You Have Been Given a Mystery

The real reason you want to understand the stories Jesus told

Let me take you into a scene drawn straight from Daniel 2. The king cannot sleep.

His dream is gone — not forgotten exactly, but dissolved somewhere in the space between sleeping and waking. He summons his wise men. The enchanters, magicians, astrologers of Babylon — the finest minds the empire can produce. Their job is to tell him what he dreamed and what it means.

They stare at the king and then at one another. They cannot do it.

And in the silence of their failure, a young exile named Daniel walks in with an actual solution. He prays. He asks God. And God shows him what no human wisdom could know.

He said to the king, “No wise men, enchanters, magicians, or astrologers can show to the king the mystery that the king has asked, but there is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries” (Daniel 2:27–28, ESV).

The Aramaic word for mysteries is rāzā. A mystery — not a puzzle waiting for a clever solver, but something hidden that only God can disclose, to whoever He chooses.

Believe it or not, this is a setup for understanding Jesus' parables. Six centuries later, Jesus sits with His disciples and tells them, “to you it has been given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God.” It’s the same word and concept from Daniel 2. Jesus said they were the recipients of divine mystery — the rāzā of the kingdom, the kind of disclosure God gave Daniel.

There was only one problem. Jesus had told a story moments before about a farmer scattering seed (Mark 4:3-9). The sower sows seed on four types of soil, but only the good soil produces lasting fruit. And the disciples did not get it at all.

Where was this great gift of insight they had just been informed that they had?

Jesus turns to them with a startling question: “Do you not understand this parable? How then will you understand all the parables?”

Is Jesus perplexed that the gift of insight isn’t working? Is He suggesting their failure to understand this parable will somehow hamstring their ability to understand all the rest?

The truth is, the disciples want to understand. And although it is not immediately apparent on the surface, there is something quite incredible happening in this moment.

Let me show you what is happening when a parable of Jesus pulls you in — when what you feel is something more than curiosity. Because what was happening to the disciples is still happening to us. And understanding what that is may be the most encouraging thing you discover about your own spiritual life.

The Foundation

At first glance, it might seem like Jesus was suggesting that if they could not understand the parable of the sower, they were missing information, or perhaps some interpretive key code hidden in this parable. But He was actually indicating they were missing out on access to wisdom.

When Jesus told them they had been given the “mystērion” of the Kingdom, it carried the full weight of the Daniel 2 tradition — a signal that revelation belonging exclusively to God had been given to them.

But this was not something they had somehow achieved.

The verb: “it has been given to you” (Mark 4:11) is passive. Actually, the Greek scholars will tell you it is a divine passive. No one is the subject of the sentence. No one earned it. No one achieved it. The mystery of the kingdom was not a reward for their spiritual effort. It was a gift.

Which raises the next question: if the mystery was given before they truly understood insights to the Kingdom, well, what does it look like to be “given the mystery of the Kingdom”? What are you actually experiencing when the gift is handed to you?

The Evidence

I find it interesting what Jesus does after He acknowledges that His chosen ones didn’t seem to be getting what they had supposedly been “given.” After the question, Jesus explains the parable. All of it. Soil by soil, image by image.

He doesn’t sigh and move on. He doesn’t say, “You’re hopeless.” He opens up the parable for them — because they are going to need to understand it.

Until writing this article, I had never considered His explanation as an act of grace. But it was grace. Not compensation.

It would be easy to read Jesus’s explanation as if He was making up for a deficit — filling in the gap because their understanding had failed. But Jesus didn’t explain the parable because the gift wasn’t working. He explained it because the gift was working exactly as it should. Being “given to know the mystery” is not about a one-time transaction. It is a process. And Jesus's explanation is part of that process.

The disciples were not behind. They were in the middle of receiving something.

And this is the exciting part that I really want you to grasp. The draw you feel to understand a parable — the desire to really comprehend it, the pull to read it again until it’s clear — that is the indicator that you have been given the privilege of the Kingdom of God.

Do you remember when Jesus said, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him” (John 6:44, ESV)? That purposeful pull is the work of the Divine. What you experience as desire is grace moving you toward what He has given you.

You see it everywhere in the Gospels. Nicodemus came at night because his questions burned to be answered. Zacchaeus climbed a tree because he was compelled just to get a look. Matthew left his tax booth the very moment Jesus said, “Follow me.” If you have been called, you will feel the draw. And when you hear Jesus’s teaching, you will want to lean in and ask of the Word, “But Jesus, what does it really mean?”

The Completion

My dad’s generation used to say, “The proof is in the pudding.” So the strongest evidence I can give you that these disciples were indeed given the mystery of the Kingdom is that they went on to turn the world upside down.

Just a few years after that conversation by the sea, those ordinary men with no formal religious training who missed the meaning of that first parable were standing before the rulers of Jerusalem — the same ruling council that had tried and crucified Jesus — and the council was astonished. Luke records the moment: “they recognized that they had been with Jesus” (Acts 4:13, ESV).

Something had happened to them that no amount of effort could have produced.

The same men who couldn’t decode a farming metaphor three years earlier were now persuasive and influential teachers and preachers. Jesus did it. Not a curriculum. Not accumulated effort. Jesus had simply delivered on His promise. He had given them the capacity to receive.

And the good news for the modern-day disciple? You don’t have to have it all figured out today. What you need to know is that the pull you feel toward the teaching of Jesus — the desire to understand what Jesus meant, the willingness to keep asking — is evidence that the process is already underway.

That pull is not coincidence or curiosity — it is Christ, and you get to run toward him every time you read a story.