Aldersgate Magazine Jeremiah 5:24 Neither say they in their heart, Let us now fear the LORD our God, that gives rain, both the former and the latter, in his season… Is there not a modern tendency to exclude God from the harvest field, to put an atheistic trust in secondary causes — subsoil ploughing, artificial manures, the rotation of crops and the like? Nature to the seeing eye and listening ear is sacramental. "Earth is crammed with heaven," and the air is redolent with a celestial music. 1. The prophet would have us cherish that filial, reverent and thankful fear towards the great Giver of all which will save us from perverting His gifts. Without a due recognition of God our temporal prosperity becomes a curse. Jeshurun waxed fat and kicked. An engraving by Retseh illustrating a great poem gives us the angels dropping roses from the skies on the heads of denizens in Inferno. Reaching them these fragrant gifts turn to molten lead but to scorch and burn. Is it not thus when the blessings of a kindly providence fall on selfish and ungrateful hearts? The intended boon becomes a bane and the perverted gift a corrosion and a blight. Such is the characteristic sign of worldliness. It is a profanation of life's gifts to basest uses, and a missing of the higher good. But the bounteousness of each glad harvest time should remind us that we are pensioners on the lavish goodness of our Heavenly Father in order that we may use it as He alone wills, for we are beneficiaries every one, and, as such, trustees of heaven's manifold mercies and gifts. 2. The thought of "life out of death" is conveyed to the spiritual mind. "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." 3. Another suggestion from the harvest is that of cooperation with God. Take a field of corn; it has not come of itself. Geologists never find amid the fossilised remains of primeval vegetation a trace of corn. It is specifically a human product. Wild wheat is unknown. Corn is the product of civilised man. It implies tillage, and this in a sense not true of many other products that minister to man's need. So also is it in the development of Christian character. We are "workers together with God." We do not attain to eminence by accident, or, as it were, automatically. It is true that "salvation is of God"; we are "saved by grace through faith; and that not of ourselves: it is the gift of God." But there is sense in which salvation is a process, a diligent culture, a strenuous warfare, a glad but real obedience. We must work out what God works in if we are to come to a real possession of truth and of Christian excellence. The graces of Christian life are not like pictures thrown on a screen by a magic lantern, they are rather like the strands woven in a costly fabric by the weaver at his loom. To change the figure, finished husbandry of soul involves sedulous and patient culture, prayerful self-examination, and a mastery of that inner realm of our being where desire, motive, volition play their determining part in human character. Truth is real, something trowed, when it has become a working and victorious principle in the life. Other than this, it is like so much unused capital locked up in a bank, or so much unworked land on a farm. The Chinese, it is said, discovered the magnetic needle centuries before it was known in the western world. But it was a mere toy. They did not use it for new voyages of discovery or for enterprise in commerce. Its practical utility was nil. May not we commit a similar futility in Christianity? 4. Again, "Everything in its season," the harvest seems to say, "First the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear." So each period in human life has its appropriate work. We cannot postpone duty and expect the reward of honest diligence. A pious, well-instructed youthhood should go before the active responsibilities and burdens of mid life, as both of these must precede and determine the mellow ripeness of advanced age. No one period in life can do the work of another period. Each has its own function and opportunity. Religion is a sublime forecast to be made use of in life's early season, and not an afterthought darkened only with unavailing regrets when the summer has ended and the harvest we had wished is forever beyond our reaping. "Know thy opportunity" was written on the temple of Delphos. It is written deep on the face of time. 5. Let us remember that as the grain of one harvest is the seed of the next, so our life is reproductive, and its influence far-reaching and beyond our power to compute. Moreover, there is a wondrously cumulative power in Christian work and influence; the reaping is larger than the sowing. A self-multiplying process is ever going forward, and the results lie beyond our reckoning. We think of the beginning of things, the initial stages of great reform movements, the so-called forlorn hopes of the past, and with grateful wonder we greet today their fruitful, immeasurable issues. It is difficult for even the most sceptical and slow of belief to resist the lesson of history, that moral and spiritual forces rule and shape the destiny of this world, and that humanity and Christianity are meant the one for the other. (Aldersgate Magazine.) Parallel Verses KJV: Neither say they in their heart, Let us now fear the LORD our God, that giveth rain, both the former and the latter, in his season: he reserveth unto us the appointed weeks of the harvest. |
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