When our northern climes are still held firmly in the embrace of winter, the brightly colored, lavishly illustrated seed catalogs arrive. As much as the melting snow (though we know we may still be in for a few hearty blizzards) and the running of the sugar maples, these hopeful little magazines are the harbingers of spring.
A “green thumb” I’m not, but I can’t help from dreaming a bit as I enjoy the samplings of the world my Father made. How can it be that those little, wrinkled seeds can turn into such fragrance and fruitfulness? You could hardly guess from their drab and humble coats what secrets they hold.
We all trace our ancestry back through the ages to Adam and Eve and beyond that to the heart of God. So each potential plant you tuck beneath earth’s blanket would be able to follow its line back to that word from Elohim recorded in Genesis 1:11. The seed was His idea.
It was His idea that every seed should be after its own kind. At the very beginning, He established that the kind of seed a man sowed would be the kind he would reap. It should be no surprise to the farmer who sows barley that his field yields no wheat. Nor should it surprise us that sowing to the flesh will not bring a bumper crop of the fruit of the Spirit.
It was His idea that sowing one seed would result in many more. You may count the kernels in a ear of seed corn, but who can count the fields of corn in a single seed? It was the intent of a generous-hearted God that seed should produce some thirty, some sixty, some one hundred-fold. Tragically, the seeds of doubt and rebellion sown in the fertile ground of the human soul are still bearing fruit too.
It was His idea that one seed would die in order to produce much more. The city where I grew up was the hometown of one of the largest seed companies in Canada. Its owner was not a Christian, although many in his family were. On one occasion, he said to me, “The Bible speaks about a seed dying to bear fruit. If my seeds die, I throw them away.” He was thinking of death as the cessation of life, but according to the Bible, death is separation. In order to bear fruit, the seed is put alone into the darkness and dies as a seed that it might not abide alone. What a Seed! What a darkness! What a death! What a harvest!
The Lord Jesus told three stories about seeds in Matthew 13. It is essential that we distinguish these. In the first, there were different kinds of ground. The seed was all the same — the Word of God. The plants that did grow were not the people, but the indicator that the Word was having an influence in the individual’s life. What was happening below ground only God could know. In fact, some of those that showed evidence of acceptance of the Word had done it only superficially. When the hot times came (and they do), it was discovered that they did not have the root of the matter in them. For this reason, the believer “rejoices in tribulation” because those who are real not only see endurance developed in their lives, but experience (the proof that they are genuine) and the hope of coming fruit (Rom. 5:4).
In the second seed parable, the Lord pictured a different kind of growth; a very little thing becomes a massive enclave for a mixture of birds. A sketch of the kingdom, it shows the phenomenal growth of a system that on the one hand acknowledges God, and on the other, becomes a refuge for anything that happens to be flying by.
In the third, there is a different kind of germ. Here the germinating influence is described as “the children of the kingdom” and “the children of the devil.” Both will bear fruit after their kind. There has been a mighty sowing, the Son of Man sowing in the light, the enemy at night. They grow side by side and at times are hard to distinguish. Then there has been a great period of growing. But there is coming a time of mowing. Then the results will be assessed — at the end of the world. It is not time that will tell, but eternity.
Adoniram Judson, who died to a life of ease as a religious professional to be a servant of the Lord in the Far East, knew what he was writing:
In spite of sorrow, loss, and pain,
Our course be onward still;
We sow on Burma’s barren plain,
We reap on Zion’s hill.