God's Sowings
Zechariah x.
To the superficial eye there is no difference in the distance from our earth of the planets and the fixed stars; but, as a matter of fact, between the one and the other there is a vast intervening space of millions of miles. So in regard to these predictions. The prophet searches “what manner of time” the Spirit of Christ which is in him signifies. He describes the great facts revealed to him; but it is not within his province to announce the times and seasons which the Father hath kept in his own power. He sees the mighty mountain ranges; but it is left for us to discover that deep and far-stretching valleys lie between the nearer and the further, between the first and second advents of Christ. We shall find, therefore, the prophet passing from the one to the other, and grouping on the foreground of his picture incidents which really belong to different ages in the world’s history. Such a method of workmanship was necessary, if prophecy was to be an incentive to faith and patience.
We have already had an illustration of this in the previous chapter, when the advent of the Christ on his lowly steed, the struggle of the Maccabees, and the deliverance of Israel in the last years of this dispensation, are classed together as though pertaining to the same epoch. There is nothing surprising in such grouping, if we remember that our Lord inserts the whole Christian dispensation in the break of a single comma (compare Isa. lxi. 2, and Luke iv. 19).
In this chapter and the next, taken as one, we detect the same fact. We are bidden, in the first verse, to ask for the latter rain, that Pentecost which is to close the present age, and which the apostle Peter describes as “times of refreshing from the presence of the Lord.” These are to be expected, he tells us, when the Jewish people repent and turn again to God, and will inaugurate the time of restitution of all things, whereof God hath spoken by the mouth of his holy prophets, which have been since the world began. And the rest of the chapter may be interpreted as referring to the same events. But the next deals with the destruction of the second temple by Titus, and the rejection of the true Shepherd. In the thirteenth chapter there is a similar rapid transition from the final cleansing of the chosen people to the awakening of the sword against the Shepherd, who is also the fellow of the Lord of Hosts. And probably there is no satisfactory clue to the comprehension of the Lord’s closing utterances about the fall of Jerusalem, which does not recognize the same principle. He passes from the close of one age to that of the other, describing both in the same sentences; and only in a passing phrase, as when He speaks of the fulfillment of the times of the Gentiles, does He open to our view the mighty gulf of time which was destined to intervene.
If these thoughts are borne in mind, there will be no obstacle to our deriving help and teaching from these chapters; and in the last days of this dispensation we shall be able, with tolerable accuracy, to assign the various paragraphs to their respective place on the great chart of God’s providential government.
From the summons to ask for the latter rain, coupled as it is with the Divine promise of a gracious hearing, we are led to a graphic description of what God will make of his people — a description which was partially realized in the successful stand made by Judas Maccabzeus and his brethren against Antiochus. “Judah was as his goodly horse in the battle. From him came forth the corner-stone, from him the nail, from him the battle-bow, from him every exactor together.”’ The following description of their successes against their foes, treading them down in the battle, as mire in the streets, was fully verified during that brief but glorious period, when for a little the waning splendor of the Hebrew people shone out in its pristine beauty. But when the prophet goes on to class Joseph with Judah, and to speak of the people being brought again from the ends of the earth, the mightiest nations being humbled for their sake, and the promised land, though inhabited to Lebanon on the north and to Gilead on the east, being too small for them, we feel that there looms before his vision something greater than has taken place, or shall take place, till God summons His people from all the world to inhabit their own land — as the bee-farmer hisses for his bees, scattered in search of honey throughout meadows and garden (ver. 8).
In the meanwhile, during the present age, we may view the Jewish race as so much buried seed. “I will sow them among the people; and they shall remember Me in far countries; and they shall live with their children, and shall return.”
At the end of the seventy years’ captivity the people of God’s ancient choice were distributed through Parthia, Media, Persia, Mesopotamia, Cappadocia, Pontus, Phrygia, Pamphylia, Egypt, Libya and Rome, Crete and Arabia. Everywhere throughout the great Roman Empire they fell into the ground to die. So far as their natural life was concerned, they seemed on the point of being obliterated among the nations of the world; but you might as well talk of the obliteration of the seed which the husbandman casts into the autumn furrows. They built their synagogues, throve in the quarters assigned to them in the great cities, and disseminated new conceptions of God, high ethical standards, a fresh religious speech, destined to be of incalculable service to the early preachers of Christ’s Evangel.
