Do you have any opinion about seeds? Most of us are city dwellers, so perhaps our only connection to seeds is through the things they grow into: fruits and vegetables. Occasionally we’ll even eat seeds, but that still doesn’t make the topic of seeds any more exciting than talking about the weather for on a date.
The Bible, on the other hand, appears to get very excited about these little things we call seeds. In particular, Abraham is promised on numerous occasions that his “seed” will be too numerous to count. I was making some bread yesterday (yes, I am a cook!), and I took some caraway seeds to mix in with my flour. You can bet that I wasn’t even remotely in the mood for counting tiny bitty seeds. They look so insignificant! And yet, of course we know that every single one of those seeds has within it enormous potential, and a future much larger than might appear on the outside.
In Abraham’s world, having at least one seed (= descendant), and preferably a whole bunch, was probably the most important thing in life. That’s why you can imagine the thoughts going on in his mind as we read in Genesis 22 about how God asked Abraham to smashhis one and only seed. This was countable stuff. One seed. I don’t need to go into all of the pain Abraham went through in order to even get that one seed, his only son Isaac. You already know that stuff. At his age (he was a centenarian), what were the chances that he would strike gold again or win the lottery twice? Continue reading
