Ground That Keeps It

The Reading That Is Handed Out

Modern teaching turns this parable into a question about the reader. Four soils are laid out, the hearer is asked which one he is, and he is told to become the fourth.

Underneath that lesson sits a different question than the one the parable asks. Modern teaching has one message, and that message is the door. The blood. The good news. Coming in. Everything hangs on the moment a man passes through it. So when that house reaches this parable, it reads a door here too — four responses to an invitation — and the three failed grounds become three people who never truly came in.

There is no door anywhere in this parable. The sowing has already happened before the first ground is named, and it happened in all four cases. The seed is in the ground. What the parable takes up is what was done with it afterward, which is the part that house has nothing to say about, because the law is the part it left out.

This is also the one parable Yahushua explains line by line. He names the seed, the birds and the thorns. Every image is handed over inside the text, and a house that was given the meanings still arrives at a personality quiz, because it never stops to ask what the word was. The parable is not asking which soil a man is. It is asking whether the word Yahuah put in him is still growing.

The Question Being Answered

Mark 4 opens with Yahushua going out to the sea to teach by parables. The scene that produced it is the chapter before.

Scribes had come down from Jerusalem saying He had Beelzebub. His own kin had gone out to take Him. His mother and brethren stood outside the house calling for Him, and a crowd sat around Him on the inside. He answered the room by asking who His mother and His brethren were, and then answered it Himself. Whosoever shall do the will of Yahuah is His brother, and His sister, and mother (Mark 3:35). The last word spoken before the parable begins is a test, and the test is doing.

Then He tells a story about one seed and four grounds. When the crowd was gone the disciples asked about it, and His answer set the weight of the whole thing:

And he said unto them, Know ye not this parable? and how then will ye know all parables? — Mark 4:13

Every other parable is read through this one. That is not a claim made about the parable, but a claim made inside it.

Four Grounds Already Standing in the Room

What follows is an observation, not the parable’s own claim, and it is offered because of where Mark set the two scenes. Four groups stood around Yahushua in that house, and He told a story about four grounds before any had left.

The scribes came down from Jerusalem, heard what He taught, and said it came from Satan (Mark 3:22). The wayside is the only one of the four grounds where Satan is named, and Yahushua says he comes immediately and takes the word out of the heart (Mark 4:15). The men who charged Him with working by Satan are described as the ground where Satan carries the word off. Nothing got in. Nothing had been opened to take it in.

The crowds came for the healings, pressing in so hard He kept a small boat ready to push off from the shore (Mark 3:9). That is real gladness and it is immediate, and Luke’s word for the stony ground is exactly that — they hear and receive the word with joy (Luke 8:13). Mark does not follow that crowd out of the chapter, but it shows how it came in. Fast, pressing, and after something.

His own family went out to take Him, saying He was beside Himself (Mark 3:21). What moved them was what was being said about Him, and thorns are named as the cares of this world (Mark 4:19). A household’s standing in front of the neighbours is one of the oldest cares there is.

Then there were the ones sitting around Him on the inside, and this one is not an observation at all. Yahushua identified them Himself, by the same test the parable uses. Whosoever shall do the will of Yahuah is His brother, and His sister, and mother (Mark 3:35). Doing. Not hearing, not sitting close, not sharing His blood.

One thing has to be said about the family, and it is the part that matters most. Looking like thorny ground in Mark 3 settled nothing about them. His brothers did not believe Him then (John 7:5), and one of those brothers is later found leading the assembly at Jerusalem (Acts 15:13). Ground that looked finished in one chapter was broken open later. Whatever this parable is, it is not a sentence handed down on a man for life.

The word going out of that house did not vary and it did not fail:

So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it. — Isaiah 55:11

Nothing in that verse allows for a word that fails on its own. It accomplishes. Same word, four grounds, four outcomes. So when nothing grows, the question is about the field.

The Seed Named

Yahushua names it flat. The sower sows the word (Mark 4:14). Luke records the same line as the word of Yahuah (Luke 8:11).

Christianity says that same sentence. The seed is the word of God. The agreement is real, and it reaches exactly as far as the words and no further, because the two houses do not mean the same thing by them.

In the modern reading the word sown is the announcement that a man is forgiven, taken in once and settled. Read from the Hebrew Scriptures it is instruction. Moses opened his final song by saying his teaching would fall as the rain and his speech as the dew upon the grass (Deuteronomy 32:1-2), and what follows in that song is the covenant — what Yahuah gave Israel, what Israel did with it, and what came of it. The rain Moses is describing is what Yahuah said to do.

Same label. Different seed. One house sows an announcement, the other sows the law of Yahuah, and everything downstream turns on which one was planted. The parable does not name the sower, and nothing here will name him either. Mark says only that the sower sows. The story turns on ground.

The Ground Named

Yahushua does not define the ground, because the hearers already had it defined. Jeremiah joined the field and the heart inside one command:

For thus saith Yahuah to the men of Judah and Jerusalem, Break up your fallow ground, and sow not among thorns. Circumcise yourselves to Yahuah, and take away the foreskins of your heart, ye men of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem. — Jeremiah 4:3-4

Break up the ground, and circumcise the heart. One instruction in two pictures, spoken in the same breath. The plow and the heart are the same object, so the ground is not a temperament or a set of circumstances a man was handed. The ground is his heart. It is also not fixed — fallow ground is ground gone hard from sitting unworked, and men are told to break up their own. Moses said Yahuah would do that work Himself, circumcising the heart so a man could love Him (Deuteronomy 30:6). Ezekiel puts it in field terms and names the second soil long before the parable was told:

A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them. — Ezekiel 36:26-27

Mark’s stony ground has a stony heart under it, and Ezekiel does not leave the picture half finished. A heart of flesh, then walking in what Yahuah laid down, then keeping it. Soil first, then crop, in the parable’s own order.

