The Seed Vault at the End of the World

Deep inside a mountain on the Norwegian island of Svalbard, 1,300 kilometers from the North Pole, sits a concrete vault holding over 1.2 million seed samples from nearly every country on earth. Walk through those frozen corridors and you'd find small foil packets containing what look like pebbles, dust, specks of nothing. Shriveled, brittle, unremarkable.

But each seed carries a blueprint the naked eye cannot imagine. A single grain of wheat, no larger than a fingernail clipping, holds the code for a six-foot stalk heavy with golden heads of grain. A tiny tomato seed, almost too small to pinch between your fingers, contains everything needed to produce a sprawling vine bearing pounds of fruit. The seed bears no resemblance to what it becomes.

Paul knew this mystery. When the Corinthians demanded, "How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?" he pointed them straight to the garden. You plant a bare seed — ugly, hard, seemingly lifeless — and God gives it a body as He has determined. Something wholly new. Something glorious.

Our mortal bodies are seeds. What the Almighty has planned for the resurrection is as far beyond our current form as the towering oak is beyond the acorn. Sown perishable, raised imperishable. Sown in weakness, raised in power. What looks like an ending is actually a planting — and the harvest belongs to God.