The Teaching of Jesus - Parables: Dust to Glory with R.C. Sproul

0:05 When we look in the seventh chapter of the gospel of John, we have a brief passage there that I think is interesting in that it gives some insight to the way in which Jesus communicated as a teacher. The question was being discussed by some of the multitude that followed Jesus regarding His identity. And in verse 40 of chapter 7, we read these words, Therefore, many from the crowd, when they heard this saying, said, Truly this is the prophet. Others said, This is the Christ. But some said, Will the Christ come out of Galilee? Has not the Scripture said that the Christ comes from the seed of David and from the town of Bethlehem, where David was? So there was a division among the people because of Him. Now, some of them One wanted to take Him, but no one laid hands on Him.

1:07 And then the officers came to the chief priests and Pharisees who said to them, Why have you not brought Him? And the officers answered, No man ever spoke like this man." On another occasion, we read the response of those who had been sent to arrest Jesus, that they said of Him that this man speaks not as the scribes and the Pharisees, but as one having authority. Now, the word that is translated authority there is the word exousia, which sometimes is translated authority, and other times power. And literally, the word has a somewhat different meaning. It has the prefix ex, which we know means out of or from, and we have the participial form of the verb to be. And so, literally, what this word exousia means, which is translated authority is being or substance.

2:23 So, in a literal sense, when it is said of Jesus that He spoke exousia, it means He didn't speak lightly or frivolously, that His words were not insubstantial, but He spoke with the authority of substance. He spoke out of the essence of things. Now, very early in chapter 7, Jesus Himself had made this remark concerning His own teaching, where He said in verse 16, My doctrine is not Mine, but His who sent Me. And if anyone wills to do His will, he shall know concerning the doctrine whether it is from God, or whether I speak on my own authority." Now, one of the things that captivates our imagination as we examine the life and ministry of Jesus is indeed His teaching.

3:32 Not only the content, which is extraordinary enough, but the manner and style of teaching that Jesus used. Even those who don't embrace Christ as the Messiah or as the living Son of God have spoken in admiring terms about His pedagogical skill. Here was a man who was obviously a master teacher. And perhaps the thing for which Jesus is most famous was His mastery of the literary form of the parable. And we're going to talk about that a little bit in a moment. But parables are not as commonplace in Scripture as they may seem to be to us who are so familiar with Jesus' selection of this method of teaching because He uses this method so often.

4:33 Occasionally, we will encounter parables in the Old Testament, the most famous of which probably is the parable that the prophet Nathan used when he confronted David about his sin. In the New Testament, we find many parables of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels. No parables in the Gospel of John, and not a single parable anywhere else in the New Testament apart from the Synoptic Gospels. But not only does Jesus use parables, but He uses them abundantly. Now, first of all, we have to take a moment and ask the question, what is a parable? And why is a parable called a parable? What's the significance of parables? Why did Jesus speak in parables?

5:31 On the surface, it may seem that the answers to those questions would be quite easy, but on second glance, they become more and more complicated. First of all, we need to distinguish between a parable and similes and metaphors, because they are not the same thing. We use similes frequently in our own manner of speech. A simile is something that is like something else. We may say, so-and-so is like a helicopter, always spinning around where he is. That's the use of simile. And Jesus makes frequent use of simile. He'll say, to what should I liken this generation? And He will say, it's like this or it's like that. Jesus also made frequent use of metaphors, particularly in the gospel of John, where we have the list of the famous I Am's, the I Am statements.

6:33 I am the door through which men must enter. I am the vine, you are the branches. I am the good shepherd. Now, he obviously was not speaking literally about being a door or being a vine, but he was using figurative language in the form of metaphor. Another figure or type of speech that he used frequently in his teaching was the use of hyperbole. Now, a hyperbole is an intentional exaggeration that is used to underscore or emphasize an important point. I remember in the debate over the inerrancy of Scripture, one very respected scholar questioned the inerrancy of the Bible and the infallibility of the teaching of Jesus because Jesus, on speaking of faith on one occasion, spoke of the mustard seed that grows into a huge bushy tree in which He said the mustard seed was the smallest seed.

