AN IMPORTANT PARABLE

In Matthew 13, there is a parable of seeds. Very simply, these seeds represent people who hear the Gospel’s Good News, and the parable describes what happens to each seed based on different circumstances. In this article, I’d like to dig into the seed talked about in verse 9:

“Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants.”

My reason for writing an article on this particular verse is a reaction to how many people I’ve spoken with who seem to have an incomplete or misinformed view of God based on trauma, adversity, or loss. As a Christ-follower in the pursuit of God’s truth and heart, and someone who greatly relates to this pain-induced disbelief, I feel incumbent to elevate awareness of this type of spiritual struggle and to bring clarity to people who are in the midst of this very experience.

First, a few points need to be made (for the sake of context) before we can clearly discuss the importance of the verse. Stay with me.

A CLOUDED MIND AND COMPROMISED FOUNDATION

To understand the Christian response to the “thorns” in the verse, we first need to understand the importance of knowing where we stand spiritually before adversity hits. Let’s call to mind the relevance of priorities, and how what we place ahead of everything else affects how we interact with the world around us. This is all based on what we believe, whether we understand what we believe or not.

That said, consider this. When our first pursuit in life is not the God of the Bible, our hearts are swayed by the ways of the world, and our hearts become defiled by its influences. As we are exposed to people who do not understand or receive the truth of God, their misinformation clouds their thinking and judgment. This, alongside the defiling of their heart, results in the agnosticism and powerlessness in their speech. Basically, if a person’s beliefs aren’t firmly placed in something with a strong foundation, then how they think and what they say will be just as compromised.

THE PEOPLE WHO ARE THORNS

There are people in our lives who act as “thorns,” who God places on our path to test our faith and to ground our relationship to Him. When we allow these thorns to choke our faith, it’s a reflection of our lack of dependence and trust in God. This is a reminder that when we come across toxic people who don’t have a love for God in them, we are to pray for them, but not allow their behavior or words to hinder our own personal relationship with God through Jesus.

Remember this, also—what we say comes from our heart, as Jesus says in Matthew 15:18. When our hearts are defiled by the world and not renewed by God through Scripture, what we say is ultimately not a reflection of our love for God, but a mirror of the defilement of our sin’s entanglements with God’s will for us (John 6:40).

SPECIFIC ADVERSITIES FITTING OUR SPIRITUAL NEEDS

What we believe about the adversities in life (thorns), and our understanding of their purpose, directly correlates with the way hardships interact with our reality and cause us to either crumble spiritually, or aid in helping us to understand there is something more at play than meets the eye. In order to understand that interaction, we need to understand the kind of God we’re talking about, and how that plays a role in the specific adversities He permits into our lives. Reason being, the kind of adversities we face are specific to the needs we have to spiritually grow, and God knows what we can handle with His help, and is refining us (Isaiah 48:10).

NOT SO POWERFUL AFTER ALL?

For many people, the idea of God is that He is powerful, that He may or may not be transcendent, and that He isn’t necessarily all-good. From this perspective, we have a God who allows adversity and suffering because though He may be powerful, maybe He’s not all-powerful. Maybe He’s good, but He’s not completely good; maybe He allows evil because He’s a little shady, Himself. Or maybe He’s not all-knowing, so He just can’t keep track of all the evil in existence today. Maybe it’s gotten out of hand and He’s just doing His best, but we’re paying for it here on Earth.

This kind of god could never hold up an entire religion on its own, and it would not cause someone to repent and change the way they live. That kind of god only leads to more questions, and unfortunately there is a generation (or maybe a couple) of people today who don’t ask enough questions; or, when they do, they don’t like the answer because it doesn’t benefit their idea of what God should be like in accordance with their worldly desires. We can’t have it both ways, and we can’t play judge with God. When we do, the conversation dies before it begins. Likewise, we can’t hold to a belief in a god who can’t even keep track of his own creation because if we can’t trust God, why follow him?

INCOMPATIBLE WORLDVIEWS

As our belief in God gets weak enough, He becomes “the universe”, or nature itself (Pantheism) in the eyes of the spiritually blind. This forces (or allows, depending on the way you look at it) the unbeliever to hold God under the lens that He is entirely impersonal and not at all omnipotent or all-loving. The concept of sin falls flat for these people because there is no foundation for objective morality in a worldview where God isn’t omnibenevolent (all-good).

But sin makes perfect sense in the worldview where an objectively good and all-loving God exists, where He permits free will out of the desire for His creation to have the ultimate freedom to choose Him, and where He also creates the capacity for choosing sin. Keep in mind, the abuse of free will is still evidence for the existence of free will, not evidence for the non-existence of the God who permits it.

