600 Miles From the Pole
Inside a mountain in the Arctic near Longyearbyen, just 600 miles from the North Pole, is a vault which recently opened at the cost of some fifty million dollars. It was built to house a very precious commodity—seed. That’s right, seed! Seed that might well prove to be more valuable than gold.
The vault’s goal is to store and protect samples of every type of seed from every seed collection in the world, and afready it has received its first seeds, millions of them.
The problem is that we are losing biodiversity every day. For example, a series of droughts and new diseases has already cut wheat production in many parts of the world. In fact, three-quarters of biodiversity in crops has been lost in the last century according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Eighty percent of maize types that existed in the 1930’s are gone. Something had to be done to save the seeds we have.
God graciously gave us plants yielding seed according to their own kind (Genesis 1). And every time that seed is planted it produces after its kind. Wheat seed will always produce wheat!
This also holds true in the spiritual realm. In one of Jesus’ parables he said, “The seed is the word of God” (Luke 8:11). And that seed produces after its kind, too. When God’s word is sown, you get Christians. In the first century it produced Christians, and in the2lst century it still produces after its kind.
The seed of the Kingdom doesn’t have to be stored. Jesus promised, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away,” so sow all that you can! When good and honest hearts receive the word of God, it will bring forth fruit with amazing results (Luke 8:15). One can actually become a new creation—a Christian! In the words of the apostle Peter, “You have been born anew, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, the living and abiding word of God” (1 Peter 1:23). ~John Gibson