There is a barn or storehouse for the ripened and threshed crops. The
farmer's toil and careful processes would be absurd and unintelligible
if, after them all, the crop, so sedulously ripened and cultivated and
cleansed, was left to rot where it fell. And no less certainly does the
discipline of this life cry aloud for heaven and a conscious personal
future life, if it is not to be all set down as grim irony or utterly
absurd. There must be a heaven if we are not to be put to intellectual
bewilderment.
What was needed for growth here drops away there, as blossoms fall when
their work is done. Sunshine and rain are no more necessary when the
fields are cleared and the barn-yard is filled. Much in our nature, in
our earthly condition, in God's varying processes, will drop away. When
school-time is done the rod is burned. But nothing will perish that can
contribute to our perfecting.
So let us ask Him to purge us with His fan in His hand now, lest we
should be found at last fruitless cumberers of the ground or chaff
which is rootless, and fit only to be swept out of the threshing-floor.
'QUIETNESS AND CONFIDENCE'
'In returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and confidence
shall be your strength.'--ISAIAH xxx. 15.
ISRAEL always felt the difficulty of sustaining itself on the height of
dependence on the unseen, spiritual power of God, and was ever
oscillating between alliances with the Northern and Southern powers,
linking itself with Assyria against Egypt, or with Egypt against
Assyria. The effect was that whichever was victorious it suffered; it
was the battleground for both, it was the prize of each in turn. The
prophet's warnings were political wisdom as truly as religious.
Here Judah is exhorted to forsake the entangling dependence on Egypt,
and to trust wholly to God. They had gone away from Him in their fears.
They must come back by their faith. To them the great lesson was trust
in God. Through them to us the same lesson is read. The principle is
far wider than this one case. It is the one rule of life for us all.
The two clauses of the text convey substantially the same idea. They
are in inverted parallelism. 'Returning and rest' correspond to
'quietness and confidence,' so as that 'rest' answers to 'quietness'
and 'returning' to 'confidence.' In the former clause we have the
action towards God and then its consequence. In the latter we have the
consequence and then the action.