06 - Sowing and Reaping
CHAPTER VI SOWING AND REAPING
It was not until the Hebrew people came into possession of the land promised to their fathers, that they were able to take up the tillage of the soil as the means of their support. From Abraham to Joshua, a period of at least five centuries, they were exclusively shepherds, and generally without any settled habitation. The conquest of Palestine enabled them to become farmers, and lay aside their nomadic habits. The change was much greater than appears on the surface of things. The life of the shepherd was one of hardship and exposure, through want of homes and their equipment. It was one of constant peril, as it admitted of no permanent defense against marauders. It was a life of great monotony, without interruption of routine except at lambing and shearing time. It was commonly a life of painful solitude, and thus exposed to the melancholy which isolation from other men breeds. The life of the ancient farmer was not that of a man living in a farmhouse apart, but that of a resident in a walled city, who went out to till his fields. It was therefore more wholesome for the mind, and of greater safety, as well as brightened by closer social association. The work was more varied, and the rest more cheerful. Time could be found for festivals, and especially for a weekly Sabbath, such as the shepherd never knew, because his work must be the same for every day of the week. Hence the silence of the Old Testament as to the observance of the Sabbath before Moses and the giving of the law. The more strenuous employments of the new age and its more rapid societary movement demanded the alternations of rest; and this need has grown greater with every century since that time. By becoming farmers, the Hebrew people moved to a higher level of the world’s social development, while those peoples that did not make the change remained on a lower. The difference grew originally out of a higher faith in the fixed laws which govern the world, and especially the law that “whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” It is difficult for us, after millenniums of uniform experience, to realize the uncertainty with which primitive man must have faced this problem of sowing and reaping. He would not have found it incredible, if told by any one claiming knowledge of the matter, that the sowing of wheat would produce a crop of spelt or tares, or no crop whatever. The races which found it hard to reach any certainty, unless driven on by necessity, clung to more palpable ways of getting their food by hunting and fishing, while others got as far as keeping sheep or cattle. In the Bible story, Esau is the type of the distrustful races; while Jacob, with his crop of red lentils, stands for those which had courage to risk their seed in sowing, in the faith that the harvest would be of the same kind, and abundant enough to repay the risk.
It is in the Zend-Avesta, the sacred book of the ancient Persians, that the antagonism of the two kinds of peoples comes out most clearly. The Persian was a tiller of the soil, and regarded it as a sacred thing, not to be profaned by the burial of corpses in it, while it repaid this reverence by the gifts of the harvest. Their savage neighbors, the Turanians, to the north of Persia, despised agriculture, and the Zend-Avesta makes the contrast between the two modes of life almost identical with the distinction between good and bad men. The Turanian justified this by his readiness to plunder the harvest-fields of his industrious neighbors. A similar situation existed in America before the Spanish conquests. The people of the warmer parts of the continent had been driven by necessity to the cultivation of maize and manioc. Their harvests were plundered by the more savage tribes to the north, who also killed or enslaved the cultivators. The Navajos named the months of their calendar from the animal they most hunted in each, and one was “Mexican month.” In the long run, the tillers of the soil have come to the front as the masters of the world, because of their wealth, their social coherence, and their trained intelligence. The taproot of their success was their faith in the beneficent order which controls the world. They have learned also that the same great law of the harvest pervades the whole of human life. The Greek poet Hesiod, the Latin orator Cicero, and the Hebrew apostle Paul express this in almost identical terms. They apply to the moral life of men the saying, “A man reaps as he sows,” meaning that we here touch a natural law, which has its exact parallel in the life of man as a responsible being. The Scriptures recognize a double correspondence here. The Old Testament, for the most part, finds this in the reaping of what we sow in the conduct of our lives. The New Testament applies the analogy more commonly to the labors of our Master and his servants for the welfare of mankind. Let us look at some of the aspects of this great parable.