GOD ALLOWS SUFFERING AND OFFERS COMFORT AND REST

This is the kind of God we can follow, believe in, and adhere to with faith. This type of God would allow suffering as a way to help us to turn to Him, desire closeness to Him, and seek Him above all else. Think about it this way. When we suffer, we desire comfort and counsel; God offers both, and is incapable of running out. When we follow God in Christ, He gives us rest for our souls:

Matthew 11:28-30 (NIV Version)

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” 

RELATIONSHIP OVER RELIGION

Let me draw a picture to make sure we’re all on the same page. If you’re like me, your upbringing included weekly church services, but religiosity was taught (rituals, rules, and what-not-to-dos’), not spiritual intimacy with a heavenly Father. And if you’re like me, childhood trauma caused a tremendous rift in your idea of what or who God really was, causing the experience of suffering to take on a stronger meaning than the notion of an existing God with unlimited power over all things while still allowing such horrible suffering to occur.

If this sounds even a little like you, then we both have an understanding as to how such traumatic suffering can play a pertinent role in leading to disbelief. Now, this isn’t the story for all unbelievers. But the common theme is that there is a misunderstanding of Scripture to begin with; worse yet, there is a betrayal of our understanding of God and His desires. We need to come to terms with God’s love for us, that His love for us is stronger than we can comprehend, in that He sent Jesus to die for us while we were still sinners, rather than requiring perfection from us first, which is impossible (Romans 5:8). 

What’s amazing about God that I wasn’t taught in school or church growing up is that God wants a relationship with me, and not just my “following the rules” attitude. He wants me. He wants you. That’s the God we believe in, and that’s the God in Christ we place our faith in.

BRINGING IN MATTHEW 13:9

What’s important about Matthew 13:9 that draws so closely to all of that I just laid out is, when people don’t have the Good News, the adversities of life become thorns. Those thorns can poke holes in our faith life, and our relationship to God, if we allow it. To put it differently, when we are bombarded with troubling circumstances and/or people in our lives, what we draw close to for encouragement and restoration is going to do two things:

1.) It will influence us to seek more of what has a strong impact on our suffering.

2.) It will solidify deeper roots in our natural inclination to search for answers and solutions from the sources we think will reduce our suffering.

Here’s the catch: If we are turning to anything or anyone besides Scripture and God, we are not going to find the peace, joy, and restoration we actually need. It’s really as simple as that. The deeper we dig into the wrong sources, the more searching we have to do because the truth isn’t there. We just find ourselves in a grave of misery. On the contrary, when we dig deeper into Scripture and find the truth of God, we dig deeper into the truth until eventually, we’re living in truth and desiring more just to maintain the relationship we’ve already established by turning away from the lies of the world and towards the God of heaven.

THE PATH OF DESPAIR LEADS TO UNBELIEF

When the people or circumstances in our lives only add to the stress we already have, we are more likely to fall to despair because the sources we’ve been relying on aren’t helping us. This is how doubt comes to play ball.

Ongoing despair can lead to spiritual disparagement, to the point of stagnancy and, ultimately, we begin to truly question our foundations altogether, thinking what we believed was never true at all—that the world is just the way it is no matter our concept of God.

WORKINGS OF THE DEMONIC REALM

At that point, omnipotence, omniscience and all the rest of God’s transcendent characteristics no longer hold any value or substantial weight in contrast to the depth of the darkness we’re facing. We don’t even care to open Scripture anymore, to pray, or to think our prayers are heard. Our hearts become hard, and before we know it, we’re back to being an unbeliever, denying the Holy Spirit and convinced we never heard from it at all.

This is spiritual deception driven by the principalities and powers of darkness in the unseen realm (Ephesians 6:12). It’s real, and the doubt we feel is evidence of the workings of the demonic realm. This is a huge thorn! Beware of this before it takes you this low.

Fortunately, just as real and even more powerful is the working of the grace of God through the Holy Spirit, able to keep us strong when faced with oppression. We must keep this in mind and keep our spirit in check by being aware that the obstacles we face are driven by the unseen realm, allowed by God for the purpose of challenging us to stay strong, vigilant, and close to Him, always.

SEARCH FOR TRUTH WHERE THE TRUTH LIVES

Remember, when faced with the adversities God allows, we are to seek His truth and His presence by remaining in Scripture, in prayer, and in obedience. The Bible isn’t just for reading, but applying for the sake of being equipped for every good work (2 Timothy 3:16-17).

We need to be well-aware of what we’re putting into our minds, and how we’re feeding our spirit. Those who don’t believe in the Bible or the God who wrote it with humans hands is looking to the world for answers, and the world is just as confused as they are. We gravitate towards movies, music, art, other books, and other people’s beliefs to try to figure out a mystery that is far too complex and intricate for us to explicate with human understanding. We need the wisdom of God and the Word of God to understand the God we’re looking for in all the wrong places and in all the wrong ways.

