GREAT THINGS ENTERPRISE
CLAUDE BLACK
Mark 4:8
Rich Soil
When my two brothers and I were young, our father farmed. On one farm, there were two fields known as the “bottoms.” The fields lay on either side of a creek that would occasionally flood the valley. When the floodwaters receded, it left behind a layer of rich soil. Of course, using the fields was a gamble that the creek would not flood the valley when there were crops in the fields. Dad always planted corn in the fields, and at harvest time, the cornstalks were tall and had large ears of corn.
In Jesus’ parable of the farmer who planted seeds, he said, “And other seeds fell into good soil and began yielding fruit, growing up and increasing, and bearing some thirty, and some sixty, and some an hundred.” (Mark 4:8)
Dad always had to prepare the bottom fields for planting by doing what was called spring plowing, which involved plowing the soil and then using a disk to break up soil lumps to smooth the soil. Then came the time for planting. Dad always used a planter, which buried the seeds in the soil so birds couldn’t eat them. There were, of course, ground critters that could destroy the seeds, but the harvest made all the prep work worthwhile.
In Jesus’ parable, the “good soil” not only had nutrients for the seeds but it also had been prepared to receive the seeds, and that was toilsome work. It seems important to remember that the rich harvest Jesus described not only had good seed, but it also had good, well-prepared soil.
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