Trinity Baptist Church

The Book of Mark

A Survey of the Soils

Mark 4:1-20

 

There are two different types of content found int  he book of Mark.  Much of it is what we’ve been calling the newspaper edition of the gospel.  It is primarily a narrative of what is happening.  It gives the who, what and where of the events.

 

The other type is focused, not on the event, but the teaching of the Lord and Mark doesn’t spend a lot of time on the detailed teaching of our Lord.  The only two lengthy sections are the here before us in chapter 4 and another in chapter 13.  There are some other sections of teaching throughout the book, but not nearly to the degree of the other three gospels.

 

So when we do land on a place where the emphasis is on the teaching of the Lord, we can know Mark considers it to be of great significance.  Certainly that is the case in this passage. In fact, the teaching of our Lord here begins in verse 3 and extends all the way down to verse 34. And because of its significance, we’ll take two or three weeks to cover this section.

 

The teaching of the Lord here includes several parables, with the first one being the parable of the soils.  Sometimes it’s called the parable of the sower, but the focus is more on the soils than the sower.  It begins in verse 3 and goes down to verse 20.  It is a very significant parable because it gives us an overview of the age in which we live from an evangelistic perspective.

I very real terms, it tells us what to expect about how people will respond to the gospel and why.

And in Scriptural terms, nothing could be more important for us than this because nothing is more important than the Great Commission.  Everything in the Christian life revolves around the responsibility of evangelism. What, then, could be more important than to understand what we should expect in terms of responses?

 

Now just to have the historical setting in mind, I think it was very hard for the followers of Jesus to understand why so few of the Jews, and in particular the Jewish leadership, believed in Him. The nation had been looking for the Messiah for a long time.

They knew what the prophets had written.

 

They knew, for instance, that Isaiah said Messiah would come, a son would be born and He would be the wonderful Counselor, the Prince of Peace, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father and of the increase of His government there would be no end.

 

They knew there was a forerunner to come and they had been there as John the Baptist announced His arrival.  They could see His power over diseases and demons and the authority He had.  They saw that He had power over nature. They saw that He could create food. They were aware that He could read minds. They saw a kind of power in Him that nobody else had humanly speaking.

 

And yet, instead of embracing Him, they’ve accused Him of being crazy and empowered by Satan himself.

 

And in spite of the size of the crowds that are following Him, the true followers are relatively few.  In fact, as chapter 3 ends, Jesus says the little group gathered around Him are the real family.

 

So the true believers were this little group of twelve Apostles and other believers who, when all is said and done, after the resurrection only numbered 500 in Galilee and 120 in Jerusalem.

 

It must have been hard for them to understand because once they had come to Jesus Christ and their faith had taken root and become the real thing and they had entered into the Kingdom of God, Christ became all the more wonderful, all the more wondrous, all the more glorious, all the more lovely, all the more attractive.

 

And as the crowds came and went and made such shallow commitments, it must have raised the question in their minds, “Why so few?”

 

It is in the context of that kind of issue that Jesus tells this parable and it’s a critical parable for us to understand if you want to get a handle on why people respond the way they do and where it comes from.

 

It is not primarily a parable about a sower because nothing is ever said about the sower. And it is not primarily a parable about the seed because there’s only one statement made about the seed.

 

It is a parable about soil and there are six different kinds of soil, three bad and three good, three in which no fruit is produced, and three in which significant fruit is produced.

And what it is telling us is why people respond or don’t respond to the gospel when they have opportunity.  And we get a little insight into the significance of this parable down in

 

verse 13

 

In other words, if you don’t get this one, you won’t get the rest. Or to put it positively, get this one and you’ll understand the rest. The Lord shared a lot of parables, but the key that unlocks all of them is the parable of the soils.

 

If you understand this one, you will understand the parable about the wheat and tares and you will understand the parable of the mustard seed, and you will understand the parable of the dragnet. They all follow.

 

So at its very core, Jesus says everything in My kingdom is in relation to the Great Commission and once you figure that out, everything else will make sense.

 

 

is in the opening two verses.

 

Mark 4:1

 

Once again we find Jesus surrounded by a large crowd of people seeking His help.  They’re pressing in so hard He had to get in a boat and push away into the water.

