The Parable of the Sower: A Prophetic Think Tank
2. Parable: Some fell upon stony places, where they had not much earth: and forthwith they sprung up because they had no deepness of earth: And when the sun was up, they were scorched; and because they had no root, they withered away.
Interpretation: Matthew 13:20-21 But he that received the seed into stony places, the same is he that heareth the word, and anon with joy receiveth it; Yet hath he not root in himself, but dureth for a while: for when tribulation or persecution ariseth because of the word, by and by he is offended.
Explanatory Parable: Matthew 13:31-32 Another parable put he forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field: Which indeed is the least of all seeds: but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof.
3. Parable: Matthew 13:7 And some fell among thorns, and the thorns sprung up, and choked them:
Interpretation: Matthew 13:22 He also that received seed among the thorns is he that heareth the word; and the care of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches, choke the word, and he becometh unfruitful.
Explanatory Parable: Matthew 13:33-34 Another parable spake he unto them; The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened. All these things spake Jesus unto the multitude in parables; and without a parable spake he not unto them:
4. Parable: Matthew 13:8-9 “But other fell into good ground, and brought forth fruit, some an hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold. Who hath ears to hear, let him hear.
Interpretation: Matthew 13:23. “But he that received seed into the good ground is he that heareth the word, and understandeth it; which also beareth fruit, and bringeth forth, some an hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.”
In these parables, the main symbols are the sower, the seed and the ground upon which it falls. The seed is the fulfilling oracles of Christ, Jesus of Nazareth. The ground is the heart of man, both bad and good, which either accepts this kind of seed as a religious motivation or rejects it because of something about himself which kills it inside of him
First Parable
The emphasis in this parable on faith is the element of understanding in the heart.
Harmonizing this first Sower parable, the way-side is that path of faith that runs off of that of the oracles of Christ. The birds, of the devil, who is the author and propagator of the anti-revelational faith, easily take this false heart understanding of the Prophetic Word and snatches it out by competing, anti-revelational interpretations. The wayside is the heart undisturbed by the righteous travel of faith of the path of this true understanding.
Jumping to v. 13: 24, Christ puts forth the Parable of the Tares by way of further explanation. The Tares, those in the Church that look identical to believers, are those that were never impressed enough to believe these Messianic prophecies as a leading reason for faith, taking it as mere religious trope and idea. A good example is here, with “seed,” “wayside,” “birds,” “heart.” How not to understand this is to take them as a general seed (“the Bible,” for example). “Wayside” is merely off the beaten path of the Church’s way of doing and understanding things. “Heart” is your emotions. All of these, however, is related not to a general revelation of man and scripture, but to the place within the heart meant to contain the Messianic Oracles of Jesus, its particular antagonist.
This is transferred to the Parable of the Tares in the Wheat, a prophecy of the coming Church age.
This “heart ” understanding supports only personal reasons for faith. For reasons which are selfish, propelled by tradition and religious feeling and a host of other anti-revelational motivations as a consequence of poor understanding of the place of the Messianic revelation. The landowner, Christ, is told that they should be cut down. Messiah says no, they should be left to the end of the age, then cut down by the Angels.
These people, no matter how inauthentic, are so entangled with the real believers that, on this side of the Judgement, cannot of separated without inflicting harm to the reach of the Bible, the Oracles, into the world. Internally false but externally sound faith is evil, but a necessary one when still in a world populated almost entirely with the same type of person, who professes love but is, in reality, set only on self-gratification and aggrandizement. After they are accepted into the Church, like the world itself, they cannot be excised before the time.
This explanatory parable, like that of the Sower, is prophetic. It describes what happened to the church that initially started its slide into irrelevancy and evil. This first stage occurred roughly after the deaths of the Apostles until the 4th century. Their preoccupations with the Jews and the Pagan philosophy, then heavy persecution, caused them to shift from a purely messianic apologetic and join with that faith locus of that outside it. The church was becoming codified into confessions instead of messianic evidence, started to solidify internally its authority and becomes rigidly structured. Slowly, logic, reason, syllogism, science, rhetoric, and a host of self-engineered methods for truth divination came to dominate.
Second Parable
Seed in stony places.
The second trope addresses the depth of faith rather than the scriptural understanding leading to the corrupt motivation of faith. Tribulation makes the seed unfruitful (again, fruit being a success in the distribution and explanation of the faith locus from the Prophetic Word of Christ) because the heart is shallow. It cant contain much. What is believed, no matter if it’s true or false, is then small, insufficient and vulnerable.