I. God and man work together in the tillage of the soil, and the ingathering of the harvest.
Man avails himself of God’s law of increase, by which the scanty seed grows into the abundant harvest, supplying seed to the sower and bread to the eater. He casts himself upon the established order of God in the creation, when he risks his seed in the earth. However well he may plant it and tend it, he cannot of himself make one grain germinate, or bring forth one blade out of the earth, as Luther says. Along with his faith goes hope. He looks to see sunshine and rainfall given in due measure, also as part of God’s order.
We lose a right sense of this through the bluntness of our perceptions. We have allowed ourselves to grow used to the wonder of God’s working in these common things, until all wonder has ceased out of the world for us. We think of nature as a big piece of machinery, which works apart from the presence and will of its Creator. So we find it hard to pray, as his Son bids us, “Give us this day our daily bread.” We have allowed the constancy of its coming to hide God’s hand in the giving. His Son, however, never took a piece of bread into his hands without blessing the Father who gave it. There must have been something distinctive in his way of doing this. The two disciples did not recognize him during their walk of five miles with him to Emmaus, but knew him at once when he “took the bread and blessed; and breaking it he gave to them.” Must he not have taken it as though it came right out of his Father’s hand, as we also should do?
Even the heathen acknowledge this truth in their way. Every pantheon had a deity of the harvest, who was worshiped while the crops were growing, and especially when they were gathered. The only native American idol which has survived the zeal of the Christian missionaries represents the Mexican goddess of the maize plant, and in her honor more festivals were held than for any other. The apostle therefore appealed to a universal belief, when he told the heathen people of Lystra that the “living God, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea, and all that in them is... left not himself without witness, in that he did good and gave you from heaven rains and fruitful seasons, filling your hearts with food and gladness.” It is upon this truth that our country bases her observance of Thanksgiving day, when the whole nation acknowledges God as the giver of our harvests. When we pass from the natural to the spiritual order, we find this fact of man’s dependence upon God not less evident. We find it so, as the Old Testament teaches, in the conduct of our Hves.
We are in the presence of moral laws as distinct as that by which the seed germinates “after its kind,” and bears its own fruit.
We all, indeed, are sowing seed of some sort, and thus submitting our lives to the operation of the law of growth; and we all will have a harvest of some sort. It may be a bad one. We may “plow iniquity, and sow trouble,” and “reap the same” (Job 4:8); or “sow iniquity and reap calamity” (Proverbs 22:8); or “sow the wind” and “reap the whirlwind” (Hosea 8:7). But this is more often and properly the neglect of tillage, which leaves the weeds of evil to spring up and possess the soil. It is not the conduct of life, but throwing the reins on the neck of our animal passions and our baser instincts, and bidding them take us where they will.
All real conduct of life is a laying hold of divine help, and working with God. It starts from him, and not from ourselves. We are indeed to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, because he has worked it in, because he worketh in us to will and to work, for his good pleasure. There can be no good in us, either in germ or in fruition, which is not from him. It is he who implants in our hearts that incorruptible seed, which liveth and abideth, and which makes us fruitful in the virtues and the activities of a Christian Hfe. Here it is that Qiristianity parts company from the paganism even of Hesiod and Cicero. The latter, in his dialogue “On the Nature of the Gods,” makes one of the speakers remark that men thank the gods for all sorts of external benefits — for prosperity, for safety from perils, for fair children, and beautiful houses; but that no one ever thanks the gods that he is virtuous, honest, chaste, generous. And quite rightly, he thinks, since a man owes these to himself. Christians know that it is just for these that they are most bound to give God thanks.
We find this equally true, as the New Testament teaches it, in the spiritual harvest which is gathered from efforts to do good to men. The greatest and most fruitful workers have been those who felt most clearly their dependence upon God. *T planted,” says Paul, “Apollos watered; but God gave the increase. So then neither is he that planteth anything, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase.” Man’s part, he says is foolishness — ’’the foolishness of preaching” by which God “is pleased to save them that believe.”
