2.01.01. The harvest field and the harvest labourerer, Part 1

THE LESSER PARABLES OF OUR LORD. THE HARVEST FIELD AND THE HARVEST LABOURERS.

“ The harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few; pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth labourers into his harvest.” — Matthew 9:37-38.

PART FIRST. THE HARVEST FIELD.

SEVERAL distinct aspects of Christ’s kingdom are represented in the gospel under the figure of grain, in its growing, ripening, and ingathering.

One view is set forth in the parable of the sower, another in the parable of the tares, and another in the separation of the chaff from the wheat; but the conception here is essentially different from all these. The harvest in this similitude springs not from the seed of the word, but from the root of human nature. The field is the world, and mankind the crop that covers all its breadth. The portions that are safely gathered represent the redeemed of the Lord; and the portions that drop over-ripe and rot on the ground represent those who perish in their sins. This field is—

1. Precious, in the very fact that it is a harvest-field.

Men, created at first in God’s image, and capable yet, when redeemed, of living in his presence for ever, are the fruit which this world bears — the fruit for the sake of which this world was made. If you ask a fanner what has been the produce of a certain field, he will not in reply enumerate roots, stalks, husks, and grain; he will answer, in one word, wheat; the other portions of the plant are valuable, not for their own sake, but for the sake of the grain which they bear. Thus the various vegetable and animal products of the earth are the stalks that support humanity; and humanity is the true fruit, for the sake of which our Father, the husbandman, cultivates his field. The conclusion of philosophy, reached through an examination of Nature, without reference to Revelation, is that all creation, from its earliest embryo, pointed to man. All that lies beneath and that came before him was a preparation for his coming. Creation contains abundant evidence that the conception of humanity was in the Maker’s mind from the first, and that the purpose of calling man into being ruled all the successive stages of the stupendous work. An American citizen from the sunny South, travelling once in New England, and holding its rugged hills in contempt, demanded of a native what his country produced.

"My country produces men,” said the descendant of the Puritans. He was right. Man, made in God’s image to be his servant and his son, is the true, heavy, precious head; plantations of cotton, sugar, rice, are merely the stalks which support it. Silk, wool, flax; wheat, barley, oats, are precious only as food and clothing for the Father’s family. These articles are not separately reckoned in the inventory of the great Proprietor’s gooda After all these things were made, and the world stored with them, its Maker counted his work only begim; it was then that God said, “Let us make man in our image.” All other products served only to make the earth ready for the reception of man. This is the fruit that God values. With this he intends to fill his stores. When ransomed men are gathered into heaven, the cotton crop, the silk crop, the grain crop, and all the crops, will be left behind like stubble, rotting in the field when its work is done.

Human beings are the head of God’s creation. For these he formed the green earth, and spread over it that bright sky; for these he hung the sun in heaven by day, and sprinkled the stars like gold dust upon the canopy of night, for these, when they fell, he gave his Son a ransom, and prepared an eternal home on high; over these, when they are forgiven and purified, he rejoices with a joy unspeakable and full of glory. O man, reverence thyself! In God’s sight thou art precious; be not vile in thine own!

2. It is plenteous. So said he who sees it all and knows its worth. We soon become bewildered when we try to realize the numbers of human beings that live or have lived on the earth; but numbers do not burden God. It would not weary him to enlighten every human heart, any more than to send a beam of sunlight into the bosom of every flower. More than ten hundred million live and breathe at one time; and many such generations have passed over the stage in succession since time began; yet the hairs of every head are numbered, and omniscience is not baflBed by the account. There may be as many blades of grass in one field as there are persons in Great Britain and Ireland; and yet every one of these gets its own drop of dew, and its portion of colouring from the sun’s rays. It is not more difficult for God to care for us than to care for them. One day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. In like manner, one man is with the Lord as a worldful, and a worldf ul as one man. If the existing population of the globe were multiplied by a miUion, none would receive less of God’s care; and if there were only one man in creation, he would not get more.

We are a great family who have been bom into this world, but not too many for the Creator’s upholding hand; and if we were all bom again, we would find room enough in the mansions of our Father’s house. When God’s Israel have got through the fire and water, it is “ a large place” into which they are ushered as their eternal home.

