I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Matthew 13-14

Jesus taught using parables because the concepts He was teaching could not be summed up in simple, one-size fits all ways.  Those unwilling to accept the complex answers which Jesus teaches find His parables confusing and contradictory.  Those who truly seek God will understand how each parable presents just a partial picture of the whole truth.  An example of what I am talking about can be seen by comparing Jesus’ parable of the good seed and the weeds to the saying “Kill them all. Let God sort them out.”  Jesus’ parable is the exact opposite of the saying.  Both things tell us that we do not have the ability to distinguish between truly good people and truly bad people.  Both tell us that only God can do that.  However, Jesus tells us that it is better to let the guilty go unpunished than to harm the innocent, while the human saying tells us that it is more important to punish the guilty than to protect the innocent.

We will see how this next bit goes.  I am going to try to make a connection between Jesus’ parables about the Kingdom of Heaven and the account of Peter attempting to walk on water.  Jesus describes how small things lead to great things.  This is a theme which Jesus speaks of quite a bit.  Earlier in Matthew, Jesus told us we should be like salt.  Here, Jesus compares the Kingdom of Heaven to yeast and to a mustard seed.  All of these things share a common element.  It doesn’t take much salt to completely change the flavor of food.  It only takes a small amount of yeast to make a lump of dough become much larger.  A mustard seed is very small and hard to locate if you drop it, but the plant which comes from it grows very large.  So, the message Jesus was giving us there was that small things can accomplish great things.  The connection to Peter attempting to walk on water is that if we want to do miraculous things we need to focus on Christ and not let ourselves be distracted by what else is going on.  In a way this brings us back to what I talked about in the first paragraph.  If we want to transform the world by destroying evil, we need to be strong and powerful.  On the other hand, if we focus on doing God’s will, He will transform those around us even though we are no more than a grain of salt, or a bit of yeast.