Welcome to Studies with Stearman.

Join us as we look deeper into the Bible.

Strengthen your faith with us, even as we see the day approaching.

And now, here's Gary.

We come to chapter 13, and Jesus begins to speak in parables, and his first parable is the

parable of the sower, which we looked at last week and the week before that a little bit.

The parable of the sower is essentially a parable about Jesus himself, who came to sow seed.

You could argue that the first seed that he planted was that of Simon Peter. Peter was the first apostle or the first disciple chosen. He chose others after that.

And then he taught them to go forth and sow. And as we noted last week, as we came to a conclusion in the study we did last week,

Matthew 13, 24 through 30, Jesus talks about the kingdom of heaven as a man who sows good seed

in his field.

All through scripture, seed is the emblem of regeneration.

You put a seed in the ground, it grows up, and it makes more. But it's more than the emblem of

regeneration. It's also the emblem of redemption, because the seed of the woman is the seed of Christ

through which redemption came into the world. Furthermore, it is the seed of the woman is the seed of Christ through which redemption came into the world.

Furthermore, it is the seed of faith.

As Paul said in Galatians, we are Abraham's seed, meaning that just like Abraham, we came to God through faith.

So seed has at least three different meanings. It has the genetic genealogical

meaning. It has the redemptive meaning and it has the meaning of faith. It's a picture of faith,

the planting of the seed. In this parable of the wheat and the tears, the enemy sews tears among the

wheat. We talked about this last week.

The idea here is that there is a constant battle between redemption and the one who would destroy

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