Search results
Just as the farmer's seed grows easily, providing a bumper crop, God's Word penetrates honest hearts. Such people understand and follow Jesus' teaching, loving God and others and exhibiting the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22–23).
Jan 16, 2012 · Consider this: when we speak of the animal kingdom or the plant kingdom, we are referring to the life existence of that species. In the same way, the “Kingdom of God” as taught by Christ is referring to the life existence of God.
- Introduction: Farming as Source of Symbols of Spiritual Growth
- Metaphors in The Law
- In The “Former Prophets”
- In The “Latter Prophets”
- In The Wisdom Books
- In The Gospel Accounts
- In The Epistles
- In Revelation
- What Is The Common thread?
- Want to Go Deeper?
When God’s messengers in the Old Covenant and the New wanted to explain the ways of the Lord to people, they looked around for objects and events familiar to them. Among the most familiar were the plants they lived with day by day and year after year. From the everyday experiences of sowing, plowing, watering, reaping, and storing the biblical auth...
One crop per field – Lev. 19:19; Deut. 22:9
In Leviticus, God demanded that the Israelites devote each field to only one kind of seed. At the close of the wilderness wanderings, He repeated this ordinance in Deuteronomy, but with more specifics: “Do not plant two kinds of seed in your vineyard. If you do, not only the crops you plant but the fruit of the vineyard will be defiled.” This command, joined to several others of a similar nature regarding two kinds of draft animals or two kinds of cloth, apparently was a lesson about holiness...
Sabbatical year – Lev. 25:20, 22
God commanded that Israelites that after six years of planting and reaping, in the seventh year they should leave their fields unplowed, unsown, and unharvested. This command had three functions. First, it was an opportunity for God to demonstrate His abundant blessing to them. They could survive on His bounty without having the seventh year’s harvest. Second, the crops that grew up on there own that year were dedicated to the needy of the community: the widows, the orphans, and the foreigner...
Agricultural blessing – Lev. 26; Deut. 28
In the blessings of the covenant, Moses promised that if the people would be faithful to serve the Lord alone, He would bless them in every way, including their crops, their livestock, their children, their finances, and their military campaigns. If, however, they were unfaithful to the Lord, nothing they touched would escape His punishment.
Symbols of God’s grace – Josh. 24:13
When the Israelites settled in the land of Canaan, God fulfilled His promises to them, granting them peace and security. This is expressed by this statement that summarizes God’s grace to them: “I gave you a land on which you did not toil and cities you did not build, and you live in them and eat from vineyards and olive groves you did not plant” (compare Deut. 6:10-11). God’s blessing allowed them to skip the lean, start-up years characterized by major effort with little or no return for all...
Judges 9:8-15 – Allegory of the thornbush
Jotham speaks to the citizens of Shechem, rebuking them for making his brother Abimelech their king. After being crowned, Abimelech had killed all of his 70 brothers; only Jotham survived by hiding. He compares the Shechemites to trees who ask an olive tree, then a fig tree, and then a grapevine to be their king. As a last resort, they ask a thornbush, who accepts. The refusals of the first three trees give us an insight into the agrarian system operational at the time. The olive tree asks, “...
Solomon’s encyclopedia – 1 Kings 4:33
In detailing the wisdom of King Solomon, the author of Kings says, “He described plant life, from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of walls. He also taught about animals and birds, reptiles and fish.” This virtual encyclopedia that Solomon wrote pre-dated the more famous one of Aristotle by several hundred years.
The literary prophets, whose ministries began in the eighth century BCE, often used the farming operations surrounding them as illustrations of their preaching and prophecies. Here are a few examples.
Prosperity – Job 8:16; 14:9
Job’s friend Bildad employs the withering of a plant in the hot sun to symbolize the person who forgets God. Job takes the opposite—the revival of a cut-down tree at the first hint of moisture—to serve as a stark contrast with the plight of human beings, whose loss in death is irreversible.
Righteous sustained by God – Psalm 1:3-4
The contrast between a tree, continually sustained by a stream of water beside it, and chaff, so dry that it lacks the weight needed to avoid being blow away by the wind, is the difference between the righteous and the wicked. The former have God as their continual source of renewal; the latter have only themselves and will soon perish.
Prosperity/disaster – Eccl. 3:2
Planting and uprooting not only applies literally, but also serves as a metaphor for positive and negative actions toward individuals, groups, and even nations. Every action has its proper place and time, according to the set order of Providence.
Among the variety of parables, similes, and metaphors in the body of His teaching, Jesus drew many illustrations from the everyday life of the people in rural Galilee, Samaria, Perea, and Judea. Farmers figure prominently among Jesus’ dozens of parables.
