3795-If It Die by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Jul 9, 1912

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 39, No. 26.

3795—If It Die

By Editor

Please explain John 12:24, "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." Scientific men say that the act of germination is an act of life in death. A grain of wheat is composed of two seed-coats, an embryo (the baby), and a store of food, requiring only heat, air, and moisture to transform the food from starch to sugar, and set the germ growing. Inasmuch as the transformation of the starch is a process of digestion, and the fact that the baby pushes its way through the seed-coats distinctly shows movement, and as no dead thing is capable of either action, I should feel obliged if you would explain the text.

We may be helped in this by an expression in 1 Cor. 15:36, 37: "Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die: and that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat, or some other grain: but God giveth it a body as it hath pleased Him, and to every seed his own body." The corn of wheat that falls into the ground dies. That grain of wheat will never exist again. It has perished. If it did not die, decay, it would remain alone, just simply one grain of wheat, to all eternity. But by dying, or yielding to the partial decay, it gives way for the germ that is within it to have life and grow and multiply. The lesson which our Lord would teach is this: The individual who stays by himself, shuts himself up to himself, will never win souls for God. Like the one talent buried in the earth, he remains alone—self-centered; but the individual that gives himself and his life to God, that life will result in other lives' being brought to God, in the multiplication of the seeds sown. It is to the individual that God refers, and He takes what is before men as a very obvious fact in this parable. Against that obvious fact there is no true science.

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