In the former Sower trope of the wayside was a commentary on the quality of the heat and of faith. This is one of the quantities of the heart and of faith, where a superficial heart, but with the sufficiently small seed (the starter, what of the Oracles initiates faith) of the PW, is not enough to withstand external pressure, like torture, exile, prejudice, superstition, pagan ignorance, exploitation, and religious greed.
The Parable of the Mustard Seed then given for the explanation, a prophecy of the coming Church that develops large but inhabited by evil.
The mustard seed is the “least,” the “small,” meaning it is a minimum quality and quantity by the world’s standards, but which packs tremendous spiritual power. The seed grows as it should, but is taken over by a kind of thought which is against its intended purpose.
With this person populating the Church, a growing worldly perspective, the real scriptural faith that Christ is teaching will become thought minor, thin, insignificant as a part of the whole. The whole is filled with doctrines, slogans, statements, slogans, ideas, anything but the Messianic Oracles that He is casting.
Then there is a prophecy.
The birds again appear as the servants of Satan. As with the poor faith motivation of quality, the devil comes to infest the church to exploit its lack of quantity of understanding. But not by stealth as with the Tares. Openly and easily detected as contradictory to Christ and this his Word. Anyone with understanding can see that the Church is infested, quite unlike with the Tares where the heart is very hard to see only by what one does and says. Only the Angels have the kind of discernment to know the difference between real and fake.
The Church leadership of the Tree that turned away from its original faith basis became preoccupied with the false challenge of paganism, and the Church which turned to itself rather than others during persecution is the fully formed tree of Christianity of the 4th century. Insularity and diffusion turned the scriptural meaning of Christ before the world into creeds, logical and philosophical principles, theological speculation, categories, and classifications, and became a monolithic home, not just a place of the personal attack, of evil.
This is interesting because persecution has two effects: one, people leaving the faith, being “offended” in persecution due to ignorance and having do the depth of understanding of what the faith is really about, and two, those filling the Church as a place of provision and refuge in the midst of persecution. The church actually grows. The problem is that it grows for the wrong reasons.
What is also interesting is that how well this describes the age of persecution that was simultaneous with that of erosion of Messianic Prophecy as the preeminent faith reason in the period between 100 and 300 AD. The church grew, so much so that it became the Roman State religion. We enter into the next parable that shows this.
Third Parable
Seed among thorns.
This third church age is the story about a Church that is seduced further from the Prophetic Word by a growing advancement in technology, culture, travel, accumulated general knowledge, health and wealth. Can you say “AD 300 to the present?”
The third kind of seed describes the coup-de grace of that evil presence within the church on the church at near its end.
Christ says the thorns are riches and cares of the world. They grow but produce no fruit. “Fruit,” in every instance, again, it must be kept in mind, is not “good works” in the general sense. It is the distribution of and elucidation of Messianic Prophecy to the world. It’s not doctrinal propositions. Its that particular Messianic, scriptural phenomena, the intended product of the “seed.” “Riches” are carnal riches, but not primarily. They are the carnal, the earthly, the worldly, riches of false knowledge. Of philosophy, a “theology” of ideas and creedal bullets, a knowledge of human relationships, anything insular and capable fo competing with messianic knowledge. It’s a burgeoning accumulation of knowledge about anything and everything, which today is reaching its culminating seductive powers. The theology of general knowledge and intellectual self indigence that slowly grew and came to characterize our age.
The coup-de grace are these thorns of “riches” like a garrot around the neck of the Church of Jesus Christ. It is here that the false church expires, but not the real one.
Then Jesus explains by another parable, the woman and the leaven. Here, the “whole” of the church, the whole of the Christian faith confession, is leavened, meaning all of it. It is perfect because the third parable of the Sower particularly mentions the attraction of “riches” as the problem.
This bread is made from the seed. Natural bread, the natueal, unadulterated Prophetic Word of Messiah, is unleavened. Then there is an additive. The leaven is not the seed itself, its a bit of an artificial construction for the making of “bread,” the Prophetic Word, more palatable and pleasant. This in itself is not a bad thing. The problem is that the artificial ingredient, when applied too much, can make bread so enjoyable that you can’t even think of unleavened bread anymore. A large Church is not a bad thing. Large leaven is.
