous shoots and branches from these old roots monopolised space and air and light,—the young blades of corn were attenuated and sickly. The power to appropriate the nutritious elements of the soil was lacking; the young corn could not even stand erect. The processes of life were checked. The force needed for kernelling was spent. The hostility was too severe; life could not survive.
4. The fortunes of the fourth portion of the seed were prosperous. The seed fell into good ground. Nursed in the warm bosom of mother earth, it soon gave signs of life. The hidden germ swelled, burst the swathing bands of hard membrane, and sent its living rootlets in search of proper food. Day by day it obtained a larger hold on life. Duly the green stalks pierced the surface, and found nutrition from dew and air and sunlight. They grew, acquired strength, flowered, kernelled into grain, and when the stalks at length fell before the sickle, they yielded large increase. Yet the fruitfulness was not uniform. In part, proportionate to the fatness of the soil; in part, proportionate to the skill of the sower: thirty grains were found where one had been sown—a hundred for one in some instances were gained.
IV. The higher revelation for the few: esoteric doctrine.—Comparatively few in every age care for spiritual enlightenment. The many are absorbed in the care for bread, or in the care for riches. To them the visible is everything; the invisible, nothing. Yet a few everywhere—the true elect—examine, ponder, and reverently ask. To such the deeper meanings of the parable appear.
1. There is failure in a man’s life through an unprepared condition of the soil. Secular traffic hardens all the better feelings of the heart. A man’s soul, which should be penetrable, plastic, accessible to the light and love from heaven, becomes callous, repellent, indurated—until it has reached the final stage—“past feeling.” In the proper condition of the mind, it is exquisitely suited to the reception of living seed; it is the seed’s home and rest. Inquiry after truth is natural. But if the emotional nature become hardened by worldly pursuits, the seed is lost; it remains on the surface, and our sleepless foe removes it at once from the memory. The man wantonly allows himself to be despoiled of his choicest treasure. In harvest time he reaps confusion and shame.
2. There is failure also in man’s best life through shallow feeling. To have sin pardoned is a joyous sensation—to be received as an adopted child is a rich privilege—to be assured of heaven is rapture. But presently the sun’s face suffers eclipse—clouds gather. Friends scowl and load us with opprobrium. The cold sleet of the world’s hatred is showered upon us. Snares are laid for our feet. Our occupation is gone. Poverty and shame have to be faced. We cannot tread this rugged path. What? give up comfort, and riches, and prospects, and friends, and health for the sake of a slender hope of future joy? It is too much to ask. Men stumble at the terms; they go back to animal enjoyments. Alas! the seed is unfruitful.
3. Failure, too, may come about through attempted compromise of the earthly and the heavenly. The convictions of truth have taken a deeper hold than in the foregoing case. The man cannot afford to forego religion—that would be ruinous! But he will relegate it to a corner. His feverish pursuit of riches need not destroy his faith. He will, he must, be rich. But his riches shall not extinguish his piety. So he reasons; and all the while the green withes of evil habit are becoming tough as steel. Still dreaming of freedom, he is suddenly cast out of the kingdom as the veriest slave of mammon. Again the seed is fruitless.
4. Success comes only through acting in concert with God. The honest mind says, “Let the truth come in! Welcome light, come from what quarter it may!” He can afford to wait for blessed fruit till harvest time. Truth cannot injure a man: error or indolence must. “He receives the Word.” He reflects on what he hears, until it has an abiding-place in the understanding. From the understanding it passes into the conscience, and becomes conviction of duty. Thence it goes down into the affections—roots itself there—and becomes new and holy experience.—J. D. Davies.
The parable of the sower.—Unlike all other teachers, this Divine Teacher, in this His first parable, displays the same perfection of method, the same mastery of this life in its highest relations to spiritual truth, as in His latest utterances. Very notable, also, is the framework of this parable, in its adaptation to the Master’s mission and that of all His followers. Seed-sowing was His work—first for its own immediate usefulness, then for our imitation.
I. The spiritual husbandman’s chief work is to sow the Word.—He is to multiply what God hath revealed, not human speculations, not current news, not scientific discoveries, however true or helpful in their sphere, not ingenious theories about the Word. That Word finds illustration in every phase of the universe; but fatal the error that abandons the spirit and work of reverent interpretation for that of substitution.
II. He who sows the true seed may count upon a sure and large harvest—A single sentence, often only a word, implanted within the soul, reconstructs the whole life, and builds the world anew and for all the future.
III. Every one, of moderate intelligence even, is a sower of seed in the world’s broad field of spiritual harvests.—Every life, however circumstanced, repeats itself, or in some way enters into other lives, with a multiplying power for good or evil, of which the world’s grain-harvests are a fit and vivid, though inadequate, illustration.
IV. The emphasis of our Lord’s teaching refers to the seed’s fruitfulness according to the condition of the hearts receiving it.—Unlike the ground, hearts are under self-control. Not passively inert, they can take condition favourable to the Word, and become fruitful beyond any chance or doubt.
1. It is safe to say that our care in hearing the Word is not proportioned to its importance. All religious life is antagonised by the adversary, but his best energies are centred upon keeping the truth from finding lodgment. It easily sets its roots if it have opportunity, but no seed will fruit if at once caught away. Wayside hearers leave the Word, however faithfully presented, to such speedy destruction. Jesus describes such as those who hearing the Word understand it not. In epitome this includes every condition of mind and heart barred against the truth. The vital truth is the helplessness of seed in hearts so preoccupied as to be steeled against its lodgment. This truth is reinforced by the revealed agency of Satan. He catches away the Word by coinciding with the heart’s pre-existing hostility. To the sensualist he heightens the promise of forbidden pleasures, lest a better life may get his attention and choice. The worldling he points to heights of power or gain or fame not yet reached, and with which nothing must be permitted to interfere. To the scoffing sceptic he paints the conquests of controversy, the sweets of destructive onslaught upon received and time-honoured doctrines.
2. The next part of the figure refers to an underlying rock formation covered with a light layer of soil. This is a fitting type of natures quick to respond in feelings warm and sympathetic, but lacking in the underlying virtues of reason, will, and conscience. With these a man has “root in himself”; without them he is carried about by the enthusiasm of the hour or moment. The quick sensibilities have their uses. Any soul devoid of them is seriously lacking in equipment for life’s best enjoyment and work. But with them there should be fixed convictions of one’s own, the combined product of clear reason, a sensitive conscience, and persistent will. This is the sub-soil into which the roots of principles thrust themselves, as do those of the wind-beaten oak, under all the blasts of tribulation or persecution.
3. Here we are to think not so much of a visible growth of thorns as of a root-infested soil, the roots long and deeply planted and holding their places with stubborn thoroughness. The soil is deep enough and of ample strength; but its resources are absorbed by these preoccupying thorns, whose roots hold the field and promptly spring up, starving the good seed. Worldly anxieties, the deceitful promises of wealth, mere self-indulgence, called pleasure, have a firm anchorage in the natural heart. The renewed heart must enthrone service of the Lord Jesus in the building of His universal kingdom. This may be only in germ, but if genuine it will have a growing mastery and final supremacy, the thorn-roots all eradicated. The best eradication, because easiest and quickest, is a transformation of “cares, riches, and pleasures” into reinforcements of the Lord’s work. These pre-existing roots become fertilisers and feeders of good soil. The Queen’s broad arrow marks and secures England’s possessions. The soul converted to Christ may put the Cross upon all riches or proper pursuits and pleasures, the Master’s kingdom supreme in its rounded life.
4. Two points of profitable inquiry concerning the good-ground hearers: How can any unrenewed heart be called “good ground,” and what determines the differing degrees of fruitage? While no natural heart is holy, it may have moral qualities favourable to receiving good seed and for an easy incorporation of its life. A heart tender and true, a knowledge of truth broad and deep, a conscience sensitive and controlling, pursuits honourable and useful—these furnish conditions of ready and vigorous growth when the seed finds lodgment. Great the encouragement to persistent effort in the moral training of children and youth! When conversion occurs a rich fruitage follows, because of the good ground thus carefully and continuously prepared. The fruitage is measured by such antecedent preparation. Towering corn and wheat cover the prairie once burdened with flowers and waving grass. We must not omit, in closing, some thought of the momentous responsibility of hearing the Word. How vital its relation to present life and future destiny! And yet what is done with less deliberation or thoroughness?—S. L. B. Speare.
The Sower and the seed.—This parable may be regarded as introductory to all the rest, and preparatory to that method of teaching which Christ in His Divine wisdom saw fit to adopt. Unless the drift of this, the first and plainest of the parables, be understood, it is useless to proceed to more difficult ones, which presuppose an acquaintance with the ordinary rules of parabolic instruction. In the parables afterwards delivered that was actually done which is here only described: the Sower sowed the Word, with the different results that He Himself foretells in this parable. Or we may say that this very parable is a portion of that Divine seed which then began to be sown. This doctrine of the preparation of the heart to receive the gospel may itself be as variously received as any other portion of evangelical truth.
I. The free grace of God, which is the corner-stone of the whole fabric of revealed truth, is the foundation on which this parable is constructed.—
1. Moved by His own infinite goodness—the same goodness which originally prompted Him to call man into existence—God “went forth,” as it were, came out of His place, to sow the seed of Divine truth in the hearts of His creatures. Whatever revelations of Himself He has been pleased to make, from the time when He talked with our first parents until the present day, the Sower has never ceased to scatter over the wide field of the human family the seeds of that knowledge which “maketh wise unto salvation.”
2. This grand operation of sowing the Word, as it proceeded from unbounded goodness, so has it always been conducted with unerring wisdom—with that wisdom which looks to the end, which contemplates great results, comprehensive benefits (Luk_2:14).
3. As we survey the world’s history, we see the Great Sower marking out, and as it were enclosing, certain portions of the common field to be cultivated with particular care, while the rest was to all appearance left in a state of nature. So it was, avowedly, under the Jewish dispensation; so it is now, actually at least, under the Christian. Actually, but not designedly. The design of the dispensation of grace is, to make known the glad tidings of salvation to all nations for the obedience of faith (Mat_28:19-20; Mar_16:15; Luk_24:47).
4. The Sower still goes forth, by His agents and ministers, to sow the Word of Life (Eph_4:11-13). The commission is unlimited, the supply of grace and strength unbounded; the deficiency is in the human instruments alone.
II. The various receptions which are accorded by men to the free grace of God.—
1. Here are three descriptions of persons whom “the Word preached does not profit,” etc. (Heb_4:2). Their characters are exactly discriminated in Mar_4:15-19. Any hearer who desires to know the cause of his own unprofitableness may sit down before this faithful mirror, and in one or other of the three reflexions presented by it he will be sure to find his own.
2. Note the points of agreement between the three classes of unprofitable hearers.
(1) They all hear the Word. This is partly the gracious provision of the Sower, who sows plentifully (Jas_1:5). But, besides, there is a natural disposition in men to “hear the Word,” independent of the reception they may eventually give it.
(2) They all, in a certain sense, receive the Word. So it is with hearers in general. They “receive the Word with joy.” They like to hear. They go away with the intention of coming again. They do come again. They become regular hearers. Hearing the Word becomes a habit with them. They feel a certain gratification in the mere act of hearing, and so they fancy they have derived benefit from it. Vain delusion!
(3) They all “bring no fruit to perfection.” The first sort never believe the Word at all; the second have faith, but such faith as will not abide the test of tribulation or persecution because of the Word; the third might endure afflictions, but yield to temptations of a different kind (Mar_4:19). Thus the end of all is the same. Some may advance further towards maturity than others; some may exhibit the blade, others the ear, but none “the full corn in the ear.” At the best they are “double-minded men,” “halting between two opinions,” “unstable in all their ways.”
3. There is yet another class of hearers, standing entirely by itself. It consists of those who “hear the Word, and receive it, and bring forth fruit.” The seed that is sown here, finding a soil congenial to it—“an honest and good heart”—and watered by the dews of heaven, “takes root downward, and bears fruit upward.” Such an one, “nourished up in the words of faith and of good doctrine,” “grows in grace,” etc. (2Pe_3:18). The “fruit of the Spirit” manifests itself in his words and deeds. By the grace of God, he “keepeth himself; and that wicked one,” who is always at hand to catch away the Word sown in the heart, “toucheth him not.” Afflictions and temptations however they may unsettle him for a time, “nevertheless afterward yield the peaceable fruits of righteousness.” Even “the cares of this world, and the lusts of other things,” from which no one is altogether exempt, although they may check the growth of the good seed in the heart, do not choke it; they may make it less fruitful, but not “barren or unfruitful in the knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ.”
OUTLINES AND COMMENTS ON THE VERSES
Mar_4:1. Christ teaching in the ship a parable itself of the kingdom of heaven.
1. A figure of its form.
(1) The evangelical ministry.
(2) The Church.
(3) Missions.
2. A figure of its condition.
(1) Small beginnings.
(2) Poverty.
(3) Mobility.
(4) Freedom.—J. P. Lange, D.D.
An imperfect Church, an unworthy pulpit, and poor hearers may nevertheless form a true Church, accepted of God.—P. Quesnel.
Mar_4:2. Why Christ spoke in parables.—
1. That the Scripture might be fulfilled (Psa_78:2).
2. That we might know that Christ spake with the same spirit with which all God’s prophets in the old time spake, whose writings are full of parables.
3. That He might descend to the capacity of the most simple, who best understand and remember homely illustrations.
4. That His auditors might take occasion to ask questions (Mar_4:10).
5. That the mysteries of God’s heavenly kingdom might be hidden from the scornful (Mar_4:11-12).
6. That every man, in his occupation and ordinary vocation, might be taught those things which concern his soul’s health: as this parable may be termed the ploughman’s gospel; he that meditates on it, when he ploughs his ground, may have a sermon always before him, every furrow being a line, every grain of corn a lesson bringing forth some fruit.
Rules for the interpretation of parables.—
1. Careful attention to the occasion of them.
2. Close adherence to the one truth or duty meant to be enforced. It is much the same here as in considering a fine painting; a comprehensive view of the whole will have a happy and striking effect, but that effect will not be felt if the eye is held to detached parts of the picture without regarding the relation they bear to the rest.
3. Great care in reasoning from the parables to the peculiar doctrines of Christianity.
(1) An intemperate use of figures tends to sensualise the mind and deprave the taste.