God has made all these of one blood. He has compassion on the ignorant and them that are out of the way. He will people heaven from every kindred and every tongue.

He so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son. The godly should be like God both in the wideness of their view and the warmth of their love. If love be true, the extent of its range will not diminish its intensity. It is characteristic of God’s laws and works that while they grasp the greatest they do not neglect the least. The power that balances the worlds in space, sharpens the down on a nettle stalk. If we, the children of the kingdom, be in spirit like our Father in heaven, no extension of range will dilute the strength of our sympathy. He who has learned from Christ to take the whole world within his embrace, loves his own house more intensely than the man who loves his own house alone. The world, as distinguished from the people of God sojourning in it, may be roughly divided into the three parts —

Pagan, Mohammedan, and Papist. Under the term Pagan may be included all who do not know and worship the one living and true God; under the term Mohammedan, all who, worshipping one God, do not approach him by the one Mediator Jesus Christ; and under the term Papist, all who, worshipping God and acknowledging Jesus, have added a multitude of other mediators.

Pagans have not God.
Mohammedans have not Christ.
Papists have not Christ only.

(1.) Pagans. We should never forget, in this land of light, that the larger portion of the human race is sitting in darkness. We are not near Christ and not like him if we do not take the burden of this fact upon our spirits.

More especially, the many millions of India and of Southern Africa have been thrown upon the compassion of British Christians. In respect to those feeble myriads who are subject to our sway, we are like a rich family at whose door a foundling has been laid. That vast multitude, nearly equal to the population of Europe, has been thrown on our hands. When they were sinking in anarchy we came to the rescue. Pushing aside others who oflTered to undertake the task, we drew the child out of the water. In our hands it is helpless as a child. If she who drew the child out of the water be a daughter of the king, she will bring up the child, not in the bondage to which it was bom, but as a prince in her father’s house. Alas! we have done little to bring the child up for our Father King. The Chinese, though not directly subject to our sway, have a stronger claim on our compassion. The nation has in time past done them wrong, and Christians in the nation should endeavour to make compensation. We introduced or winked at the introduction of a destroying flood; we should prepare a channel in which the water of life may flow.

(2.) Mohammedans. The region of the false prophet’s rule is a study of intense interest to Christians in respect of its geographical position. It constitutes a broad and continuous belt, running across the world from the Atlantic on the west to the deserts of Siberia on the north-east, separating Christianity from Paganism. Observe the skilful strategy of the god of this world. The gross idolatry of the heathen was not allowed to come into contact with, the Christianity of the West. To meet the strongest enemy a more ethereal system was pushed forward, and accordingly Christianity and Paganism, previous to the date of modem missions, were nowhere geographically conterminous. The foolish idols, were withdrawn into the dark bosom of the East, and a line of stronger lies drawn up to cover them from the onset of Christian truth. When the power of Mohammed swept over Western Asia and Eastern Europe like a lava flood, some Christian communities were embedded in it, like Herculaneum and Pompeii; and these fossil Churches have been found of late by some American missionary explorers. If the breath of the Spirit bring life into the petrified skeletons, it will be a grand sight to see a resurrection of dead Churches, after the silence of many centuries, in the very lands where the disciples of Jesus were first called Christians.

(3.) Papists. The greater part of the nations called Christian have remained under the Roman Antichrist, or are bound by the similar superstitions of the Greek Church.

I shall mention here ouly one feature of the many-sided system, — the discovery lately made and proclaimed by the Pope of the immaculate conception of the Virgin. On first hearing the fact we are surprised that the Papacy should thus expose its own weakness. One would think, if they were wise in their generation, they would hold by antiquity, and not confess that there are saving truths in religion which Popes for many generations did not know. But when we examine the state of the case, we find they could not help themselves; They are in the power of a law as mighty and as inexorable as gravitation. “ Evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse.” They cannot fix their doctrine at the present point, although they would. On — on they must go, like the fall of a stone or the flow of a river. The Popish system, by the mere weight of its wickedness, sinks necessarily deeper and deeper, until it fall like a mill-stone into a sea of wrath. Priests and people have for many generations been gravitating deeper and deeper into the worship of Mary. In this direction the mighty mass was moving, and it could not be recalled. Any attempt to arrest the movement would have rent the huge bulk of the Papacy asunder. The heads of the great apostasy f oimd themselves in this dilemma: the people with one consent were worshippers of Mary as much as the people of Ephesus were worshippers of the great goddess Diana. They must either forbid the worship or declare its object divine; they must either go backward or forward.

