Isaiah 9:3. They joy before Thee according to the joy in harvest.
1Taken with editing from The Family Treasury for 1866. Two of the six main points appeared in last month’s section: Harvest presupposes (1) surrender (2) surrender unto death.
3. Life in Death
But now, tracing out yet further the fulness of this idea of harvest, we also find the grand principle of life in death – life reached and reproduced through death. This is the very core of what is implied in harvest. “That which thou sowest is not quickened except it die; but if it die,” it is quickened; “it bringeth forth much fruit.”
The seed corn cast into the ground undergoes a process of disorganisation and decomposition. Its outer body, or shell, really dies; it becomes assimilated to the soil and lost in it; “dust to dust, and ashes to ashes”. But an inner and central germ of vital power is thus set free, which, bursting the rapidly-disorganising outer layers and setting them aside, sprouts into a new life – urging, securing its resurrection, and claiming our notice as “first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear”. Here is vitality in the original grain more powerful than death; not only so, it turns death into its service – making death the occasion, the means and the minister of its own development.
Most completely is the analogy in this respect met in the person and work of Christ. And in the very nature of things, it never could have been met in the moral government of God and the spiritual world except in a redemption and a Redeemer – yes, a Divine Redeemer. In a sinless universe, the phenomenon of harvest in the natural world could have had no analogue, no parallel, in the moral world.
I have said that only in redemption and a Redeemer can the analogy of harvest be truly met; and, I add emphatically, a Divine Redeemer – God manifest in the flesh – dying as a substitute for sinners. Observe what it is that the analogy demands. It demands an inner life that shall prove more than a match for death; nay, that shall serve itself at death’s hands, that shall turn death into its help and servant and make death the very means of liberating it into full and free development and crowning it with glorious triumph. No creature can do this; no creature has such an inner and invincible vitality. For that vitality is invincible which passes unhurt, not through danger and disease, but through very death itself; indeed it outlives death and breaks forth into its grandest triumph in the valley and shadow of death. That surely is life invincible. And invincibility is no quality of the creature. The “Child born”, the “Son given”, must in very truth be “Wonderful” if He can put this into effect. He must be “the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father”.
A Divine Person, He is Life itself – the very fullness, the fountain, of life. A Divine Person in human nature, He is not only the Life; He is capable of death. As a Divine Person, He answers to that element of the analogy in which the seed corn is seen to have a secret life capable of prevailing over death itself. As a Divine Person in human nature in the room of sinners, He meets the analogy also in respect of the seed corn falling into the ground and dying. That death which would have engulfed in everlasting ruin the sinner suffering in his own person, Christ, in His Divine Person taking the sinner’s nature and place and condemnation, can suffer and conquer and set aside.
And the Fountain of life, which death hitherto had sealed against us, bursts forth for us, liberated for us by death itself, triumphing not only in death and over death, but, most marvellously, by death. And the life that could not come to us direct from the throne of heaven has come through an earthly grave. Heaven could not be – what the grave has become – the birthplace of life for sinful men. For “except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone”; and “that which thou sowest is not quickened except it die”.
This principle of “life in death” – life by death – re-appears in you who are members of Christ. You are baptized into His death. You are engrafted into Christ, expressly and especially, as a dying Christ. You take hold on His death by faith, and make it your own. This is the very value of the cross to you. It becomes full of meaning and full of worth exactly when you see and believe this: that when conscience and the law are denouncing death to you, the cross is that very death – death complete, death harmless to you. You embrace death when you embrace the cross.
It is no less the very death the law was denouncing because it is Christ’s death. On the contrary, it is for that reason exactly the death which the law was denouncing – no, which it has exacted and received. But it is the death of Him who is the Fountain of life. Receiving it, being baptized into it, buried with Christ, you are so buried with Him that, like as He was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so you also now walk in newness of life. Being planted with Him in the likeness of His death, you are also in the likeness of His resurrection. In union with Him you partake of His death, which the law exacts and inflicts for sin. But receiving death in virtue of union with Him who is the way and the truth and the life, you receive life also, everlasting life.
