'A harvest heap in the day of grief.' This clearly points on to a
solemn ending--the day of judgment.
(a) How poor the fruit will be that a God-forgetting man will take out
of life! There is but _one heap_ from all the long struggle. He has
'sowed much and brought home little.' What shall we take with us out of
our busy years as their net result? A very small sack will be large
enough to hold the harvest that many of us have reaped.
(b) All this God-forgetting life of pleasure-seeking and idolatry is
bringing on a terrible, inevitable consummation.
'Put in the sickle, for the harvest is ripe.'
No doubt there is often a harvest of grief and desperate sorrow
springing, even in this life, from forgetting God. For it is only they
who set their hopes on Him that are never disappointed, and only they
who have chosen Him for their portion who can always say, 'I have a
goodly heritage.' But the real harvest is not reaped till death has
separated the time of sowing from that of ingathering. The sower shall
reap; i.e. every man shall inherit the consequences of his deeds. 'They
that have planted it shall eat it.'
(c) That harvest home will be a day of sadness to some. These are
terrible words--'grief and desperate sorrow,' or 'pain and incurable
sickness.' We dare not dilate on this. But if we trust in Christ and
sow to the Spirit, we shall then 'rejoice before God as with the joy of
harvest,' and 'return with joy, bringing our sheaves with us.'
'IN THIS MOUNTAIN'
'In this mountain shall the Lord of hosts make unto all people a feast
of fat things, a feast of wines on the lees, of fat things full of
marrow, of wines on the lees well refined. 7. And He will destroy in
this mountain the face of the covering cast over all people, and the
veil that is spread over all nations. 8. He will swallow up death in
victory.'--ISAIAH xxv. 6-8.
A poet's imagination and a prophet's clear vision of the goal to which
God will lead humanity are both at their highest in this great song of
the future, whose winged words make music even in a translation. No
doubt it starts from the comparatively small fact of the restoration of
the exiled nation to its own land. But it soars far beyond that. It
sees all mankind associated with them in sharing their blessings. It is
the vision of God's ideal for humanity. That makes it the more
remarkable that the prophet, with this wide outlook, should insist with
such emphasis on the fact that it has a local centre. That phrase 'in
this mountain' is three times repeated in the hymn; two of the
instances occurring in the verses of my text have lying side by side
with them the expressions 'all people' and 'all nations,' as if to
bring together the local origin, and the universal extent, of the
blessings promised.
The sweet waters that are to pour through the world well up from a
spring opened 'in this mountain.' The beams that are to lighten every
land stream out from a light blazing there. The world's hopes for that
golden age which poets have sung, and towards which earnest social
reformers have worked, and of the coming of which this prophet was
sure, rest on a definite fact, done in a definite place, at a definite
time. Isaiah knew the place, but what was to be done, or when it was to
be done, he knew not. You and I ought to be wiser. History has taught
us that Jesus Christ fulfils the visioned good that inspired the
prophet's brilliant words. We might say, with allowable licence, that
'this mountain,' in which the Lord does the great things that this song
magnifies, is not so much Zion as Calvary.
Brethren, in these days, when so many voices are proclaiming so many
short cuts to the Millennium, this clear declaration of the source of
the world's hope is worth pondering. For us all, individually, this
localisation of the origin of the universal good of mankind is an offer
of blessings to us if we will go thither, where the provision for the
world's good is stored--'In this mountain'; therefore, to seek it
anywhere else is to seek it in vain.
Now, I wish, under the impression of that conviction, to put before you
just these three thoughts: where the world's food comes from; where the
unveiling which gives light to the world comes from; and where the life
which destroys death for the world comes from--'In this mountain.'