(2) By the misapplication of figures false ideas are given to the hearer of the things they stand for.
(3) The reasoning injudiciously from types and figures begets a kind of faith that is precarious and ineffectual. An enthusiast, struck with appearances, hastily yields his assent to a proposition, without considering the evidence carefully. But as soon as his passions cool, and the false glare upon his imagination subsides, his faith dies away, and the fruit expected from it proves utterly abortive. “Parables are more ancient than arguments,” says Lord Bacon: and it is not difficult to see why. A parable is winning and attractive, because it is a narrative or story: it is easy to be understood, since it deals with familiar events and actions, with sayings and doings of common life, which are well known to all its hearers: lastly, it is acceptable and effective, because it does not arouse antagonism and opposition in the mind of the hearer, as argument frequently does.
Christ’s thought for the multitude.—It is easy to have tender regard and helpful disposition towards the few kindred spirits, but Jesus thought of the needs of any and all of His fellow-men to which He could minister. But this spirit of beneficence was always guided by unerring wisdom as to methods. We may blindly yield to benevolent impulses in ways self-defeating and often harmful. He thoroughly measured the situation of His opening ministry, and taught by parable which should both reveal and conceal. Idle curiosity, much less personal prejudice or selfish scheming, is never the condition of helpful hearing. Concealment by parable was a favour to all who would have wrested the truth to their own hurt.—S. L. B. Speare.
Mar_4:3. The sower is now any and every one who rehearses and enforces the same doctrines as our Lord. It matters little who or what he is, so long as he has full store of the good seed and is faithful in scattering it. The harvest tells nothing as to the husbandman—whether a master or slave—save his wise and trustful labour. Results are the same in either case, and these are the objects in all sowing.
Analogies.—
1. Between the sowing of seed and the teaching of truth.
2. Between the earth’s reception of the seed and man’s reception of the truth.
3. Between the earth’s response to the seed sown and man’s response to the truth taught. So too it is the same God—
1. Who gives man seed to sow and truth to learn.
2. Who prepares the earth for the reception of the seed and the heart of man for the reception of the truth.
3. Who causes the seed to grow and bring forth fruit, and who guides and helps man to carry into practice the truth which he learns.
Mar_4:5-6. No depth of earth.—At first, when the wheat sprouts, the blade which it sends up to the surface is green and beautiful. But after a while the field of emerald loveliness looks suddenly sere and yellow; the blades seem to droop and languish as if a worm were at the root. This remarkable change is caused by what the farmers call the “spearin’ brash” (Scotch for “weaning brash”). The corn is weaned from its mother’s milk, as it were; for the supply of food which was stored up for it in the seed is now exhausted, and it has to seek food for itself in the soil and air. It has not yet strength to do so, and therefore fades and becomes sickly. It falls off, just as a human child falls off when weaned. If, in such circumstances, there is soil enough, it soon recovers; if, however, there is no room beneath and fierce sun above, then because it has no root it withers.—H. Macmillan, D.D.
Mar_4:9. Eloquent hearing is indispensable to effective preaching: it is as necessary that listeners should be taught how to hear, as it is that preachers should be taught what or how to speak.—W. M. Taylor, D.D.
Qualities to be cultivated by gospel hearers.—
1. Attention. The good hearer stirs himself up to listen. He trains himself to follow the speaker. His hearing is an opportunity, and he takes care to make the most of it.
2. Meditation. What he “hears” he “keeps” by reflecting upon it, and assimilating it for his own edification and growth in grace. Says Willmott: “Proportion an hour’s reflexion to an hour’s reading, and so dispirit the book into the student.” So I would say: Let every time of hearing be followed by a time of meditation, that the seed which has fallen on the soil may, as it were, be “harrowed” into it by the process.
3. Obedience. To hear without obeying is to harden the heart; for, as Bishop Butler says, “passive impressions grow weaker by being repeated.” But the acting on what we hear prepares us for being better hearers next time, and quickens the receptivity of the soul. Even among good hearers, however, there will be differences; some will make more of their opportunities than others.—Ibid.
Divine truth needs attention.—Perhaps our Saviour used so frequently to conclude His Divine discourses with, “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear,” to teach us that there is no employment of our faculties, that more deserves their utmost attention, than the scrutiny of Divine truths (Isa_4:3; Rom_10:17).—R. Boyle.
Mar_4:10-12. Parables necessary for outsiders.—Parables are, so to speak, forced upon the Lord. They are His only method of dealing with this loose mob that is following Him. He cannot venture to confide to them His full mind, for it would but confuse and repel them. So long as it was His disciples He could address them openly, as in the Sermon on the Mount, with plain, strong directions. So it had been, apparently, at the first; but now that His fame had spread—now that a mixed multitude is swarming around Him—He is driven to protect His doctrine from degradation, misunderstanding, confusion. It is not enough that He has in His hands pearls to give; He must see to it, also, that He distributes them aright to those that will profit by them. So the parables express the guarded caution with which the great revelation of the Father must be made. It is not enough that God should reveal His love for fallen man; but more than that, He must do it in a way of condescension to all the gradations of darkness into which men have fallen. Here is the irony of the terrible passage quoted by our Lord from Isaiah in answer to the wondering question of the disciples why He should speak in parables. Why in parables? Because so many, though they willingly listen, are in such a state that, hearing they hear not, and seeing they see not; it is because “this people’s heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes are closed, lest at any time, seeing with their eyes, and hearing with their ears, they should understand with their hearts, and should be converted, and I should heal them.” “Lest they should be converted, and I should heal them.” That is the dreadful thing that would happen; that is the dreadful thing that they are bent on postponing. That is the irony of love picturing the postponement of the good it brings; and since the facts are so, since men have determined that the process of their salvation shall be slow, and difficult and gradual, therefore Christ has conformed to their ways; He has qualified the blinding light, He has shadowed it down to the dusk in which men abide, He has divided His teaching into stages, so as to protect these obstinate hearts against their own prejudices, He has fallen back on these parables. Even those who most vehemently repudiate the more emphatic message, even those who might in indignation take up stones to kill Him if they heard the full claim, will stand and listen to these parables; and if they listen and are pleased to walk away without further question no irremediable harm will be done, only they will be much as they were before, only they will postpone the day of possibility, they will not have been brought up near enough to the fire to be scorched by it, they will have been saved the uppermost disaster. But, on the other hand, if there are any there who have ears to hear and eyes to see, then the parable will work its perfect work upon them, they will never be satisfied by its mere beauty, they will feel the prickings of a Diviner secret, the parables will quicken and animate them into more eager expectation; something in them will provoke them, they will be restless until they have gone further, they will press in with the other disciples into the house with the Master, they will insist on being told what it all means. And it is these persistent, clamouring questioners to whom it is given to know the mysteries of heaven. These will ask and knock, and asking will receive, and knocking it will be opened unto them.—Canon Scott Holland.
Double aspect of parables.—Inasmuch as a parable is the presentation of some spiritual truth under the guise of an incident belonging to the material sphere, it follows, from its very nature, that it may either reveal or hide the truth, and that it will do the former to susceptible and the latter to unsusceptible souls. The eye may either dwell upon the coloured glass or on the light that streams through it; and, as is the case with all revelations of spiritual realities through sensuous mediums, gross and earthly hearts will not rise above the medium, which to them, by their own fault, becomes a medium of obscuration, not of revelation. This double aspect belongs to all revelation, which is both a savour of life unto life and of death unto death.—A. Maclaren, D.D.
The veil of allegory.—The ideas of the Christ of God are thinly veiled in parables, so as to conceal them from idle and corrupt minds, who hate the Cross, and do not think truth worth their steady attention. But this slight veil of allegory enhances their beauty for those who are worthy of initiation into the “mysteries of the kingdom,” just as the sun and moon appear more beautiful for the thin luminous mists through which they rise above the horizon, as they turn the vapours into gold.—E. White.
Mar_4:10. Explanation of difficulties to be sought.—As in the schools of human knowledge, so soon as the lecture is read, it is the scholars’ duty to question among themselves how to parse and construe it, and when they doubt to have recourse to their grammar rules, by which all construction is examined; and when they do not understand a hard rule to come for a resolution unto their master, who is as it were a living grammar and a walking book,—so likewise in God’s academy, in the divinity school, when either the lecture of the law is read, or sermon on the gospel ended, it is your part to reason among yourselves, as you walk abroad in the fields or talk at home in your house, how this and that may be construed; and when you cannot resolve one another, with the men of Berea, to search the Scripture daily, whether those things are so, to try the spirits of men by the Spirit of God, for the Bible is our divinity grammar, according to which all our lessons ought to be parsed and construed. And if ye meet with a difficult place, repair to God’s usher, the priest, whose lips should preserve knowledge; demand of your pastor, as the disciples of Christ here.—Dean Boys.
Mar_4:11. “The mystery of the kingdom of God.”—Religious knowledge, and especially that Christian and saving knowledge which the gospel brought to light, is what our Lord means by “the mystery of the kingdom of God.” A “mystery” is something dark and incomprehensible; which may happen in two ways—either through the want of a clear revelation, or through the natural and incurable imperfection of our faculties. “The kingdom” contains mysteries of both kinds: some sublime secrets which are altogether too high for us, which no revelation could impart to us, and which are therefore properly said to “belong unto the Lord our God”; others, again, which in former ages were not made known unto the sons of men, as they are now revealed unto the holy apostles and prophets, and through them to mankind in general, by the Spirit. In the latter there is no mystery as soon as the revelation is made, no difficulty which may not be removed by the instructions and explanations of a discreet, patient, and condescending teacher. Such a teacher was our Blessed Lord. He had to teach things, not unintelligible in their nature, but yet strange and hard sayings to His poor, ignorant, carnal-minded hearers; such as required to be helped out by comparisons and illustrations from things which they did understand. He did not attempt to show to such persons what the kingdom of God was, but only what it was like; that by the help of these patterns and representations of things in the heavens He might at last lead up their minds to the heavenly things themselves.
Mar_4:14. The emblem of seed for God’s Word needs no explanation. The tiny, living nucleus of force, which is thrown broadcast, and must sink underground in order to grow, which does grow, and comes to light again in a form which fills the whole field where it is sown, and nourishes life as well as supplies material for another sowing, is the truest symbol of the truth in its working on the spirit.—A. Maclaren, D.D.
Sowing broadcast is the only right husbandry in Christ’s field with Christ’s seed. “Thou canst not tell which shall prosper, whether this or that.” The character of the soil is not irrevocably fixed; but the trodden path may be broken up to softness, and the stony heart changed, and the soul filled with cares and lusts be cleared, and any soil may become good ground.—Ibid.
The seed must be genuine: wheat, not bastard wheat; the wheat that makes bread and sustains life—the seed of the Word of God. Not all seed sown in Sunday schools, just as not all seed scattered from Christian pulpits, is unadulterated truth of God. While there must always be the human element in the teaching of the inspired Word, it must not be all the human element, which it is too often found to be, whereby much of the teaching given is, for all higher and Divine purposes, not bread, but sawdust.—Bishop Thorold.
Twofold sowing.—According to Jewish authorities there was twofold sowing, as the seed was either cast by the hand or by means of cattle. In the latter case a sack with holes was filled with corn, and laid on the back of the animal, so that, as it moved, onwards the seed was thickly scattered. Thus it might well be that it would fall indiscriminately on beaten roadway, or on stony places but thinly covered with soil, or where the thorns had not been cleared away, or undergrowth from this thorn hedge crept into the field, as well as on good ground.—A. Edersheim, D.D.
The sowing of the seed of goodness, even among the rank growths of evil, will do in the spiritual world what the growth of the wild flowers of England is doing at this moment among the rank vegetation of New Zealand, and what the fire and hoe of the settler have failed to do. We are told that the common clover of our fields, tender as it looks, is actually rooting out the formidable New Zealand flax, with its fibrous leaves and strong woody roots. By the law of natural selection, as it were, in the spiritual world, the stronger growth of heaven will extirpate the feebler growth of earth.—H. Macmillan, D.D.
Mar_4:15. By the wayside.—These are they who, when the Baptist came with austere severity, said he was mad; and when Christ conversed and taught with mild condescension, said He was a drunkard, a glutton, and a keeper of bad company. They hated the doctrines, and so found fault with the teachers. Such are those who have entered betimes, and continued long, in the service of the devil; who are slaves to vices and bad habits; who have extinguished all reason, reflexion, and natural conscience, and whom no ordinary methods can reclaim. The Word is preached to them, and they trample it underfoot, and ridicule those who offer them good advice. They lie out of the reach of persuasion and instruction, and nothing short of some grievous calamity can rouse them. But from their deplorable condition others may take due warning, lest, by departing from their duty and neglecting a timely reformation, they should, through the deceitfulness of sin, arrive at such a hardened state. And this seems to be the only use these incorrigible offenders serve in this world: they stand forth, not as marks and friendly lights to guide and direct the passenger, but as signals of danger and death to be avoided.—J. Jortin, D.D.
The devil’s activity.—“Wherever there is a preacher in the pulpit, there is a devil in the pew,” to carry off the good seed if it be neglected.
Satan hinders men in sundry ways from profiting by the Word.
1. By keeping them from hearing it, stirring up occasions of worldly business or some other impediments on the Lord’s Day to keep them away from church. 2. By keeping them from attending to it when they do hear it.
3. By blinding their minds, that they may not understand it.
4. By labouring to hold them in infidelity, that they may not believe and apply the Word to themselves.
5. By using means to thrust the Word heard out of their minds, that they may not remember it.
6. By keeping them from yielding obedience to the Word.—G. Petter.
Mar_4:16-17. No root.—These are persons who have conscience, reason, and reflexion; who can discern the amiable and profitable nature of religion, and the folly and danger of vice; who can sometimes give attention to the Word of God, approve it as right and fit, speak and think honourably of it, and of those who practise it, and even entertain purposes of acting suitably to it: but they have no steadiness, resolution, and perseverance; and so are not proof against trials and temptations. They are such as are described in Eze_33:31-32. Moral precepts and religious arguments appear fair and lovely in idea, but are found grievous in practice and execution; and the paths of righteousness, which make a fine landscape in description, are rough, steep, and tedious to ascend. Such is the effect of religion upon those who have some taste and natural discernment, but no steady love of goodness.—J. Jortin, D.D.
