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I. EXPLANATION OF THE PASSAGE.

1. Panorama of the emerging plants. On all sides spring up, as though by magic, the floating algae, the circling lichens, the luxuriant mosses, the branching ferns, the waving grasses, the graceful palms, the kingly cedars, the iris-hued flowers. And a blessed vision it is: this grateful exchange of dull uniformity and barren nakedness for vegetable colours — for carpets of emerald, and tapestries of white and azure and crimson and orange and purple. Even the God of beauty Himself feels that it is good.

2. The birth of life.

3. The soil the matrix of the plant.

4. Fruit after its kind. Here the Sacred Chronicle virtually asserts the invariability of what we call "Species."

5. Ministry of vegetation.

(1) Plants are the source of all our food: directly as in vegetable diet — e.g., bread, which we call the "Staff of Life"; and indirectly, as in animal diet — these animals themselves having been fed on the vegetable world. Annihilate plants, and where is food? Annihilate food, and where is man?

(2) Vegetation is the grand means of atmospheric purification.

(3) The vegetable world is a never-ending source of aesthetic delight. The two great occasions and conditions of physical beauty are figure and colour. The plants, in their infinitely varied range from diatom to cedar, illustrate every conceivable line of figure, every conceivable hue of colour. Their ravishing song ranges through the whole scale of possible figures, through the whole gamut of possible hues. They are not only ministrants to a transient pleasure, they are also witnesses to an eternal beauty.

II. MORAL MEANING OF THE STORY.

1. The plant is a beautiful emblem, or, rather, a prophetic type of man himself.

2. The birth of powers.

(1)  The parable of germination.

(2)  The parable of evolution.

(3)  The parable of fructification.This then is the lesson of the hour: The birth of powers to issue in heavenly fruitage. Be not content then with the mere sense of individuality and of duty, mechanically taking your allotted place with the grouping lands and seas (Genesis 1:9, 10); actually put forth in living exercise your latent powers. Yes, happy the day when the Lord of seeds and of souls says to thee: "Let the earth put forth shoots, and the fruit tree yield its fruits!" Thrice happy the day when thou obeyest, thy life becoming arborescent, the leaves of thy tree spirally arranged so as to take in the most thou canst of God's air and sunshine, yielding the fruits of a Christian character.

(G. D. Boardman.)

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KJV: And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.

WEB: God said, "Let the earth put forth grass, herbs yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit after their kind, with its seed in it, on the earth;" and it was so.