The Garden and the Seed

The seed, much like the Tabernacle, embodies a sacred potentiality veiled beneath layers of protective grace.

Some time ago, I posted about the contrasting but related symbols of the foundation stone and the stumbling block. My appreciation for this symbolism has deepened since writing that post, and I’m hoping to detail some additional thoughts in this post. Hat tip to deep-thinking brothers Jonathan and Mathieu Pageau for helping expand my thinking on this symbolism.

The basic symbolism of the foundation stone and the stumbling block is that, depending on our orientation to Him. If we are committed to serving Him, Christ serves as our foundation stone. If not, He becomes a stumbling block. Both manifestations are motivated by love. It is an act of love to hedge up the way of someone who is heading down a perilous dead end.

Because He is “the Father of heaven and earth, the Creator of all things from the beginning,” (see Mosiah 3:8), there is simply no way for Him to not be a part of our lives. He is either the center of our focus, or an uninvited obstacle, depending on our objective at any time. Either way, He is there, big as a mountain or small as a pebble.

The Garden and the Seed

In a similar way, the rest intended for the righteous followers of Christ is always nearby, but depending on the conditions of the people, this manifests as either a garden — in the setting of righteousness/adherence to the everlasting covenant — or a seed — in the setting of wickedness/tyranny, where the ideal garden state is reduced to mere potential.

Agricultural metaphors abound in the scriptures, from Alma 32 to Jacob 5 to Matthew 13 to Isaiah 5. Covenant-keeping disciples of Jesus Christ are likened to a watered garden in Isaiah 58:11. In essence the deeper message is that as we re-approach the garden of Eden, a tree of life grows up within each of us. There’s a fractal nature to this pattern, with Adam and Eve leaving the first garden, but innumerable new gardens being created through their righteous posterity.

The garden aspect of this symbolic pattern is pretty easy to identify, but what about the seed? How does the seed appear in scripture? Here are a few examples I’ve found.

Noah

In a time of great wickedness, Noah gathers a small cross-section of all creation into the safety of the ark. After the flood, the theme of ‘new creation’ is readily apparent as the creative potential contained in the ark emerges forth:

13 ¶ And it came to pass in the six hundredth and first year, in the first month, the first day of the month, the waters were dried up from off the earth: and Noah removed the covering of the ark, and looked, and, behold, the face of the ground was dry.
14 And in the second month, on the seven and twentieth day of the month, was the earth dried.
15 ¶ And God spake unto Noah, saying,
16 Go forth of the ark, thou, and thy wife, and thy sons, and thy sons’ wives with thee.
17 Bring forth with thee every living thing that is with thee, of all flesh, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth; that they may breed abundantly in the earth, and be fruitful, and multiply upon the earth.
18 And Noah went forth, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons’ wives with him:
19 Every beast, every creeping thing, and every fowl, and whatsoever creepeth upon the earth, after their kinds, went forth out of the ark.

Genesis 8

Not only does the stated timing of the event shout out a theme of new beginning, but we also see deep ties to the first creation account in the way “every living thing” is mentioned. In addition, a more subtle aspect of the new creation theme is the fact that eight souls (“Noah…his [three] sons…his wife…and his sons’ wives”) emerge from the ark. Eight, the symbol of new beginning, is the first number after seven, the symbol of completion.

Moses

The seed theme in the story of Moses comes in two forms. First, at his birth, when he is miraculously saved from the destructive forces of tyranny (an edict to drown all Hebrew male babies in the Nile) by an ark:

3 And when she could not longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein; and she laid it in the flags by the river’s brink.

Exodus 2

Having survived the first wave of wickedness and after growing up in pharaoh’s household, a second seed theme develops as Moses, acting as God’s agent before pharaoh, disrupts the might of Egypt (see this post from Stisa to see how the plagues represent an unraveling of the creation), frees his people, and leads them (along with their animals) into the wilderness.

After their miraculous crossing of the Red Sea (passing through water may be seen as a “cleansing” of sorts, but it also represents a reduction to primordial potential), the Israelites journey to the mountain, where God gives Moses specific instructions regarding the building of the tabernacle, including very strict commands about how these sacred objects are to be carried. They can only be touched by those who are consecrated to God’s service, and they cannot even be looked up by the general masses. These things are holy.

40 And look that thou make them after their pattern, which was shewed thee in the mount.

Exodus 25

The tabernacle is a seed capable of being temporarily set up as a place of worship — of spiritual sustenance — for the wandering Israelites.

Lehi

After encountering intense rejection from the people of Jerusalem, Lehi is commanded to take his family into the wilderness, with a promise that they will be led to a choice land. He leaves behind his worldly inheritance and precious things and departs with “nothing … save it were his family, and provisions, and tents…” (1 Nephi 2:4) into the wilderness, where they sojourn for eight years (1 Nephi 17:4).

Comparing to a seed and concluding thoughts

These are just a few. I could have just as easily discussed Abraham, the brother of Jared, Mosiah-1, Alma the Elder, and others. The common themes include:

• Symbols of new beginning, including passing through or over water, the number eight, etc.
• Out of few come many.
• Wandering in a relatively inhospitable setting prior to arriving at a new location for planting.
• The tent – a symbol of the (concealed) presence of the Lord.

A seed is a pattern of the plant in a portable, protected format, allowing it to carry the potential of the plant to other areas. In this sense, the “tabernacle as seed” metaphor is perfectly apt. It is a seed of heaven, waiting for signs of ideal conditions to sprout forth.

In nature, seeds come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, but two common themes are a protective covering and a means of conveyance, often by the wind. The ‘protective covering’ is symbolized by the ‘strict commands’ governing their unveiling — a hard heart is unable to receive the mysteries (see Alma 12:9-11). The means of conveyance is symbolized by the wandering in the wilderness.

On a deeper level, the covenant promise given by God to Abraham is also embodied beautifully in the symbol of the seed: infinite potential, eternal progression, numberless posterity.

Anyone can count the seeds in an apple, but only God can count the number of apples in a seed.

Robert H. Schuller