Many mistake feeling for faith, admiration of Christ for attachment to Him, the appreciation of the beauty of holiness for the use and practice of it, the power of emotion for depth of piety. Such are as quickly offended as they are impressed.
Quick maturity means brief life and speedy decay. “Gladness,” although certainly a result of true conversion, is not the immediate result, but sorrow for sin and repentance in dust and ashes.
A forgotten truth.—Much more of true religion consists in deep humility, brokenness of heart, and an abasing sense of barrenness, and want of grace, and holiness, than most who are called Christians imagine; especially those who have been esteemed the converts of the late day, many of whom seem to know of no other religion but elevated joys and affections, arising only from some flights of imagination, or some suggestion made to their mind of Christ’s being theirs, God’s loving them, and the like (Joh_5:35; Mar_6:20; Luk_4:23; Luk_4:29).—D. Brainerd.
Revival converts.—The short and pathetic history of some who are called revival converts. They are charmed, but not changed; much excited, but not truly converted. Their root is in the crowd, the fine music, the lively stir, the hearty companionships of the gospel meeting. The Moravians every Sabbath offer up this prayer: “From light-minded swarming deliver us, good God.”
Mar_4:18-19, The Word choked.—To this class of people religion is presented and propounded; and they assent to it and receive it, and call themselves Christians; but many things arise between them and their duty, many avocations and impediments which prevent the Word from having a due effect upon their hearts.
1. “The cares of this world,” when admitted and nourished and encouraged, seize upon the whole man, and so fill the head and occupy the hours that the attention is entirely fixed on worldly affairs, and no leisure is allowed for spiritual concerns. And as no person can bear the toil and fatigue of being always contriving, projecting, labouring, plodding, and some amusement must intervene, the times for recreation are, for such persons, the times when other Christians are attending the public worship of God, or meditating on things sacred and serious at home. Thus religious considerations are totally banished; and the man may be said to be dead to God and Christ, and alive only to the world.
2. “The deceitfulness of riches” has the same bad effect. When the love of wealth is predominant and engrosses the affections, it produces an eagerness to acquire it; a proud trust and confidence in it; a settled resolution to preserve and increase it by any methods, and in defiance of honesty and humanity; and an esteem or contempt of other persons, according as they are rich or poor: and then mammon alone is worshipped, and the love of God is expelled from the heart.
3. “The lusts of other things”—viz. desires of magnificence and splendour, of flattery and popular applause, of power and pre-eminence, and, in a word, immoderate affections for anything that is temporal and transitory.—J. Jortin, D.D.
Disheartening influences.—The ridicule of companions, the polite surprise or cold sneer of former friends at their earnestness, the tyranny of fashion, the seductions of pleasure, the force of habit and inclination, unexpected sorrows and difficulties, which would drive an earnest spirit nearer to God, dishearten those whose religion is founded on emotion rather than on principle.
Mar_4:20. Ground which disappointeth not the sower, and bringeth forth fruit in its season, is naturally good, and is improved by culture. The heart of every well-disposed person is such. God has given to all of us abilities, and power to exert them; He has also given to us Christians superadded His revealed will in the gospel; and what aid is necessary He is ever ready to bestow: but a man must put forth his own strength, and seek out and work out his own salvation. The persons, therefore, here described act like rational creatures; they have a love of knowledge and goodness, and a desire to make improvements in both. Thence they are disposed to inquire into themselves and their duty; and opportunities for this are never wanting: morality and revealed religion lie within their reach, and they may read or hear what God requires from them. “They hear the Word, and receive it”; they lay it to heart, and call it to mind; they meditate upon the benefits arising from it, the danger of neglecting it, the reasonable and lovable nature of it, the dangers, inconveniences, and temptations which may arise and assault them, the proper methods of shunning or resisting them, and the wisdom of preferring eternal life to all other considerations.—J. Jortin, D.D.
Varying yields.—Every one has observed the difference between those who may be called good Christians, in the matter of their good works—how some seem to produce twice or thrice the fruit that others do. Some are, compared with others, three times more careful in all the trifling matters which make up so much of life; three times more self-denying, three times more liberal, three times more humble, subdued, and thankful. Does not the Lord recognise this difference in the parable of the pounds, when the nobleman, in leaving, gives a pound to each of his servants; and one servant makes it ten pounds, and another five; and he commends both, but gives to the more industrious worker twice the reward?—M. F. Sadler.
ILLUSTRATIONS TO CHAPTER 4
Mar_4:2. Christ’s parables differ from all others in this, that in their application they seem inexhaustible. Just as one may, from Geneva, watch the sun setting on Mont Blanc, and while the sunny peak in its gigantic outlines remains ever the same, yet the rays of the sun, as they fall upon it at different angles, so change its marvellous tints that at one moment it sparkles like burnished gold, at another it is bathed in roseate hues, and then again, as the sun sinks beneath the western hills, it stands out in cold, grey tones, in grand relief against the glories of the azure sky,—so with our Lord’s parables, while the outline of the familiar story remains always the same, yet every time we come to its contemplation in the light of the Holy Spirit, not only do we see new beauties, but new lessons, I had almost said new truths!—A. G. Mortimer, D.D.
The parables of Jesus are simple in structure and for the most part easily understood. And yet they are deep as His Divine Spirit. Their inimitable perfections appear as often as any one tries to parallel them. Meeting with Dr. Robert Breckinridge, “Tom” Marshall, the Kentucky orator, asked, “Why do you not imitate your Model, and preach in parables?” “Because I cannot make them.” “Why,” said the politician, “they are perfectly simple; I could write parables.” “Then,” answered Dr. Breckinridge, “bring one of your own at our next meeting.” When next they met, and Mr. Marshall was reminded of the parable, he said, “I am beaten. No man can make a parable any more than he can make a speech like Jesus.”
The spirit in which to study nature.—By studying nature in the spirit of meek devotion and solemn love, a good man may indeed “walk up and down the world as in a garden of spices, and draw a Divine sweetness out of every flower.”—J. Keble.
What we can see in nature.—There is in nature just as much, or as little, as the soul of each beholder can see in her.—J. G. Shairp, LL. D.
Nature leads to God.—Nature represents the Soul from which all souls come, and by its beautifulness helps us to delight ourselves in God. He leads us to no dead museum or stony cathedral, but under the dome of the sky. He says, “The whole is alive, full of God’s life.”—John Pulsford.
Nature a mirror.—To a man under the influence of emotion, nature is ever a great mirror full of emotions. To the satiated and quiescent alone, she is a cold, dead window for the outward world.—J. P. Richter.
Nature a print of God.—The heavens are a print from the pen of God’s perfection; the world is a bud from the flower of His beauty; the sun is a spark from the light of His wisdom, and the ocean is a bubble on the sea of His power.—From the Persian.
A story helps the truth.—“The story,” as Dr. Guthrie says, “like a float, keeps the truth from sinking; like a nail, fastens it in the mind; like the feathers of an arrow, makes it strike; and, like the barb, makes it stick.”
Parable a mode of conveying truth.—A parable is Christ’s mode of conveying His mind into ours—the waggon in which He puts deep thoughts, not apparent or necessary at the time, but useful for the Christian Church when out of its infancy.
Mar_4:9. Ears to hear.—All men for the most part have both their ears, but not to hear. The man sick of the gout hath both his feet, but not to walk. He that is purblind hath both his eyes, but not to see clearly. He that is manacled by the magistrate for some fault hath both his hands; but so long as they are bound they cannot do their office. So most men have ears; but few men have ears to hear—namely, to hear that which is good, and to hear that which is good well.—Dean Boys.
Best to have no left ear.—In listening to God it is as well that we have no left ear. True, we are commanded to use both ears—“He that hath ears to hear, let him hear”; but this takes it for granted that both ears are right ones. Now, morally speaking, there is a right ear and there is a left ear; and he has both who, in listening to the gospel, takes it in by the one ear and lets it out again by the other. It is right to admit the sound, but it is left, or wrong, to allow it to escape so soon. In this sense it is best to have no left ear. The most profitable way is to put the right ear to the gospel trumpet, and, as the joyful sound enters, to let it drop at once down into the heart, from whence it will not arise to depart. This right ear is just faith in the Word; and he who believes what God says, not only hears rightly, but never loses what is heard. In such an one the Word of the Lord abideth for ever.
The gospel to be heard.—In the reign of James II. that king commanded an Act of Parliament, called the “Liberty of Conscience Act,” to be read in all the churches. The clergy were very unwilling to read it, and some of their congregations did not wish to hear it. One Sunday a clergyman, when the time came for reading the document, said to his congregation: “Though I am compelled to read this, you are not compelled to hear it,” upon which the people rose up and left the church, and the clergyman read the Act of Parliament to the pews, hassocks, and walls. But we may not thus treat the gospel. This is God’s message to our souls; and while true ministers are indeed compelled by the Spirit of God to speak the Word to us, we too should feel that we are compelled to listen to it with reverence and attention because it is a message from God.
Worthless hearing.—One day a very clever countryman, named Jedediah Buxton, who could multiply nine figures by nine figures without a slate or paper, went to see Garrick, a famous actor, perform upon the stage of a theatre. When he went home from London to his native village, and was asked what he thought of the acting of Garrick, he replied, “Oh, I don’t know; I only saw a little man strut about the stage and repeat seven thousand nine hundred and fifty-six words.” Instead of listening to what was said, he had been counting the speaker’s words. More foolish is it for us to come to hear the Word of God and then amuse ourselves by noticing something that is beside the mark.
Hearing.—Give but interest in the theme, and the listener’s ear fulfils its natural function, that of hearing. “Mine ears hast Thou opened.” Intensify the interest, and the listener is all ears, all ear. Webster’s ill-starred Duchess of Malfi assures her brother, “I will plant my soul in my ears to hear you.” “Alarmed nature starts up in my heart, and opens a thousand ears to listen,” cries Colonel Talbot in an old play. Perplexed in the extreme, and cut to the heart, by a revelation of household treachery and wrong, an incredulous husband is described in a modern romance, with his hands clasped together, and with his head bent to catch every syllable of the harrowing news—listening “as if his whole being were resolved into that one sense of hearing.” It is with hearing as with seeing. The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. Mendelssohn, in one of his letters from abroad, rapturous with gazing on his favourite Titian, declares that “one might well wish for a dozen more eyes to look one’s fill at such a picture.” “Had I three ears I’d hear thee,” exclaims Macbeth, when summoned to attend by the apparition of an Armed Head, in the witches’ cave. D’Artagnan, in the ante-chamber of M. de Treville, is described as looking with all his eyes and listening with all his ears, stretching his five senses so as to lose nothing. The same author tells how Mazarin listened, dying as he was, to Anne of Austria, as ten living men could not have listened. “Will you listen?” asks a prince in the same story; and is answered, “Can you ask me? You speak of a matter of life or death to me, and then ask if I will listen!”
Mar_4:11-12. The door kept open.—In Mrs. Whitney’s story Odd or Even? she gives the following ingenious interpretation of a declaration which has puzzled many people (Mat_13:13-16). It is given in a conversation between Mr. Kingsworth, her ideal minister, and Philip Merriweather, a young man of sceptical tendencies. “Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand.… Lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them,” quoted Mr. Kingsworth again. “That is the heart of the Healer, waiting for them that shall fall down from their mountain.” But Flip was still only climbing his mountain. He was pleased at every clutch and foothold he got, that seemed to lift him higher. “And yet the fog is put there on purpose! it says so.” The boy did not dare to say “He,”—“ ‘lest’ they should see, and understand—and the rest of it! That’s just the way. Why couldn’t it be plain, if it meant to be?” “Suppose you fasten the door, at night, ‘lest’ any unauthorised person should come in?” “Well, I do exactly that,” said Flip, wondering what it justified in respect of a door that he was contending should be freely open. “And suppose you leave it unlocked, ‘lest’ your brother should come home at midnight?” Whether he was puzzled, or whether he began to see, Flip made no answer. “Don’t you see there are two ‘lests’—a providing against, and a providing for?” asked the minister. “Take those words with the second ‘lest.’ ‘I speak these things to them in parables; I put them away, in their memory, as in My creation; so that they may see, even without perceiving, and hear, even if they cannot understand: in case that at any time they should see with their spiritual eyes, and hear with their spiritual ears, and understand with the very heart of them, and be converted, and I should heal them.’ Isn’t the waiting there, in those words?” “You have altered a good many of them.” “I have chosen between those two ‘lests,’ ” said Mr. Kingsworth. “That interpreted all the sentence, which I tried to translate, not change. Because, otherwise, how do they agree with those different words: ‘I am come unto you, that you might have life’; and, ‘I came to call the sinners’?”
No spiritual impression.—In a room glazed with yellow glass the photographer would get heat and light from the sunshine, but he could not produce a photograph, because yellow glass, while it lets in the light and heat of the sun, keeps out the chemical or actinic ray necessary to produce a portrait. And so it is true of many that, while they live in the free light and warmth of the gospel day, while the true Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world shines upon and all around them, they are not savingly changed, they are not transformed by the light into the image of God. And the reason of this is that they have a yellow spot in their spiritual eye, and live, as it were, in a house of yellow glass. They get the light and the heat of the gospel, but not its renewing power. Their eye is not single, and therefore their whole body is not full of light. The medium in which they live and move and have their being is unfavourable to spiritual impressions, and therefore they are not spiritually impressed.
Mar_4:12. Does God harden hearts?—Suppose two merchant vessels out on the same sea, sailing before the same wind, which comes prosperously on their quarter. Suddenly upon one of them a mutiny is organised; the captain is murdered, and the crew put in irons; then the captors turn on their course exactly, face in the opposite direction, and start for some desolate pirates’ isle, where they may beach their stolen cargo in safety. The same wind which drives the honest ship along now drives the wicked one too, and so it helps in the crime. But all it really does to help it is—to keep blowing on. God never does anything to harden a heart which would not soften it if properly received.
Mar_4:14. Sowing the Word.—Doubt not, but earnestly believe, that if “long sleeps the summer in the seed,” the summer is in the seed, if the seed sown by you is indeed the Word of God; and even now it may be shining and ripening in many a changed heart passed far out of your reach and ken. The sailor keeping watch on the midnight sea, praying as he watches; the miner toiling for gold in some Queensland gully, and thinking of the better treasure in the heavenly country towards which, by words of yours, his feet are moving; the shepherd among the wooded valleys of New Zealand, saying over to himself the Shepherd’s Psalm taught him by you; the settler’s wife in some rude cabin on the Pacific slope, training her children as you trained her, may, without your knowing it, have found the Pearl of great price, which, but for you, they would never have found; through you, also, may be helping others to find it.—Bishop Thorold.