 

Verse 2

 

Let’s stop for a moment and talk about parables.  The word from which we get “parable” means to lay alongside.  A parable is a story that places one thing alongside another for comparison. It’s simply a way to make a comparison. To help you understand a spiritual truth, I’ll give you a physical truth that compares to it.

 

Sometimes a parable is as simple and short as a single sentence as is the case in 3:23-24.  Sometimes they are lengthy stories like with the parable of the two sons in Luke 16.  But always the design is to give us something comparable to make a spiritual truth understandable.

 

By the way, they’ve been around for a long time.  You’ll remember when Nathan confronted David about his sin with Bathsheba, he told the story of a wealthy man who took one little lamb from a man who owned nothing else.  David was indignant that someone would abuse his power, but when Nathan said, “You are that man”, David knew what the parable meant.

 

Parables were one of Jesus’ favorite teaching tools.

In fact, there are over 60 parables recorded in the New Testament.  They aren’t complex; they don’t have hidden mystical meanings.  They are simple stories that are intended to be laid alongside a spiritual truth to make that spiritual truth more understandable.

 

So, with that in mind, notice

 

Verse 3a

 

“Listen!”  The Greek form of that word is used ten times in Mark 4.  Obviously, in this chapter, the Lord has something to say and we need to listen as did they.

 

Then He begins

 

 

Verse 3b

 

Maybe as He said that they looked out in the fields and saw that going on. It would have been all over the place in the flat lands that rose from the lake before the mountains. A sower went out to sow.

 

They would plow rows with an animal or by hand. And then they would walk up and down the rows and broadcast the seed and that was a very common scene in their world and it needed no clarification.

 

Then comes the important part.

 

Verses 4-8

 

So far, so good.  It’s a simple story that everybody in that crowd could understand.  They knew about farmers.  They need about seed and the inherent problems that came with planting. But let’s look at the story a little closer and see what we find.

 

First of all, in verse 4, notice the seed falls beside the road.  The fields weren’t fenced or walled and typically, the hillsides were terraced and used for vineyards and the plains were for the crops.

 

So they didn’t put fences or walls around the crops.  Instead they used pathways to separate them.  That allowed productivity and travel without disturbing the crops and vineyards and in reality those pathways were the roadways of the day.  

 

Most likely that’s where Jesus and the disciples were back in chapter 2 when they plucked some grain and ate it and got in trouble with the Pharisees.

 

Now obviously the paths were uncultivated. They beaten down and compacted because of all the traffic of both people and livestock.  And in the hot, dry climate of the area, they became as hard as a rock.

 

Therefore, any seed that happened to fall there may as well have fallen on concrete because it has no chance of getting down into the soil and taking root.  SO as it lay on top of the ground, it became easy pickings for the birds.

 

Birds have always been a problem for farmers; that’s why someone invented scarecrows.  And birds aren’t dumb.  They know if they just follow a farmer around, before very long there’s going to be some grain available.

 

By the way, Luke adds in his account of this parable that what the birds didn’t get was crushed and trampled under the feet of those who walked.  And again, everyone would understand that.  So that’s soil #1.

 

 Then He goes on to another kind of soil that people who sowed seed had to confront.

 

Verses 5-6

Again, it’s not hard to understand, especially if you are native to the time and place where they were.  And those of us who grew up in the country know what that’s all about also.

 

What we perhaps don’t understand is He’s not talking about soil with rocks in it.  Those could be removed.  When I was a teenager my day plowed up about 30 acres to plant some hay.  Right through the middle of that hayfield there was an old oilfield roadway.

 

When he plowed it up, it broke into chunks and for the next several days after school it was my job to pick those chunks up, put them in the back of the pickup and haul them out of there.  ANd when I was finished, that particular section of land was just as productive as the rest of it.

 

What these verses are talking about is not that, but rather what’s down below the level of the plow.  He’s talking about something like limestone bedrock down under topsoil.  And what happened was the seed found the topsoil and began to grow.  There was plenty of water and nutrients and Jesus indicates the plant grew very rapidly.

 

But the roots can’t get deep enough to sustain life.  Instead of growing deep, they are forced to grow sideways.  They couldn’t get down to the water table and eventually they deplete the soil and the sun dries them out and they die. 

 

And chances are good his audience understand that. They had all sowed a field and then later looked at the field and saw one section of field where the plants were up higher than all the other plants.

