In God’s Garden ናሙና

Mustard Seed

The Bible is full of metaphors that come from plant life: sowing, pruning, tending, reaping, and storing; seeds, stalks, fruit, chaff, and leaves. “The grass withers, the flower fades: but the word of our God shall stand for ever,” Isaiah wrote (Isaiah 40:8). “The kingdom of heaven is likened to a man which sowed good seed in his field,” Jesus explains in Matthew 13:24. A few verses later, He begins another parable with, “The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed” (verse 31). What is it about the mustard seed that makes it such a fitting example of the kingdom of God?

The mustard plant is an annual herb that germinates quickly. The seed is tiny—only one to two millimeters in diameter—but the mustard plant soon towers over other common garden herbs, eventually producing an enormous number of yellow flowers. The mustard of the Judea region was black, unlike the yellow mustard many people are used to today. Christ’s parable of the kingdom of God would have been a vivid image to the listeners who had carefully planted the miniscule seeds in their gardens and then watched the plants rapidly stretch upward. In the same way, the kingdom, planted by Christ in one tiny region of the world, quickly reached across the globe, and it is still extending to “all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues” (Revelation 7:9).