It is indeed foolishness to expect sinners to give heed to a message which runs counterto all their natural inclinations, humbles their pride, and calls upon them to do what is beyond their power. It is a mere waste of words unless God be in it, and make men welcome what is most distasteful, and enable them to believe what is incredible, and to do what is impossible to flesh and blood. It is just this that makes the preaching of the gospel a thing apart from all other speech of man to men.
It is a message from God, with the assurance that a divine power attends it, making it possible for sinners to believe and obey it. The human instrument, indeed, God will not dispense with. “How shall they believe,” says the apostle, “in him whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher? and how shall they preach, except they be sent?” God has committed this ministry to men, and not to the angels, for the good of men. He draws us “with cords of a man, with bands of love”
(Hosea xi:4), in speaking to us through the heart and the voice of a fellow-man, just as in the Incarnation he meets us as one of ourselves —
“So through the thunder comes a human voice Saying, *0 heart I made, a heart beats here!
Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself!
Thou hast no power nor mayest conceive of mine, But love I gave thee, with myself to love, And thou must love me who have died for thee.’ “ Nor is the true preacher a mere Hfeless trumpet, through which a message is sounded in our ears. His fitness for the work is through the training he has had from the Spirit of God. The life of the Spirit in his heart gives him an entire assurance of the truth he brings, a lively sense of the need of those he addresses, and a yearning love to reach and touch them. Thus it is made manifest that “the foolishness of God is wiser than men.”
11. The farmer proceeds upon the conviction that the law of growth will operate uniformly in every case where the conditions are fairly favorable. We as a people risk hundreds of millions of dollars every year upon that conviction, and the labors of millions of men besides. All this is risked upon something unseen, intangible, and yet real. The gains of the hunter and the herdsman are much more tangible from the outset, but those of the farmer are greater. When European settlement began, the entire population of our country was about a quarter of a million of Indians. They had all the resources of our national area at their disposal, but they lived mainly by hunting and fishing. They suffered from hunger very often, and died of famine in many years. We are feeding nearly ninety millions at home, and we send the food for millions across the Atlantic. The spiritual law of seedtime and harvest is just as certain, but we are far slower to learn its truth. We even fancy sometimes that we can evade it by our cleverness, although we would not venture upon that with the natural law. By no sort of tillage would we seek a crop of wheat where we had sown only spelt or rye. The religions of the world are in some cases little else than devices to escape the law of reaping as you have sown, by bribing the divine powers to show favoritism. There are erroneous forms of Christian teaching or believing, which have the same purpose. The notions that some ritual observance, or wearing of a scapular, or an emotional experience which left the life unchanged, or a rigid orthodoxy of the head which has nothing to do with the heart, will serve as a substitute for holy living, are subtle forms of Antinomianism, which reappear in every age. The apostle’s doctrine as justification by faith without the works of the law, in the Epistle to the Galatians, has been as much abused in this way, and wrested by the ignorant and the unsteadfast to their own destruction (2 Peter 3:16), as any other part of the Bible. It is, however, in this very epistle that he gives us the solemn warning, “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. For he that soweth unto his own flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth unto the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap eternal life.”
God ’Vill render to every man according to his works” (Romans 2:6). “Follow after peace with all men,” says the Epistle to the Hebrews, ’’and the sanctification without which no man shall see the Lord.” John saw the dead before the Throne, “and they were judged every man according to their works.” This spiritual law commends itself to our judgments and our consciences in the most forcible way. It fits into all that we know of the universe, as exactly as does the natural law of gravitation, and we have just as good reason for acting upon its truth. There is nothing that is either factitious or arbitrary about it. The fruits of our lives are the corresponding outcome of what we have been planting and sowing in the conduct of our lives; and in the nature of things they cannot be otherwise. Yet no sinner ever gathers his armful or barnful of thistles and darnell and wild mustard without grumbling at its not being wheat.
