Matt. 13:1-23 – The Parable of the Sower & Why Jesus Used Parables

I had just been thinking earlier in the week that God used parables and stories to describe the Kingdom of Heaven and teach us because it was the only language that we could understand. That is, Parables and stories are analogies of heaven and spiritual things using every day events and language to teach universal spiritual truths. But then in this passage Jesus clearly says that he’s using parables to reveal the truth of the Kingdom but in a way that those “others” won’t understand what the stories really mean. In other words, without his follow-up “story key” about what the different characters in the story mean the story tells the uninformed listener nothing about the kingdom of Heaven. It almost seems deceptive to me, but his point is that they had become so callous to God’s moving in their lives that by laying out the Truths of the Kingdom out before them in this way highlights their actual blindness. Point taken, if we chose to say that we understand it all and close our hearts off from the teaching of our Heavenly Father, he will continue to present it to us in every day events and experiences but we won’t benefit from any of it because of our spiritual blindness.

Regarding the sower, we’ve all heard how the Word of God is equally given to all of us but if our heart isn’t fully receptive it doesn’t produce the abundance of fruit that it could. One question that lingers in my mind when the Lord says that “He produces a crop, yielding a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown,” what is this “crop”? The “seed” is the message about the kingdom of heaven, but what then is the crop? Something to meditate on, I do believe. JBB 8/6/04

[ed. note: I just found the most amazing web-site with bible stories illustrated with Lego characters! OMG! Check out The Brick Testament (a/o 6/28/2007)]