Luke 8:4 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters | Metropolitan Tabernacle

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Luke 8:4

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This was one of the biggest crowds ever to come into the presence of Christ, people out of every city, every town and village also, and he spoke to them in parables, everyday illustrations of the kingdom of heaven. ‘A sower went out to sow his seed.’ The sower is Christ himself, and indeed anybody who represents Christ, anybody who preaches about Christ, any individual who speaks about Christ, to a member of the family, to a neighbour, or to people in general. What is the seed? The seed is the word of God. It is the message of the gospel. Now a seed, this is very interesting illustration for the message of God, because a seed is a given thing. You cannot manufacture a seed. The seed was ready made, and the way of salvation is like that. It is a given thing. It wasn't invented by any human mind. It wasn't thought up by religious people. It was given by God. Only God knows on what terms he will save us and forgive us and take us to heaven, and what we have to do to seek him and find him. No human being can invent a method of salvation, a way of becoming a child of God, or see into these things. The gospel, if we understand it, tells us how to come to God, what God has done to make a way of forgiveness for us, how we are reconciled with him and walk with him. The first type of person is represented here. ‘And as he sowed, some fell by the way side; and it was trodden down, and the fowls of the air devoured it’ – the wayside hearer. Christ explained this a little more in verse 12. ‘Those by the way side are they that hear; then cometh the devil, and taketh away the word out of their hearts, lest they should believe and be saved.’ This person is represented by the hardened pathway. Some of the seed falls on the pathway where people come and go and their feet tread it down and there is not soft earth there; it's like iron. The seed just rolls along the ground and before it has any possibility of taking root, it's snatched by the birds of the air. Well the ground represents us and we have to ask, ‘Am I a wayside hearer? Am I described by this hardened pathway?’ This is about unimpressionable person, programmed people, brainwashed people. So as far as the message of God is concerned, they are unimpressionable. They don’t give it a moment's thought. If they ever hear it or read about it, it doesn’t make any impression on them. They listen in an utterly superficial way. It is like life in a box. This world is everything to them. They worship material things, the here and now, and they are completely taken up with the present. There is no room for the eternal, for the spiritual, for the great designer and maker of all things, the great issues of life. They are meaningless as far as they are concerned. Different people make efforts to reach them to get something into them, but it means nothing. You can be unimpressionable because you're naive. You can be unimpressionable because you're proud. You can be unimpressionable just because that's what other people around you seem to be, and you just follow suit. You can be unimpressionable because of the constant brainwashing of an unbelieving world.

Application

So that's the first type of person or personality type described here. Sometimes maybe you wake up in the morning and you have a sense of pointlessness. What's the purpose of life? That soon goes and disappears because you're like that hardened pathway, you can't take in any reflection or thought like that. Maybe you've done something terrible and you have just a moment of shame but it soon passes. You won't process that; you're just for the here and now and this present life. A thought of eternity perhaps, it won't last with you, and it won't make any impression on you. There are some very clever people in this position, some brilliant people endowed with powerful intellects. In many things they can excel, but when it comes to spiritual things they're just programmed, brainwashed, they can't take anything in. If you think you are anything like that, then be honest with yourself. This is a most dangerous and sorry state to be in: spiritually impenetrable, unmovable. You need to cry out to God to help you and to soften your heart and to change all this.

I know a man who with others built up a huge business in the USA growing house plants to be sold throughout the country. It was a great business. For it to be economic they had to pioneer a way of making these plants that could be sold and taken into homes very quickly. They couldn’t be allowed to develop in their normal cycle; it would take too long. It wouldn't pay. So they built massive greenhouses to get those plants ready for production, and they were on conveyor belts, passing under endless lights. You can simulate the sun or the effect of the sun on plants. You can even manufacture the soil that goes into the pots. They did that also. They didn't take real soil, they made it. But there was one component they could not make, and that was the seed. There had to be a real seed. The sower sowing his seed is a marvellous illustration of the word of God. You cannot make the word of God. It's from God. He gives it. You cannot make for yourself a way of salvation. You cannot get for yourself the forgiveness of God. You cannot impart to yourself new life, spiritual life. These things, and the message which speaks about them, come from God and from God alone. So the seed that the sower in the parable was sowing was something exclusively from God.

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Luke 8:4 Commentary and Bible Study