(Ver 1.4)  I have been doing a series of Bible lessons on the significance of understanding how Seeds work.  Only by understanding how natural seeds work, can we really ever focus on how spiritual things operate.  God gave us the natural things in our world to teach us about the unseen spiritual things using the wisdom of His intelligent design.  Using many Bible verses and the Seed laws from Genesis 1 I have explored several subjects applying the knowledge of seeds to other scriptures in the New Testament.  We have discovered that the Bible says there are multiple things that are all referred to by the title of a “seed”.  This is just one of God’s techniques of concealing the truth in plain sight.  God calls many things by the same name, title or description.  This makes it more difficult for the reader to determine what type of seed He is talking about.  From our study we have seen that there are natural seeds, like fruit seeds or grass seeds mentioned in the Bible.  We have seen children called seeds all over the Bible.  We have seen the male sperm called his seed.  We have seen spiritual spiritual things like God’s Word being labeled as the seeds that are spread by teachers in the spiritual soil of man’s heart.  We have discovered that there exists two types of seeds in the Bible; one is the Good Seed and other is called the Bad or Evil Seed.  By pattern association we can conlude these can be representative of the good words from God versus evil words from Satan.  The Good seed was always sown by God exclusively and the evil seed was always sown by his enemy Satan.  These are such important concepts to fully grasp.   If you have not been reading this series from the beginning you should stop and go back to start reading with “Part 1” first.  If you haven’t read from the beginning you have just missed more than I can possibly teach you in my simple introduction.

Today I want to discuss the previous seed concepts and seed laws in more detail to apply them to how a person becomes a Christian.  I have alluded to this subject before in other lessons, but I will address it more completely today filling in some gaps.  We have already seen that Jesus told us that the most important parable to fully understand is the Parable of the Sower.  From this parable we should now know that God’s Word was the seed that the sower was spreading.  We also learned that the soil in this parable was always the hearts or spirits of the men and women in the world.  There were 6 revealed types of soil presented to us in this parable; 3 types of soil did not produce spiritual fruit and 3 types of soil did produce spiritual fruit in varying degrees of multiplication.   This parable demonstrates Salvation to us very clearly and fully describes how you became a Christian.  Those that hear the Word of God and allow other factors (spirits, natural attartions, etc) over rule their decision to be a Christian are those that were not saved.  Those that hear the Word of God, understand it and choose to believe it, they are the ones that are saved and born again.  All of this is really not that complex to me but I guess many people have not understood it and therefore do not apply it to the subject of how people become Christians. 

So based upon the intimate knowledge of this parable of the sower, it would appear to me that the more Word of God we know the more fruitful we will become.  Conversely the less you know about God’s Word seals your fate to hell.  You do understand this don’t you?  Jesus teaching the parable of the sower was Jesus spreading the Word of God to the entire world.  Every man, woman and child born from Adam represents the symbolic soil that is responsible to allow or permit  God’s seed to be planted.  It is much more the human rejection of the Word of God (the Seed) from the soil (the spirit) that causes people to go to hell than anything else that they will ever do.  People like to think that sin is the key factor for going to hell, but this is simly not the case based upon the Word of God.  The Bible says that everyone has sinned and come short of the glory of God (Rom 3:22).  If everyone is a sinner there must be another factor for who is saved and who is not and it basically boils down to what type of soil we each choose to be.  Do you realize that only you make the choices in your own life and for your life?  I can’t do it for you, your wife can’t do it for you, your mother can’t do it for you and even God can’t and will not do it for you either.  Do you also know that you have a spiritual enemy that is helping you to make the wrong choices?  Only by studying the Bible can we better recognize the devices, plans and traps of this spiritual enemy.  Only by continuing to study in the Bible are you able to grow and mature to being the overcomer that God has designed you to be.  God is expecting to come back for a victorious church and not a defeated church.

So the Parable of the Sower gives us the basic overview for the whole plan of God for our Salvation.  Jesus told us to “Go into all of the world and Preach the Gospel AKA the Word of God” (Mk 16:15).  By preaching the Word of God you are sowing the Seed of the Word of God into the hearts of more people who can choose to let it grow.  This is salvation or damnation in action.  The soil decides its outcome and what kind of fruit that it produces.  Let’s look at this in action in the Bible:

1Co 3:6  I have planted  , Apollos watered; but God gave the increase.

