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    Soul Seeds: Jesus' Parables
    Soul Seeds: Jesus' Parables
    Soul Seeds: Jesus' Parables
    Ebook117 pages1 hour

    Soul Seeds: Jesus' Parables

    By Ed Hurst

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    About this ebook

    Common understandings of Jesus' parables often go astray because they are read from a modern Western perspective. It's too easy to miss the real import of what Jesus had to say unless we take the time to delve into the historical context. More importantly, we must approach them from the Hebrew intellectual approach. Not only is this Hebraic approach seldom understood by people today, it was no longer the approach used by the Jewish leaders of Jesus' day. This volume seeks to offer a corrective understanding of some of the parables recorded in the Gospels.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEd Hurst
    Release dateOct 28, 2012
    ISBN9781301727339
    Soul Seeds: Jesus' Parables
    Author

    Ed Hurst

    Born 18 September 1956 in Seminole, OK. Traveled a great deal in Europe with the US Army, worked a series of odd jobs, and finally in public education. Ordained to the ministry as a Baptist, then with a non-denominational endorsement. Currently semi-retired.

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      Book preview

      Soul Seeds - Ed Hurst

      Soul Seeds: Jesus’ Parables

      By Ed Hurst

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright 2012 by Ed Hurst

      Copyright notice: People of honor need no copyright laws; they are only too happy to give credit where credit is due. Others will ignore copyright laws whenever they please. If you are of the latter, please note what Moses said about dishonorable behavior – be sure your sin will find you out (Numbers 32:23)

      Permission is granted to copy, reproduce and distribute for non-commercial reasons, provided the book remains in its original form.

      Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

      Table of Contents

      Chapter 1 - Introduction

      Chapter 2 - Salt and Light

      Chapter 3 - Treasured Living

      Chapter 4 - Pigs and Pearls

      Chapter 5 - Hard Paths

      Chapter 6 - Holy Detectives

      Chapter 7 - New Life in Old Forms

      Chapter 8 - Worthy of All Sacrifice

      Chapter 9 - Casting Aside Your Burdens

      Chapter 10 - Divine Order

      Chapter 11 - The Institution Can Fail

      Chapter 12 - Christ’s Wedding Feast

      Chapter 13 - Taken for Judgment

      Chapter 14 - Self-appointed Fools

      Chapter 15 - Can’t Please `Em

      Chapter 16 - Public Privacy

      Chapter 17 - Can Anything Good Come out of Samaria?

      Chapter 18 - The Vast Gulf Between

      Chapter 19 - What Time Is It?

      Chapter 20 - By Its Nature, the Kingdom

      Chapter 21 - Tough Enough

      Chapter 22 - Confidence Games

      Chapter 23 - Never Satisfied

      Chapter 24 - Kingdom to Come

      Chapter 25 - Not in Shadow

      Chapter 26 - Soul Seeds

      Chapter 1 - Introduction

      The parables of Jesus helped to serve the purpose of revealing deep truths, while separating the true seekers from the religious busy-bodies. Given the context of these stories is some 2000 years in the past, their meaning is no longer obvious even to true seekers. Because of this, an awful lot of silly teaching has arisen based apparently on what these parables would mean only from our own historical context. In an attempt to restore some sanity, I offer an examination of selected parables which are often twisted.

      I’ll never forget; he told me, You can’t make a parable walk on all fours. In his quaint rural dialect, this very wise country preacher was telling me something which should have been a matter of common sense. Many people over-work the teachings of Jesus, delivered mostly in parables, in an attempt to extract every possible detail. I often think Jesus would have been horrified at what has been made of some of His lessons.

      First, let’s have a little background. In our modern culture, a real education, including the full range of Liberal Arts – the Classics, multiple foreign languages, history instead of propaganda, etc. – is very much a rarity. While this is not a screed to criticize modern education, it’s important we note the facts. It’s no secret our Enemy will do all in his power to block the Truth. Rather than placing blame for this state of affairs, it’s enough to note what burden this places on those aspiring to teach God’s Word: We have to fill in the gaps so God’s People can intelligently decide how to follow Him.