Everlasting life has thus reached you through death: first, Christ’s death for you, and then your death in Him. Not only does Christ die for you; you die in Him. You see Christ dying on the cross, offering Himself to God a sacrifice in death. As between you and Christ and God, you see no reason for this, no justification of this, no possible fruit of this, unless the cursed death of the cross shall be held as suffered for your sin and unto your salvation.
To furnish a reason, therefore, and justification and fruit of this wondrous death of Calvary – the highest, grandest loyal duty man or angel can discharge – you conjoin yourself, by faith, with Christ in His death. You offer yourself up to God in and with Him on the cross. You render up the old life to be extinguished. You thus judge, that if One died for you, then you also died, that you, now living, may not live unto yourself, but unto Him that died for you and that rose again. Thus you are crucified with Christ; nevertheless you live. You are part, in fact, of Christ’s harvest. It is the life of Christ reproduced in you. Christ does not now “abide alone”. He has you with Him. “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”
The Christian life is life in death; and the death is helpful to the life, on the harvest principle: “If ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live”. This also is the quickening power of sanctified affliction. It is just so much death, liberating so much more life; procuring and conveying great scope for the unhampered development of life. It is “bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus may be made manifest in our mortal body. For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, the inward man is renewed day by day.” Our outward man is the shell of the seed corn; and it must be disorganised, that the secret germ of life may burst in to its plenitude and power and triumph.
4. Abundance of Life
In the idea of harvest, there is not only the thought of life through death, but of abundance of life. “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” The life produced by the dying of the seed corn is not merely sufficient to compensate for the death which has taken place, but exceedingly abundant above that. The result is not another seed corn as a substitute, replacing what had been surrendered, but a manifold return – in some thirty, in some sixty, in some an hundredfold. Thus harvest is enriching. The surrender that is required to procure a harvest is the source of riches.
Economists, in fact, tell us that agriculture is the only real source of wealth. The literary, scientific and professional men of a community may ornament and dignify a nation; the talented and energetic men of commerce may redistribute and circulate, to the advantage of the greatest number, the materials of necessity, convenience and luxury; but it is the cultivators of the soil alone who, positively and immediately, increase the country’s wealth. The total increase of the world’s wealth in any year is the sum of its harvests – nature itself teaching that, under this world’s constitution, surrender unto death is the condition of plenteousness and abundance of life.
Need I say that this is very gloriously illustrated in the Person and work of Christ? His death is the source of life. Himself the firstfruits and first-begotten from the dead, He is, by His death, the cause of life to a people whom no man can number. It was concerning Himself that He said, “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone, but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit”. And when He said this, the harvest field His eye really rested on was the countless myriads of His people in Gentile days and Gentile lands, as it is written also in Psalm 72: “There shall be an handful of corn in the earth upon the top of the mountains; the fruit thereof shall shake like Lebanon: and they of the city shall flourish like grass of the earth. . . . Men shall be blessed in Him: all nations shall call Him blessed.”
The same thing is exemplified in the Christian as in Christ: the life which the believer has through death is an abundant life – plenteous, overflowing, eternal life. “I am come,” says Jesus, “that ye might have life, and that ye might have it more abundantly.” “They that receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness shall reign in life.” They shall have a royalty, a kingliness of life. “He that hateth his life” – surrendering it, as we have seen, on the principle and on the faith of harvest – shall not only keep it, but “shall keep it unto life eternal”. That which he receives is abundant and plenteous compared with that which he surrendered. He surrendered a life unto self; he receives a life unto God. He lives henceforth not unto himself, but unto God. And greater as God is than self, so much greater is the amount of real life he receives than he surrendered. For before the surrender the seed corn was “alone”; now it has brought forth “much fruit”.