Spring rains had ended. By the time the seed was in the ground, summer was really hot. Moisture was quickly drawn out of the soil and all the promise died. And Luke even adds in his account of the parable, Luke 8:6, “It had no moisture.”

 

The third kind of soil is found in

 

verse 7

 

Now this one’s kind of tricky.  There is no hard, trampled soil that makes the seed available to the birds.  There is no rock bed underneath. Everything looks good and ready and productive.  It appears the ground has been well-prepared.

 

But down in the soil there is life and before you know it all the unwanted and undesired thorns can spring up and choke out what you’re trying to grow.  You have weeded a garden, right?

 

When I was pastor in Duncan, I drove by my youth director’s house one day and saw him mowing between his rows of corn.  Listen:  It is a repercussion of the fall in the Garden of Eden that now weeds grow better and faster and taller than anything!

 

And anytime you have good seed and dormant weeds competing together for the same ground, the weed will always win. The weeds squeeze the life out of the good seed. They rob the necessary nutrients and water.

 

Now I want to break with the traditional field of thought at verse 8.

Normally when preachers deal with this passage they talk about four kinds of soil and when they get to verse 8 they talk about good soil.  But to do that is to miss some of the impact of what Jesus is teaching.  There aren’t four kinds of soil.  There are six kinds of soil.  Three of them are bad and unproductive.  Three of them are good and productive.

 

Notice how verse 8 begins.

 

Listen:  Not all dirt is the same.  Take note that the seed falls into good soil.  This category of soil is different from the first three.  It is different kind of soil.  Now pay attention!  Not all dirt is the same and the differences are not just in good and bad, but in how good the good is.

 

There is some soil that is more conducive to producing a crop than others.  Some soil has nutrients that are superior.  Some retain water better than others.  Good soil is deep and soft and rich and clean and when seed gains entry into it, it finds nourishment and grows to an abundant harvest.

 

And that abundant harvest is the focus of Jesus teaching in these verses.  In fact, what Jesus said would have been shocking.  Jesus always threw a shocking element into virtually every story He told.

 

The shocking element in this story is a crop of thirty, sixty and a hundredfold. Why is that shocking?  Most things I’ve read suggest that an average crop would be about 7.5 fold. One gentleman in Vermont bragged about planting 30 pounds of winter wheat on 1/8^th acre and harvested 250 pounds.

Most expectations are a harvest of 50 pounds of wheat for every 7 pounds planted.  Because of rising fears about world population and diminishing crops there is much research and development going into high-yield crops, but by anyone’s standards, what Jesus is talking about is a massive harvest. 

 

When He says this soil produced a 3,000, 6,000 and 10,000 percent increase He is way outside the expectation of what they would normally think.  And yet, that’s exactly what He says.

 

So that’s the story.  We’ve got six kinds of soil coming in contact with seed.  And humanly speaking, it’s not that difficult to understand.  And if it were not Jesus telling it, we wouldn’t be tempted to say it’s not that big of a deal.

 

Seed falling on hard ground doesn’t germinate.  Instead it gets eaten by birds and crushed underfoot.  Seed falling on rocky soil may grow for a little while but it can’t get any water, so the sun dries it up and it dies.  And sometimes weeds and thorns choke out plants.

 

On the other hand, seed falling into good soil is going to be productive and it will differ based upon the nutrients and the components in that given soil and just to be ridiculous, some crops do really well.

 

But so what? What’s the meaning of it?”  Well, before I tell you the meaning of it, let’s take a look at

 

 

verse 9

That phrase appears eight times in the New Testament.  It’s a call to pay attention.  So for the third time in nine verse, the Lord says, “Listen!  Behold!  Hear what I’m saying!”

 

Verse 10

 

We don’t know the time gap there. We don’t know how long it took to dismiss the crowd. We don’t know how long the rolled that story around in their thoughts without any explanation.

 

But eventually they asked Him to explain the story. What does this mean?  Unfortunately we don’t have time to look at the meaning tonight so we’ll stop there and

 

Now that is the parable, the hearers, and not the explanation. So what does it mean?  Well, unfortunately we don’t have time to get into the meaning of it tonight.  But I promise you next time we’ll look at in detail and try to put it all together for you.

 

Let’s pray.