Through His death and resurrection the Lord Jesus not only healed the soil, but He also released God’s life and imparted it into the soil. Through His death the divine life in Him was released, and through His resurrection this life was imparted to the soil. Hence, the Lord’s death and resurrection were the completion of His sowing Himself as a seed into His disciples.
This sowing began in chapter one of Mark and continued throughout this Gospel until it was completed in chapter sixteen. In chapter after chapter the Lord Jesus was sowing Himself into His disciples. This is clearly revealed in chapter four where we see that as the Sower He came to sow the seed of the kingdom. When the Lord Jesus was resurrected, this sowing was completed. The disciples then became another kind of soil, the good soil, and they began to grow Christ. In the early chapters of the book of Acts we see that the disciples were good soil producing Christ.
However, the fact that the disciples became good soil and began to grow Christ does not mean that the “weeds” could not grow in them again. In Galatians 2 we see that certain weeds had begun to grow again in Peter. The reason the weeds came back was that Peter was still under the influence of the old religion.
Actually, the weeds were trying to grow in Peter in Acts 10. According to this chapter, Peter saw a heavenly vision, a vision related to the sowing of the seed into the Gentiles. God intended to use Peter to sow the seed of the kingdom into another kind of soil, into Gentile soil. At first Peter refused to obey the vision. This refusal indicates that something was growing in Peter instead of wheat. The things of the old religion, the weeds, were growing in him.
In chapter twenty-one of Acts we see that Peter was under the influence of James. When we consider Acts 21 together with Galatians 2, we see that many weeds were growing in Peter.
We need to ask ourselves how many weeds are growing in us. What do we mean by weeds? A weed is something other than Christ that is growing in us to replace Christ. In our experience these weeds may include culture, religion, ethics, morality, philosophy, improvement of character, and the effort to be spiritual, scriptural, holy, and victorious.
Many of the saints who have been under this ministry for years are still under the influence of their cultural and religious background. Because of this influence, the view of God’s New Testament economy has not been made clear to them. This influence and this lack of clarity delay the Lord’s coming back because it frustrates the development of the kingdom within us.
At this point we should once again ask this question: what is the kingdom of God? Contrary to the traditional understanding, the kingdom is not merely a realm where God rules over people and a realm which we enter to enjoy eternal life. Many Christians do not have a proper understanding even of what eternal life is. They think that eternal life is some kind of everlasting blessing. We need to have a clear view from the New Testament concerning the kingdom of God.
In the New Testament the kingdom of God is not a material realm in which God exercises His authority to carry out His governmental administration so that we may enter this realm to enjoy an eternal blessing. This is not the concept of the kingdom in the New Testament, and we should drop this concept. What is revealed in the New Testament regarding the kingdom of God is that the kingdom is a Person, not a material realm. This Person, the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is the embodiment of the Triune God. This One who is the embodiment of the Triune God came to be the kingdom. In Mark 4 He says that the kingdom is like a sower sowing the seed. Both the Sower and the seed are the Lord Himself. The Lord Jesus came to sow Himself as the seed of the kingdom into God’s chosen people. In His ministry He did not sow anything other than Himself as the seed of the kingdom.