SEEDS, PLANTS and SOULS

1 ORIGINS

To set the scene,
we ought to start at the beginning of things.
How did seeds, plants and souls originate?
And why have they given fruit
to allegories, parables, metaphors and so forth?

Many answers have been proposed to these questions,
and whichever one we think is correct
will colour our understanding and appreciation
of our place and purpose in the world.

I shall not go into them here,
but simply look at the answer that Scripture provides,
for that was the basis for the parables found in the Bible.

The book of Genesis starts out by saying that
in the beginning,
God created the heavens and the earth.
 Sometime after that, God said:
:
"Let the land produce vegetation:
seed-bearing plants and trees on the land
that bear fruit with seed in it,
according to their various kinds.
And it was so.
The land produced vegetation:
 plants bearing seed according to their kinds
and trees bearing fruit with seed in it
according to their kinds.
And God saw that it was good."
(Genesis 1:11-12)

And it still is good!
That is why we are now so worried about deforestation
and the degradation of our environment.

God didn't stop there, of course.
He then went on to create us -
we who now do the damage.
Out of the soil our original ancestor, Adam, was made
- the first soul from soil.

In a second account of the creation,
Genesis describes the relationship of man and plant life
as a garden specially made for Adam.

Now the Lord God planted a garden in the east, in Eden;
and there he put the man he had formed.
And the Lord God
made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground -
trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food.
In the middle of the garden were the tree of life
and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
(Genesis 2:9)

However we may interpret the garden and the two trees,
we can agree that here is the beginning
of an important botanical allegory
of the human race and our present condition.
The narrative goes on:

And the Lord God took the man
and put him in the Garden of Eden
to work it and care for it.
And the Lord God commanded the man,
"You are free to eat from any tree in the garden;
but you must not eat
from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,
for when you eat of it you will surely die."
(Genesis 2:16-17)

So - a paradise over which man had stewardship,
with only one prohibition.
No need for parables about avoiding weeds,
And to make life even more perfect,
Eve came along to share this paradise with Adam.

How evil, and the temptation to want it,
personified by the snake,
found a place in God's creation
can be difficult to understand.

But one thing is clear -
God did not want to create automatons -
people who had no choice but to obey him.
He wanted us to be free to decide that He knows best
 and to choose to love and obey Him.

Thus there had to be an alternative.
And that alternative without God,
it seems to me,
has to be the state of evil.
This is what the snake said to Eve:

"Did God really say,
`You must not eat from any tree in the garden'?"
The woman said to the serpent,
"We may eat fruit from
 the trees in the garden, but God did say,
`You must not eat fruit from the tree
that is in the middle of the garden,
and you must not touch it, or you will die.'"
"You will not surely die,"
the serpent said to the woman.
"For
God knows that when you eat of it
your eyes will be opened,
and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."
(Genesis 3:2-5)

The seeds of doubt were sown.
Did God really know best?
What was good and evil anyway?
Perhaps evil was better than good!
With the freedom to choose,
things went inevitably wrong.
Instead of being satisfied
with having all they needed,
Adam and Eve wanted more.

When the woman saw
that the fruit of the tree was good for food
and pleasing to the eye,
and also desirable for gaining wisdom,
she took some and ate it.
 She also gave some to her husband,
who was with her,
and he ate it.
Then the eyes of both of them were opened,
and they realised that they were naked;
so they sewed fig leaves together
and made coverings for themselves.
(Genesis 3:6-7)

From the seeds of doubt
sprouted the weeds of disobedience,
which gave fruit
to selfishness, greed, sickness, violence -
all the things that bedevil the world.
Isn't it curious
how the first consequence of this disobedience,
this original sin,
was a sense of embarrassment -
of shame for the human body?

That was the beginning of the troubles
we now face.
Man and woman
had chosen not to follow God,
and so God had to banish them from paradise.

And the Lord God said,
"The man has now become like one of us,
knowing good and evil.
He must not be allowed to reach out his hand
and take also from the tree of life and eat,
and live forever.
So the Lord God banished him
from the Garden of Eden
to work the ground from which he had been taken.
(Genesis 3:22-23)

And the ground outside paradise
was just as God had warned Adam it would be.
Not a fertile land
where everything grew that was needed,
but a land that was now cursed
and where man's days were numbered.

"Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat of it
 all the days of your life.
It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
 and you will eat the plants of the field.
 By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food
 Until you return from the ground,
 since from it you were taken; for
dust you are and to dust you will return."
(Genesis 3:17-19)

And that unfortunately sums up our situation still!
However,
God did not completely abandon us
to the consequences of our own decisions,
otherwise
we would have completely destroyed ourselves by now.
 He still loved and wanted us back with Him.
But how?

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