7:56 And critics have said, wait a minute, we know of other varieties of seeds that are microscopic in their size that are in fact smaller than the mustard seed, and objectively, in terms of reality, the mustard seed is not really the smallest seed. But here, this would be an attack on the trustworthiness and credibility both of Scripture and of Jesus where Jesus is plainly using this quite acceptable form of speech. Elsewhere, we'll find statements in the gospel such as, "...all Capernaum went out to hear Jesus." We speak in the same way. A press report may talk about a multitude that gathers to celebrate a world championship in baseball and say that when the victorious team came home from the World Series, the whole city came out to meet Him.

8:50 Now, nobody understands that to mean that every man, woman, and child, and every infirm person or invalid actually came out of their houses to greet the returning team. That's hyperbole, and it's a legitimate form of communicating truth. But again, as I say, the most famous form of communication that is related to Jesus is the parable. Now, a parable, the word parable, again, is made up of a prefix, para, and the bull at the end. And actually, the word is a combination, sort of a jamming together, of this prefix, which means alongside of.

9:49 And the root verb that is the source of the root of this word is the Greek word that means to throw. And so, literally, a parable is something that is thrown alongside of something else. Now St. Augustine, when he was teaching his students on the rules of proper biblical interpretation, said the three most important rules that must be observed when interpreting a passage from Scripture are these three. Number one, context. Number two, context. Number three, context. And Augustine was saying, it's context, context, context. You've heard the statement about the three most important things that determine the value of property of real estate. Location, location, location. So we could say that the three most important elements of dynamic communication.

10:59 Our illustration, illustration, illustration. And the principal form of illustration that Jesus used to throw alongside His proclamations and declarations of truth was the parable. Now, parables can be short or parables can be long. We have a tendency to think of parables simply in terms of the lengthy stories such as the parable of the prodigal son or the parable of the good Samaritan. But one can have a very short parable, such as, if the blind lead the blind, they both fall in the ditch.

11:56 That's a parable. It's basically one sentence long, but it is a parable. And when you notice those shorter, more abbreviated types of parables in the teaching of Jesus, then you will see that the number of parables that are sprinkled through His teaching reach into the scores, and not just a handful as we may sometimes suppose. Now often parables take the role of the riddle, and they are used in situations of tension and of conflict, and sometimes they become a device or a technique to trap one's opponent in a debate, and Jesus was the master of that. You recall when He was engaged in a discussion with the Pharisees concerning their interpretation of the Old Testament law, and Jesus had reminded them about the great commandment, that thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and all thy strength and all thy mind and all of that, and you must love your neighbor as yourself.

13:17 The Pharisees were engaged in a dispute as, Who is my neighbor? And so they came to Jesus, and they said, Well, who is My neighbor? Now, Jesus could have answered that directly and simply and said to them, Well, the guy that lives next door to you, or the person that lives on your street, or He could have said, Everybody in the world is your neighbor. But that's not how He chose to answer the question. What did He do? Well, who is My neighbor? Jesus said, Well, a man went down from Jericho, and he fell among thieves. And then he goes on to tell the story of the Good Samaritan. And when he's finished with that story, with that profound illustration of compassion, he then looks at his opponents and said, Who acted as a neighbor here?

14:21 So, we see that this is the kind of thing that Jesus used in the midst of conflict and of tension and of debate. Now, one of the most difficult things to deal with with respect to the parables has to do with a somewhat enigmatic statement that is found in Mark's gospel at the time when Jesus introduces one of His most famous parables, the parable of the sower. We know that story of how the sower went out to sow and the seed fell on the ground and all of what happened as a result of that. And after He had pronounced this parable, He said to those who were listening to Him, He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

15:19 And the disciples didn't quite get it. They didn't quite understand the point of this parable. And so, they came to Him, and we read in verse 10 of chapter 4 of Mark that when He was alone, around Him with the twelve asked Him about the parable. And He said to them, To you it has been given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God, but to those who are outside all things come in parables, so that seeing they may see but not perceive, and hearing they may hear and not understand, lest they should turn and their sins be forgiven them." Now that is really somewhat jarring to our sensibilities, isn't it?

