What makes the soil good?

In Luke 8:4-15, Jesus teaches about four types of soil that represent different types of people, and each soil responds to sowing of seed in different ways.

Three of the soils are ultimately fruitless, and one produces a miraculously large crop – a hundredfold yield, when in Christ’s day a tenfold yield would have been great. Now and on Judgment Day, we want to be part of that good, fruitful soil, so we need to ask, “What makes the soil good?”

In the beginning, God made the soil and everything else good. He said after creating the world out of nothing in six days, “It is very good,” perfect, just the way He planned it. But then Adam’s sin turned everything bad, including the ground, which would bring forth thorns and thistles, Genesis 3:17-18. God also would follow through on His threat to punish sin with the death of our bodies, so God said to Adam and all of us, “You [will] return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” Genesis 3:19. “The wages of sin is death,” Romans 6:23, St. Paul says. And as the Letter to the Hebrews says, 9:27, right after death comes judgment.

So, as we approach the parable of Jesus about the three bad soils and the one good, we need to realize that by nature all of us humans start out as fruitless dust, bad soil. We are by nature sinful and unclean, and our sins have earned us temporal and eternal punishment, not the fruit of everlasting life. Therefore, the first thing we need to rule out in the parable is that there is something in us that makes us good soil versus bad, as if bad soil can make itself good. We were all born with original sin, and therefore as bad soil.

And if we’re honest with ourselves, in the parable we find more in common with the three bad soils than the good one that produced a miraculous crop of faith, hope, love, patience, steadfastness and every good work. Like the first type of soil, we are plagued by unbelief and misbelief. Like the second type of soil, the devil attacks and we set aside God’s Word. Like the third type, riches, cares and pleasures stunt the growth of our fruit.

But the good news is that we have a Savior who makes us good soil purely by grace. The way He accomplishes this goodness is by sending the Good Seed, Jesus Christ. For immediately after Adam and Eve rebelled against God and brought sin and death into the world, God promised that He would overcome sin, death and Satan through the Seed of the woman, Genesis 3:15. Later,God renewed this promise, saying to Abraham, “in your Seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed,” Genesis 22:18.

The Seed was the Messiah, the Christ, and the Seed “for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary and was made man.” And by His perfect life, innocent sufferings and death, victorious resurrection and ascension to God’s right hand, He has in Himself all the power to make the worst soil good, to save even the most hardened sinner. And He says that those who believe the Gospel are made into good soil by the forgiveness of their sins and by His own righteousness.

As Jesus said in another agricultural image in John 15 — in fact, He said it right after the Last Supper, when He gave to us the Sacrament of His true body and blood — He said, “Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. … You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you,” John 15:4, 16. Good soil only stays good and only becomes fruitful by God’s grace, as we stay in Jesus through faith in Him, by patiently holding fast to His goodness delivered in His Word and Sacraments. Amen.