WORLDLINESS WILL LEAD US ASTRAY

The people in this world who follow other people, or who follow themselves, will only lead others on the pursuit of self-gratification. Sometimes we even confuse altruism with selflessness.

When we do things we consider good for the sake of it being “the right thing to do,” we are claiming that under a moral framework. But the only reason morality could possibly exist is because God created the standard for it. If God created the standard for what we’re judging as “right,” then our pursuit of altruism, just as much as the pursuit of self-gratification, is in vain if our pursuit of altruism is founded on the belief that there is no God. That kind of altruism still leads back to itself rather than an ideal that is set before us in Scripture to uphold to, to believe in, to crucify our fleshly desires to (Galatians 5:24), and to be reborn by; namely, Jesus Christ.

MANIPULATIVE AND CUNNING WAYS TO BE DECEIVED

Don’t let people who believe in themselves, or who believe in ideals without ideal-Creators, deceive you into believing in the world! The devil is very cunning and manipulative, he will look for ways to make living a certain way appear to be justifiable by human standards, but we live in a world created by a God who has higher standards than ours (Isaiah 55:8-9).

We can’t afford to make the mistake of living under false pretenses provided by minds that don’t have the wisdom of God, by hearts that don’t have a love for God in Christ, who haven’t committed their lives to living out the truth of God as known in Scripture. We can’t afford to be spiritually lazy by not asking the hard questions and getting to the root of what we don’t understand about living in a world created by God. What we do, say, think, believe—all matters.

HARD LOVE LOOKS LIKE MAKING THE RIGHT CHOICE

There is no way out of that fact, because what we believe and how we live will determine where we go when we die, and God is a God of righteousness just as He is a God of infinite love. He loves us enough to allow us to run to the gates of hell if we really don’t want to accept that we are sinners in need of Jesus. That is hard love, but He didn’t send Jesus to have us mock and ignore the faith. We can say no, but isn’t that just what the world wants? Is that a ‘thorn’? Don’t let it choke your faith.

THIS WORLD WILL PASS AWAY

God reveals Himself to us in Scripture, advising us to not invest in the world, to not seek the world, and to not worship anything of the world because the world only offers idols that pull us away from Him.

When we surround ourselves with people who do not fear God, who do not love God in Christ, and who haven’t repented or been born again in the spirit, then the people and ways of this world will attempt to distract us away from humility and servitude. They will encourage us to aim our purposes towards the lie of self-sufficiency, of constantly pursuing pleasure and never actually finding fulfillment, but only temporary rushes of excitable emotions. The unbelieving world would have us to place our faith in the constantly evolving attractions humanity offers, but this world will pass away, the Bible makes that clear:

Matthew 24:35 (NIV Version)

“Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.”

DEVIATING FROM ETERNAL LIFE

Jesus tells us to store our treasures in heaven, not here (Matthew 6:20). When we surround ourselves with people storing up treasures here, we know they have not prioritized God’s kingdom, and have placed their worldly desires above His. Their rewards have already been given, and they receive nothing when they die but eternal separation from God. These kinds of people do not aid in our pursuit of God’s truth, because their lives are contrary to the way Scripture tells us to live.

Don’t let others’ way of life distort your understanding that God has a better way for us to live, and it is the only way that leads to eternal life (John 14:6).

KEEPING CLOSE TO GOD; KEEPING THE WORLD IN CHECK

We are to be meditating on His Word, daily, and be uncompromising towards the ways of this world. When adversity hits, we turn to God first, we submit to His Lordship over our lives and surrender our fears and anxieties to Him, knowing in faith that He will not only provide, but He will deliver us.

Worldly troubles will come and they will hurt, but they won’t take our souls—we’ve been purchased by the blood of the Lamb of God! We have eternity to look forward to when God takes us home, and until then, the world cannot give us the same reward God will give us. The world cannot promise what God promises. The world cannot save itself from itself, but God already has, in Jesus Christ.

WILLING TO PURSUE CHRIST OVER FLESHLY THINGS

Today is the day we give our lives to Christ and turn away from the sin that the world wants us to embrace. Today we commit to loving God first, and seeking Him above all else. When we fail, we turn back to Him again. We continue to practice this and eventually, it gets easier.

Today, Christ lives in us. The world needs to see that there are people who are willing to admit that our need for Christ outweighs our desires for pleasure. That’s the kind of people the church is made of, right? Do it all in the name of Jesus!

Photo by Marisa Harris on Unsplash