(Ver 1.6)  This of course is a difficult subject to cover, yet one that I believe is very critical for every Christian to understand.   God said in the Bible some things that are very profound about seeds and if you can understand them, you will gain vast amounts of spiritual knowledge and understanding of how almost everything in the world works.  I know that sounds like a very broad statement but, you obviously do not know very much about seeds right now or you would have to agree with me.  Seeds represent concepts that apply both to the natural realm and the spiritual realm simultaneously.  When you begin to understand them, you will begin to understand why things have happened in your life and how to affect or change your future results.  Too many Christians think that what happens to them in life is predetermined by God.  If it is God’s will I will live to be an old man, if not only God knows.  While God does know your future, it is definitely wrong to say that you can not change it.  If you do not believe me you should read your Bible more often.  When you read in the Bible in 2 Kings 20, you will see Isaiah the prophet coming to King Hezekiah and telling him that the Lord says for him to “Set Your House in Order, for thou shalt Die and Not Live!”.  The prophet of God tells the King what God has already told him will happen and these are the sayings of the almighty God.  King Hezekiah ends up praying to God and as a result God tells Isaiah to tell the King he shall live 15 more years.  What would have happened if Hezekiah had not prayed?  He would have died.  Who changed, God or Hezekiah to cause him to live 15 more years?  The Bible tells us “I am the Lord and I Change Not” (Mal 3:6).  So obviously God did not change his mind, so what happened?  That certainly is a mystery that too many Christians do not understand.  It is not totally up to God what happens to you, it is more up to you than it is up to God.  However, since that is not my primary subject, we will continue learning about seeds and see if you can figure this mystery out for yourself.    Here is one of my foundational scriptures for this series of Bible lessons:

Gen 8:22  While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.

What God is revealing in this verse, is that there are established laws in the earth.  These laws consist of physical laws as well as spiritual laws.  These laws are representative of established natural patterns within creation and even reveal the hidden qualities of God.  These laws represent established cycles that will not cease unless God causes them to change in the future.    However, it is clear that God says these laws will persist as long as the earth is here, so they are not going away anytime soon.  God mentions 3 of these cycles and laws in this verse.  The first one mentioned is that of the law of seeds and harvests.   You plant a seed you reap a harvest.  The next cycle mentioned is that of our established pattern of annual seasons.  Winter and summer are just two of the 4 seasons mentioned.  Next we have the cycle of Day and Night and again this is representative of a 24 hour cycle of time that the earth revolves in every day.  What I want to focus on is just the subject of “Seeds” in this series of lessons.  You can read about Understanding Night and Day in another blog series that I have already done.

Planting seeds and getting harvests are a part of the essential design of God’s creation as well as being an essential part of God’s hidden nature and character.  Hopefully you will better understand this as we go through the Bible on this subject.  But, here is a challenge from God, there are multiple things in the Bible called “seeds” and this is one of the complexities found while studying the Bible.  God calls multiple things by the same name and we are required to figure out which one He is talking about to correctly understand each verse.  While the overall concepts behind each occurrence of the word can overlap, they are certainly not the same entity.  Let me give you some examples of seeds found in the Bible:

1. Natural Grass Seeds
2. Natural Fruit Seeds
3. The Seed of a Man, His Sperm
4. The Seed of a Woman, Her Children
5. The Seed of a Man and a Woman, their offspring
6. The Word of God
7. The Seed of your Mouth, Your Words
8. The Body of Jesus Christ
9. The Church
10. Your Body

So I just gave you 10 examples of a thing that the Bible calls seeds and that is certainly not a complete list of all of them.  Just for grins let’s start by looking up a dictionary definition of the word seed in a noun form:

A mature fertilized ovule of angiosperms and gymnosperms that contains an embryo and the food it will need to grow into a new plant. Seeds provide a great reproductive advantage in being able to survive for extended periods until conditions are favorable for germination and growth. The seeds of gymnosperms (such as the conifers) develop on scales of cones or similar structures, while the seeds of angiosperms are enclosed in an ovary that develops into a fruit, such as a pome or nut. The structure of seeds varies somewhat. All seeds are enclosed in a protective seed coat. In certain angiosperms the embryo is enclosed in or attached to an endosperm, a tissue that it uses as a food source either before or during germination. All angiosperm embryos also have at least one cotyledon. Many angiosperms were created with specific fruits for dispersal of seeds by the wind, water, or animals.

There are too many things in this description to take note of them all.  Also I changed the last sentence to state that seeds were created and did not evolve as some deceived scientists have theorized.   According to this definition a seed is a self-contained unit designed for the reproduction of a species.  A seed contains specific qualities that enables it to work even after extended times outside of the normal environment that they like to grow in.  We understand this because we can buy seeds at the farm and garden store to plant in our backyards to grow whatever we would like.

Seed is a unique word that can either be taken as a single unit or as a plural word meaning multiple instances of the same reproductive unit.  In other words if I said that I have a package of watermelon seed, we do not know how many I have in the package.  It is more than likely several and logically more than one, but yet it would be legal to just put one in the package and sell it with the same name.  The plural word for seed can also be stated as seeds, so the complexity of the words can be significant.  If you are a type of person who is into the details you will certainly get into these Bible lessons.