Vitality of the Word.—The Word has all the hidden vitality of a seed. Take up a grain of wheat and examine it; ask yourself where its life lies. Certainly not on the surface; nor yet in its inner compartments, so far as our senses can detect. Chemistry will inform you as to every material element it contains, and leave you as far as ever from knowing or seeing the very thing that makes it a seed—that mysterious something we call its life. Within that little mass of matter there lies a force which sun, rain, and soil shall call forth with voices it will hear and obey. God hath given it a body, and to every seed a body of its own. The hidden life and unwearied force of the wheat-grain furnish analogies to the Word of God. Heaven and earth shall pass away, but the Word of the Lord endureth for ever. It is an eternal seed, to which God has given eternal form; but its vitality is not lodged where we can see and analyse it.
Mar_4:15-19. Three kinds of unprofitable hearers.—There are three different kinds of hearers of the Word,—those like a sponge, that suck up good and bad together, and let both run out immediately; those like a sandglass, that let what enters in at one ear pass out at the other, hearing without thinking; those like a strainer, letting go the good and retaining the bad.
Thought dissipated.—Have you ever seen grain scattered on the road? The sparrow from the housetop and the chickens from the barn rush in, and within a minute after it has been scattered not the shadow of a grain is left. This is the picture, not of thought crushed by degrees, but of thought dissipated, and no man can tell how or when it went. Swiftly do these winged thoughts come when we pray, or read, or listen; in our inattentive, sauntering, wayside hours; and, before we can be upon guard, the very trace of holier purposes has disappeared. In our purest moods, when we kneel to pray, or gather round the altar, down into the very Holy of Holies sweep these foul birds of the air, villain fancies, demon thoughts. The germ of life, the small seed of impression, is gone—where, you know not. But it is gone. Inattentiveness of spirit, produced by want of spiritual interest, is the first cause of disappointment.—F. W. Robertson.
The trodden heart.—There was an old legend of a goblin horseman that galloped over men’s fields at night; and wherever his foot struck, the soil was so blasted that nothing would ever grow on it again. So is it with the heart over which the beastly feet of lust, sensuality, greed, selfishness, passion, are allowed to tread. The heart is never the same again.
Hardened by evangelical teaching.—Speaking of a certain place in which he conducted a mission, the Rev. W. Haslam says: “It was certainly a very difficult place, for the congregation had been hardened with overmuch evangelical teaching of a general kind. Seed had been abundantly sown without any due preparation of the ground. It was amazing to witness the hardness of the people, and their unwillingness to yield.”
No refuge from the storm.—Some years ago two undergraduates went up one of the highest mountains in Switzerland. They would not have a guide. They said they had been there before, and they feared nothing. Their friends watched them with their telescopes, and saw them reach the top, and then came a storm of snow which lasted a week. Nobody could reach them, and they never came down alive. When found, they were close to a track by which, if they had had a guide, they could have come down in safety when the snow first fell. So it is that many a proud philosopher of our time, resting on reason and his own conceit, climbs the highest steeps of learning; then comes the storm, the icy hand of Death is on his shoulder, and he knows not where to turn, because he has forsaken the Guide of his youth, the Light and Life of men!
Unpromising, but not hopeless.—Many years ago my friend Colonel Boyd, of Wytheville, Virginia, gave to a Frenchman, by the name of Hartmann, a rocky hillside. Everywhere the hard, blue limestone protruded. A more unpromising garden could not be imagined. In the spring the warmth and moisture made the hillside green for a little while, but the first drought scorched it dry and brown. But Hartmann worked away, patiently, perseveringly, systematically. He dug out the rocks, he deepened the soil, he irrigated from the neighbouring brook. Years passed, and the “Frenchman’s Garden,” as everybody called it, was the most beautiful, the most picturesque, the most fruitful, the most profitable garden in all that part of Virginia. So, after all, that peculiar kind of human hearts which the Lord described as “stony places” are not absolutely hopeless. These shallow hearts may be deepened. This sentimental religion may be enriched. The Word of God may be cultivated until it grows to be a fruitful plant in even these unpromising lives. From being a mere enthusiasm, or a dead orthodoxy, religion may become a life, a deep-rooted life, a life hid with Christ in God.—R. S. Barrett.
Fugitive impressions.—When Daguerre was working at his sun-pictures his great difficulty was to fix them. The light came and imprinted the image; but when the tablet was drawn from the camera, the image had vanished. Our lamentation is like this; our want the same—a fixing solution which shall arrest and detain the fugitive impressions. He discovered the chemical power which turned the evanescent into the durable. There is a Divine agency at hand that can fix the truth upon the heart of man—God’s Holy Spirit.
Mar_4:17. Want of root.—Men have no root in themselves. That is the best account that I can give of the vast failure of our systems of general education. I am not thinking of elementary schools merely, but of all schools. They are able to produce a certain measure of success. In the fairly good schools boys and girls learn something, and sometimes a good deal. Eighty, ninety, and ninety-five per cent, of the scholars in our common schools, under energetic and able teachers, read fairly, write fairly, become fairly successful in arithmetic. In schools of a higher class they will learn something of Greek and Latin grammar, and they can make a fair show in arithmetic. But though the teaching may not be mechanical, there is something mechanical in the result, and in a few years after they have left school it is quite clear that the mind of an immense proportion of those who have been taught is dead; it does not grow. We discover that large numbers of those who have passed through the schools have never grasped for themselves, as the roots of a tree grasp the soil, any subject that sustains intellectual activity. The mischief is not merely that they have forgotten much that they learned; that cannot be helped. I am not sure that we ought to cherish any wish that it should be helped. I remember meeting an eminent man not long ago who was a high Wrangler at Cambridge, and he said he was thankful that he had forgotten most of the mathematics he knew when he took his degree. I do not complain that what was learned has been forgotten, but that there is nothing, no science, no history, no province of speculation or of art in which large numbers of those who have received an early education have a real, personal, enduring interest. One of the first objects of every wise teacher should be to get the mind of his pupils to strike root into something, it does not much matter what, but something that will stimulate and maintain intellectual activity. When once that miracle is wrought, and the mind has a root of its own, the great work of the educationist is done. Take another illustration. How many men succeed in maintaining a fairly excellent character, because they are sheltered from moral peril by the circumstances that environ them, and supported in well-doing by the general opinion of those with whom they are most intimately associated! Let the circumstances change, place them among men with a lower sense of honour, with less ideas of honesty and of truthfulness, place them in circumstances in which it will look safe to violate some of the laws which they now honour, and what will become of them then? If the moral opinion of society is to be sound, there must be men who give an ethical law to others, and do not merely receive it from others—men with an ethical idea of their own, to which they are loyal at all costs, men who have discovered eternal laws which they must obey whatever comes of their obedience. Such men have a root in themselves; they are not to be bribed into wrong-doing by the promise of wealth or of honour; they are not to be terrified into virtue by the penalties of law or by the fear of loss of property or of social position. They are faithful because the law that has been revealed to them is too august to be broken.—R. W. Dale, D. D.
Mar_4:18-19. The Word choked.—What an illustration of this the speech which a dying, despairing man addressed to one under whose ministry he had sat for twenty years! “I have never,” he cried, “heard a single sermon!” The minister, to whom his face was quite familiar, who had known him for years as a regular attendant at church, looked astonished, fancied he was raving under the delirium of his approaching end. No, not at all! The man was in his sad and sober senses. “I attended church,” he exclaimed, “but my habit was, so soon as you began the sermon, to begin a review of last week’s trade, and to anticipate and arrange the business of the next.” Now, in like manner, to a greater or less extent, Satan deals with thousands who occupy pews in the church.
Good impressions destroyed.—Robert Burns—who had times of serious reflexion, in one of which, as recorded by his own pen, he beautifully compares himself, in the review of his past life, to a lonely man walking amid the ruins of a noble temple, where pillars stand dismantled of their capitals, and elaborate works of purest marble lie on the ground, overgrown by tall, foul, rank weeds—was once brought, as I have heard, under deep convictions. He was in great alarm. The seed of the Word had begun to grow. He sought counsel from one called a minister of the gospel. Alas that in that crisis of his history he should have trusted the helm to the hands of such a pilot! This so-called minister laughed at the poet’s fears—bade him dance them away at balls, drown them in bowls of wine, fly from these phantoms to the arms of pleasure. Fatal, too pleasant advice! He followed it: and “the lusts of other things” entering in, choked the Word.
Strangled.—In the gardens of Hampton Court you will see many trees entirely vanquished and well-nigh strangled by huge coils of ivy, which are wound about them like the snakes around the unhappy Laocoon; there is no untwisting the folds, they are too giant-like, and fast fixed, and every hour the rootlets of the climber are sucking the life out of the unhappy tree. Yet there was a day when the ivy was a tiny aspirant, only asking a little aid in climbing; had it been denied then the tree had never become its victim; but by degrees the humble weakling grew in strength and arrogance, and at last it assumed the mastery, and the tall tree became the prey of the creeping, insinuating destroyer. The moral is too obvious. Sorrowfully do we remember many noble characters which have been ruined little by little by insinuating habits. Covetousness, drink, the love of pleasure, and pride, have often been the ivy that has wrought the ruin.
Blinded by self-interest.—Many a man of influence and position is blinded by the interests that absorb his thought. From the summit of East Rock in New Haven there is a magnificent view. The city has wisely taken the place as a public park, and now its paths are daily thronged with pilgrims to that shrine of beauty. But on that rock has been found a counterfeiter’s cave. The time was when those were on the hill who cared nothing for the wondrous view, but whose only desire was to hide themselves in the cave to pursue a nefarious business. So long as they were there the glories of the out-stretching valley and the distant sea were unseen by them. It is just such a difficulty that hinders men from seeing the loveliness of Christ. They are busy in caves of worldliness. They see nothing because they keep themselves where they cannot see.
Mar_4:20. Receptiveness.—“Receive” is the one word that describes the healthful conduct of human life. We receive being at birth; we do nothing but receive for the months that follow—receive mother-milk, clothing, warmth, care. The lad receives protection, advice, and wisdom, if indeed he does receive; for, rejecting these, he rejects his destiny, to find out his own way, which is death. We receive pickaxe and pen, and our place in the world. Old men smile, as they hear proud youth talk of “hewing a way” or “winning a way” through life to fortune, as if there could be any path discovered or cut out that was not hard-beaten like a Broadway by the thousands who have trodden it before us. In all honourable vocations the road is Patience, Industry, Frugality, Knowledge. And, if one go higher, Repentance, the New Heart through Christ, and the common gate to heaven. The youth makes his experiment. At times he seems to be hewing, winning, and inventing; but afterwards reviewing, he perceives he was but lifting up a hewing hand to cut away the obstacles to his receiving. As when one bursts a prison wall, or emerges toilfully from a wood, he has but to receive the down-pouring sun. Old age testifies, “All my battles have in fact been against Self, that I might not reject, against Others that I might not be defrauded of, the good which God meant me to receive.”—E. J. Haynes.
The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary (gen. ed. Joseph S. Exell; Funk & Wagnalls, c. 1892) — public domain (pre-1929). A full-Bible homiletical/sermon-outline anthology covering 65 of 66 books (2 John is absent from the source module). Text from a community e-Sword module.
William B. Godbey 1900 · Public Domain Mat 13:1-23; Mar 4:1-25; & Luk 8:4-18. Mark: “And…
CHAPTER 26
THE SOWER
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Mat 13:1-23; Mar 4:1-25; & Luk 8:4-18. Mark: “And again He began to teach by the sea; and a great multitude were gathered unto Him, so that, entering into a ship, He sat in the sea. The whole multitude was at the sea on the land. And He was teaching them many things in parables. And He said unto them in His teaching, Hear ye! Behold, a sower went out to sow, and it came to pass while he was sowing, some fell by the wayside, and the fowls of the air came and devoured it; and others fell among the rocks, where it had not much earth, and immediately it sprang up, because it had no depth of earth; the sun having risen, it was scorched, and because it had no root, it withered away. And other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns sprang up and choked it out, and it brought forth no fruit; and others fell in good ground, and springing up brought forth fruit, and produced, some thirty, some sixty, and some a hundred fold. And He said unto them, Let the one having ears to hear, hear.”
Mat 8:10 : “And His disciples coming said to Him, Wherefore do You speak to them in parables? And He responding, said to them, Because it has been given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For whosoever has, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundantly; but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he hath.” How clearly do we see this law of spiritual thrift universally demonstrated in the kingdom of God! The great preachers are not those favored with brilliant precocity in the outset. Adam Clarke, who became the greatest linguist and theologian of his day, is said to have been proverbial for his juvenile stupidity. The brightest saints did not all receive a Pauline conversion nor a Pentecostal sanctification; but utilizing the germ of grace and spark of fire, they have moved on from the tinkling rill to the swelling river, from the potato-hill to the towering mountain. If you do not cultivate the grace given and utilize it for God, it will be taken from you, and given to others who will magnify the Donor. “Therefore I speak to them in parables, because seeing, they see not; hearing, they hear not; neither do they understand;” i.e., they see with their physical eyes and hear with their mortal ears, while their spiritual senses are locked tight in the death of sin. “The prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled unto them, saying, By hearing, ye shall hear, and may not understand; seeing, ye shall see, and may not perceive.” You observe here the contingent tense of these verbs revelatory of grace, which is freely administered by the Holy Spirit to all who will receive it, as He is ever present to open the blind eyes and unstop the deaf ears, soften the stony heart, and quicken the dead spirit into life, thus giving blessed spiritual availability to all who will reciprocate His merciful intervention.
“For the heart of this people has waxed gross, and they hear heavily with their ears, and they have closed their eyes, lest they may see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their heart, and turn, and I shall heal them.” (Isa 6:9.)
