Harvest Home

Come, ye thankful people, come, raise the song of harvest home;
All is safely gathered in, ere the winter storms begin.
God our Maker doth provide for our wants to be supplied;
Come to God's own temple, come, raise the song of harvest home.*

It seems like harvest time used to have more significance when I was younger. Of course, when I was younger I lived around lots of people who actually harvested! It was a normal for guys at my school to miss classes so they could help combine corn. I should add that young men also missed school for deer hunting, ice fishing, and any other manly activity their father was convinced was more important than academics.

Although we lived "in the country," my father worked for IBM. I studied math.

The harvest of 68 million acres of corn in the United States is an incredible task done each year by fewer and fewer farmers. It doesn't happen without a lot of planning, work, luck,and more work.

Charles Swindoll tells about visiting a citrus orchard belonging to an older man in his congregation. When an orange fell down and hit Swindoll on the head, he responded by saying, "Did you see what just happened?" The farmer picked up the fruit and said, "It didn't "just happen." I planted, fertilized, pruned and cared for these trees. There is a reason for it."

The Bible uses the image of the harvest to communicate several truths:

In the Old Testament, after both the flood and Noah's sacrifice, God said,"While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease" (Genesis 8:22, ESV). The harvest was seen as part of the natural rhythm of life.

The New Testament explains several ideas using the imagery of the harvest.

The "harvest passage" that most quickly comes to mind is found in Matt 9:37. Jesus said to his disciples, "The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few." He went on to encourage His disciples to pray for additional workers. That need still exists.

In Matthew 13 Jesus uses the idea of an eventual "eternal harvest" to talk about impostors in our midst - people that look like they belong, but don't. We are told that eventually everything will be revealed when God's angels reap the final harvest.

I am both frightened and comforted by the idea of angels reaping a harvest.

In Matthew 21 Jesus told a story that was probably directed to the religious leaders of the time. A landowner had built a vineyard and then leased it to tenant farmers. When it was harvest time he sent his slaves and, later, servants to collect his due. Instead the tenants beat some of the land owner's representatives and killed others. Finally, the landowner sent his own son - thinking he would be treated with more respect and listened to. And, as we all know, they didn't. In fact, they took him outside of the vineyard and killed him.

Of course all of these pictures of the harvest speak to us about kingdom realities. We really will "reap what we sow." Given the choice, and by the grace of God we have been given the choice, I would rather be a worker in the harvest, than a thistle (imposter) or one who has rejected the Son.

*The author of those lines was Henry Alford, a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge. He was a serious schol­ar who pro­duc­ed books on Homer, Eng­lish po­et­ry, and the Greek New Test­a­ment. He also wrote the following in his Bible when he was only 16: "I do this day in the pre­sence of God and my own soul re­new my cov­e­nant with God and sol­emn­ly de­ter­mine hence­forth to be­come his and to do his work as far as in me lies." Not bad, for a teenager