16:19 That Jesus said, you know, one of the reasons that I use parables to teach is on the one hand to reveal the mysteries of the kingdom of God that I am announcing to you and to those who have ears to hear. But the same time that these parables are used to illustrate and to clarify the truths that I'm announcing, there is a double-edged sword involved in this technique because to To those who do not have the grace of the illumination of the Holy Spirit, actually the parable serves to conceal the truth from them, lest seeing they may see and hearing they may hear.

17:15 Does this not remind us of the prophecy of Isaiah in the Old Testament and of the commission of Isaiah when God consecrated to the task to go and preach to this people and saying that seeing they would not see, hearing they would not hear, lest they repent and be converted, because God had visited His judgment on those people who didn't want to hear His Word. And His punishment was a kind of poetic justice. If you don't want to hear the truth of God, God said, okay, I'll stop your ears. If you don't want to behold My glory, then I'll conceal My glory from you. And in a sense, God was delivering these hard-hearted people over to their own wickedness. And so when Christ comes and teaches His parables from the vantage point of the twentieth century where we've had the benefit of the whole New Testament exposition of the teaching of Jesus and sermon after sermon on the parables of Jesus, we tend to think of the parables as simple little techniques to make things very easy for anybody.

18:32 But that wasn't the original purpose. To those who were perishing, whose hearts were closed to the teaching of Jesus, they were unfathomable riddles that they were hearing. They had no idea what He's talking about, and even the disciples themselves here didn't fully grasp the significance of this parable that's called the parable of the soil or the parable of the sower, depending on the person describing it. They didn't get it until Jesus sat them down and explained the significance and the meaning of it. Now, there's some principles that we need to know whenever we meet parables in the New Testament. The first one is that a parable normally, and I say normally, is not an allegory. And the church got herself in lots of trouble historically by trying to interpret the parables as if they were allegories.

19:37 Now, you're familiar with that particular genre of literature that we call the allegory. We think of Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown, or perhaps the most famous allegory of all time is Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, where every element in the story has some particular symbolic meaning. everything stands for something. And the temptation is to look at the parables of Jesus and read them all as if they were allegories. Now, it becomes problematic because the parable of the sower has strong elements of allegory within it, and the wicked husbandman is another parable that has elements of allegory in it. But in the main, the basic rule of interpreting parables is that most of the parables are delivered with the idea of communicating one central critical point.

20:45 And if you try to find too much hidden in the incidental elements of the story, you'll end up with all kinds of bizarre theories and distortions of the Word of God. And so we need to be careful about that. Another thing that's been observed about parables is that they tend to follow the universal principle of storytelling, of folktales, which is called the rule of three. If you want to know the rule of three in our own culture, think of the story of the three little bears. How many bears? Three bears. How many beds? Three beds. How many chairs? Three chairs. How many bowls of porridge? Three.

21:37 So, everything is set up in these cycles of three. And that's what you find in the parable of the sower, three different kinds of soil. In the parable of the prodigal son, you have three main actors. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, how many people are coming down the street after this person had fallen among thieves? Three. But there's also a rule of two, where sometimes in folk stories and in parables, you have two main characters to represent a contrast or a comparison to illustrate a point. Now, in the story of the prodigal son, you do have three characters, but so much of the tension and conflict in that story is between the two brothers. The one who left and wasted the Father's inheritance, and the one who remained behind and became fiercely jealous when the Father honored the returning Son.

22:42 So we see that, and we see one other principle frequently in the parables of Jesus, and that's the principle of comparison that is used with the phrase, how much more. Now, again, the central motif, not the only one, but the main motif of Jesus' parables was the kingdom of God. And again and again He would say, the kingdom of God is like unto this, and the kingdom of God is like unto that. But then He would build these major comparisons, such as the parable of the unjust judge, where The unjust judge is set in contrast to the just judgment of Almighty God. And the point of the parable at the end would be something like this. If a worldly, wicked, politically corrupt person like this unjust judge will listen to the prayers of this importunate widow, how much more will your heavenly Father, who is just, listen to your groans and yearnings and prayers.

23:55 And so we see that how much more motif. Watch for it when you're reading the parables.