Leaven is then not, in its minimal conception, is love, patience, equanimity, morality, meekness. This is true leaven because it’s not revelational but is inspired directly for the service of that which is. It is intentionally practiced strategically in order to allow the seed to properly take root, even when the evangelist does not feel like doing it. But what if being good, and nice and patient, good leaven, comes to replace the seed, the true bread, as that bread’s the main revelation?
What if this and “doctrine” of a revelation from a symbol and not a substance comes to overshadow the seed, the substance, the thing in itself, where “doctrine” is thought a multiplicity of many pleasant, interesting and inspiring things, among which the right thing either takes an equal part or does not appear? This propositional doctrine, not the Prophetic Word, is capable of then influencing the church by other integratable but false knowledge, such as occult, sacraments and Church authority, the scholastics and the mystics, creeds, and slogans, schismatic apologetics, comparative religion, philosophy, history, atheism, and agnosticism. Just about anything, but not the main thing. This false, leaven results in “full leaven,” where everything of the Prophetic Word is relegated to and overshadowed by insular human attractions of knowledge.
The parable states that the leaven is added to the bread, the prophetic Word of Christ until it is “fully leavened.” The age after the 4th century and up to our time is that age that produces the result of the first three soils. This leaven of the Pharisees (Mt 16:6,11-12; Mr 8:15; Lu 12:1) is this same thing, the Pharisees, Sadducees and Scribes as a monolithic organization that began as the religion of God’s future promises, one the existed only for its fulfillment, that slowly lost their bearing. They came instead to be gathered for the purpose of the Law, the Temple, intellectual pursuit and personal righteousness, not on the Messiah of the Old Testament.
Pharisaical religion is of the wayside. It’s a heart soil that existed firmly off the Messianic path, the primitive liberal path, loving the idea of the outer realms instead of the world, but also what was only meant to be the abstract subjective symbols of that that outer world’s revelation. Doctrinal religion, doctrinal faith and the worship of spiritual ideas. They cant then understand the meaning of a Prophetic Word that is not a doctrine or a religious idea but a phenomenon of supernatural knowledge. These loved things are subjective symbols of a propositional faith instead. The “Law” concept in primitive spirituality is such a one, is used as the affirmation of an outside, personal and universal influence on faith (YHVH), but by a faith that cannot identify His scriptural mediatory and Personal agent.
Neither can the Sadducees, but for another reason. The Sadducee’s religion is implied to be on the path, among a heart that has sufficient depth to know and believe, but is a stony place instead, not real spiritual soil. He receives the objective word, the ordained religion, with Joy, but only the objective part, and so can’t keep it when the objective world comes after him with more power. Shallow spirituality always goes after the most shallow things of doctrinal religion. However, the Prophetic Word is a phenomenon of God’s presence in the spirit through a single objective revelation. Objective symbolism, candles, rites, priests, Temple, rules, ordinances, physical obedience are the loves. External expression instead of internal expression by certain beliefs. At its most primitive it denies the supernatural because what it is conserving is only what is known, what is at hand, what is obvious.
Thorns are both blended, seduced by the wonders, abundance, and threat of the world.
Last Age
But he that received seed into the good ground is he that heareth the word, and understandeth it; which also beareth fruit, and bringeth forth, some an hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.
He “hears” it, he takes it to heart deeply. He “understands” it, he takes it into his mind accurately. He does nothing that is not a direct fruit of this seed. And here is the final age of the real Church that exists as a pure entity, living among the corrupt heart of the world but not infected by it. No evil motives, no lies, and no riches sufficiently qualifying as “revelation.”
Here is the real Context of Apostasy, and the context of its antagonist, Christ.
Epilogue
The Parable of the Sower is then begun with something good and ends with something good, but with a middle that is anything but. It starts with Seed, essentially Messianic Prophecy and its realization by Messiah. It ends with the Seed, a church fully mature as a product only of that Seed and nothing else.
The initial phase of the evangelistic activity of the 1st-century church, which casts exclusively the prophetic seed of Jesus Messiah. The second phase is represented by the tares in the wheat, a concern with the growing and obvious problem of a church that expands far past the designed ability of the Holy Word to attract only honest truth-seekers. Then it slips into an overabundance of people who don’t care anymore about prophetic motivation, but feeling and tradition. This leads to our present time: the Church of the “general” revelation of the Bible and the Gospel.
Head and Heart: John 14:1-12: Having Jesus In Your Heart But Not In Your Head
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