Even good men fall short here, though in a less degree. Robert Bruce, the great Scottish preacher, was an eminently good man. When pressed to declare his full belief that the Earl of Gowrie had made a treasonable attempt on the Hfe of King James, he said they were asking of him a “persuasion of the fact which he could not get for the articles of his belief.” “What!” said Lord Kinloss, “are you not fully persuaded of the articles of your belief?” “Not, my lord, as I should be. If you and I were both persuaded that there were a hell, we would do otherwise than as we do.” If we felt, at every instant of life, the reality of the spiritual laws which govern life, we would rise to heroic heights of obedience and endurance. Then we would be earning the praise our Lord gives to the pearl-trader, who realized that the one pearl was worth more than all he possessed, and who acted with businesslike promptness on that knowledge. And we would not be falling under that sorrowful rebuke, that the children of this world are wiser after their sort than the children of the Light. Those go to their object as straight as the bird flies, while these hesitate, shilly-shally, and compromise.
III. This stern law of reaping as we sow has a gracious and gospel aspect, in respect to the abundance of the harvest, whether natural or spiritual. Our Lord especially Insists upon this.
He says that the seed which fell upon good ground bore fruit “thirtyfold, and sixtyfold, and a hundredfold.” May we not suppose that he had been counting the gains in a wheat ear, and saw in this the beneficence of the law of growth, and a prophecy of nature as to the growth of his kingdom? This natural multiplication goes far beyond what we should have expected. It is increase after a divine measure, rather than the human. Our Lord sees another example of this in the mustard plant, which grows from one of the tiniest of seeds, but within the year mounts up into quite a branchy bush, the biggest of the garden herbs of Palestine, and affords rest and shelter for the birds. The Talmud quotes a Rab Simeon, who said he had one in his garden so large that he climbed into it. A third of his illustrations is the diffusion of the morsel of leaven through the six gallons of meal, which we now know to be another instance of vegetable expansion. To the truth which these illustrate, he constantly returns in his teaching. He tells us of the surprise which awaits us, when we see the great results which will oome from seemingly small causes. A cup of cold water, if given in the name of Christ, or even in that of a disciple, shall not lose its reward. The giver may forget it, but not he. Whoever makes sacrifices for Christ’s sake and the gospel’s “shall receive a hundredfold, and shall inherit eternal life.” He who is found faithful in the handHng of five talents or ten, shall be called to bear rule over as many cities. In the day of judgment those who ministered to the needs of his hungry, naked, sick, or imprisoned brethren, will have the same measure of joy as if they had done this to himself. Thus he lifts the law of growth into a very gospel of growth. His teaching is confirmed by the experiences of even the life that now is. In the conduct of life we are all tempted to despise the small crosses he sends us, the small openings for kindness and self-sacrifice the day brings us, and the petty duties and burdens which fill up our humdrum existence. When we meet these faithfully and nobly, we have our reward on a grander scale than we could have expected. Burdens grow to wings, crosses to crowns, faithful endurance to triumph; and from each discharge of duty we acquire the power to meet the next with efficiency. ’’We see dimly in the present what is small and what is great,” as Lowell says. We are blinded by the illusions of life, and take the great for the small, because it is not the big. Our small victories in the face of temptation are won over obstacles and spiritual enemies of the highest rank, and are won to the shaping of our characters, the strengthening of our wills, the purification of our vision, and the increase of our faith and joy.
