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An Associated Press release told of the sprouting of some ancient seeds discovered in China. It seems that in 1983 archaeologists discovered remnants of fruits and nuts in their exploration of a Han Dynasty tomb, which dates back to the first century AD. The archaeologists were stunned to find that some of the fruits (about 40 plants) sprouted after having been wrapped in protective coverings for about a month. The fruit produced was definitely tomatoes.
This would seem to have some biological implications. Seed brings forth after its kind, just as it has from the very beginning (Gen. 1:11–12). Wouldn’t the evolutionist like to find (indeed he would give a king’s ransom for) a seed or a fossilized plant or animal form that was half one kind and half another or that was half plant and half animal? The lowly tomato seed of two millennia ago still produces a lowly tomato, not a fruit that is half tomato-half watermelon or half tomato-half bullfrog. Will atheistic, humanistic blasphemers never learn?
This occurrence also has some spiritual implications. It is interesting that the discovered seeds were about 2,000 years old. They still had life in them, and they still produced what God had originally programmed into their life germ—nothing more, less, or different. What is true of the seed of a tomato is just as true of the spiritual “Seed,” the Word of God (Luke 8:11). The Lord programmed into the Seed of His Word all that He wanted the finished Fruit of His Word to be, both for individual saints and for the church. When only the Lord’s Seed is faithfully preached, if any plant comes forth, it will be the faithful product of the Seed. It matters not that the Seed is 2,000 years old; it is still as living and active as it was when God first gave it (Heb. 4:12). It matters not that the true church may have disappeared from the stream of human history for some centuries as apostasy raged. As long as the Seed remains intact (and it does in the New Testament), the kingdom can always be faithfully reproduced in any generation.
Question: Why did the church begin changing in the second century and eventually go into utter apostasy?
Answer: Because men began planting a seed that was different from the Gospel.
Why is the church changing before our very eyes and becoming unrecognizable in some cases? The answer is tied up in the “seed.” An altered “seed” that disdains the fundamentals of the faith and is contemptuous of Scriptural authority is already producing some sorry fruit. Men who truly love the Lord will sow only His true Gospel Seed.
[Note: I wrote this article for and it was published in The Edifier, weekly bulletin of Pearl Street Church of Christ, Denton, TX, March 14, 1985, of which I was editor.]
Attribution: From thescripturecache.com; Dub McClish, owner and administrator.