The Apostle Paul is writing to the church at Corinth and to you and I.  Paul says that He has planted.  So what does it mean to plant something?  What was planted?  As you can clearly see these are seed concepts that are repeated for us.  Maybe you do not understand these concepts fully because you have never planted a natural garden in your back yard, but I have.  You always start the process by putting seeds in the soil and you then conintue the process by watering the soil and they grow over time into something that you desired to have.  If you look back at the previous verse you will see that Paul and Apollos were “ministers”.  A minister is anyone that sows God’s Word by God’s design.  If you hear someone speak in church that is not teaching from the Bible they are not a minister of God.  If you go to a church and the speaker is teaching from a Reader’s Digest you need to find another church that works like God said it should.  Paul sowed only from the Word of God to the people in Corinth and they believed it.  Then there came along another preacher named Apollos and he watered the seed that was in the hearts/spirits of the people  with more of the Word of God and this helped the seed to continue to grow.  But, it says that it was God that gave the increase.   In other words God caused His Word to Grow!  Therefore only God gets any glory in the salvation of any man.  Do you understand that no farmer can take credit for what is grown in his field?  Does the farmer understand how corn is produced from seed?  Did the farmer create the seed that produces the corn crop?  I think you can see that he did not.  Neither a farmer or a minister created the seed they are sowing or invented the growth process that takes place, only God did this.  They just plant the seeds, water them and watch them grow like it was magic.  However, this is just the designed seed process from God using His created Seed.   This is a really amazing concept of how the spiritual New Birth process works.  It is a partnership effort with God working through men and women who preach to spread the Seed of the Word of God.  So the man that is planting the seed is not that important, it is only the word of God being planted that is the critically important part of the process.  It is really a paradox and a puzzle, without men and women sowing the word of God no one would ever be saved.  However, without the Word of God no one is saved either.  If you are sowing seeds of Buddhism no one will be saved no matter how much you teach on it.  If you are sowing the seeds of Islam you are sowing words that never produce salvation.  If you are sowing the words of Judaism you are also not going to be saved.   It is not very good news for any world religion out there; God made only One Way into the Kingdom of Heaven and that was through His Son Jesus Christ.  So do not throw stones at me, I’m just a farm messenger.  I did not write the Bible!

1Pe 1:23  Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever.

So I think I have given this verse before in another lesson on seeds, but it bears repeating for our current discussion on how people are born again.  The fact that we have been “Born Again” is attributable to us receiving the incorruptible Seed of the Word of God into our spirits.   There are two terms given to us by God in this verse that are critical to understand.  These are “Corruptible” vs. “Incorruptible”.   The term corruptible means able to “decay” and you can state this to be equivalent to a man’s mortal body.  The natural realm is a temporary realm of decaying particles.   The laws of thermodynamics dictate that everything around us is decaying and not reorganizing like evolutionists like to believe.  If you build a new car today and never drive it; it will become a pile of rusted metal in the course of time.  The opposite of mortal is immortal.  We have been born again from an immortal seed.  You may recall that Jesus said “heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away” (Mat 24:35).  So the Word of God is immortal, and not capable of being eliminated.  The Word of God is the incorruptible SEED that causes us to be born again spiritually.

Corruptible seed can be viewed as either a physical or a spiritual type of seed.  The sperm of a man is a corruptible natural seed.  But also the spiritual words (seeds) of Satan are also considered to be corruptible towards the human spirit.  Jesus never says that the words of your enemy Satan will stand forever.  So every false teaching and false religion will be eliminated someday.   So we now have a dilemma of sorts of how to discuss natural things so that we do not offend anyone by comparing them to spiritual things.  You see if being Born Again is s comparable pattern to being born in the natural the first time, then how are natural babies conceived?  You can begin to see my difficulty, can’t you?  God created sex for a reason and it wasn’t just to make you feel good.  Sex is a part of the reproductive pattern of new life on our planet.  So sex must be related to new spiritual life also.   So how does natural sex relate to the spiritual New Birth?  That is where we are today in this discussion.  Get ready for a new concept that you may have never though of:

Gen 4:1  And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the LORD.