Prof. Wilham James suggests that to do each day of Hfe some one thing we know we ought to do, but do not want to do, would have the result of making us wiser and braver men, and more fit for great things if these fell to our share. On the New Testament side of the parable, it is the joy of those who work for others to have a present experience of this law of increase. We who teach have it in a lower sphere. Our "boys” come back to us in their manhood and say, “I never forgot what you said to us one day,” and go on to quote something which has escaped our memories completely. Every day of earnest and honest work in the schoolroom or the college class reaches some with a touch which helps to shape lives in the years of their plasticity. There is, however, one teacher who far surpasses us in this. It is she who has the first word with her child, before any other can reach him, and who is molding him in ways which neither she nor the child can see. It will take heaven to show what the work of Christian mothers has been in building up the kingdom, and it will be a joyful surprise to many a mother, perhaps to all of them. The minister of the word already shares in the joy of his Lord, which is depicted in the fifteenth chapter of Luke’s Gospel, in the parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin, the lost son. As is there said, it is the joy which lights up heaven with a new gladness, because a sinner has turned to God. The effort the preacher puts forth is trifling in comparison with the vastness of the result which is achieved. As our Lord told his apostles, he is but reaping where others have sown in most cases. The best environment of the man’s life has been working toward grace. As George Herbert says: —
Lord, with what care hast thou begirt us round!
Parents first season us: then schoolmasters Deliver us to laws; they send us bound To rules of reason, holy messengers, Pulpits and Sundays, sorrow dogging sin, Afflictions sorted, anguish of all sizes, Fine nets and stratagems to catch us in.
Bibles laid open, millions of surprises, Blessings beforehand,ties of gratefulness, The sound of glory ringing in our ears;
Without, our shame; within, our consciences; Angels and grace, eternal hopes and fears.
All these have entered into the plan of the man’s life, who at last is brought by the preached word to submit his will to God. And with all these has been the divine Sower, whose work underlies every good influence which touches any human life, whether effectually or not. Yet the reaper, who gathers the harvest, is not the less blessed. “He that reapeth receiveth wages,” the Lord tells his apostles, “and gathereth fruit unto life eternal; that he that soweth and he that reapeth may rejoice together.” In his very first epistle the greatest of apostolic reapers tells how he thus rejoiced with his Lord. Paul writes to his Thessalonian converts: “For what is our hope, or joy, or crown of glorying? Are not even ye, before our Lord Jesus at his coming? For ye are our glory and our joy.”
IV. Harvest is naturally and everywhere a time of rejoicing. The risks of tillage being beyond man’s wisdom or strength to cope with, when these perils are past, men’s hearts grow lighter. The Hebrew Feast of Tabernacles was their harvest festival, and the spirit which animated it finds fit expression in the Eighty-first Psalm. When Isaiah would describe the deep and hearty joy of the reign of the Prince of Peace, he says: —
They joy before thee according to the joy of the harvest. And as men rejoice when they divide the spoil, binding together two of the situations in which social joy overflows into festivity. Who that was brought up on an old-fashioned farm, will ever forget the harvest-home? The last handful of wheat was cut with care, bound with bright ribbons, and carried home by the reaper to grace the fireplace in the farm-kitchen.
Then came the feast, at which master and men, with their households, ate at one huge table.
After hunger and thirst were satisfied, there were cheerful talk of the season just passed, merry jesting about its incidents, singing of old ballads, and games for the younger folk. Honest joy and mirth drew all together, and if any were kept away by sickness, their share was sent them. Whenever I read that verse in the ninth chapter of Isaiah, it takes me back to the Ulster farm of my boyhood, and calls up the kind faces and warm hearts which gathered at its harvest-home.* The spiritual life, like the life of the farm, is one which reaches its joys through its toils and even its anxieties. It is a steady transition from the sadder to the brighter side of things. **The evening and the morning were the first day;” and the shadows of the one passing into the brightness of the other have been present in every spiritual day since the first. As Lord Bacon says,
* Harvest-home is still kept in many parts of America, notably in New Jersey, where the farmers of a neighborhood unite in a common celebration. The grounds of the Presbyterian Church of Dayton, N. J, have been thus used for years past. adversity is among the very promises of the New Testament. It tells us of tribulations in the world to be endured; of chastenings which seal us as the sons of God; of reproaches for the name of Christ; of sharing in his sufferings; of daily bearing of our cross. Our Lord allowed his disciples to cherish no delusions on this point, declaring that he sent them forth “as sheep in the midst of wolves,” and warning them to expect at men’s hands no better treatment than he himself received.
