Sample of Alibrando writing (link to more articles below)
Our lives are filled with so many wonderful things we cannot understqand and even have difficulty believing:
- You didn't exist before. That's hard to get a hold of that.
- Infinity is real. We know it, but finite minds cannot truly embrace this.
- Your eyes are brain extensions. When we look at a person's eyes, it is the only visible part of the brain. It's weird.
- God made everything. Nobody, nobody, nobody else can take credit.
But consider with me, resurrection through the example of seeds.
Does a Seed Die?
Children ask some of the deepest and best questions. Many of our own best questions come from child-like curiosity.
How do you answer the Bible statement of Jesus saying “… That which you sow will not come to life unless it dies.” (1 Corinthians 15:36)?
TREES DON'T COME FROM TREES
Consider this: Every tree or plant in the world comes from a seed. Not a tree, a seed.
Inside the seed is not a miniature tree but the components to construct a tree. Trees never start as recognizable trees but tiny sprouts fighting their way through the dirt with roots. If underground, seeds must break through the soil to reach sunshine.
The seeds know up from down, otherwise roots would reach for sunshine and the sprout would quickly die buried in the dark. How do they know?
Every bit of wisdom necessary is in every seed of every species to build itself into the form of its parent. This means the same trunk, the same leaves, and the same shape with identical functions for attracting pollinators, fighting insects, fungus and other diseases.
Trees bloom in sync and behave similarly within each species. You may notice how many forests are often dominated by one species of tree.
But about the seed being dead or alive, let's define ALIVE. I can say this about living things:
Nothing dead needs food, nothing dead is affected by a lack of nutrition.
Nothing that grows is dead or non-living.
Nothing that reproduces is dead.
TREES WITH FLOWERS
A seed begins on its mother tree microscopically. It leaves it mother and on the ground, seems "dead".
If the seed is cut off from that nutrition given by the mother, how can it have the ability to fulfill its purpose of reproduction?
Seeds have the specific function of leaving its "parent" with one primary purpose: to replicate its parent and at full maturity will bear more seeds that repeats the same cycle. But how can it go from microscopic to its full size after losing life-giving nutrition away from its mother? Not all seeds succeed.
Here is a critical observation: while receiving nutrition it cannot germinate. It can never reproduce while "alive" (eating, growing, dependent).
There is no photosynthesis in a seed nor does it require nutrition.
DORMANT
Some would call this a dormant stage, not dead. Some animals hibernate, but in hibernation, their functions are complete and they continue consuming nutrition stored (fat, prey or something else). If immature, they will also grow during hibernation. Growth and nutrition are signs of true life. A seed is not "hibernating" because a seed does not consume anything stored in itself nor does it leech on something else as a parasite.
Like hibernation, a pupa (such as a caterpillar into a butterfly) is morphing continually while in the cocoon as a living thing that is changing.
Lazurus had been dead for days and smelled very bad, but Jesus said “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep; but I am going there to wake him up.” John 11:11 NIV
Some seeds can maintain this "functional, dead" state for literally thousands of years, neither growing nor consuming. The seed has all the characteristics of something not alive, but dead.
It is the same one day in form and character as it was 500 years earlier., except for external forces, like being eaten or burned.
But a rock and seed are different because at one time the seed lived. The seed was alive but “died” taking on the charateristics of something dead.
GERMINATION is its RESURRECTION
In another place at another time under the right circumstances, germination is triggered and suddenly there is movement, there is change, it the seed is alive.
At germination, the seed does not become its "old self" but something completely different.
The seed can never return to its seed state after coming alive.
- It can now die permanently if it lacks nutrition.
- It is now more vulnerable and dependent on certain environmental necessities
- It can be killed by disease, by insects, by storm or extreme environmental change.
The seed "died" once but for the first time, triggered by the right conditions, the seed lives again!
Now it will have a new body and become something unlike anything it was before. No one sees a resemblance between a tree and its seed. You have to know what kind of seed makes what kind of tree.
The rites of passage for a tree seed is:
* Emerging growth budding on its mother tree
* Detached seed with a shell
* Life Awakened
* A total metamorphosis to something reaching for life capable of becoming a full grown tree that creates many new seeds
Not science fiction, true, real technology. Honestly, this is beyond the grasp of man’s intellect testifying to intellect superior to our own,
Can you believe engineering greater than man’s capability requires no intelligence?
Imagine this: a seed has ALL this.
It is astounding to consider the design of all life, plant and animal, begins with a type of seed.
