Not everyone is prepared to hear and accept the Truth. We often invest so much time and energy in believing a certain thing, that it becomes almost impossible to change that belief. Too many other beliefs would have to change. So we reject new evidence in order to maintain our original belief system. We narrow the input in order to control the output.
If Al Gore were to wake up today and find out that CO2 had nothing to do with the temperature on the planet, it would be almost impossible for him to accept it. His whole life, career, identity, investments, persona, ‘expertise’ would be out the window. He would have to reinvent everything in his life, because everything has global warming woven into it. And every thread of global warming would have to be removed, leaving a tattered tapestry of a life.
If the billionaire Warren Buffett woke up tomorrow and discovered that all his wealth and his ability to gain more wealth had been taken away, it would be nearly impossible for him to continue. Money is at the core of his being. Without it he would lose his defining feature.
The crowds have again gathered around Jesus to such an extent that He must get into a boat, push away from the shoreline and teach from the boat. This time of preaching is characterized by Mark as being filled with parables. Mark gathers the stories together and uses them to advance his understanding of Jesus as the Servant of the LORD, the Messiah.
A parable is a story about everyday life that teaches a spiritual truth or principle. Almost all parables have one main lesson. The elements support the lesson and the details shouldn’t be pulled apart and examined under a microscope. To put it another way, every detail does not become a lesson in itself. The lesson comes from the whole.
So what is the lesson of this parable? Jesus explains the lesson in detail to His disciples, because even they didn’t understand how parables worked. If you read these verses you will see one thing that continues to change: the soil where the seed is sown. Same seed. Same person scattering the seed on the ground. Presumable the same weather, rain, warmth and sunshine. The one thing that changes is the soil.
So the condition of the soil is the point of the parable. Some soils are prepared, readied by someone else, to receive seed and produce a crop uninhibited by outside factors. What is your soil like?
The Arnold Journey 