It is part of that intimate communion which Christians have with their Lord, that they should suffer in the presence of sin and shame as he did.
We must taste of the bitter of his cup, as well as of the sweet, and learn why he was “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.” The sight of the world’s evil was a burden to him at all times; the vision of its shamefulness pierced his heart. They who are his desire to share his estimate of human life, and to “know the fellowship of his sufferings.” Paul went farther than we can see our way, when he spoke of “filling up that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ.” The saying indicates the closeness of his sympathy with his Master. This is one side of the Christian’s experience, but the Scriptures always conjoin with it the joy of the harvest. “Blessed are ye that weep now, for ye shall laugh.” “Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.” “Ye shall be sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be turned into joy.” These two notes, in this order, always run through the New Testament, as describing the blessedness of the saints. It is in exact harmony with them that the Christian’s last experience in this world should be emergence through the shadow of death into the light of the life eternal. The same alteration from sorrow to joy runs through the life given to the service of men. Our Lord went before his disciples in this experience also. He knew what it was to toil in vain for the spiritual elevation of those who heard him. He mourned over the blindness of the cities by the Galilaean lake, which saw his mighty works, but did not repent. He went over Jerusalem, saying, “If thou hadst known in this day, even thou, the things which belong unto peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes.” To his countrymen at large he said: “Ye will not come to me that ye may have life.” “Few there be that find” the way to life. The success of our Lord’s ministry, if measured by the number of the disciples he made, was far from remarkable. At the end of three years he had but a handful, and not one of them stood by him in the dark hour. So has it been with many of his most spiritual servants. Henry Martyn toiled to small result among the Persians; Keith-Falconer sowed the good seed on stony ground among the Arabs; James Gilmour labored for a lifetime among the Mongols without a convert to show. Even those who have had marked success have had to endure the heartache of prolonged failure before it came, as Robert Moffatt did among the Bechuanas, feeling **as if he were trying to lift a mirror by taking hold of its face.” Where the sowing has been without the harvest during the life of the laborer, it yet may have a brighter and better result for the world in the long run. Dr. W. Robertson Niccoll suggests that there is a prophecy of the final success of missions, which have seemed to fail, in the words of the Twenty-second Psalm: —
All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn unto Jehovah; And all the kindreds of the nations shall worship before thee. The seed fell into the ground and seemed to die — in a sense did die — ^but it brought forth much fruit.
So, as our Lord predicted, it proved true of his own work. He gave the world the best that could be given it, and it gave him the cross. Men wrote ’’Failure!” on that sealed tomb, and turned lightly to their affairs of ritual piety, or moneymaking, or politics. But he who had said, “Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, shall they give into your bosom,” was not to receive less than he promised to those who heard him. The grandest powers of mankind have been used in his service — the eloquence of the orator, the speech-mastery of the poet, the meditation of the philosopher, the artistic skill of painter and sculptor and architect, the statesmanship of the ruler. All these are but the summit-peaks of a land ruled by his memory. Millions and hundreds of millions have lived for him, repressing the evil passions and brute instincts of their nature, laying aside their violent tempers, purging themselves of their impurity, rising above their covetousness, and toiling in honest ways for themselves and others. They have cut off the right hand and plucked out the right eye at his bidding, and carried their daily cross that they might follow him. Myriads have died for him, and in no century so many as in that whose close we have witnessed. More love him to-day than yesterday, and more will love him to-morrow than to-day. His influence, unlike that of other great men, at once deepens and widens with every year since his death, showing it not to be subject to that law of limitation which binds all finite things. Of him especially may we say: —
“They that sow in tears shall reap in joy.
He that goeth forth weeping, bearing seed for sowing, Shall doubtless come again with joy, bringing his sheaves.”