All growth must start somewhere. Human life begins when egg and sperm come together. Most plants start with some type of seed. But no matter which starting point you use, you can always back it up in time. You could say that the seed starts when pollen from the pistol reaches the stamen. Or you could say it is when the plant produces the flower, or the second set of leaves grows after the cotyledon (the first set of leave) has broken out of the seed. Or when the plant produces the seed, or when the plant buds in the spring preparing to produce flowers.
Our description for this difficulty in naming the beginning of the process is call the cycle of life. Every step is an integral part of the process. You can’t skip a step and complete the cycle. You can’t rearrange the order. It can’t be done backward or out of sequence. God designed it to move in one direction in a particular order.
We have an individual who starts the process by scattering grain seed in the field. That is the part that they do. They are responsible to begin this process. Without this step none of the others will happen. But they must do it. No one else will.
But after they have scattered the seed the process is the work of someone else. Some people want to name this entity responsible “Nature” to keep from admitting that the LORD is at work, but changing the name doesn’t help the matter. They want to say that this non-personal, non-entity, non-rational thing guides and directs. But by their very definition of Nature it can’t do any of the things they need it to do. Seed needs someone with intelligence behind it to create the mechanism that causes growth to happen. No accumulation of accidents can create intelligence. And even if it could, this statistically impossible event would have had to happen innumerable times to complete even the simplest life.
Think of it like this. If I could throw a basketball a mile and happened to get it through the hoop scoring a point, I would have to be able to drive a hole in one from the opposite side of the earth, and shoot a rifle from Mars and hit a quarter, and thread a needle by dropping a thread from the top of the World Trade Center building. Life involves so many complicated, statistically impossible events that random chance can’t accomplish the task.
The person scattering the seed certainly doesn’t know or isn’t aware of the power behind the various developmental moments of a plant’s growth. And they really don’t care about the particulars. His job was to scatter the seed.
What are you supposed to be doing? What parts of life are you not supposed to be concerned about? Where do your responsibilities end and someone else’s begin? Rest happens when you know the line and stay behind it.
The Arnold Journey 