| “And He spake many things unto them in parables, saying, Behold, a sower went forth to sow; and when he sowed, some seeds fell by the way side, and the fowls came and devoured them up” (Matthew 13:3-4). |
| After the Lord Jesus was rejected by Israel as the true Messiah, it tells us in verse 1 of our chapter (Matthew 13) that He went “out of the house, and sat by the seaside.” The house is a picture of Israel, and the seaside is a picture of the Gentile nations. The Lord Jesus was going outside the nation of Israel and was going to bring blessing to the whole world. |
| He shows us what He was going to do by telling us the parable of the sower. We do not sow seed like this today where I live, as most of it is now done by machines pulled behind tractors. But in those days they worked the land up, and then a man went out with a bag of seed over his shoulder. He scattered the seed by hand, and of course it fell on different kinds of soil. The Lord Jesus uses this parable to show us what happens to the Word of God when it is preached, for the Word of God is the good seed. |
| Here in today’s verse we find the first kind of soil. The “wayside” is a term for a hard path beside the field, where people walked. As you can imagine, the ground was all packed down hard from the many feet that walked on it, and there is no way that any seed that fell there would grow. No, the birds quickly ate it. |
| Later in the chapter, the Lord Jesus explains that this is a picture of the devil catching away the good seed that was sown, so that it never had a chance to grow. The ground was hard, and our hearts are sometimes hard too, so that they do not want to receive the Word of God. Then Satan snatches away that seed by filling our minds with many other things. How many people have heard the gospel but have had Satan snatch away that good seed that they heard! |