Where E.V. here says “be converted,” the reading is simply “may turn unto Me,” denoting their own spontaneous action, receptive of Divine mercy and spiritual overtures. “Happy are your eyes, because they see; and your ears, because they hear. For I say unto you, That many prophets and righteous men desired to see those things which you see, and saw them not; and to hear those things which you hear, and heard them not.” All the prophets, from the days of Abel through the lapse of four thousand years, had hoped and longed to see Jesus come on the earth, but died without the sight. So the saints of the Christian ages have lived and died, longing to see Jesus return in His glory. Shall our faith waver because He tarrieth? God forbid! Mar 4:14 : “The sower soweth the word. Those who are by the wayside, when the word is sown, and when they may hear it, immediately Satan comes, and takes away the word which was sown in their hearts.
And likewise those who were sown upon the rocks are they who, when they may hear the word, immediately with joy receive it. And they have no root in themselves, but are temporary; then tribulation or persecution arising on account of the word, immediately they are offended. And the others, who were sown among the thorns, are they who, hearing the word, and the cares of this age and the deceitfulness of riches and desires concerning remaining things come in, choke out the word, and it becomes unfruitful. And those which were sown in good ground are they who hear the word, and receive it, and bring forth, some thirty, some sixty, and some a hundred fold.” Here, in this notable, beautiful, and exceedingly lucid Parable of the Sower, we have four different sowings — the wayside, the stony ground, the thorny ground, and the good ground. You observe the final failure on the part of all the sowings except the good ground. The wayside sowing was all caught away by the fowls of the air, which emblematize demons. Consequently there were no results whatever in their case. O, what a large proportion of popular audiences belongs to this class! The precious truth on which they are dependent for salvation is snatched up by their guardian demons and carried away, the Word going in at one ear and out at the other, leaving them utterly empty and blank; so they get nothing, thus living and dying under the blaze of gospel day, but in practical heathenism, only hastening to a more dreadful damnation than if they had lived and died in Central Africa. The second sowing is among the rocks, where soil is scarce, and the underlying strata near the surface. It is a well-known fact in agriculture that this sort of land warms early under the vernal sun, germinating quickly, giving farmers the first grass in spring and the first vegetables; yet it is the first to wilt under the scorching summer sun, and to feel the heavy tread of an autumnal drought. What is needed to make this land all right? Blow up the rocks, break them to pieces, using the workable for edifices, fences, and roads, burning the fragments into lime to enrich the ground, thus transforming these almost worthless stony hills into fertile fields and blooming gardens. The stony ground here is the superficial convert, who, as Jesus says, “immediately receives the Word with joy;” i.e., is converted easily and quickly, characteristic of the great, sweeping revivals, in which hundreds and thousands are counted, and after a year we scarcely find a corporal’s guard. The trouble is, they are not “rooted and grounded in love.” (Eph 3:18.) Hence, when tribulation or persecution rises, they are offended; i.e., they fall away. If the work could move on steadfastly, not giving them time to backslide, till the dynamite of the Holy Ghost blows out and breaks up all the stony strata in the deep interior of the heart, thus sanctifying them wholly and transforming them into “good ground,” they would stand all right. The third sowing is in the thorny ground, which is much better and more hopeful than the stony ground. Thorns indicate rich soil, yet they are awfully obnoxious to the crop, and exceedingly difficult to get rid of, surviving every other indigenous bramble, and even making their appearance after the land has been cultivated a hundred years. We need the long, sharp mattock of entire sanctification to dig them out by the roots, then burn them into ashes, and sow it on the fields to enrich the soil, thus developing it into good ground. Jesus tells us that these thorns are the cares of the world, and the deceitfulness of riches, and desires appertaining to other things; i.e., things other than the kingdom of God. The thorny ground here gets a much better and deeper work of grace than the stony ground, and is apt to get the victory over the seductive temptations to carnal pleasure and worldly amusement incident to the youth, and go on into the sterner responsibilities of middle life, to find accumulating riches, multiplication of worldly business, social and official aggrandizement, preponderant over the citadel of grace in his heart, ultimately getting the door open wide enough for Satan, with a cohort of carnal and worldly imps, to come in, quench the fire of spiritual devotion, and freeze him into a beautiful iceberg, reflecting the splendor of the polar sun, which shines six months without setting, concentrating the admiration of the whole Church, so they elect him a member of the General Conference, promoting him to honors and emoluments, making him a ruling elder; and, finally, preaching him a glorious funeral sermon, while he is with Dives in hell. The digging necessary to take out all the thorn roots is quite a painful ordeal, while the consuming fire of the Holy Ghost, in His sanctifying Pentecost, by the mere mention, brings stampede into a popular Church, filled up with these thorny-ground backsliders. The fourth sowing is on the good ground. Of course you already know what this good ground is. It is the heart which the Holy Ghost has made good, as none are good by nature. In the Divine estimation, pursuant to the great plan of salvation, the ground is not good till all the rocks and thorns are sanctified out. You see ample provisions are made in the economy of gospel grace to make all the ground good; i.e., sanctify every heart. How can you make the hard, dry, wayside land good? Throw the fence of God’s gracious providence around it, and keep stock from treading on it. The vernal showers will soften it, the freezes loosen it up, till it becomes alluvial. Cast fertilization on it, take out all of the rocks, and grub up all of the thorns; let the plow go down deep, and the harrow do thorough work, and before you are aware, you have good ground. You see in the progress of this parable that, out of the four sowings, only one proves a success. The wayside does not so much as receive the seed till it is devoured by the demons. The stony ground germinates quickly, but utterly withers speedily, terminating in total failure; while the thorny ground not only germinates, but grows up and produces fruit; but Luke says it does not bring it to perfection; i.e., it either rots on the stalk, or after it is gathered, as unripe fruit will not keep. Hence you see that the only hope for the first three sowings is to turn all of the land into good ground — i.e., get all hearts sanctified wholly — then every sowing will be a success. You here see the wonderful growth in grace peculiar to sanctified people; as in case of the good ground some produce thirty-fold — i.e., at the end of life had thirty times as much religion as when they were converted; others, sixty; and others, a hundred — i.e., winding up with a hundred times the quantum of regenerating grace. O what an incentive to everybody to come into the good ground — i.e., to get sanctified wholly!
“And He said to them, Whether does the light come, that it may be placed under a bushel or under a bed? is it not that it may be placed on a candlestick? for there is nothing hidden which may not be revealed; nor was there anything secret, but that it may come into the light. If any one has ears to hear, let him hear. And He said to them, See what you hear. With what measure you measure, it shall be measured unto you, and shall be added to those who hear. For whosoever may have, shall be given unto him; whosoever has not, it shall be taken from him whatsoever he hath.”
Thus our Lord winds up this beautiful, lucid, and instructive Parable of the Sower with a few pertinent practical remarks. If you would not put your light under a bushel, you must become good ground, and appreciate the wonderful possibilities of accumulation here specified, one gaining thirty, another sixty, and another a hundred fold. His trite maxim about hearing, He also subjoins. To the unspiritual it sounds insignificant, as the multitude were then hearing His voice; yet it is only the spiritually quickened ear that can hear the voice of God that wakes the dead, physical ears only hearing the voice of the man who can not save. We receive the Man Christ, while the God Christ saves us. He also here very pertinently repeats His wonderful law of spiritual thrift. That if we faithfully utilize the gifts and graces He gives us, He will increase them indefinitely; while if we are lazy and unappreciative, He will take them away altogether, giving us a place with the “unprofitable servant.”
William B. Godbey, Commentary on the New Testament (1896–1900) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Sermon Bible 1900 · Public Domain Mar 4:3-4
Mar 4:3-4
Waste.
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The sower went out to sow, and, as he sowed, there was a great waste. Much precious seed fell, to his right hand and to his left, on ground unprepared to receive it. Ground hard as the nether millstone was one part of the surface on which the germ of food and life fell. It lay there for a few moments, more or less, but it sank not in, it found no receptive, no digestive, no assimilating power in the earth on which it lighted; it was caught away and devoured, and the act of sowing was all that it ever knew of a harvest.
I. The text teaches us to regard waste of all kinds as a great fault and sin. Wasted food, wasted money, wasted health, wasted time, wasted opportunities of doing and receiving good, these, in their several ways, are all sins against God and our own souls.
II. Observe that, sinful as waste of any kind is in us, there is in nature, in providence, in the spiritual world, a constant waste going on, suggesting much of anxious and painful wonder. In nature, might we not almost say that for one thing used, ten are wasted? for every seed brought to maturity in plant or tree, ten perish and are defeated? for every human body preserved through the accidents and risks of life to complete its term of earthly existence, ten fall prematurely into disease and decay, and are abruptly cut off from that amount of enjoyment and of usefulness which might seem, theoretically at least, to be the birthright and inheritance of all into whose nostrils has once been breathed the creative breath of life? Would we could stop here! would that we could ascribe only to that part of God’s operations which we call nature, or at the utmost to that part of God’s operations which we call providence, the manifestation of that principle of which we are speaking. But in the spiritual world also—it is the saddest sight of all—we seem to see it in its fullest development. How much of truth—precious life-giving truth—have we trifled away in our short lifetimes! Let us awake to a better appreciation of the gift of the Word of life, that we may at last hear unto profiting, and believe to the saving of our souls.
C. J. Vaughan, Memorials of Harrow Sundays, p. 304.
References: Mar 4:3.—J. Keble, Sermons from Septuagesima to Ash-Wednesday, p. 151. Mar 4:3-9.—Homiletic Quarterly, vol. ii., p. 50.
Mar 4:7, Mar 4:18-19
Prosperity a Trial.
I. The growing occupation of time, although apt to be overlooked, is one of the most serious clangers of prosperity; for usually money is not made, social circumstances are not made, influence of any kind is not gotten among our fellow men, without great efforts. He who seeks these things, as a rule, you may depend upon it, rises early, sits up late, and eats the bread of carefulness. One of the chief dangers of a state of general prosperity, especially when that prosperity is in a growing state, is the constant tendency to the entire occupation of time with merely secular duties, which may be done in a religious spirit, but which will be done in a religious spirit with more and still more difficulty if there are not select and express times for the purpose of refreshing.
II. Is it not very evident that if the time, which rightfully should be devoted to the care and cultivation of religion expressly, be unwarrantably abridged, and other subjects and interests, social or what not, engross the attention and fill the heart, is it not very evident that when the time comes, the inclination and spiritual taste for religious improvement may be very much abated? Spiritual things prove dim and hazy; the busy labours of the day are succeeded by the slumbers of the night; and bargains, and speculations, and gains and losses, will form the subject even of the man’s dreams and visions in the night. "The cares of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches, and the lust of other things, entering in, choke the word, and it becometh unfruitful,"
III. The third danger to be apprehended from a growing prosperity is the increase of pride.
IV. Closely associated with this danger comes another; that of self-indulgence, an easy, soft, luxurious temper.
V. Worldly success has a tendency to lead to what we usually understand and I think fairly describe, without uncharitableness, as a worldly life, that is, a life occupied with transitory things, a life from which spiritual religion is, to a considerable extent, excluded altogether, a life without religious hope, a life without God in the world.
A. Raleigh, Penny Pulpit (New series), No. 96.
References: Mar 4:7, Mar 4:18, Mar 4:19.—Preacher’s Monthly, vol. vi., p. 65. Mar 4:11.—Ibid., vol. iii., p. 111. Mar 4:13-25.—H. M. Luckock, Footprints of the Son of Man, p. 80. Mar 4:14-20.—H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxv., p. 234. Mar 4:16, Mar 4:17.—Plain Sermons by Contributors to "Tracts for the Times," vol. ii., p. 49. Mar 4:20-29.—W. Hubbard, Christian World Pulpit, p. 45. Mar 4:21.—Homiletic Quarterly, vol. i., p. 353. Mar 4:21, Mar 4:22.—S. Cox, Expositor, 2nd series, vol. i., p. 130. Mar 4:21-24.—Ibid., 3rd series, vol. iv., p. 149. Mar 4:21-25.—Ibid., 2nd series, vol. i., p. 372.
Mar 4:22-23
The Manifestation of Hidden Things.
I. We all know that such is necessarily the imperfectness of human legislation, that a great deal of crime passes undiscovered, and that what is discovered often goes unpunished; and whilst an active system of government represses or prevents much wickedness, its unavoidable incapacity of finding out all crime and fastening it upon the perpetrator, encourages many to commit it with the hope of impunity. There is hardly anything so widely powerful in the encouragement to sin as the expectation of concealment. It is virtually this which produces the chief mass of wrong-doing.
II. There is not one of us who would not be thoroughly shocked at having what passes through his mind in a single day laid bare for public inspection. And yet there is nothing hid that shall not be revealed—revealed either as ground of accusation against those brought to Christ’s bar, or as material of vindication of the sentences which have been passed. In either case, what hope have you of escape. Look on the right hand, look on the left; what is to hide you from wrath, when the disclosed impurity of a thought is all that is needed to provoke its visitation. No living man can endure such a scrutiny, unless he have applied to his conscience that blood which "cleanseth from all sin"; and surely therefore there is no one who can be easy in the prospect of such a scrutiny, until he has prepared for it by making Christ his Advocate with the Father.
III. All of you can understand and appreciate the motive to right doing, which we thus fetch from the sublime scenes of the last great assize. If the certainty of being found out would keep you from crime, if the shame of being detected in anything vile and dishonourable help to make you shun what would forfeit good opinion, then believe and remember, that when the Lord cometh, He will both bring to light the hidden things of darkness and make manifest the counsels of the hearts.
H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit, No. 1,096.
References: Mar 4:24.—Spurgeon, My Sermon Notes: Gospels and Acts, p. 59; Preacher’s Monthly, vol. iii., p. 113. Mar 4:24, Mar 4:25.—Homiletic Quarterly, vol. iii., p. 119. Mar 4:26.—F. W. Robertson, The Human Race, p. 71.
Mar 4:26-27
Mysterious growth.
We little think how much is always going on in what we may call the underground of life; and how much more we have to do with those secret processes which underlie everything, than might at first sight appear.
I. For we are all, whether we realize it or not, always casting seeds, and those seeds, dead though they look, are always alive. Every word we say, every act we do, goes down into somebody’s mind, and lives there; and there it has its influence. To what an awful consideration this might turn.