Backward they were not able to go, and therefore, making a virtue of necessity, they went forward. They separated their idol from humanity; they declared her a sinless being.

Happy Mary! she got safe to heaven before these lies were invented. She rejoiced in God her Saviour, while these her worshippers, if they had been living then, would have told her she was mistaken — that she had no sin, original or actual, to be saved from. Be of good courage, then; the apostasy of Rome cannot help itself. Further and faster it must fall by an inexorable law, until the jubilant cry be raised by emancipated nations, “ Babylon is fallen, is fallen, and shall be found no more at all.” But in a general survey of the field, we must not overlook the portion that lies nearest ourselves. Multitudes of our own flesh and blood, speaking our own language, and dwelling on our own soil, are living without God and dying without hope. As the Lord intimated to his disciples in Samaria, we have only to lift up our eyes where we stand, and we shall see fields large enough to occupy all our energies. The need of home missions has been fully recognized by the Church, and the work of home missions has been fairly begun. The features of this work, however, with its difficulties and its hopes, may be more appropriately noticed in connection with the latter portion of the parable — the prayer for an increase of harvest-labourers. In the meantime, looking generally to the world as the field to which the reapers must be sent, we gather from manifold symptoms that —

3. It is ripe. In the days of our Lord there was a divinely arranged readiness in the world for receiving his truth. It ran like the breaking out of waters over the empty aching breast of Greece and Bome. The Master saw that readiness, and pointed it out to his disciples in a tone of reproof. They were inclined to delay; he was eager to send them forth upon their work. Accordingly (John 4:35) he said, “Say not ye. There are yet four months, and then Cometh harvest?... Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest.” Whatever interval might be needed to ripen the natural grain, the spiritual field was ready for the reaper. There was a panting expectation both in Jew and Gentile then, and the Master commanded his servants to strike in while the opportunity was good.

I believe at no period since Jesus spoke these words to the twelve in Samaria were the fields so generally and so manifestly ready for the reapers as they are in our day. The idols of the heathen are losing hold and tottering to their fall. The Euphrates is drying up from its springs, — the doctrines of the prophet are effete, and his followers do not find their hands. The Papacy is rent from within, and its empty and disappointed multitudes, discontented with the teachers who have cheated them, are opener, therefore, to the advent of the truth. Even the Jews are weary with waiting, and the godless multitudes of our great cities are heaving like the sea in a ground-swell, some with dumb, indefinite desires, not knowing what ails them, but some with the grand old question of a quickened soul, “ What must I do to be saved?” No worker needs to wait four months or four days for the harvest. The fields are already white. There is a tide in human things which should be taken at the flood. When the grain is ripe it comes easy to the gatherer’s hand. But —

4. It is perishing. When vast breadths of land have been sown in spring, and few hands can be found in harvest to gather it, the sight is one of the saddest. So much come to the birth, and not strength to bring forth! The heavy ripened fields are bending and growing black, and falling to the ground. Whatever may have caused the scarcity of reapers; whether war or pestilence or oppression may have cut them down or cast them away, or whether it be mere indolence that clogs exertion, the sight of food left to perish is equally a melancholy sight. Seldom does such a sight present itself, for men value the fruit of the earth. They cannot want it, and therefore they make adequate exertions to secure it. We know what hunger is, and therefore we do not waste food. When our spiritual appetites become as k en as our natural, God will get his work done. When it becomes our meat to do the Father’s will and to finish his work, we shall be like Christ; and soon thereafter, I suppose, we shall be with him, and see him as he is.