Whoever does God's will - Mark 3:31-35
Mark mentioned Jesus'
mother and
brothers, but did not mention Joseph. Perhaps this means that Joseph was already dead by that time. Jesus' family made another attempt to get Jesus to come to his senses and come home with them. Jesus continued with his ministry to the family of God. Doing the
will of God is the mark of the true member of Jesus' family. The will of God was Jesus' priority.
Parables of the Kingdom - Mark 4:1-34
Verses 11, 26, and 30 make it clear that the theme of this chapter is the
kingdom of God. More specifically, these parables illustrate what the kingdom of God looks like in an environment of unbelief. The crowds were searching for a miracle worker. The Jewish leaders were calling him Satan. His family thought he had lost his mind. These parables are Jesus' teaching about the Kingdom of God in the middle of that kind of misunderstanding and unbelief.
Crowd size - Mark 4:1
Again Mark emphasized the size of the
crowd that Jesus was attracting.
Jesus' favorite teaching device - Mark 4:2
The word that is translated
parables was used to denote a wide range of figures of speech, from short sayings to long stories. The parable seems to have been Jesus' favorite teaching device.
Results were very different - Mark 4:3-8
Ancient Palestine was one of the few places where farmers first scattered their seed and then plowed the earth. The result was that the seed fell on different kinds of soil and that's why the results were often very different.
Listen - Mark 4:9
Jesus called on all those who heard the parable to pay close attention. It was a serious warning not to ignore his teaching. Notice that in verse 3 he began the parable with the word,
Listen. Just like this warning at the end it stressed the importance of what Jesus was saying.
Even this group did not understand - Mark 4:10
Verse 10 describes a time that was probably very shortly after Jesus had taught the large crowd from the boat (4:1). It involved the twelve disciples plus a larger group of followers who seem to be as genuinely committed to him as the twelve. Even this group did not understand Jesus' teaching in the parable.
Mystery - Mark 4:11
In this context the
mystery of the kingdom of God was that the kingdom was powerfully present in the preaching and miracles of Jesus the Messiah. But it was present in such an unexpected form that many people missed it altogether.
Hard-heartedness of the Israelites - Mark 4:12
Jesus quoted Isaiah 6:9, 10 to explain why he told parables. In their historical setting in Isaiah those verses were a condemnation of the hard-heartedness of the Israelites of Isaiah's day. Jesus told his disciples that he used parables because they both revealed and concealed truth at the same time. He used them to obscure the truth before the eyes of those who had hardened their hearts to the things of God and refused to believe. (See note on 3:29. Note also Matt. 7:6; Acts 18:5, 6.)
The word that Jesus sowed - Mark 4:13-20
Jesus wanted his disciples to
understand the parable so he explained it to them. In his preaching Jesus had sowed the word of the gospel of the kingdom of God.
Satan takes away the word that Jesus sowed.
Tribulation …
persecution … the cares of the world … the deceitfulness of riches were all expressions that would have been meaningful to the suffering Christians in Rome who first received this Gospel. See
WLC 195.
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