The first mention of seed in the Bible is within the context of the first chapter of Genesis when God creates the world that we all live in.  In Genesis 1:11 God says “Let the earth bring forth grass yielding seed”.   This is the first mention of seed and the first mention of the reproductive system for propagating the further existence of future plants in the world.  Within the same verse, God also tells us of “the earth bringing forth Fruit Trees yielding fruit after its kind, with the seed in its self”.  These are very important concepts being given to us from creation.  Some have called this the “Law of Genesis”.  Everything will reproduce after its own kind.  In other words a cat doesn’t come from a dog.  A watermelon doesn’t come from an orange.   Everything that God created comes from and reproduces after its own kind.  That means there was no evolution that took place at any time on the earth.  Evolution is a fantasy embraced by ignorant people who deny the design of God.  Everything that God created is self-sustaining and self-perpetuating.  Today on the evening news I watched a humorous story about which came first the chicken or the egg?   This has long been a debated controversial subject in the world.  However, according to the news, and a group of scientists in England who studied the subject, they have concluded that the chicken had to come first based upon scientific evidence.  They discovered that the shell of the egg comes from a protein found only in the ovary of a chicken.  Since this protein does not exist anywhere else in the world, they have concluded that the chicken had to come first.  But, they certainly did not say where the chicken came from.  Isn’t that interesting?  I can tell them where the chicken came from, but maybe another day.  I’m sure if you search the internet you can find more information on this scientific discovery and why they concluded this.

There are over 250 verses in the Bible that speak directly about seeds in the Bible.  I will not even attempt to go through all of these.  Then there are many other indirect references of seeds in the Bible so the total number of verses on the subject is by far greater than that.   We have already touched on the first occurrence in Genesis 1 of natural seeds from plants, so let’ move on to the second occurrence of seed found in Genesis 3 and it goes like this:

Gen 3:15  And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.

I have written a blog on this subject, so I will not attempt to repeat that information again.  If you want to learn about it you can go and read “The Seed of the Woman, the Seed of the Serpent!”   It is noteworthy to see that the woman has seed and so does Satan and I’ll leave it at that for now.  It is implied that these seeds are children, and we will find out more about this as we go.  The third occurrence of the word “Seed” arises in Chapter 4 of Genesis and this is Eve speaking and she says the following:

Gen 4:25  And Adam knew his wife again; and she bare a son, and called his name Seth: For God, said she, hath appointed me another seed instead of Abel, whom Cain slew.

Eve tells us that “Seth” is her Seed.  His brother Cain had killed his other brother Abel and now she has given birth to another “Seed”.  Obviously the implication is given to us that all of the other children are also her “seeds”.  So we see a clear pattern that children are called seeds of their parents.   Let’s find a confirming scripture to this fact from the book of Ruth:

Rth 4:12  And let thy house be like the house of Pharez, whom Tamar bare unto Judah, of the seed which the LORD shall give thee of this young woman.

We can clearly see that God refers to children as seeds.  The term is related to a concept of planting and harvesting.  This concept was first introduced in Genesis 1 when God said to Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply.   You see two descriptive qualities of planting seeds, you always get a multiplied increase and it is always related to bearing fruit.  What we discover is that each child produced has the built in capability to reproduce more of its own kind in the earth.  The females carry the eggs, the males carry the sperms and they are joined together to produce more of the same kind as themselves.  What we have in the world is an exponential growth seed pattern of the population of the world.  From Adam and Eve, who were just two people on the planet just around 6000 years ago, we now have well over 6 billion and getting closer to 7 billion people on the planet.  That is God’s idea of a plentiful harvest field.  These are God’s plans and God’s designed laws of increase being demonstrated.  All of these are basic seed concepts, seed principles and seed laws.  I hope that you understand them.  Let’s look at the next occurrence of the word “seed” found in the book of Genesis.  You will find this one in the story of Noah and the flood:

Gen 7:3  Of fowls also of the air by sevens, the male and the female; to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth.

What we have is a reproductive biology lesson from the story of God’s creation.  The stated law of how God can create the original pairs of each species, both males and females so that they reproduce and multiply and still be here today for us to enjoy.  God informs Noah to gather and place on the ark, the male and the female of every species so that their “seed” would not vanish from the face of the earth.  What we learn from this verse is that all we have to do is kill every animal of a particular species and that species is not coming back.   That kind of kill’s evolution doesn’t it?  Man is doing a pretty good job at eliminating species on this planet so what will the results be?

Gen 12:7  And the LORD appeared unto Abram, and said, Unto thy seed will I give this land: and there builded he an altar unto the LORD, who appeared unto him.

Obviously “seed” is a very important subject to understand.  God in speaking to Abram tells him that his seed will be given the land.   God is speaking about children or as we can read later in the N.T. God is speaking about a specific promised child.  Too many times people like to read a verse in the Bible in isolation and try to interpret it without using God’s helpful commentary and definitions.  This causes people to come up with erroneous teachings that results in confusion.  You see you can take this verse in many different ways.  Some try to take it literally and naturally and interpret it using their own human reasoning.  But, later we will discover that God gives us more information and we should always use the Bible to interpret the Bible.

Gen 13:15  For all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed for ever.

Again we have a great mystery presented to us.  Is the land given to a natural seed or to a spiritual seed?  You will notice that God did not tell Abram that it was his forever, because obviously Abram died and is no longer here to possess it.  What we have to conclude is that whoever this seed is that will be given the land, must be an eternal seed or a seed that will live forever.   That certainly changes the interpretation dramatically doesn’t it?

This has been an introduction to the subject of “Seeds” in the Bible.  I hope that you have learned something that you can begin to apply to your life and to your understanding of the Bible.  In the next lesson we will talk further about the other types of seeds that I have listed in the top of this lesson.

If you would like to continue reading this series, please go to “Part 2“.