Monday, January 26, 2009

A Sower went forth to Sow; as Jesus observed.

A sower went forth to sow. Pr 11:
[24] There is that scattereth, and yet increaseth; and there is that withholdeth more than is meet, but it tendeth to poverty.
...may have been the inspiration for a parable of Jesus Christ. While that water of life soaks into a flowerpot of soil in your mind, I'll attend to an item of business that we overlooked last entry.

We looked at Satan's premier lie, and his first. We also took a run at what might have been a premier truth of God's. For completeness, we should take a moment to know his 1st truth. Gen 1:
[1] In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
[2] And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
[3] And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
[4] And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
[5] And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

Evolutionists, for some reason, think that IF there IS a God, this God should still accommodate their own theory of the order in which things should have been created, such that God _should_ have created a Universe, and then proceeded to solar system and earth by some ordered process, finishing up with man. In fact, by whatever process or mechanism Time came to be, at that point the stuff that there was had no form, and was defined as empty. God's first utterance in Time was a potentially untrue statement: "Light." He could not lie, and thus there was light. As we have seen before, in Isa 45:7, God created evil. If the light had been evil, it could not have tempted him (per Jas 1:13,) but this is a good time to examine the context of my previous allusion to Isa 45:
[5] I am the LORD, and there is none else, there is no God beside me: I girded thee, though thou hast not known me:
[6] That they may know from the rising of the sun, and from the west, that there is none beside me. I am the LORD, and there is none else.
[7] I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.
[8] Drop down, ye heavens, from above, and let the skies pour down righteousness: let the earth open, and let them bring forth salvation, and let righteousness spring up together; I the LORD have created it.

While Isaiah did not accommodate a bullet point outline, and he uses language from which it is hard to build syllogisms, he still conveys meaning and communicates with poetic beauty. Since God dictated it, we should observe that God is capable of figurative argumentation, as well as literal.

Whatever the case, God evaluated the light, and found it met the criterion of being good, noted it, and went on about the rest of Creation accordingly... we may not have all the info there is to know about the process.

That being taken care of, we return to Christ's parable of The Sower. So far, we have restricted ourselves to abstract arguments, including a limited number of logical constructs, but since the Gospel of forgiveness was implemented by Jesus, it is appropriate that we should give his own illustrations their due (I have previously suggested a contemplation of "The Parable of the Talents.") He opens the discussion with the elementary illustration of the occasion upon which a liberal distributer increases - a farmer sowing seed. He got a lot of mileage out of this one, as I hope to note elsewhere, but in this context, we should not neglect to answer a basic question: Could Jesus lie? As a man, I think that he had the ability, but he may have been restricted in that regard too, like his God (Ps 22:1, Mt 27:46, see here also, with regard to the quote "The LORD said unto my Lord,") Regardless, he surely did not say that there was a sower he knew for purposes of deceiving us... I think there was, because most other parables begin with: "The Kingdom of Heaven is like..."

This sower, then, sowed seed as follows: Mt 13:
[3] And he spake many things unto them in parables, saying, Behold, a sower went forth to sow;
[4] And when he sowed, some seeds fell by the way side, and the fowls came and devoured them up:
[5] Some fell upon stony places, where they had not much earth: and forthwith they sprung up, because they had no deepness of earth:
[6] And when the sun was up, they were scorched; and because they had no root, they withered away.
[7] And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprung up, and choked them:
[8] But other fell into good ground, and brought forth fruit, some an hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold.
[9] Who hath ears to hear, let him hear.
[10] And the disciples came, and said unto him, Why speakest thou unto them in parables?
[11] He answered and said unto them, Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given.
[12] For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.
[13] Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand.
[14] And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Esaias, which saith, By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see, and shall not perceive:...

The next three verses are richly instructive, but I'll limit our consideration here on the basis of Ps 119:103... I am aware that there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. The obverse argument is that his audience of multitudes exhibited ignorance, and didn't understand. For this reason, he went ahead and explained himself to his future apostles, then known as 'the twelve,' as follows:
[18] Hear ye therefore the parable of the sower.
[19] When any one heareth the word of the kingdom, and understandeth it not, then cometh the wicked one, and catcheth away that which was sown in his heart. This is he which received seed by the way side.
[20] But he that received the seed into stony places, the same is he that heareth the word, and anon with joy receiveth it;
[21] 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.
[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.
[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.

The point I would like to draw out here is this: By the same process that we are supposed to obey Jno 14:
[1] Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me.

...we are not helpless to be made whatever soil the devil chooses... we have control over the process. To be sure, Ecc 10:
[2] A wise man's heart is at his right hand; but a fool's heart at his left.

...it may be an exercise in dexterity to control it, but we CAN choose to understand and obey as good ground. What we may not be in a position to control is the extent of the harvest. In the effort to control my own heart, I have been able to observe the following.

1. If we continually find the Bird's taking away the seed for their OWN use, like verse 4 implies, we can still till the soil by obeying Ps 1:
[2] But his delight is in the law of the LORD; and in his law doth he meditate day and night.
...just as Jesus must have been doing, just to get the idea.

2. The dexterity can be improved by prayer: Jas 1:
[5] If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.

Jesus tended to use very simple examples, so I hope this is of some use to all and sundry. If we get temporarily off course, there is no need to return to the starting point and begin again. Like an intercontinental jetliner, just make a course adjustment, and keep a vector on for that place where our treasure should be.

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