Good Morning Friends,
“He also said, ‘This is what the kingdom of
God is like. A man scatters seed on the
ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps
or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain — first
the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the
sickle to it, because the harvest has come.’” (Mark 4:26-29)
What does the farmer do to make a seed grow
and produce a crop?
In our time there are a number of things that
a farmer can do to help the seed grow and produce a crop. He can fertilize. He can irrigate. He can use pesticides and herbicides and
fungicides. And there are probably other
things that can be done today that I don’t know about. But even with all of those things, the farmer
still does not control the germination and growth of the seed. The farmer doesn’t determine how much crop is
produced by the seed. The farmer can’t
protect the crop from all of the forces that might damage or destroy it – wind,
flood, hail, etc. A significant part of
the production of the crop is out of the farmer’s control.
And that truth was even more apparent in the
days of Jesus. The farmers in Israel
didn’t have access to the fertilizers that farmers today can use. The farmers then didn’t have the means to
provide the irrigation that we can do now.
And they didn’t have the other chemical and organic means of dealing
with disease, pests, and etc. The
farmers in Jesus’ day were even more reliant upon nature and nature’s God than
we are today. The farmer in Jesus’ day
controlled very little about seed germination and crop production.
And that is Jesus’ point in the parable
above. The farmer’s job was to sow the
seed. It was the quality of the soil and
other forces beyond the farmer’s control that determined whether the seed would
sprout a plant and how much crop that plant produced. The farmer’s job was to be faithful to sow
the seed and harvest the crop – the rest was not in his control.
As farmers in God’s kingdom we are to
faithfully sow the seed and then joyously harvest the crop when it is
ready. The rest is out of our control.
His, by Grace,
Steve
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