A messianic prophecy

He Taught in Parables

The promise

Psalm 78 is a teaching psalm by Asaph, and it announces its own method at the very start: the writer will open his mouth in a parable and utter dark sayings of old. He then retells the long story of Israel, God's mighty acts and the people's repeated forgetting and rebellion, so that the next generation might learn from the past and set their hope in God rather than repeating their fathers' failures.

The word parable here names a wisdom form, an instructive recounting that wraps deep meaning inside a memorable story. The dark sayings are not meant to confuse but to reward attention, hiding truth in a way that draws the listener in and repays those who ponder. In its setting the verse describes how sacred truth is handed down, carried in narrative that must be turned over in the mind before it yields its lessons.

So the psalm gives us a picture of the inspired teacher whose method is the parable, who teaches the deepest things not by bare statement but by story, and who thereby separates the attentive from the careless. Truth offered this way is a kind of test, open to all yet grasped only by those willing to seek it.

Asaph's purpose in teaching this way was generational. He wanted the story of God's faithfulness and Israel's failure to be passed on, so that the children yet unborn might arise and declare it to their children, and set their hope in God. The parable was not a trick to keep truth from people but a vessel to carry it safely across the generations, memorable and ponderable, resistant to being forgotten.

“I will open my mouth in a parable: I will utter dark sayings of old:”Psalm 78:2

The fulfillment

Matthew observes that Jesus taught the crowds in parables and did not speak to them without a parable, and he sees this fulfilling the psalmist's words about opening the mouth in a parable and uttering things that had been kept secret from the foundation of the world. Jesus took the most ordinary scenes, a sower in a field, a mustard seed, a lost coin, a wedding feast, and packed the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven inside them.

Like Asaph before him, Jesus taught the deepest truth through stories that reward the attentive and pass by the careless. To those willing to lean in and ask what the parable meant, he opened the secrets of the kingdom; to those who would not, the same stories remained a closed door. His teaching honored the freedom of his hearers, drawing in the seeker and leaving the indifferent to their own resistance.

Matthew reads the psalm's description of the wise teacher's method as answered supremely in Jesus, in whom the pattern of the inspired parable-teller reaches its height. What Asaph did for one generation of Israel, unveiling the past to teach the future, Jesus did for the world, unveiling things hidden since creation itself.

Jesus himself explained why he taught this way. To his disciples it was given to know the mysteries of the kingdom, but to the crowds he spoke in parables, so that the willing would understand and the resistant would be left to their resistance. The parable is a mercy and a sifting at once. It offers the kingdom to everyone in a form that only the seeking heart will open, and it lets each hearer show, by how they respond, what kind of soil they are.

The crowds who heard him marveled that he taught with such authority and such vividness, drawing the mysteries of heaven out of the soil, the seed, and the sky. In him the pattern of the inspired teacher who hides truth in story for the seeking heart reached a height Asaph could only foreshadow, and things kept secret from the foundation of the world were at last brought into the open.

“All these things spake Jesus unto the multitude in parables; and without a parable spake he not unto them: That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying, I will open my mouth in parables; I will utter things which have been kept secret from the foundation of the world.”Matthew 13:34-35