II. You look at a man today, and you see nothing in him. You may look at him tomorrow, and there is a change in that man, evident, palpable. The bud may be either just peeping, or the fruit may be full burst, just as God pleases. But it will come in its time; it will come out in a distinct view; it will be as the stars wake up at even; it will be as Jesus rose unseen from His grave. If you begin to ask the when and the where and the why and the how, I can only say, "So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed into the ground; and should sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how. For the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself; first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear." It is very kind of God to give us this wide margin of thought, seeing His own work in the heart is such a long hidden thing. And who can tell where, at this moment, it may be going on, under the most unlikely surface. It is a good thing to have a faith in every one’s salvation, and so to regard and treat everybody hopefully, honourably. Who knows, if the process be so very far out of sight, whether it is not going on in any one at this moment. Fathers and mothers, who have cast the early seed, you have slept for very sorrow, and many a day, and many a night, you have risen up to see what has come of all your sowing in your child’s heart. But you see nothing. Wait on. It may be all there. And the springing and the growing will be you know not where, and you know not how.
J. Vaughan, Sermons, 1865, No. 33.
References: Mar 4:26-27.—J. Burton, Christian Life and Truth, p. 293; Preacher’s Monthly, vol. ix., p. 185. Mar 4:26, Mar 4:27.—J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons, 6th series, p. 68.
Mar 4:26-29
We have in this parable:
I. A most simple, yet striking representation of the business, and, at the same time, the helplessness of the spiritual husbandman. To the ministers of the Gospel, who are the great moral labourers in the field of the world, there is entrusted the task of preparing the soil and casting in the seed. And if they bring to the task all the fidelity and all the diligence of intent and single-eyed labourers, if by a faithful publication of the grand truths of the Gospel they throw in the seed of the Word, why, they have reached the boundary of their office, and the boundary also of their strength, and are to the full as powerless in the making the seed germinate, as the husbandman in the causing the valley to stand thick with corn. "It springeth and groweth up, he knoweth not how."
II. But if we are ignorant of the mode, we are well acquainted with the result. "The earth bringeth forth fruit of herself,"—not through the skill of the tiller, but through the virtues wherewith God has endowed her—"first the blade, then the ear, and after that the full corn in the ear." You have here an account of the successive stages of long experience. (1) There is first the convert in the young days of his godliness—the green blades just breaking through the soil, and giving witness to the germination of the seed. This is ordinarily a season of great promise. We have not, and we look not for, the rich fruit of a matured well-disciplined piety, but we have the glow of verdant profession, everything looks fresh. (2) Next comes the ear; this is a season of weariness and of watching. Sometimes there will be long intervals without any perceptible growth; sometimes the corn will look sickly, as though blasted by the mildew; sometimes the storm will rush over it and almost level it with the earth. All this takes place in the experience of the Christian. (3) "When the fruit is brought forth, immediately he putteth in the sickle." When we look on aged believers, who appear to have been long ago fitted to depart hence and to be with the Lord, we almost marvel that they have not been called home, and that God still exercises them by the discipline of affliction. But of this we may be sure—the ear is not full, otherwise it would be plucked.
H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit, No. 1,988.
The Seed growing secretly.
I. The work of sowing and the joy of reaping advance simultaneously on the spiritual field. The labour of the husbandman in the natural sphere is all and only sowing at one season, all and only reaping at another; the seed of the Word affords a difference of experience; in the kingdom of God there is no period of the year when you must not sow or may not reap. These two processes are in experience very closely linked together. They become alternately and reciprocally cause and effect; if we were not permitted at an early period to reap a little, the work of sowing would proceed languidly, or altogether cease; on the other hand, if we cease to sow, we shall not long continue to reap. When the workmen are introduced into this circle, it carries them continuously round.
II. In any given spot in the field there may be sowing in spring, and yet no reaping in harvest. If there is not sowing, there will be no reaping, but the converse does not hold good; you cannot say, wherever there has been sowing it will be followed by a reaping. The seed may be carried away by wild birds, or wither on stony ground, or be choked by thorns.
III. The growth of the sown seed is secret; secret also is its failure. It is quite true, there may be grace in the heart of a neighbour unseen, unsuspected by me; but the heart of my neighbour may be graceless, while I am in its earlier stages ignorant of the fact.
IV. Though the sower is helpless after he has cast the seed into the ground, he should not be hopeless; we know that the seed is a living thing, and will grow except where it is impeded by extraneous obstacles.
V. In every case the harvest, in one sense, will come; on every spot of all the field there will be a reaping. If one set of ministers do not reap there, another will. Where there is not conversion, there will be condemnation. The regeneration is one harvest; the judgment is another. The angels are not sowers, but they are reapers.
W. Arnot, The Parables of our Lord, p. 312.
I. Though the sower sleep after his labour, yet the process of germination goes on night and day.
II. Simple beginnings and practical results may be connected by mysterious processes: "he knoweth not how." There is a point in Christian work where knowledge must yield to mystery.
III. As the work of the sower is assisted by natural processes, so the seed of truth is aided by the natural conscience and aspiration which God has given to all men.
IV. The mysteriousness of processes ought not to deter from reaping the harvest. The spiritual labourer may learn from the husbandman.
Parker, City Temple, 1871, p. 81.
References: Mar 4:26-29.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxvii., No. 1603; H. M. Luckock, Footprints of the Son of Man, p. 84; Homiletic Quarterly, vol. iii., p. 186; W. M. Taylor, Parables of our Saviour, p. 196; A. B. Bruce, Parabolic Teaching of Christ, p. 117.
Mar 4:26-33
Christ’s Idea of Christianity.
I. The kingdom of God, or the beginning of a truly religious life in the soul of a man, may be obscure, imperceptible and unconscious. When a man is building a house he sees it as it goes on. That is an outside matter. A man goes into his garden and plants seed. He may sit up all night with spectacles and a lantern, but he will not see anything going on; and yet there is something going on which is vitally connected with the whole operation of vegetable development. So is it with the spiritual life. The work of God in the human soul is gradual. Further, the working of religion in the human soul is not scattering, accidental, promiscuous, just as it may happen. It has its regular stages, and one will not precede the other except in the order of these stages. First the blade, then the ear, then the kernel in the ear, and you cannot make one of them anticipate the others so that they will not follow in that sequence.
II. Conversion is often an imperceptible condition. That is, when a man is converted in the old-fashioned understanding of that word, when he has passed from death to life, when the balance is struck, and it is for purity, for holiness, for obedience to God, for love; he may not know it. Unconscious piety is simply this, the being trained from your cradle by your surrounding circumstances into those very moods and into that very purpose of life which conversion means. It is being inwardly changed, away from animal toward spiritual life; away from the law of selfishness toward the law of a true love. The moment a man can have the testimony of himself that that is his purpose, though not his attainment, then he is converted, though he may not know it.
H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit, p. 120.
Reference: Mar 4:27, Mar 4:28.—W. G. Horder, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xviii., p. 209.
Mar 4:28-29
The seed cast into the ground is undoubtedly to be understood of the knowledge of good which may be at any time laid before the mind of another. We have an opportunity, it may be, of doing this; a person is with us for a certain time, and then perhaps is removed from us; we must even leave the seed to itself and go on our way trusting that God in His good providence will preserve it, and make it spring up in its season.
I. It may be asked, What is the lesson we are to learn from this? for it is not the custom of our Lord merely to state a thing as a matter of fact actually occurring in life, unless there may be something derived from it practically useful. And we cannot suppose that He means to advise us to be careless, to take no pains of our own, but to leave the event wholly to God. Undoubtedly it does not mean this; for how does our Lord represent Himself? As the gardener digging about and dressing the barren fig-tree, in the hope that it might perhaps at last bring forth fruit. And what Christ teaches us in one parable will never contradict what He teaches us in another. Let the two parables teach us different lessons, each making that of the other complete. We should do all that we can do, and then leave the event to God with confidence. To provide for the future by any present act is wise and good; but to be anxious about the future, where no act of ours can affect it, is a weakness and a want of faith. The parable of the fig-tree teaches us the first, the parable of the growth of the corn while men slept, teaches us the foolishness of the second.
II. But together with a vain anxiety, the parable also condemns a vain impatience. "The earth brought forth first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear." Each in its own order, but not all at once, and still less the last first. What we should look for in the spring is promise, in the summer and autumn, it is performance. What should disappoint us is to find these wanting; it were a strange folly that should seek in summer for the fresh leaves and delicate flowers of spring, or in spring should require the deep foliage and abundant fruits of summer.
T. Arnold, Sermons, vol. vi., p. 140.
The Seed growing secretly.
I. In this passage we have a striking picture of the silent growth of God’s word, whether in the individual, or in the Church at large. So is the kingdom of God: not different, but exactly similar in its development to the process by which food is brought out of the earth. The sower does not meddle with the seed when once it is in the ground. He does not, after a week or a month, go to the field and take up the seed, and look if it be growing. No; but he leaves it there, confident that it has a quickening power in itself, and that in due time it will break through the clods and spring up and bear fruit. And this should teach us to have faith in the power of God’s Word, which His ministers sow in the hearts of their hearers. It should teach us patience; it should teach us to wait in faith, till the Word we sow has had time; it should increase our faith in the power of the Word to grow of itself, when once it has been received.
II. And this growing of itself is further set forth in the words that follow—"For the earth bringeth forth of herself; first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear." You cannot hurry the growth of a seed of corn. It must have time and its own time. It must go through the several stages of its appointed growth. Nor is it otherwise with the seed sown in our hearts, the Word of God, the Gospel, the teaching of Jesus Christ. There must be in the young a growth in grace, a gradual going forwards. We must not expect to see in them a wisdom and a goodness which belong only to a riper age.
III. Let us bear in mind for our warning that what God requires in all the plants of His sowing is fruit-return for the care bestowed. He showers down upon the soul the dew of His blessing. He gives us largely in this country every means of grace, that we may grow thereby, and in return He expects fruit. He expects that we, thus highly favoured, should not be barren and unprofitable, but should bring forth fruit unto Him—fruit that shall remain, fit to be stored in the heavenly garner—fruit unto life eternal.
R. D. B. Rawnsley, Sermons in Country Churches, 2nd series, p. 130.
References: Mar 4:28.—S. Baring-Gould, One Hundred Sermon Sketches, p. 72; R. Tuck, Christian World Pulpit, vol. v., p. 164; G. Litting, Thirty Children’s Sermons, p. 205.
Mar 4:30
The kingdom of God is not the Church, but a far wider, vast, outlying region; where Jehovah’s omnipotence and wisdom—with, indeed, all His glorious attributes—reign absolutely. The Church is the centre of this kingdom; the kingdom, the outlying territory of the Church.
I. This doctrine of the kingdom of God as distinct from the Church will assist us in the interpretation of many passages of Scripture, and notably of our Lord’s parables. To take one instance, there is the question whether the Church in any given land ought to include all the inhabitants within its fellowship; or to exclude those of wicked, sinful life. Men turn to the parable of the tares, in which it is said, "Let both grow together until the harvest," and argue that Christ has absolutely forbidden the exercise of discipline and the removal of wicked men from the Church. This might be correct if the Lord had said, "To what shall we liken the Church of God? or with what comparison shall we compare it? "Instead of that, He said, "The field is the world"—not the Church.
II. This doctrine of the kingdom of God as distinct from the Church, will assist us in our estimate of things sacred and secular. Many things outside the Church are yet inside the kingdom. Many things belong to God that have nothing to do with the Gospel. The commerce and manufactures of Great Britain are as much God’s gifts to us for His service and praise as were Bethlehem’s fields to Jesse. The science and marvellous discoveries of the nineteenth century are as directly Jehovah’s bestowments upon us as were the abundance of the sea and the treasures hid in the sand His blessings upon Zebulon.
III. The doctrine of the distinction between the kingdom of God and the Church will assist us to overcome the irreligiousness with which we deal with earthly things.
IV. The doctrine of the distinction between the kingdom of God and the Church will assist us to appreciate the greatness of our privileges as members of the Church of Christ. Wherefore has the kingdom of God the Church for its centre, but that she may be stored with privileges and blessings that shall regenerate the world. As were the Apostles to the Church, so is the Church to Christendom. The Church is the army of liberation for this sin-worn desolated world.
A. Davies, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xv., p. 269.
Reference: Mar 4:30.—A. Davies, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xv., pp. 252, 269.
Mar 4:30-32
I. Observe the minuteness of the seed which is ordinarily first deposited by God’s Spirit in man’s heart. If you examine the records of Christian biography, you will find, so far as it is possible to search out such facts, that conversion is commonly to be traced to inconsiderable beginnings, a single word, a solitary verse, a casual expression, one of these it is which, in the vast variety of cases, settles down into the heart, and after lying buried there a year it may be, or two years, or ten years, it will suddenly and unexpectedly vegetate, so that the forgotten and apparently dead grain shoots into a plant of conversion and righteousness.
II. The parable under review is an accurate figure of the religion of Jesus Christ, when considered in respect of its spreading over all the earth. It has been sometimes thought that there lies an evidence against the Divine origin of Christianity, in the fact of the inconsiderable progress that it has hitherto made among men. We think, calculating probabilities by our imperfect arithmetic, that Christianity, as soon as published, might have been expected to start into unlimited empire. But the Bible gives no countenance to such an expectation. On the contrary, a season of depression and disaster, and occasionally almost extinction,—introductory, indeed, but at long distance, to a season of strength and glory—this is throughout the Scriptures a Scriptural representation. The parable before us agrees in all its main features with those ordinarily given in Scripture. The imagery drawn from our fields and gardens will always suggest the idea of a difficult and interrupted growth. As a general rule, vegetable productions pass through so many positions of danger ere they reach their maturity, that likening the text to a kingdom or dispensation will always suggest, if not actually require, the idea that such a kingdom or such a dispensation can only reach its greatness or its fulness by passing through long stages of difficulty or hindrance.
H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit, No. 1,907.
I. Small beginning may have great endings. (a) This should encourage all holy labourers. (b) This should alarm all wicked men.
II. Vitality is more than magnitude. (a) This applies to creeds; (b) to church agencies or organisations; (c) to a public profession of faith.
III. The least thing in nature is a better illustration of Divine truth than the greatest object in art. The least of all seeds more fitly represents the kingdom of heaven than the most elaborate of all statuary.
Parker, City Temple, 1871, p. 82.
References: Mar 4:30-32.—Homiletic Quarterly, vol. ii., p. 472. Mar 4:30-34.—H. M. Luckock, Footprints of the Son of Man, p. 89.