This is exemplified also in the Christian’s good works. Each of them is a seed corn cast into the ground, but it does not re-appear “alone”. Let it simply be surrendered unselfishly and unreservedly; let all personal interest of your own in it be abjured, for only then does the principle hold good – the work is really good only when it is disinterested. But following the analogy of the seed corn put away, abandoned, given up, it will in due time re-appear in the harvest in a plenteous return. Yes, the Saviour has declared that no man can act thus for His sake without receiving “an hundredfold now in this time . . . with persecutions” – this is one form of the dying of the seed – “and in the world to come eternal life”. There is a vitality in every good work, every work of faith, which absolutely nothing can extinguish. No opposition can crush or quench it. The world’s utmost hostility, when it comes nearest to killing a Christian’s good work, is only hastening its fertile harvest – only disimprisoning the life that is in it and making it reproduce itself more rapidly. And when reproduced, it is far more abundant: handfuls of corn, bosomfuls of sheaves.
5. Beautiful Life
In analysing the idea of harvest we find, still further, the element of beauty. It is also beautiful life. There is not only more life than was surrendered, but it is much more lovely also; no imagination could have anticipated the result. The pen of inspiration speaks of it thus: “That which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain; it may chance of wheat, or some other gain”. There is no beauty in the bare naked grain, the seed corn – a rough husk, with no pretension whatever to fine form or colouring or delicacy. There is no violation of good taste in casting it out among the clods of the valley.
But mark the exquisite delicacy of the fresh and tender little blade. Mark the stately, graceful form of the full-grown stalk in earing time. Mark the queenly dignity with which it bows its head with autumn’s rich tiara of the full-grown corn in the ear. This you have now, replacing what Paul calls the “bare grain”. And he accounts for this change: “Thou sowest . . . bare grain . . . but God giveth it a body as it hath pleased Him”. Yes, “as it hath pleased Him”. He consults His own “pleasure”, His own good taste – to speak with deepest reverence, for good taste, like all that is good, is of God. He consults His own sovereign sense of what is fit, becoming, beautiful; and so it comes to pass that every seed acquires a body that “pleases” God. I might apply this again to Christ, to the Christian, and to Christian good works.
To Christ
To Christ, dying and living through death as the root of David, the root of all the Israel of God; to Him God gives a body as it pleases Him – the Church, which is His body, the fullness of Him that filleth all in all. That Church, that body, is called Zion; and Zion is called “the perfection of beauty”. “Glorious things are spoken of thee, O city of God,” O body of Christ. Thou art Beulah; thou art Hephzibah; thou art a crown of glory; thou art a royal diadem; thou art adorned as a bride for her husband; “Thou art beautiful, O my love, as Tirzah; comely as Jerusalem” – and Jerusalem is beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth.
Beauty in the Individual Christian
Beauty appears also in the individual Christian. The Lord beautifies His people with salvation. The life that springs up from the surrender of the old life is beautiful. It is the image of God. “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance.” All these are beautiful. They are the beauteous life that, in regeneration, is developed from communion with Christ crucified.
Beauty in the Good Works of the Believer
There is a beauty also in the good works of the believer. Each of them is as a seed corn from which manifold return accrues; and the harvest here too is beautiful as well as abundant. Shining in the beauty of holiness, which is the beauty of the Lord, it is so beautiful that believers will not know their own good works again but will be ready to deny them, saying, “Lord, when saw we Thee an hungered and fed Thee?”
6. Variety of Life
In a harvest, there is not only the idea of beauty, but variety of life too – abundant diversification. Paul goes on to speak of this also, in a passage already quoted. He not only speaks of the great difference, in respect of beauty, between the bare grain you sow and the lovely plant that springs from it – “God giveth it a body as it hath pleased Him” – but He brings into view the principle of diversification, which God illustrates and honours in this area of His works perhaps more than in any other: “God giveth it a body as it pleaseth Him, and to every seed his own body”.
