8/9/13
Mar 4:33 With
many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it.
Mar 4:34 He did not
speak to them without a parable, but privately to his own disciples he
explained everything.
In Milton Terry’s book “Biblical Hermeneutic” He quotes from
another book about “Parables” I thought it was so interesting, I want to share
it with you.
“It is not merely that these analogies assist to make the
truth intelligible, or, if intelligible before, present it more vividly to the
mind, which is all that some will allow them. Their power lies deeper
than this, in the harmony unconsciously felt by all men, and by deeper minds
continually recognized and plainly perceived, between the natural and spiritual
worlds, so that analogies from the first are felt to be something more than
illustrations, happily buy yet arbitrarily chosen. They are arguments, and
my be alleged as witnesses; the world of nature being throughout a witness for
the world of spirit, proceeding from the same hand, growing out of the same
root, and being constituted for that very end. All lovers of truth
readily acknowledge these mysterious harmonies, and the force of arguments
derived from the. To them the things on earth are coped of the things in
heaven. They know that the earthly tabernacle is made after the pattern
of things seen in the mount (Exod. Xxxv, 40;1 Chron. Xxviii, 11, 12); and the
question suggested by the angel in Milton is often forced upon their
meditations –
‘What if earth
Be but the shadow of heaven and things therein
Each to other like, more than on earth is thought?’
For it is a great misunderstanding of the matter to think of
these as happily, but yet arbitrarily, chosen illustrations, taken with a
skillful selection from the great stock and storehouse of unappropriated
images; from whence it would have been possible that the same skill might have
selected others as good or nearly as good. Rather they belong to one
another, the type and the thing typified, by an inward necessity; they were
linked together long before by the law of a secret affinity. It is not a
happy accident which has yielded so wondrous an analogy as that of husband and
wife to set forth the mystery of Christ’s relation to his elect Church.
There is far more in it than this: the earthly relation is indeed but a lower
form of the heavenly, on which it rests, and of which it is the utterance.
When Christ spoke to Nicodemus of a new birth, it was not merely because birth
into this natural world was the most suitable figure that could be found for
the expression of that spiritual act which, without any power of our own, is
accomplished upon us when we are brought into God’s kingdom; but all the
circumstances of this natural birth had been pre-ordained to bear the burden of
so great a mystery. The Lord is king, not borrowing this title from the
kings of the earth, but having lent his own title to them – and not the name
only, but so ordering, that all true rule and government upon earth, with its
righteous laws, its stable ordinances, its punishment and its grace, its
majesty and its terror, should tell of Him and of his kingdom which ruleth over
all – so that “kingdom of God” is not in fact a figurative expression, but most
literal: it is rather the earthly kingdoms and the earthly kings that are
figured and shadows of the true. And as in the world of man and human
relations, so also is it in the world of nature. The untended soil which
yields thorns and briers as its natural harvest is a permanent type and
enduring parable of man’s heart, which has been submitted to the same curse,
and, without a watchful spiritual husbandry, will as surely put forth its
briers and its thorns. The weeds that will mingle during
the time of growth with the corn, and yet are separated from it at the last,
tell ever one and the same tale of the present admixture and future sundering
of the righteous and the wicked. The decaying of the insignificant,
unsightly seed in the earth, and the riding up out of that decay and death of
the graceful stalk and the fruitful ear, contain evermore the prophecy of the
final resurrection, even as this is itself in its kind a resurrection – the
same process at a lower stage – the same power putting itself forth upon meaner
things/… And thus, besides his revelation in words, God has another and an
elder, and one indeed without which it is inconceivable how that other could be
made, for from this it appropriates all its signs of communication. This
entire moral and visible world from first to last, with its kings and its
subjects, its parents and its children, its sun and its moon, its sowing and
its harvest, its light and its darkness, its sleeping and its waking, its birth
and its death, is from beginning to end a mighty parable, a great teaching of
supersensuous truth, a help at once to our faith and to our understanding.”
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