Have you ever looked at a tomato? I mean really look at a fully ripe, lush, shiny red tomato. Sitting in the sun it is a thing of beauty. When I was a boy someone told me in ancient times people thought tomatoes were poisonous. I wondered who was the first brave person who dared try one only to discover it wasn’t dangerous, or maybe someone tried to commit suicide by eating one and it didn’t work, or maybe they tried to use one as a means of capital punishment only to have the intended enjoy his last meal. They could always throw them at bad public speakers.
It’s marvelous that tomatoes grow from those tiny white seeds. One would never know what a tomato looks like by only looking at a tomato seed. Paul had this in mind when people asked him what we will look like after the resurrection. So he wrote the following in I Corinthians 15. “When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else. But God gives it a body as he has determined, and to each kind of seed he gives its own body.”
So the answer to the question is Paul didn’t know and neither do we. What we do know is it will be splendid. “Just as we have borne the image of the earthly man, so shall we bear the image of the heavenly man.” Verse 49 In verse 51 Paul calls it a mystery. This is a mystery we all should love because it is about us, His redeemed. No wonder sometimes we refer to someone as a “real tomato.”
Written by Roger Bothwell on December 29, 2016
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