God has a variety of forms – boundless variety in the compass of His grand creative idea – at the disposal of His great creative fiat. And He has given “to every seed his own body”. “All flesh is not the same flesh”, continues the Apostle, and then follows a detailed protest against the idea of tame repetition and insipid uniformity, every region of the universe being summoned to be witness against it. “There is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds. There are also celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial: but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for one star differeth from another star in glory. So also is the resurrection.” So also is it in harvest, of which resurrection is but a single, special case. In harvest the whole autumnal plain of nature is not one field of wheat, or of any one grain. No, nor is that harvest in which the Church of God rejoices as in harvest joy.
See, rather, a garden tastefully laid out! See where botanical skill, the finest taste and the resources of many countries have contributed to produce some lovely specimen of nature’s wealth of flora. There is one glory of the rose, and another glory of the lily, and another glory of the daisy, and another glory of the violet. And one flower differs from another flower in glory. There is one glory of the oak, and another glory of the cedar, and another glory of the palm, and another glory of the cypress. And one tree differs from another tree in glory. So in the harvest of Christ’s death, of the Christian’s death in communion with Christ, and of the Christian’s good works. There is variety – diversity – in them all.
I shall not speak of the variety of beauty in Christ – the Rose of Sharon, the Lily of the valley, the good Olive tree, the Vine out of Egypt, its goodly branches like the cedars of Lebanon as it fills the land. Nor shall I speak of the diversities of gifts, of ministrations, of operations among believers, all wrought by that selfsame Spirit, who divides to everyone severally as He will.
I specify only the good works of believers. And I would put the case somewhat as Paul puts it: “Let us not be weary in well doing; for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not”, for “he that soweth bountifully shall reap also bountifully”, and he that soweth variously shall reap also variously – not bare grain again, but something unutterably more beautiful: with wonderful variety also, on which indeed beauty so much depends. For “to every seed” you sow, God gives its “own body”. Now all seed is not the same seed. For there is one kind of seed of prayers, and other seeds of silent tears, anxious cares and thoughtful devising for the good of others, another seed of liberality, another seed of almsgiving, another seed of kind teaching of the young, and countless others, of which we cannot now speak particularly.
Yes, there are good works which, because of God being their more immediate object, we might – culling some more of Paul’s vocabulary on the mysteries of harvest – call celestial: such as worship of God and meek submission and obedience to Him. And there are good works which, because of man being their object, may be called terrestrial – such as scrupulously-just transactions, carefully-kind courtesy, generous forgiveness, charitable construction and all mutual helpfulness, sympathy and love. “But the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another.” To each of all these kinds of good works, and to every individual instance of them all – considered as a seed which you sow in faith – “God giveth it a body as it hath pleased Him, and to every seed His own body”. Therefore when you reap, after God has given the increase, you will be gathering the produce of a variedly-lovely garden which the Lord has blessed: “I the Lord do keep it; I will water it every moment: lest any hurt it, I will keep it night and day”. With what joy unspeakable and full of glory will the reaping be!
Rejoice in the Lord, ye righteous; and shout for joy, all ye that are upright in heart. Light is sown for the righteous, and gladness for all them that are upright in heart. In due time you shall reap them. Think of sheaves of light, bosomfuls of gladness – gladness and light more rich, beautiful, variegated. And, blessed rule, “they that sow in tears shall reap in joy: he that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him”. Verily, they joy before Thee then, according to the joy of harvest.
There are yet two other principles to be born in mind:
1. Identity in Kind
There is the principle of identity in kind. There is increase, but it is increase in the same kind. He that sows tares shall not reap wheat. He that sows wind shall not reap sunshine. The increase shall be in kind: “they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind”. “Whatsoever a man soweth, that also shall he reap.”
2. Proportion
There is the principle of proportion. The return may be manifold; yet it is in proportion. “He that soweth sparingly shall reap also sparingly; and he that soweth bountifully shall reap also bountifully.” “Therefore be ye steadfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord; forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.”