Last time we began the study of the mystery of the kingdom of heaven that Jesus said, in Matthew 13:11, He was going to explain to His disciples, and to us by the extension of the New Testament Scriptures. So, we go to Matthew 13. What are we talking about? If the kingdom of heaven has been postponed, so to speak, until the time that the Jews and the nation of Israel repents, and are ready to receive their King, which we find out in other revelation of Scriptures will take place at the second coming of Christ, we know that is going to happen, in the meanwhile, what do we have here? The kingdom was offered. It was rejected. It has been postponed. It has not been removed, it will come as promised, but not yet. It could have come at the coming of Jesus, but it did not. So, what is going on?
Jesus begins a series of parables. Seven different parables, in Matthew 13, that talk about life as it is now, and in this particular time which we now call the Church Age. Some people have called what Jesus is talking about here, Christendom, because it is not the church that He is talking about. The mystery of the kingdom is not the church, but it is something that the church is part of, and there is a mixture of that.
The first parable is the parable of the sower. That is the best known of the parables. In Matthew 13:2-9 it says, “And large crowds gathered to Him, so He got into a boat and sat down, and the whole crowd was standing on the beach. And He spoke many things to them in parables, saying, ‘Behold, the sower went out to sow; and as he sowed, some seeds fell beside the road, and the birds came and ate them up. Others fell on the rocky places, where they did not have much soil; and immediately they sprang up, because they had no depth of soil. But when the sun had risen, they were scorched; and because they had no root, they withered away. Others fell among the thorns, and the thorns came up and choked them out. And others fell on the good soil and yielded a crop, some a hundredfold, some sixty, and some thirty. He who has ears, let him hear.’” So, we begin with this parable in which Jesus is talking about the seed of the gospel. The seed of the kingdom, actually, was the message that was being given, as going out to recipients. Jesus now identifies those recipients as four different kinds of soil, and we see those, four different kind of soils, there that He mentions. So, rightly, the original audience heard this sermon and went away a bit perplexed. Who is he talking about, what do these soils mean, and how do they relate to us? They really didn’t know. So, that is why the apostles would come and say to Jesus, explain to us these things, and Jesus begins to do that later on in the chapter . . .
