But others fell into good ground,.... Not beaten and trodden by the feet of men, nor stony, nor thorny, but well broke up, manured, and tilled; which designs good, honest hearted hearers who become so by the Spirit and grace of God; who with a spiritual understanding, experience, savour, and relish, what they hear; seeMt 13:23and brought forth fruit, some an hundred fold, some sixty fold, some thirty fold: some seeds produced an hundred, others sixty, and others thirty.
The first of these especially was a large increase, but what was sometimes had, and which Isaac received in Gerar, in the land of the Philistines, Ge 26:12 and is what Pliny says of Byzacium, a country of the Lybiphoenicians, that it yielded an hundred fold to its husbandmen; and of such fruitfulness was the land of Israel, of which the Jewish doctors say some things incredible: they tell us a story of"one that sowed a measure of vetches, or pease, Nyao twamvlv hvew, "and it produced three hundred measures"; they say unto him, the Lord hath begun to bless thee, &c.'
'Here, in the parable, these various increases intend the different degrees of fruitfulness in gracious souls; for though the fruits of grace, in believers, are of the same quality, yet not of the same quantity.
Some believers are grown to a greater maturity than others; some are but little children, some are young men, some are fathers. Nat. Hist. 1. 5. c. 4. T. Hieros. Peah, fol. 20.