Mar 4:33-34
This text may be used as supplying three lessons as to the duties of the Christian teacher.
I. He must adapt himself to his hearers.
II. He must consider his hearers rather than himself.
III. He must increase his communication of truth and light according to the progress of his scholars.
Parker, City Temple, 1871, p. 82.
References: Mar 4:33-34.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxviii., No. 1669. Mar 4:34.—J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons, 6th series, p. 191. Mar 4:34-41.—Homilist, vol. iv., p. 177.
Mar 4:35
Veiled under some real fact in our Lord’s life on earth, lie all the revelations of His will in faith and doctrine concerning His Church and His children throughout the ages; so I seem to trace the spiritual teaching of Advent under the storm that befel the disciples on the lake long ago.
I. As I see the time when this took place, I learn something. It was eventide—nay, it was more than that—it was eventide when these disciples braced the halyards and drew up the brown sail, and gave the prow of their little vessel to the setting sun; but at the crisis of the story it was more than eventide—it was night; the hours had sped on, twilight so short in those eastern lands had slipped suddenly away; not alone a storm, but darkness had overtaken these disciples. So with us now the time as of old is eventide; the ages have slipped by and we are standing here, heirs of all the ages past, nearer the time than when we believed. It is eventide with us, and it is something more—darkness has overtaken us also.
II. From this darkness on the lake I learn another thing. The darknesses of our holy religion—its mysteries, its sacraments—make Christ to be prized even more highly than if our faith existed without such darkness and such shrouds. In the dark shadow of these mysteries sits Jesus Christ. It was so of old. It is so now. These disciples, sitting in the setting sun, with light all around them, with no storm battling against their sails; no darkness around them; nothing to hide Christ from them;—think you it was good for them; nay that they half realized what they realized of their Master when loosing their vessel, they swept across the sea of Galilee, and entered the darkness; spent the night with Him; discovered the mystery of His hidden presence? I think not; but when they had thus proceeded, how different it was with them, The darkness came; did it take Christ away? nay, it brought Him nearer as their helper. The night fell; it shrouded Him, but it took not Christ away; dearer and closer their yokefellow in danger; it was the reason that he rose up at their greatest need and cried His great words of "Peace, be still."
W. Meller, Village Homilies, p. 9.
References: Mar 4:35, Mar 4:36.—A. G. Brown, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxv., p. 309. Mar 4:35-39.—Parker, Cavendish Pulpit, vol. i., p. 47.
Mar 4:35-41
There are various instances in Sacred Scripture of the effect produced by the revelation of God to man, sometimes by mere power, sometimes by terror, sometimes, as in the drama of Job, by a long discourse of natural history. But here it was the mercifulness, the sympathy, the succour which were manifested, that touched the hearts of the disciples. He came to their rescue; and although the wonder of His power over great natural laws was not without its effect, yet that which seems to have touched them and filled them all the rest of their lives, was the sense that He was their protector, their Saviour.
I. Everyone comes first or last to God, through tribulation. There never was a people that lived and flourished on the earth, outside of a fable, who did not need a God of compassion. Taking the human race comprehensively, the whole world has been in a condition that no other than such a Deity could possibly fit, or endure, either the measurement or the morality which has been inspired by the Gospel. Consider what poverty has done and is doing all over the world. Go inside of men, and see what a torment is the sense of right and wrong, of unaccomplished rectitude, of unfulfilled vows, and of purpose ignobly wasted. Men, looking at them in their very best conditions, as in modern developed society, are continually in need of somebody to be willing to help them; and the mischief is, that according to our ideas of the laws of nature and the laws of grace, men feel, I dare not ask for help. What am I that I should? But if there could break out from heaven a voice, saying, "Not because you are rich, but because of your poverty; not by reason of your worth, but by reason of your misery, I will help you?" The very conception of the love of God under such circumstances—how much light it brings to despairing souls.
II. The doctrine of the compassion of God, of the compassion of Christ, I think, has been the salvation of the Bible, of the Church and of faith; and every limitation of it is a peril. The Christ in art has mostly perished. There was a time when men spoke by art, carved, built, painted; and there are certain ages in which the idea of art conveys more really the living thought of the age than anything that is recorded in book of history. That has gone by long ago, and the glory of Christ, and the thoughts of men about Christ, are diffusing themselves throughout the whole Christian world. Christ in humanity, Christ in sympathy for others, that has become the Christ of our age. That amelioration has been going on in barbarous countries and among civilised nations. That different conception of the outcast and criminal classes; that hopefulness of reformation under certain possible conditions of mind; that general kindness and tenderness even to those whom society must banish frequently from itself; the recognition of the brotherhood of men—that is Christ at the present time, working into actual affairs, and leavening the whole lump.
H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxiii., p. 51.
I. We see here the organised Church in peril—Christ and His disciples were all in this tempest.
II. Dangers beset the Church even whilst it is carrying out the express commands of Christ.
III. The spirit of Christ, not the body of Christ, must save the Church in all peril.
IV. Jesus Christ answers the personal appeal of the imperilled Church.
V. All the perils of the Church may be successfully encountered by profound faith in God.
Parker, City Temple, 1871, p. 82.
References: Mar 4:35-41.—H. M. Luckock, Footprints of the Son of Man, p. 94; Christian World Pulpit, vol. vi., p. 95; Preacher’s Monthly, vol. iii., p. 248; Outline Sermons to Children, p. 136. Mar 4:36.—Spurgeon, Morning by Morning, p. 258.
Mar 4:36-38
The toiling Christ.
Among the many loftier characteristics belonging to Christ’s life and work, there is a very homely one which is often lost sight of; and that is, the amount of hard physical exertion, prolonged even to fatigue and exhaustion, which He endured. "They took Him even as He was into the ship." And many expositors suppose that in the very form of that phrase there is suggested the extreme of weariness and exhaustion which He suffered, after the hard day’s toil. Whether that be so or not, the swiftness of the move to the little boat, and His going on board without a moment’s preparation, leaving the crowd on the beach, seems most naturally accounted for by supposing that He had come to the last point of physical endurance, and that his frame, worn out by the hard day’s work, needed one thing—rest.
I. First, let me point out some of the significant hints which the Gospel records give us of the toilsomeness of Christ’s service. We are chiefly indebted for these to the Gospel of Mark. Note (1) how distinctly this Gospel gives the impression of swift, strenuous work. The narrative is brief and condensed. There is one word which is reiterated over and over again in the earlier chapters, remarkably conveying this impression of haste and strenuous work. Mark’s favourite word is "straightway," "immediately," "forthwith," "anon," which are all translations of one expression. The story seems as it were to pant with haste, to keep up with Him as He moves among men, swift as the sunbeam and continuous in the outflow of His love as these unceasing rays. (2) Again, we see in Christ’s service, toil prolonged to the point of actual physical exhaustion. (3) We see in Christ toil that puts aside the claims of physical wants. (4) We see in Christ’s service a love which is at every man’s beck and call, a toil cheerfully rendered at the unreasonable and unseasonable times.
II. Notice how we get from our Lord’s own words a glimpse into the springs of this wonderful activity. There are three points which distinctly come out in various places of the Gospels as His motives for such unresting sedulousness and continuance of toil. (1) The first is conveyed in such words as these, "I must work the works of Him that sent Me." "Wist ye not that I must be about My Father’s business?" "My meat is to do the will of Him that sent Me, and to finish His work." All these express one thought. Christ lived and toiled and bore weariness and exhaustion, because wherever He went, and whatsoever He set His hand to, He had the one consciousness of a great task laid upon Him by a loving Father, whom He loved, and whom, therefore, it was His joy and His blessedness to serve. (2) And still further, another of the secret springs that move His unwearied activity, His heroism of toil, is the thought expressed in such words as these, "While I am in the world, I am the light of the world." "The night cometh when no man can work." He recognised the brief hour of sunny life as being an hour that must be filled with service, and recognised the fact that there was a task that He could only do when He lived the life of a man upon earth. (3) And there was a final motive which I need barely touch. He was impelled to His sedulous service by the motive expressed in such words as these, in which this Gospel is remarkably rich, "Jesus, moved with compassion, put forth His hand and touched him."
III. So much for the motive; and now a word finally as to the worth of this toil for us. What do we learn from His example? (1) Task all your capacity, and use every minute in doing the thing that is plainly set before you to do. (2) We may bring the greatest principles to bear on the smallest duties. (3) We learn the possible harmony of communion and service.
A. Maclaren, Sermons preached in Manchester, 3rd series, p. 273.
Mar 4:38
I. Look at the illustrious sleeper. The greatest of all slept. Thus was He in all points like unto His brethren; the substance of His body was wasted and was repaired, renewed and restored by food; the brain and nerves were exhausted, and their power was renewed by sleep. A morbid piety and a false morality find virtue in wakefulness, when nature preaches forgetfulness and demands repose. Religion is rather in going to sleep when Nature has need of slumber, than in a forced watchfulness for its sake. Doubtless, Christ was often weary, and now we see Him at rest. He sleeps after the hard work of a very busy day. To cease from labour is as much a duty as to work; rest is pure and holy and good, when in season. To everything there is a season and a time, for every purpose under heaven there is a time to rest. He who, in his working, works the work of God, and does God’s will instead of his own, will see the season for rest, and will have the hour for rest.
II. This sleep of Jesus, the Man and the Christ of God, in the storm, was natural, and not in any sense forced or artificial; but it presents two things—first, the complete exhaustion of the body of Jesus, and secondly, the sweet and perfect peace of His spirit. Safe from evil and from every fear, He must live until of His work it could be said, "It is done." He will die, but not now; He will be killed, but not by the storm; He will go to the grave, but will not find His tomb in the depths of the sea. In the fulness of time He will die, and by means fixed in the foreknowledge, and predetermined in the counsel of God. Until that day He will deliver Him from all evil—God will guard His soul. He was in the hinder part of the ship asleep.
III. In the case before us, the disciples were awake, the Master was sleeping. Now, the Master sleeps not, slumbers not, and the disciples may, in season, safely, quietly, peacefully sleep. Let Christ be with you always, with you everywhere—with you at all times, with you in all circumstances. Seek to be conscious of His presence, and you will not only be safe, but you will feel blessed.
S. Martin, Penny Pulpit (New series), No. 389.
Mar 4:38
The Sympathy of God and Necessity of Man.
I. It cannot be denied that there are many facts and many experiences in the life of this world, which irresistibly suggest the question whether God can be waking, or if wakeful, caring. To try to enumerate such phenomena is as needless as it would be painful. We cannot but read this sleep of Jesus Christ in the boat, tossed by the waves, with His disciples standing by, wondering and half murmuring, as intended to represent the world-wide, age-long mystery to which we are pointing.
II. The sympathy of God is more vital to us even than His omnipotence. The disciples accepted the perishing—in other words, the non-intervention of Christ to save—what they could not accept was His not caring. In its influence upon the heart, to care is more than to save. Love is more than power, even in the Divine. Far better would it be for us, as spiritual and immortal beings, to imagine that there might be some opposing and thwarting impediment in the way of the present exercise of God’s attribute of omnipotence, than that there should be any defect or any coldness in His love. And when a man has made up his mind at all costs to believe in the Divine care for him, he will find, as he casts himself day by day upon that love and that compassion that, for him at all events, however it may be for the universe, the power is already sufficient too. Beginning with the axiom, "Thou, God, carest," he passes on into the experimental conviction, "There is none like unto Thee, O Lord, there is not one that can do as Thou doest."
III. "Carest thou not?" has a voice for the disciple as well as for the Master. It reproves the lazy loitering, the purposeless sauntering, the silly dreaming, in which so many of us pilgrims and voyagers pass this responsible, this anxious lifetime. Not to care that we perish is suicide; not to care that our brother perishes is murder. Christ cared, God cared, that we might care; and yet, as I look within, as I look around me, I find almost nothing that expresses, almost nothing that is consistent with this anxiety. I see lives given to this one thing, the making themselves easy, soft and luxurious. "Give me one serious man" was the French statesman’s challenge. "Give me one," we will echo it, "who cares if he himself, cares if his brother perishes."
C. J. Vaughan, University Sermons, p. 305.
References: Mar 4:38.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xix., No. 1121. Mar 4:39.—J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons, 10th series, p. 77. Mar 4:39, Mar 4:40.—J. H. Thom, Laws of Life after the Mind of Christ, p. 47. Mar 4:40, Mar 4:41.—Homiletic Magazine, vol. xii., p. 138.
Mar 4:41
Our Divine Saviour teaches us sometimes by deeds, sometimes by words, sometimes by silence. His silence speaks more than the words of other men; His words do more than all men’s deeds together; while His deeds themselves possess moreover an infinite eloquence. We have in this miracle, as we shall see in the sequel, all these modes of teaching combined.
I. Jesus had all day long, like His own good householder, been busy, bringing forth every form and phase of truth which might comfort and forewarn His little flock. And having so done, He winds up His day by that act of marked significance which is now before us. Does He not in this parabolic miracle show to those who were the nucleus and kernel of His kingdom, to those valiant souls who were with Him in His labours and were to be with Him in His approaching trials, that let come what storm there might upon the Church and on the soul, He was with them still, and would be with them even to the end? Let us not be like that captain, who having a true and correct chart in his cabin, failed to consult it while the weather was calm, but went below to look for it only when the wind and tide had drifted his barque upon the bar, and so with his eyes upon the course he should have steered, felt the shock, which in a few moments sent them down to the abyss. Our souls are like a ship upon the deep, and as we sail over the waves of life, we must, like wary mariners, take the hints given us in our nature. If we see on the horizon a cloud of some possible temptation no bigger than a man’s hand, though all else be bright and clear, we must beware; for in that speck may couch a tempest ready to spring up and leap down upon our souls. Above all, we should always have Christ aboard with us; we should have Him formed within us as our hope of glory; under His ensign we should sail as our only hope of reaching that haven for which we are making.
II. The Church at large and the several members of the Church, like the boat in the miracle, have Him with us whom even the winds and the sea obey. Though He seem to be careless of us, is it not the fact it is we who are forgetful of Him? Though he sleeps, so to speak, that is to say, though He seem to our faithless hearts to hide Himself for a moment, His heart waketh, and a single cry to Him will let us know to our peace and joy that He is there;
W. B. Philpot, Church of England Pulpit, p. 208.
Mar 4:41
The Unknown Quantity in Christ.