Two olive trees – Romans 11
Tree-grafting is the focus of Paul’s illustration to show the distinctions between the Jews who accept Jesus as Messiah, the Jews who reject Him, and the Gentiles who are prompted to accept Him when they witness the unbelief of some of the Jews. His concern is to show both that the believing Gentiles become grafted in to the true Israel and that those unbelieving Jews, who are broken off, cease to be of the true Israel anymore. A third point is that the dead branches lying around at the base...
Evangelism – 1 Corinthians 3:6
Paul calls himself, Apollos, and perhaps others “God’s coworkers,” and he calls the Corinthian Christians “God’s field” (1 Corinthians 3:9). He says, “I planted the seed. Apollos watered it, but God made it grow. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow” (1 Corinthians 3:6-7).
The resurrected body – 1 Corinthians 15
Just as the plant that sprouts is different from the seed that was planted and just as God can assign a different ‘body’ to each kind of plant, He is capable of assigning a body to the human being raised from the dead that is different from the body “planted in the ground” at death (1 Corinthians 15:35-38). Paul then makes a series of contrasts between the body that is “planted” and the body that emerges from the grave (1 Corinthians 15:42-45).
Harvest as judgment against evil – Revelation 14:14-16
John compares the coming judgment to a wheat harvest and a grape vintage. Neither the wheat nor the grapes can avoid the sickle; judgment is inevitable.
Fruit tree of life – Revelation 22:2, 19
The water of life flows through the New Jerusalem, and along its banks grows the Tree of Life, whose leaves are for the healing of the nations and whose fruit, newly ripe each month, is freely available to every citizen of the city of God. From anyone who omits words from the Revelation prophecy God will take away their share in the tree of life.
In nearly all of these passages and the many more that we could examine, one common thread seems to be the idea that plant life illustrates a process of change that nevertheless contains within it a remarkable degree of continuity. The life that exists within all plants comes from God, going back in an unbroken chain to His powerful, spoken word du...
For further reading:
George E. Post. Flora of Syria, Palestine, and Sinai.Beirut, Syria: Syrian Protestant College, 1896. Gives a brief, scientific description of virtually all plants in Palestine, Syria, and Sinai. Very comprehensive. Borowski, Oded. “Agriculture.” 1:95-98 in Anchor Bible Dictionary. 6 vols. David Noel Freedman, ed. New York: Doubleday, 1992. Provides a thorough discussion of the farming methods and crops of both Old Testament and New Testament agrarian economies. “Farming.” 269-272 in Dictionar...
“Whirlwind” represents the harvest in kind which comes from sowing the wind. “The futility (wind) which she had planted like seed would yield a crop of destruction (represented by the whirlwind). All her efforts directed toward self-preservation would be self-destructive.” 2. Psalms of Promise
- Life is filled with choices, choices that affect us on an everyday basis in everything we do which means our everyday choices are not without signi...
- If anyone had told David before or even right after his affair with Bathsheba (2 Sam. 11) that he would break every one of the laws of the second t...
- “Too many believers are sowing wild oats throughout the week and then going to church on Sunday and praying for a crop failure.”3 They hope their l...
- No fact is more significant and sobering than this one. When we sow good, we bountifully receive from the hand of God who is debtor to no man; for...
- The promise and warning of Scripture is that we reap what we sow. This means that life’s choices are filled with consequences both good and bad—tem...
- This is a sobering principle of life. Scripture and the experience of life itself teach us that we reap the full harvest of the good only if we per...
- Life is full of consequences both good and bad. Life is full of important choices because every choice has a consequence of some kind and to some d...
Aug 4, 2022 · “The kingdom creates a realm, the kingdom creates a people, but the kingdom of God is not synonymous with its realm or its people,” John Piper says. Instead, the church are the people who are preparing for the Kingdom of Heaven and showing others what that Kingdom will look like with God.
These metaphors help us know God and live the Christian life coram Deo, before the face of God. For example, out of the many ways God could have communicated with Israel, He chose agricultural metaphors.
People also ask
Is the Kingdom of God already coming?
What does the Bible say about the Kingdom of God?
What does “the Kingdom of God” mean?
Is the Kingdom of God just the church?
Is the Kingdom of God a reign of God?
Is the Kingdom of God actually Heaven?
To what can the kingdom of God be compared? A mustard seed falls where a field's been prepared, And there, where predictable plantings should be, There grows up a wild bush --as big as a tree! God of love, here on earth, hidden things still surprise: Loving deeds--signs of birth--faithful, Spirit-filled lives.
