Imperishable

 

For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God. For,

“All people are like grass, and all their glory

is like the flowers of the field;

the grass withers and the flowers fall,

but the word of the Lord endures forever.”

And this is the word that was preached to you. (I Peter 1:23-25)

          Many of the Eastern religions teach reincarnation. The idea is that when you die if you weren’t perfect, you are reborn and get another try. Of course, you aren’t given sufficient memory of your past lives to know what you did right or wrong. You might even have been an animal in that past life, so this one as a person might show that you did a pretty good job as that animal, but is what passes for a “pretty good job” as that animal be the same as what is expected of you as a person? Whether you’re a person or an animal, unless you reach perfection during a lifetime, when you die, you’ll be reborn to die again. If you do reach perfection, supposedly you are subsumed into God, and effectively cease to exist. The reward of perfection is extinction as a person.

          Christianity doesn’t teach such a thing. When you are born again, it isn’t a physical rebirth, you’re not trapped in an endless cycle of failure. What’s more, you don’t have to wait to die to be reborn, which means you can learn from the mistakes you made along the way.

          Some people talk about it not being fair that we only get one chance, one life in which to get it “right.” I disagree. I think it’s unfair to steal what we learned in one life and then throw us into a series of lives. It steals from us the chance for imperishable seed.

          Now, I don’t know enough about seeds. I just planted some Garlic Chives seeds today and I plan to plant some echinacea seeds tomorrow. There are two things I know. Either they will grow, or they won’t grow, and what grows from Garlic Chive seeds must be Garlic Chives. Another seed might get into the soil and grow, but the plant that grows from that seed won’t be Garlic Chives.

          That’s why it does no good for us to have seeds less than the imperishable Seed, Himself.