The unknown quantity in Christ was (1) beneficent, and therefore not from beneath; (2) intensely spiritual, and therefore not of the earth, earthy; (3) wholly self-sacrificial, and therefore different from ordinary human policy and purpose; (4) it set aside canons, traditions, and standards established by men, and therefore claimed a wisdom superior to the ripest wisdom of all human teachers.
Parker, City Temple, vol. i., p. 97.
References: Mar 4:41.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxviii., No. 1686; Preacher’s Monthly, vol. ix., p. 184; Homiletic Quarterly, vol. ix., p. 271. Mark 4—W. Hanna, Our Lord’s Life on Earth, p. 190. Mar 5:1-10.—H. M. Luckock, Footprints of the Son of Man, p. 99.
The Sermon Bible, ed. William Robertson Nicoll (1888–1900) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
J. R. Dummelow 1909 · Public Domain Parable of the Sower. Stilling the Tempest
Parable of the Sower. Stilling the Tempest
1-9. Parable of the Sower (Mat_13:1; Luk_8:4). See on Mt.
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10-20. The parable interpreted (Mat_13:10; Luk_8:9). See on Mt.
21-25. Further remarks upon teaching by parables (Luk_8:16-18). Omitted by Mt, who introduces these sayings in other connexions, viz. Mat_5:15; Mat_7:2; Mat_10:26, which see.
21. A candle] RV 'the lamp.' A bushel] RV 'the bushel.' A bed] RV 'the bed.' A candlestick] RV 'the stand.' St. Matthew introduces this saying into the Sermon on the Mount (Mat_5:15). There it bids the disciples give to the world the light of a good example. Here it bids them enlighten the world by their teaching.
22. For there is nothing hid] 'Our Lord corrects a false impression which might have arisen from the mention of a mystery (Mar_4:11). If the gospel was for a moment treated as a secret, it was so only because this temporary secrecy was essential to its successful proclamation after the Ascension. Those to whom the secret was now confided were charged with the responsibility of publishing it then' (Swete). See further on Mat_10:26, where the saying recurs. 23. See on Mat_11:15.
24. Take heed what ye hear (AV, RV). The context, however, requires that this should be rendered 'Understand (weigh well the meaning of) what ye hear,' a quite possible rendering. With what measure ye mete] i.e. 'ye measure.' 'In that measure in which you measure your attention to My teaching, in the same measure will spiritual understanding be measured unto you' (Euthymius). This proverb occurs in several connexions (Mat_7:2; Luk_6:38 q.v.).
25. To the diligent student of divine truth more of divine truth shall be revealed. The slothful student shall not only learn no more, but shall even forget what he already knows. In Mat_13:12; Mat_25:19, the context being different, these words have a different meaning.
26-29. The seed growing secretly (the only parable peculiar to Mk). Tatian in his 'Diates-saron' places it immediately before the Tares. Such a position for it is suitable, but it is wrong to regard it, with Weiss, as only an imperfect and mutilated version of that parable.
The point of the parable is not so much the secret invisible energy of the seed, or divine Word, as that of the earth into which the seed falls, i.e. the moral and spiritual nature of man. The seed of Christianity will grow, because the soil into which it will fall is suitable to nourish it. The human soul is 'naturally Christian' (Tertullian), and Christianity is the 'natural religion.' Christianity can, therefore, propagate itself without human effort, and often does so.
26. A man] i.e. the apostles and other preachers of the gospel. Cast seed] i.e. preach the gospel by word or example. The ground] i.e. the souls of men.
27. Sleep, and rise] i.e. ministers of the gospel having preached the word are to pursue their ordinary employments without undue anxiety. Visible results may be slow, but the seed is sure to germinate, because the soul of man is specially fitted by God to receive it, and will by its own spiritual activity cause it at last to bear fruit. Christ does not, however, discourage due pastoral care. Though the earth brings forth of herself, 'this does not exclude due cultivation, and rain from heaven, and sunshine' (Bengel).
28. First the blade, etc.] Therefore missionaries who have no results to show, are not to be discouraged. In India at present, few converts are made, but the seed is being sown, and the time of the harvest will come.
29. The harvest] is an earthly harvest. It is gathered in Christian lands, when a faithful pastor, after long waiting, gathers in a harvest of true penitents and genuine servants of Christ. It is gathered in heathen lands, when the hindrances to the gospel are at last removed, and the people ask for baptism. Many, however, regard 'the harvest' here as that at the end of the world.
30-32. The grain of mustard seed (Mat_13:31; Luk_13:18). See on Mt.
33, 34. Mat_13:34, Mat_13:35. See on Mat_13:10-17.
35-41. Stilling the storm (Mat_8:18, Mat_8:23-27; Luk_8:22). See on Mt. St. Mark's graphic details should be noticed—' the other boats with Him,' Mar_4:36, and 'the pillow (cushion) in the stern,' Mar_4:38.
J. R. Dummelow, A Commentary on the Holy Bible (Macmillan, 1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
J. W. McGarvey 1914 · Public Domain J. W. McGarvey's The Fourfold Gospel [LIV. A. The…
J. W. McGarvey's The Fourfold Gospel [LIV. A. The First Great Group of Parables].
LIV. THE FIRST GREAT GROUP OF PARABLES. (Beside the Sea of Galilee.) Subdivision A. INTRODUCTION. aMATT. XIII. 1-3; bMARK IV. 1, 2; cLUKE VIII. 4.
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a1 On that day went Jesus out of the house [It is possible that Matthew here refers to the house mentioned at Mar_3:19. If so, the events in Sections XLVIII.-LVI. all occurred on the same day. There are several indications in the gospel narratives that this is so], and sat by the sea side. b1 And again he began again to teach by the sea side. [By the Sea of Galilee.] And there is { awere bgathered unto him a very great multitude, agreat multitudes, bso that he entered into a boat, and sat in the sea [that the multitudes might be better able to see and hear him]; and all the multitude astood on the beach. bwere by the sea on the land. c4 And when a great multitude came together, and they of every city resorted unto him, he spake by a parable: a3 And he spake to them many things b2 And he taught them many things in parables, and said unto them in his teaching, asaying, b3 Hearken [While Jesus had used parables [328] before, this appears to have been the first occasion when he strung them together so as to form a discourse. Parable comes from the Greek paraballo, which means, "I place beside" in order to compare. It is the placing of a narrative describing an ordinary event in natural life beside an implied spiritual narrative for the purpose of illustrating the spiritual.]
[FFG 328-329]
J. W. McGarvey (with Philip Y. Pendleton), Commentaries on the New Testament (The Fourfold Gospel, 1914; Acts; and the epistles) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Arno C. Gaebelein 1922 · Public Domain Chapter 4
Chapter 4
1. Teaching by the Seaside. The Parable of the Sower. (Mar 4:1-20. Mat 13:1-23; Luk 8:4-15.)
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2. The Word to shine forth in testimony. (Mar 4:21-25. Luk 8:16-18.)
3. The Parable of the Growth of the Seed and the Harvest. (Mar 4:26-29.)
4. The Parable of the Mustard Seed. (Mar 4:30-34. Mat 13:31-35; Luk 13:18-19.)
5. The Storm on the sea and the wind rebuked. (Mar 4:35-41. Mat 8:23-27; Luk 8:22-25.)
1. Teaching by the Seaside. The Parable of the Sower. Mar 4:1-20
In the Gospel of Matthew the scene which closes the preceding chapter is followed by the seven parables (Mat 13:1-58). In the seven parable discourse the Lord teaches the mystery of the Kingdom of Heaven in its present form. These parables belong into the first Gospel because it is the Gospel of the King. First He proclaimed the principles of the Kingdom (Mat 5:1-48; Mat 6:1-34; Mat 7:1-29); then after His rejection He taught in parables the Kingdom in mystery. Only two of these parables are reported by Mark, the parable of the Sower and of the Mustard Seed. Both relate to His work of ministry. Another parable, however, is added, which is found nowhere else in the Gospels.
The parable of the Sower is explained by Himself (Mar 4:13-20). He Himself is the great Sower and His fellow servants sow after Him. That which is sown is the Word, even as He came to preach the Word. The devil, the flesh and the world are the hindering forces.
The Parable of the Sower is very simple. It is also noteworthy that Mark adds a sentence, which is not found elsewhere. “Know ye not this parable? And how then will ye be acquainted with all parables?” It is a fundamental parable and a key to other parables. He graciously explains it. What patience He had with His dull fellow servants! He is the Sower. That which is sown is the Word; for this He came. Man cannot bring any fruit. That which He sows can produce fruit. The devil, the flesh and the world are antagonistic to the Word and the causes of failure and unfruitfulness. Those who hear the Word and receive it (believe) yield fruit. But the devil, the flesh and the world are even then active and influence fruitbearing.
2. The Word to shine forth in testimony. Mar 4:21-25
The Word received in faith gives life and yields fruit. It must also shine forth in testimony. This testimony may be obscured by “the bushel and the bed.” The bushel stands for the cares and material things of this present age; the bed for ease and comfort. The cure for occupation with earthly things and for an ease-loving life, the hindrances of a bright shining testimony, is to remember the coming day of manifestation (Mar 4:22). How bright and perfect the example of the Servant. He did not know the bushel nor the bed.
3. The Parable of the Growth of the seed and the Harvest. Mar 4:26-29
This parable is not recorded by any of the other evangelists. It is closely linked with the words which precede. The day of manifestation is the day of the harvest. The seed sown grows in secret. None knows how. Life is in the Word. The blade, the ear and the full corn, after that the harvest. This is the comforting assurance of the Servant. He sowed the seed and then “slept and rose”--He died and rose from the dead. In view of it He could rejoice in the knowledge that the seed would spring up, increase and bring a harvest. And the sower will put in the sickle. The harvest (the end of the age) is more fully revealed in Mat 13:1-58. What was His comfort is the comfort of all His true servants who sow the word.
4. The Parable of the Mustard Seed. Mar 4:30-34
The unexpected growth of the Kingdom during the absence of the Sower is taught in this parable. In Matthew it is linked with the parable of the leaven. The external growth (mustard seed) and the internal corruption (leaven) of Christianity are foretold by Him. Christendom has developed into a powerful world institution and become the lodging place of the fowls of the air. These typify unclean beings (Mar 4:4, Mar 4:15). The humble Servant never meant the Word to produce such an abnormal growth.
5. The Storm on the Lake and the Wind rebuked. Mar 4:35-41
The close of the chapter fits in beautifully with the whole. The Servant is seen in chapter 4 as the rejected One. He is sowing the seed. He leaves the earth while the seed groweth unto the harvest. The storm on the lake gives the picture of the trials and dangers of His own during this age; but He is in the ship. Note a statement peculiar to Mark. “They took Him even as He was in the ship.” The Servant, though Lord of all, had a real human body. Here we have a little picture of His weariness as Servant. Yet what a scene! He had perfect rest in the midst of the storm while His disciples were unbelieving. And then He manifested His power in rebuking the wind.
“Reader, do you think that the power of the Son of God and God’s counsels could have failed because of an unexpected storm? Impossible! The disciples were in the same boat with Jesus. Here is a lesson for us. In all the difficulties and dangers of the Christian life, during the whole journey upon the waves, often agitated by the tempestuous sea of life, we are always in the same boat with Jesus, if we are doing His will. It may seem to us that He is sleeping; nevertheless, if He allows the tempest to rise in order to prove our faith, we shall not perish since we are with Him in the storm; evidently neither He or we can perish. His security is our own.”
Arno C. Gaebelein, The Annotated Bible (1913–1922) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Paul E. Kretzmann 1924 · Public Domain Teaching by Means of Parables.
Teaching by Means of Parables.
v. 1. And He began again to teach by the seaside; and there was gathered unto Him a great multitude, so that He entered into a ship and sat in the sea; and the whole multitude was by the sea on the land.
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v. 2. And He taught them many things by parables, and said unto them in His doctrine.
Jesus had devoted some time to the private instruction of His disciples, in which He had been interrupted by the dispute with the Pharisees. He now resumed His ministry to the people of Galilee and the others that had come from other parts of Palestine. We have here one of the two chapters in Mark that present a connected discourse of the Lord, chapter 13 being the other. Christ’s teaching was, for the most part, done in the open air, at various points along the shore of the sea. Greater crowds than ever assembled about Him, making it necessary for Him to enter into a boat and address the people while seated out there, at some distance from the land. The entire multitude, meanwhile, stood or sat along the shore, which arose from the sea in a gentle slope. Jesus thus had the advantage of having His entire audience before Him so that He could see practically every one of them, and it was much easier for Him to address them with uplifted head, since the voice carries better. And the people, in turn, were all able to see Him, a condition which is almost a prerequisite for close attention. Mark emphasizes the fact that the Lord’s address was teaching, instructing. His purpose was not to keep the crowd amused, but to impart to them the knowledge pertaining to their salvation. This must be the aim of all true Gospel-preaching. The preacher that degrades His church into an amusement-hall and His sermon into a mountebank’s foolishness, does not follow in the footsteps of the great teacher. The feature of Christ’s teaching was his speaking in parables, in the simple telling of incidents taken from every-day life, but with profound application to spiritual matters. Note: There was never the least of the frivolous or profane in the stories as told by the Lord. His was not the cheap art of the professional exhorter; the matter with which He dealt was far too serious to permit of unseemly levity.
Paul E. Kretzmann, Popular Commentary of the Bible (1921–1924) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
unfoldingWord translationNotes 2017 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Connecting Statement:
Connecting Statement:
As Jesus taught from a boat at the seaside, he told them the parable of the soils. (See: Parables)
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the sea
This is the Sea of Galilee.
translationWords
Sea of Galilee
parable
unfoldingWord translationNotes — © Distant Shores Media and the Door43 World Missions Community, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: git.door43.org/Door43/en_tn.
Tyndale Open Study Notes 2022 · CC BY-SA 4.0 4:1-34 In this section Mark collects a number of…
4:1-34 In this section Mark collects a number of Jesus’ teaching parables.
4:1 Jesus again uses a boat to avoid the press of the crowd when he is teaching (3:9; Luke 5:2-3).
Tyndale Open Study Notes — © Tyndale Open Resources, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Text via the HelloAO Bible API.