'Give ye ear, and hear my voice; hearken, and hear my speech. 24. Doth
the plowman plow all day to sow? doth he open and break the clods of
his ground! 25. When lie hath made plain the face thereof, doth he not
cast abroad the fitches, and scatter the cummin, and cast in the
principal wheat and the appointed barley and the rie in their place?
26. For his God doth instruct him to discretion, and doth teach him.
27. For the fitches are not threshed with a threshing instrument,
neither is a cart wheel turned about upon the cummin; but the fitches
are beaten out with a staff, and the cummin with a rod. 28. Bread corn
is bruised; because he will not ever be threshing it, nor break it with
the wheel of his cart, nor bruise it with his horsemen. 29. This also
cometh forth from the Lord of Hosts, which is wonderful in counsel, and
excellent in working.'--ISAIAH xxviii. 23-29.
The prophet has been foretelling a destruction which he calls God's
_strange_ act. The Jews were incredulous, 'scornful men.' They did not
believe him; and the main reason for their incredulity was that a
divine destruction of the nation was so opposite to the divine
conservation of it as to amount to an impossibility. God had raised up
and watched over the people. He had planted it in the mountain of His
inheritance, and now was it going to be thrown down by the same hand
which had built it up? Impossible.
The prophet's answer to that question is this parable of the
husbandman, who has to perform a great variety of operations. He
ploughs, but that is not all. He lays aside the plough when it has done
its work, and takes up the seed-basket, and, in different ways, sows
different seeds, scattering some broadcast, and dropping others
carefully, grain by grain, into their place--'dibbling' it in, as we
should say. But seedtime too, passes, and then he cuts down what he had
so carefully sown, and pulls up what he had so sedulously planted, and,
in different ways, breaks and bruises the grain. Is he inconsistent
because he ploughs in winter and reaps in harvest? Does his carrying
the seed-basket at one time make it impossible that he shall come with
flail and threshing-oxen at another? Are not all the various operations
co-operant to one end? Does not the end need them all? Is not one
purpose going steadily forward through ploughing, sowing, reaping,
threshing? Is not that like the work of the great Husbandman, who
changes His methods and preserves His plan through them all, who has
His 'time to sow' and His 'time to reap,' and who orders the affairs of
men and kingdoms, for the one purpose that He may gather His wheat into
His garner, and purge from it its chaff?
This parable sets forth a philosophy of the divine operations very
beautiful and true, and none the less impressive for the simple garb in
which it is clothed.