Jesus often spoke in parables through which He taught core truth. Each one explains or reinforces things we need to know about God in order to understand what He is doing with mankind.
The teaching about the sower has many levels to it, but it is also one of the most sweeping of all of Jesus’ explanations. Let’s take a moment and consider the weight and nature of all of Jesus’ words. He did not merely speak for God – He IS God. His words are the breathe of God Himself.
Historians, philosophers, heretics, and the religiously zealous often take what Jesus did and taught and minimize both. By choosing to mis-report what happened, how it happened, and why it happened – we lose the plain sense of what God has spoken.
It is actually a good exercise to do your own inquiry as to the great religions of the world. Mentored by God (pages 136-138) can give you a great launch point for this. When determining the authenticity of a religious leader or the beliefs of their followers, always go as closely to source materials as you can.
When it comes to Jesus the Nazarene, several things make Him shine among sages of antiquity. First, there is the choice of Abraham to become the Father of a nation (the Jews) who would testify to the rest of the world about the way to return to God by faith. Next, there are numerous specific statements by the Hebrew prophets over centuries, which tell us about the coming of the Messiah Who will save the world.
We then have the actual appearance of Jesus in 0 AD. According to the scriptures, this first coming was promised before the foundations of the world, and provides the only way the total mess of humanity can be delivered: by God providing a blood sacrifice of His own.
So the Father’s own Son left heaven and came to the earth. He would teach like no other sage in history, He would do miracles never before seen or imagined, and thousands of people would see Him and then kill Him. And this was not done in a corner. It occurred in the middle of the expansive Roman empire, in what the Bible calls the fullness of times.
I heard a quote once that “the Bible is not a book man could write if he would, or would write if he could.” It is way too unflattering to the human race, and much to expansive and divine to be manipulated at the source. In the first century the world was simply overtaken by the coming of Christ. It did not take long, however, for humans to began to rewrite and recast what had authentically occurred.
Pages 38-41 of Kingdom: Finding Your True Self talks about the great sowing plan of the Sower. This parable encompasses every human who has ever lived or ever will live on the face of the earth. My, my, my.