      The Holy Spirit will use you as you are, but your cultural and intellectual orientation can actively war against His power, preventing you from understanding of some things. Even with the best Liberal Arts education, we are still far removed from the time and culture of Jesus. So very much of what we read in Scripture is hard to follow because most of it was written in a totally foreign setting. Many of the assumptions we bring to God’s Word confuse the issues completely. Rather than an attempt to promote a Christianity where the Bible is regarded as safe only in the hands of an elite caste of high priests with the proper education, my aim is to start all believers the path to that high status.

      Of course, we cannot discount the importance of proper training and education for our spiritual leadership. Somewhere in the complexity of relying on God – recognizing that 2000 years of Christian history cannot be ignored, avoiding past abuses, not reinventing the wheel – we do well to place a higher priority on one’s calling, and secondarily on professional preparation. The called-but-unprepared can eventually get what God wants for their preparation, provided they are faithfully pursuing His will. On the other hand, God save us from highly professional leaders who are self-called.

      The reader will likely have considered the difficult balancing act of deciding on whom to rely as a fit spiritual leader. This writer obviously seeks your open mind, hoping to give evidence first of the calling, and also of the education. As I rely on the Holy Spirit to guide this writing, I must rely on Him to convince the hearts and minds of readers.

      In addressing the parables of Jesus, we must first grapple with the gulf of understanding between us today and the people of Jesus’ time. The cultural differences, while numerous, can be broached best by making one broad generalization: Our modern Western civilization is built on what is called inductive reasoning, and deductive reasoning, while the ancient Hebrew culture was initially built on symbolic reasoning, often mistaken for formless mysticism. Rather than chase tangents in defining the full meaning of those terms, I will risk overly simplifying, relying on the reader to keep in mind such generalizations are generally accurate, but never precisely true.

      It matters not how we operate intellectually as individuals; our Western Civilization is based on certain assumptions of how knowledge is gained. How do we know things? Inductive reasoning is the habit of mind which attempts to survey and observe all available to us. We gather piles and piles of facts and attempt to organize them and build categories. We test things under various conditions, and attempt to explain the hows and whys based on what we can discern from the tests. This is by far the best way to understand the basic rules for living in this world. If we see fire, and touch anything close to that fire, finding it hot to the touch, even painful, we reasonably conclude fire itself will hurt us even more. Thus, we gain a working knowledge of our world. The facts are inducted into a body of knowledge.

      Induction is a poor means to learn everything we need to live. Instead of experiencing everything first hand, we rely on others to share with us their experiences. We then take that knowledge given and deduce from it broader implications as we match it to our own experiences.

      Induction and deduction alone are unfit to approach things which stand outside the world of direct human experience. The Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) mystical culture approached life from the opposite end, so to speak. That which is eternal, which transcends the senses, is the place to start. This is more than mere deductive reasoning, because it requires allowing revealed truth to reshape our very being, not merely our intellectual grasp. Over the ages, things have been revealed from powers beyond this world, and are clues to how we should view what takes place here. Indeed, what takes place here merely symbolizes what goes on there. The Person of God is indicated by how He acts on this level. Truth is a Person, not mere principles. Our daily experiences of life are to be understood in light of what we come know about that Person, giving them a personal meaning. What can be seen is an illustration of what cannot be seen. Facts which do not seem to fit the image of the Person are put aside for a time, until their place is discerned. We don’t waste too much time on knowing facts, but invest effort into knowing that Person.

      In the ANE viewpoint, the great wise man is one who has striven to embrace that Person early on, then spent sufficient time contemplating the events of life to see where they fit in the image of revealed Truth. In the Western mold, contrary to that, the great wise man is one who has paid attention to all the details of life, observed them in all likely settings, and constructed a complex framework which adequately accounts for all those details. It is an exercise in fixing a static and impersonal entity called truth – but always devoid of God as Person.

      It would be wholly misleading to say the Jews of Jesus’ time used neither inductive nor deductive reasoning. Nor do we today suffer an absence of symbolic reasoning. The primary reason for Jesus’ miracles was to present Living Truth which challenged the static framework Jewish leaders had adopted, cast in stone, of what was assumed to be Truth. Anyone who had actually read the Old Testament, rather than relying on the vast pile of commentaries from generations of rabbis past, would recognize what Jesus taught was consistent with God’s Word. By the time Jesus was born, the concept behind the term The Law of Moses had become corrupted, a mockery of what it had once been. Thus, while in the strictest sense Jesus was teaching

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