Daily Bible Reading 10th October 2026 // Luke 13: 18-21
18 He said therefore, “What is the kingdom of God like? And to what shall I compare it? 19 It is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his garden, and it grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air made nests in its branches.”
20 And again he said, “To what shall I compare the kingdom of God? 21 It is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, until it was all leavened.”
In these verses, Jesus proceeds to describe what the kingdom of God is like - how, so to speak, the kingdom becomes a reality in human experience. The word 'then' in 18 is a connecting particle, which means that the reference to the kingdom must follow either from the incident of the miracle in 11-17 or from the previous passage (6-9) about the fig-tree. Either way, the connection holds: in the earlier verses, in relation to the fig tree, it would be the possibility of a seed germinating in the 'this year also' given to the unresponsive when 'space to repent' was granted; in the later verses, the meaning would be that in the healing of the woman we have a 'token' - small and insignificant, perhaps, in face of evil and sin everywhere, but a 'germ' of the kingdom of God and its power, that holds a guarantee of future results out of all proportion to its size. At all events, the two parables belong together, and in each the message is the same: it is the contrast between the smallness of the beginning and the end-result seemingly out of all proportion to it. The fact that from small and insignificant beginnings the Church of God grows and develops into something which by contrast is great and considerable - this is the message of both parables: the development of the kingdom of God, in one from without, and the other from within. Externally, the kingdom of God will reach widespread; internally, it will transform the whole of human life.