At this present hour the Jews. He sown among all the nations of the earth. But they still live, with their children, and shall one day return. There shall be springtime, earing, and harvest. The sea of affliction has too long rolled over them, with the thunder of its mighty billows. Its wide expanse has stretched out between them and their great destiny; but their Almighty Friend shall yet pass through it, smiting its waves and drying up its depths, achieving a national deliverance, so that they may reoccupy the land given in covenant to their fathers.
It was thus with the first believers. By the rough hand of the persecutor, the rich wheat of Pentecost, which had laid too long in the bin of the mother Church, was scattered abroad throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria. “They therefore that were scattered abroad went everywhere preaching the Word.” “They therefore that were scattered abroad, upon the tribulation that arose about Stephen, traveled as far as Phenicia, and Cyprus, and Antioch.” These spring sowings yielded a marvelous return. There was such a crop of churches and converts as multiplied the original number of the Church a hundredfold. Though there was a diminution of the numbers at Jerusalem, there were sheaves of golden corn throughout the world’s acreage.
How many illustrations have existed, throughout the entire history of the Church, of the effect of God’s sowings! ‘My Father is the Husbandman,” said our Lord. With both hands He has prosecuted his work of sowing. In the persecutions of Nero, Decius, and Diocletianus, the precious seed of the Kingdom was sown deep in the dark graves of agony and death. Surely the great Sower went forth weeping, as He bore the precious seed to its destined ministry. It was buried in the voracious animals of the arena, in the labyrinths of the catacombs, in the dens and caves of the earth; but it lived again in millions of converts that so filled the earth as to appall and silence their persecutors. The emperors at last gave up the work of slaughter, because martyrdoms only served to root Christianity deeper in the empire. The blood of the martyrs became the seed of the Church.
There was a grand quality in the corn of the Waldensian Valleys, in the Paulicians, the Hussites, the Lollards, which was sown by the Master in the dungeons of the Inquisition, in mockings and scourgings, in bonds and imprisonment, in the fires of martyrdom, and in the current of swiftly-flowing rivers. But what harvests it all yielded! There was, for instance, the harvest of the Reformation in Germany, of the Huguenots in France, and of the Puritans in England. It would be impossible to compute the vast hosts of the true disciples of Jesus through the dreary Middle Ages, because the apostate Church has concealed their number and misrepresented their influence. But many pages of the Lamb’s Book of Life must be filled with their names. “A great multitude which no man can number, of every nation, and tribe, and people.”
So in later days. The martyrs of Uganda have yielded today three hundred Christian churches. The devoted labors of saintly missionaries in India,
Burmah, China, and Africa, who fell into the ground of obscurity, and loneliness, and disappointment, and died among strangers, many of them prematurely or violently — have resulted in the salvation of myriads. There was a handful of corn in the tops of mountains, in the ledges, where the earth was deep and rich enough to admit of a grave being dug, and the fruit thereof has shaken like Lebanon.
In all probability many of the children of God who read these lines know what sowing means. They, too, have fallen into the ground to die. That obscure village in which your friends say you are buried; that humble position in which your powers. are cramped and limited by neglect and confinement; that bed of suffering and weakness; that incessant demand to undertake menial and lowly drudging; that summons to leave home and friends, and sphere of successful labor, to become the companion of savage and illiterate people — all this is the grave, with its darkness and silence, in which God sows his people; not that they should abide there forever, but that they should bring forth much fruit. You shall live through other lives. Your prayers and alms shall be a memorial before God, and the day shall reveal the wonderful. ways in which you have no longer abode alone.
Listen to the complaint of the buried seed: “Lord, in trouble have we visited Thee. We have poured out our prayer when thy chastening was upon us. We have been with child; we have been in pain; we have, as it were, brought forth wind; we have not wrought any deliverance in the earth, neither have the inhabitants of the world fallen.” And here is the Divine response: “Thy dead shall live; my dead bodies shall arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust; for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast forth the dead.”
Sowing means death. “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die * * *” We must be prepared to die, not only to sins, and weights, and self-indulgences, but to our own notions of pleasing God, to our emotional life, to our self-congratulation at the results of Christian service, to the energy and enthusiasm of our devotion. The little corn of wheat must feel very disconsolate when it finds itself attacked by chemical agents lurking in the soil, that begin to tear at its integuments and strike their rapiers at its heart. It is sad at having to surrender its beauty of form, its sprightly nimbleness, its secret soul. Dying is not easy work. And when the process is prolonged, when the disintegration of the self-energy takes place by slow degrees, it is bitter to bear.