We are informed that Adam “knew” his wife Eve and she conceived his physical seed.  This is God’s definition of natural sex in the Bible.  By the law of first mention, God again gives us the definition of what it means to conceive revealed in terms of spiritual information and descriptions.  God could have described this act differently, but He specifically chose this Hebew word translated as “knew”.  The definition of this word is therefore very critical for us to understand in order to see how it applies to spiritual things like being born again.  The Hebrew Word translated as “knew” means “to ascertain by seeing”.   This is truly complex because men are visual types of people, they like to see.  Women are not visual people and they do not want to see anything generally speaking.  There is a widely used term for natural sex that is called “carnal knowledge” and this phrase is more in the line with the spiritual realm information that we need to apply correctly instead of thinking of the human term “intercourse”.  We need to correctly transfer God’s definition of sex as “knowling” into the spiritual New Birth process.   We should be able to see using our knowledge of the Parable of the Sower that in order for any human to be born again, they must have “spiritual knowledge” with the Lord God’s Word (Seed).  This is not sex as you are thinking right now is it?  However it is still spiritual sex according God’s definition of the act.   The human ability to “see spiritually” God’s Words causes them to conceive it.   However don’t forget there still exists an enemy to that salvation process trying to steal the seed from being sown.  The success or failure of the salvation seed process is completely dependent upon the fact that some people understand the Word of God and some people do not.  This enemy’s method of causing some people not to understand is revealed more clearly in the New Testament scripture that says “the god of this world has blinded the minds of them that believe not” (2 Cor 4:4).  You see spiritual blindness is the inability to see or literally understand spiritual things.   If you recall in the parable of the sower, Satan came immediately to steal the Word of God that was sown in their heart and he was able to do this only because they did not understand it (Mat 13:19).   Therefore, spiritual eyesight is the key to having spiritual knowledge and understanding.  I could talk a lot more about that part of the subject, but I’m running long in this lesson.  I do pray that you are following me on these points and beginning to understand how people are born again.  Let me end this lesson with one more verse from Paul:

Gal 4:19  My little children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you,

So here we have another very difficult complex deep scripture to try to swim through.  The apostle Paul is not a natural female yet he speaks in the terms of being a spiritual female.  Can you see this?  Only females give birth, yes?  According to what I have seen in the Bible God created only females to give birth.  So what exactly is Paul talking about?  Paul is saying I have spread God’s seed into your hearts by teaching God’s Word to you and I am now waiting for Christ to be formed in you as a result.  What is the key to this spiritual birth happening?  It was the spiritual ability to see or the  “spiritual knowledge” of the person who heard the word of God that will determine whether they will conceive Christ and be born again.  Paul can sow all of the seed he wants to, but none of it will grow unless the soil of the hearer allows it to stay by understanding what was said.  You can easily see how that you can read verses in the Bible and totally miss what is said, can’t you?   You can also see that there is an implied reality that Paul is a part of a spiritual woman, called the Bride of Christ.  So the complexity of the Bible is so great that it causes many people to stumble.  People will never see the spiritual truth of God’s Word trying to figure it out using only their natural minds.  What we can see is that Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus was not the be all and end all for his Christian experience.  He was now responsible for getting more people born again by sowing the incorruptible seed of the Word of God.  Getting more people Born Again of the Incorruptible Seed, that is the goal of every Christian.  This is the expansion of the new spiritual family of God and the multiplication of the Spiritual Seed of God by sowing the Incorruptible Seed into new soil.  Today’s lesson has been some of the basic Bible ideas of how people are born again using the laws and concepts surrounding Seeds in the Bible.  I know I did not cover everything that I could have, I know I left out many verses that could have been included, but I did the best that I could in a limited time and space forum.   God Bless you to see and to understand His Word!  Thank you for your time in studying the Bible.

If you would like to continue reading this series of lessons on seeds you can go to “Part 10“.