Luke 8:4-10 - Sowing seeds

8:4-8

This is another of the very well known parables. As usual, a great crowd gathered with people coming from all around. First we get the parable, then Jesus explains the parable to His disciples. A parable is a story that uses an everyday parallel to teach a moral or spiritual lesson. The parable is explaining what is happening (and will happen). The seed represents the word of God. The same word fell on different types of ground, having different results. Some have used this as teaching we should be careful what sort of ground we sow into, but this is not what Jesus did, nor is it what the early church did. The word was preached to all, and so had the wide variety of effects that we see. No one is to be deprived of the chance to hear the gospel. Sometimes the results are very disappointing or frustrating, but when the seed falls on good soil the crop is amazing. A tenfold increase would have been considered good, so a hundredfold is extremely good. Mark’s version (Mark 4:8) says “thirty, sixty or a hundred fold”. This is probably because Jesus told the parable on more than one occasion. Alternatively, the point is the large increase, the precise size of the increase is neither here nor there.

8:9,10

The disciples asked Jesus to explain the meaning of the parable. We might wonder why they could not see the point? Surely the purpose of a parable is to make things simple, yet it seems to fail to have that effect. Then Jesus says “to you it has been given to know...”, yet they did not seem to know much at all! So what is the difference between them and the “others”? It is that the disciples have Jesus, they can inquire of Jesus. Their natural intelligence or spiritual insight is no better than that of anybody else, but they have come to learn from Jesus. We need to have the same attitude, one of humility and teachability. We need to ask the Holy Spirit to teach us. Even if we have several university degrees, all of us can be spiritually thick! If a person will not come to Jesus, then they will never see the truth.