God’s woman. Then by this proved loyal government God purposed to destroy utterly the Serpent and all the wicked offspring which the Serpent would bring forth. In this way God purposed to bring back all the earth and its inhabitants under the universal sovereignty of God and to restore paradise and make it earth-wide. All this is included in his cryptic words to the Serpent, Satan the Devil: “I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; he shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt wound his heel.” (Gen. 3:15, Le) Four thousand years later God’s Son from heaven, Jesus Christ, suffered the heel wound and was raised from the dead and returned to heaven to become King. Then his apostle Paul wrote to the King’s faithful followers: “For his part, the God who gives peace will crush Satan under your feet shortly.” (Rom. 16:20, NW) The time is very short now till Satan and his seed are crushed and paradise is afterward restored on earth.

⁴ When suffering the wounding of his heel by dying on the torture stake at Calvary Jesus Christ gave promise of the restoring of paradise to earth. The evildoer hanging alongside him had just said sympathetically: “Jesus, remember me when you get into your kingdom.” Jesus showed the resurrection hope which was set before this evildoer and all mankind in their graves by saying to him: “Truly I tell you today, You will be with me in Paradise.” (Luke 23:42, 43, NW; Ro) This evildoer had not been a follower of Jesus Christ and so could hope only for paradise as the place for him to gain everlasting life. However, during the three and a half years of Jesus’ teaching campaign among the Jews he had invited believers to become his footstep followers, forsaking this world. He held before them no earthly paradise hope, but a heavenly hope. He told them of his returning to heaven to receive the kingship in the government of a new world, and he invited them to prove themselves worthy to share with him in his heavenly kingdom. To this end he told them many parables or illustrations and explained the meaning of these to them. Among other requirements, they must be fruitful to the praise of God and his kingdom. Fruit of this kind results in eternal life for the fruitbearer, whereas the fruit that Eve and Adam brought forth in Eden resulted in death for us all. To illustrate this, Jesus, in the second year of his public lecture campaign, gave his parable of the sower of seed. Life seekers will be interested in studying it in the article that next follows.

Parable of the Sower

1. How does Matthew introduce the parable of the Sower?

THE parable of the sower is found in the gospel accounts of the disciples Matthew, Mark and Luke. Matthew’s history of Jesus Christ introduces it this way: “On that day Jesus, having left the house, was sitting by the sea; and great crowds gathered to him, so that he went aboard a boat and sat down, and all the crowd was standing on the beach. Then he told them many things by illustrations, saying: ‘Look! a sower went out to sow: