Of Soil and Seed

God knows His genetics. He has ordained that the pattern for living things must come from living things. All of His plants and creatures reproduce “after their own kind”. How could it be said more simply? Life begets life.

This is true of the meanest microbe and the most ponderous pachyderm. From germs to elephants, from mice to men it is a known fact that the offspring receive their pattern from those who lived beforehand.

The aging and teetering insanity of Darwinism with all its ensuing variations, adjustments and accommodations runs counter to the most basic common sense of what we both see and know. Only Life begets life.

Nowhere in recorded history, nor in any of the annals of modern science – despite all the resources and the application of the best human minds – has any one ever observed anything which would remotely contradict this fact: only life begets life.

Life does not spring from rocks, minerals, thin air or dead soil. Yet life abounds. Life thrives in almost every nook and cranny of our planet. There are insects that live in the snow of the arctic regions. A vast panoply of life exists in the deepest parts of the oceans where the direct energy of the sun never reaches. The air is filled with organisms and the rocks and soil teem with bacteria, both good and bad. Yet all this life only produces after its own kind.

Common sense teaches us the difference between the animate and the inanimate. We know it instinctively. Only when we become clever enough to think we see do we become blind to the obvious. It has happened in the conjectural sciences and it happens in the church, too. No one is exempt.

Jesus loves to use examples of life producing life; the vine and the grapes, the corn and the ears, the wheat and grain – all are simple and common examples which are readily understood by all types of people, from the genius to the ingenuous. The peasant may see what the Paleontologist will not. But in many parables there is a temptation for us to confuse the inanimate with the animate – to mistake life for mere minerals.

When God speaks of scattering seed, He speaks of producing life from life. Life is in the seed, not the soil into which the seed falls. The pattern exists within the seed that will produce after its own kind – corn after corn, wheat after wheat and Christ after Christ. God sows Christ, the Word and the Word grows up in the soil of our being into what is like Christ, because it bears His pattern – His spiritual genetic code.

No one reaps the soil itself. The soil does not grow up and produce fruit thirty, sixty, or a hundredfold. The soil is not eaten by people or re-sown so that more people may be fed. The soil is a dead, inanimate medium that provides a supply of materials to build a repository for the seed and for the seed’s eventual progeny.

In a similar way, we must understand ourselves to be that self-same soil. Dust we are and to dust we shall return. He is the Potter and we are the clay. Great drops of blood fell from Jesus’ brow in Gethsemane and fell where? Onto the ground. Ground is what we are – dirt, soil, clay, earth. The inanimate materials of which we are formed are worth no more than a few dollars as individual chemicals.

The living seed is planted in the dead soil of our own beings. It takes root. It draws minerals and moisture from us. And by the mystery of life it converts them into living fruit, using the pattern within itself. It takes the environment and makes the environment into copies of itself, using the pattern that was already contained in the seed.

We ourselves, though dead soil when the seed of grace is planted, are somehow drawn up into the growing plant and changed into its likeness as fruit in due season. And the seed, though living, dies into the already dead earth, in order to bring forth life from it. The Seed of God has fallen to the earth in me and died. And He has resurrected, bringing me with Him.

Let us remember, therefore, that we are but clay; that we are not the seed, but repositories of it; that we have no life in ourselves but only what life that the Living Seed produces from His inexhaustible heritage – the Christ of God Whom the Father has given to have life in Himself.

Let us cease from trying to live of ourselves, and repose in the life which comes from Him – His life within us – His very Being moving in and through us, just as He is the one in Whom we ourselves live and move and have our being.

[Update July 28, 2008 - Now we know that diamonds may be responsible for life on earth]