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Jan 8, 2015 · The kingdom of the world advances by exercising “power over,” while the kingdom of God advances by exercising “power under.” A contrast of aims: The kingdom of the world seeks to control behavior, while the kingdom of God seeks to transform lives from the inside out.
- Beauty
Beauty - 5 Differences Between The Kingdom of God and the...
- Classical Theism
God is transcendent, which basically means that God is...
- Choice
Choice - 5 Differences Between The Kingdom of God and the...
- Beauty
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).
- 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...
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.
Sow two kinds of biblical seed — (1) Christian people and (2) God’s word — and you will reap what you sow, that is, a bumper crop, an abundant harvest of new believers in Christ. The biblical principle of sowing and reaping never fails.
Aug 13, 2024 · Let's look at the original Greek and Hebrew meaning of the phrase, the different phrases used throughout the Bible, what it means to seek first the Kingdom of God, and how to live and pray with the Kingdom of God in mind. Origin and Meaning of the Kingdom of God
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Being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, he answered them, “The kingdom of God is not coming in ways that can be observed, nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There!’ for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you.” Matthew 4:17 ESV / 122 helpful votes. Helpful. Not Helpful.