Sowing means darkness. Through long months the seed lies in darkness and has no light. Madame Guyon tells of prolonged seasons in which she lost all the joy of God, that she might be led to God Himself. It is a strange experience; “God removes all conscious experience of his grace, all power to work for Him, and the very beauty of the Divine virtues.” The soul does not fall away from God, because He is beside it while it treads the dark valley; but it goes ever deeper into the grave of Jesus — no song on its lips, no rapture at its heart, no ray of sunlight from the former sources of hope and consolatior.
Sowing means loneliness. The corn of wheat falls into the ground to die, that it may not abide alone; but this dying is necessarily a long experience. Each man is born alone, and alore he dies. God will perhaps touch your friends, and you will be separated from them by misunderstandings; your home life, so that your dearest will be called from your side; your church relationships, and you will have to go forth without the camp, bearing his reproach. But there is no one who has left brethren, or sister, or father, or mother, or children, for Christ’s sake, that shall not receive a hundredfold in this time, houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children; and in the age to come eternal life.
But God does not forget the buried seed. Cana woman forget her sucking child? Can a farmer forget the seed which at so much pains he flung abroad on the brown furrows? Can God forget those who have not counted their lives dear unto themselves, but for his sake have been killed all the day long, and counted as sheep for the slaughter? They shall be his, in the day that He shall make even his peculiar treasure.
In that wonderful ladder or scale of ascending prayer, of which we are informed in Hosea, we hear the heaven calling to God, the earth calling to heaven, and the corn, wine, and oil calling to the earth, and Jezreel (the sown) calling to the corn, wine, and oil. And as the result of these appeals, ringing through earth and heaven, He who had sown his people in the earth, has mercy on them, and says, Thou art my people; and they say unto Him, Thou art our God. “Doubtless Thou art our Father, though Abraham knoweth us not, and Israel doth not acknowledge us: Thou, O Lord, art our Father, our Redeemer from everlasting.”
When the destined hour has come the buried seed hears the call of spring to arise and come forth from her cell. The voice that bade Lazarus come forth is heard deep down in the recesses of the earth. That which was in the grave hears the voice of the Word of God, and comes forth. How beautifully the words of the prophet’s vision lend themselves to the metamorphosis of the spring: “So I prophesied as He commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood upon their feet, an exceeding great army.”
Yes, buried ones, God does not forget your work and the love which ye have showed toward his name, in that ye have ministered to his saints, and still minister, though your ministries be hidden from the admiration of the great world. Your resurrection is guaranteed. You may not be able to discover the body of usefulness with which you will be clothed. God will give you your body as it pleases Him, and to each its own. But your death shall be swallowed up in the victory of life, and God shall wipe all tears from your eyes.
And that new life will be God’s. “They shall remember Me, * * * and they shall live.” Jesus said that he who believed in Him, through he were dead, yet should he live. Now, to believe is to receive. Evidently, then, the life which comes after death is by the reception into our spirit of Him who is the Resurrection and the Life. We obtain by union with Jesus, and direct from God, all that we had previously sought in his service, his gifts, his people.
“The soul lives no longer, works no longer of itself. It is God (by the Holy Spirit) who lives, works, operates within it. This goes on increasingly, so that it becomes rich with his riches. It is also enriched and revivified by degrees as it was stripped by degrees (2 Cor. iii. 18). The soul lives with the life of God. He being the principle of life, it cannot want for anything. It has lost the created for the Creator; nothingness for all things. All is given to it in God, not to possess, but to be possessed (2 Cor. vi. 10; Col. ii, 9).
You have, as it were, been buried in Egypt; but God is going before you, smiting the waves of the sea and drying up the depths of the mighty river, which had seemed an impassable barrier. He will strengthen you to follow Him; only dare to step out in faith, and you shall walk up and down in his name (x. 12).
Who shall estimate the results? One head of corn may have fifty seed-corns, and each of these fifty, and each of these again fifty. At this rate we may soon arrive at tens of thousands. Behold the revenue of your tears, and prayers, and anguish. God will richly compensate. Lift up thine eyes and see. They gather themselves together, they come to thee; thy sons shall come from far, and thy daughters borne in arms. The little one shall become a thousand, and the small one a strong nation, because the Lord will hasten it in his time.