Part Seventeen:  Nature Provides Illustrations of Spiritual Rebirth   and Resurrection through Easily Recognized  Analogies

There are two amazing biological phenomena in nature that can be viewed as symbolic analogies illustrating God’s promise to His people of a future rebirth into transformed, resurrected bodies. In this week’s blog I’ll emphasize rebirth; next week we’ll look at a specific analogy of the resurrection.

Less than an hour’s drive east of my home in Southern California is Anza Borrego Desert State Park. With 600,000 acres, it is second only to Adirondack Park in New York State as the largest state park in the contiguous United States. In early spring, if winter rains were sufficient, the desert explodes into magnificent vistas of wildflowers. Where weeks before only dry, parched sand and desiccated shrubs and cactus dominated the land, the desert floor is swiftly transformed into a vast floral display, which often spreads across hundreds of acres of desert landscape. Many of the seeds that give birth to the flowers have lain dormant for decades.

The rebirth of wildflowers from seemingly “dead” seeds is a picture of the promised rebirth of God’s people through Jesus Christ. It also illustrates our promised future resurrected bodies at the end of this age, when we will be clothed in glorified, immortal bodies. The Apostle Paul uses the analogy of dead looking seeds emerging into fruitful plants to illustrate this. He writes,

But someone may ask, “How will the dead be raised? What kind of bodies will they have?” . . . When you put a seed into the ground, it doesn’t grow into a plant unless it dies first. And what you put in the ground is not the plant that will grow, but only a dry little seed of wheat or whatever it is you are planting. Then God gives it a new body—just the kind he wants it to have. A different kind of plant grows from each kind of seed. And just as there are different kinds of seeds and plants, so also there are different kinds of flesh—whether of humans, animals, birds, or fish…. There are bodies in the heavens, and there are bodies on earth. The glory of the heavenly [resurrected] bodies is different from the beauty of the earthly bodies.  (1 Cor. 15: 35-40 NLT)

In His wisdom, God could have planned the death and resurrection of Jesus anytime of the year. But with God nothing happens by accident. It occurred in spring. We know this because the Jewish Passover celebration is in the spring, and Jesus was crucified during that time.

The sensational springtime rebirth of wildflowers, when nature is afresh with new life and fresh starts, is a picture of our own new life and fresh starts—spiritual rebirth—through Jesus Christ (2 Cor. 5:17). Every spring when I witness desert wildflowers bursting into bloom, reborn from desiccated, dead looking seeds, I’m reminded of the risen Christ, and His promise of our own future rebirth in resurrected bodies. Just as dormant wildflower seeds emerge into beautiful new life, so too, in the new heaven and new earth, God will transform our decayed bodies into immortal physical bodies designed to live forever. ©

Next week we’ll look at a remarkable analogy of the resurrection common in certain varieties of animals.

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