Jeremiah names what gets planted in ground like that. Yahuah says He will put His law in their inward parts and write it in their hearts (Jeremiah 31:33). That verse is handed around as the moment the law was retired. It says the opposite in plain words. The law was not removed under the new covenant. It was moved, out of stone and into the ground this parable is about.

Fruit After His Kind

The piece that separates the two readings was settled on the third day of the world.

And Yahuah said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. — Genesis 1:11

Seed brings forth after its kind. Whatever the seed was, that is what comes up. An apple seed does not give figs. That is the rule Yahuah built into the ground, and every sowing picture in Scripture runs on it.

Now hold the modern reading against that rule. The seed is said to be an announcement — a man is forgiven — and then he is told to bear fruit. But no one can say what fruit an announcement produces, because an announcement is not a kind of plant. So the empty space gets filled with whatever the teacher has on hand. Warmer feelings. Better attendance. General improvement. A man plants one thing and is told to grow something else.

Read the other way there is no empty space at all. The seed is the law of Yahuah. The fruit is the keeping of that law. What went in is what comes out, which is the order Ezekiel gave — a new heart, then walking in the statutes, then keeping the judgments and doing them. The heart is the soil. The law is the seed. The keeping of it is the crop. One kind, start to finish.

A fruit list most readers know by heart ends with a line that gets read straight past:

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law. — Galatians 5:22-23

Against such there is no law. That is usually taken to mean the list replaced the law. Read it as it sits. It says the law has nothing standing against these things, and it does not, because every one of them was already commanded. Love Yahuah with all your heart (Deuteronomy 6:5). Love your neighbour as yourself (Leviticus 19:18). Rejoice before Him at His appointed times (Deuteronomy 16:14), and Israel was warned that failing to serve Him with joyfulness would cost them everything (Deuteronomy 28:47). Longsuffering is the word Yahuah uses of Himself (Exodus 34:6). The fruit of the Spirit is not a replacement for what Yahuah said. It is a description of a man in whom it took root and came up.

The Three That Fail

The wayside is a path, packed hard by traffic, where the seed sits on top because nothing opened to take it in. Yahushua names the birds Himself, and nothing is added here.

The thorns are named by Yahushua as the cares of this world, the deceitfulness of riches, and the desires for other things (Mark 4:19). Moses gave that same sequence to a nation about to get rich. When you are full, and your houses are built, and your herds and silver are multiplied, your heart is lifted up and you forget Yahuah — and Moses defines forgetting Him as not keeping His commandments (Deuteronomy 8:11-14). The thorns are not poverty and not hardship. They are a full life that crowded out what was planted, and the first thing crowded out is the keeping.

The stony ground settles what the parable is measuring, and it does it by winning. That ground had the best reaction in the story. It took the word in right away. Luke says it received the word with joy. It came up faster than the good ground did. If this parable were grading how a man responds when the word arrives, the stony ground takes it outright.

It is one of the three that fail. It springs up fast and dies fast, and the reason given is that it has no root. When trouble comes because of the word, it withers (Mark 4:16-17). Jeremiah drew the same picture — the man who trusts Yahuah is a tree planted by the waters, spreading his roots by the river, whose leaf stays green when the heat comes (Jeremiah 17:5-8). Heat does not make a tree fail. It only shows where the roots went.

So the parable is not grading reaction. Reaction shows on the first day, and not one of the four grounds is judged on the first day. They are judged at harvest, on one question. Is it still there, and did it produce.

What Is Actually Being Tested

All four grounds hear, so hearing is not the line either. Ezekiel was sent to people who came in crowds to listen to him, and Yahuah told him plainly that he was a pleasant song to them — they heard his words and would not do them (Ezekiel 33:31-32). By this parable’s measure that is wayside, stony and thorny ground filling a room together.

Luke preserves the word that closes the matter:

But that on the good ground are they, which in an honest and good heart, having heard the word, keep it, and bring forth fruit with patience. — Luke 8:15

Keep it. Not produce something new. Keep the thing that was planted. That is what separates the fourth ground from the other three, and it is the only word in the four that says what a man does with a seed already in the ground.

Scripture had already put that man on the page:

But his delight is in the law of Yahuah; and in his law doth he meditate day and night. And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper. — Psalm 1:2-3

Every element of the good ground stands in those two verses, and the psalm gives the root before it gives the tree. This is where the modern reading collapses on itself. A house that teaches the law was set aside has pulled up the very root Psalm 1 names, and then wonders why so little comes up.

The Verdict

Two houses read this parable and are not answering the same question. One uses it to work out who was truly converted, which is why the three failed grounds are a permanent problem for it. A house whose whole message ends at the entrance has nothing left to say to a man already inside, so it pulls the parable back to the entrance and turns four outcomes into four answers to an invitation.

The other takes the story as it stands. A word went out. It landed in four hearts. A season later, one of them still had it. The blood is the door, and the door is not what is in question here. What is in question is the law, and whether it is still growing in a man a season after it went in.

Judah is the warning underneath it. Jeremiah told that nation to break up its fallow ground, it did not, and he watched the harvest come in — wheat sown and thorns reaped (Jeremiah 12:13). They were pulled up by the roots.

Yahushua said this parable is the key to all the others (Mark 4:13). Every parable after it asks a version of the same question. What was done with what was given. Modern teaching holds all four meanings and still lands on a quiz, because it never asks what was sown. Once the seed is named as the law of Yahuah, the fruit is settled by the oldest rule in Scripture. Seed brings forth after its kind. What He put in is what He is looking for when He comes back through the field.