Hosea 10:12 Sow for yourselves righteousness; reap steadfast love; break up your fallow ground, for it is the time to seek the LORD, that he may come and rain righteousness upon you.
Much of the world is dealing with the greatest disruption of their lives… probably in their lifetimes, particularly in the West, and what is known as the “First World”. Here’s a helpful perspective toward understanding what is taking place.
Imagine for a moment that your life is a farm… a plot of land set aside to produce a crop. The Farmer knows what He needs to do to prepare an abundant harvest. Your soil is fallow, hardened, full of weeds. The seeds are dry and must absorb water to initiate respiration and begin to digest their stored food, and respiration requires sufficient oxygen in soil that is moist and broken up. Your field must be turned over and plowed.
Plowing seems to do violence to soil in its fallow state. Yet nothing will grow or can even be planted in hard unplowed soil. The plow turns the soil upside down and inside out, looks like a disaster zone, as thousands of weeds and chunks of earth fly apart. Insects in the soil endure an apocalyptic experience, and some of them are killed by the metal blades and crashing mounds of earth. The farmer is simply doing his job, what he must do to prepare an abundant harvest.
Now that the Farmer is preparing His field, and the mounds of earth and weeds are flying everywhere, step back if you can and observe what is taking place. The world is His field, not ours. and His crop is righteousness and steadfast love in a fruitful crop of human souls. Fallow ground full of weeds will not do for a good harvest. Take the Farmer’s perspective, endure the plow, and you will rejoice with him in the harvest to follow.
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[worthy_plugins_devotion_single_body]The book of Isaiah, often called the Old Testament Gospel, reveals that a child was to be born and his name called “The Mighty God, and the Everlasting Father”. We know that this Child was Yeshua (Jesus) of Nazareth, that He is the unique Son of God, the express image of the invisible God. The throne of David was to be given to Him and He now holds its “key”, a symbol of the right and authority of His reign, which will be consummated when He returns to this world and restores the Kingdom to Israel [Acts 1:6-7].
Patience is one of those things… so hard to learn it… so hard to practice it faithfully in our daily walk. It’s one of of those things I truly wish we didn’t have to learn — but God requires it of us! As I was reading through this passage again in Exodus, it dawned on me that Moses sat on the mountain for six entire days before the Lord spoke to him. He had to patiently wait for the Lord for six days!
When I studied Isaiah 53 earnestly in the ancient Hebrew, I was taken back by the Hebrew word for “afflicted” (me-u-neh). In modern Hebrew this word means “tortured”. When I was young, and first learned what torture actually involved, my soul was shocked that this could happen to people; in fact that it was happening to people. That a person could be kept alive for the purpose of intentionally causing him intense agonizing pain was an astounding enigma for my young soul. It really frightened me; and I think that fear of torture is probably the greatest fear that humans can experience. We read about people who have been tortured, with a kind of horrified awe. And quietly we wonder inside, “How can this be?” And, “Could this ever happen to me?”
I love this story! Peter was sitting between two guards and suddenly an angel of the Lord comes to him and frees him — and he thinks it’s a vision! He’s not sure if he truly believes it.
“Exhausted but still in pursuit…” Well, now we know why the angel of YHVH addressed Gideon the way he did. With his small three hundred man army he had just decimated the army of Midian — but the victory wasn’t complete, and so the Jewish general and his small, exhausted, hungry, band were determined to cross the Jordan and take care of 15,000 additional Midanite enemies and their leaders, Zebah and Zalmunna.
His nightmares began each day when he awoke. James Stegalls was nineteen. He was in Vietnam. Though he carried a small Gideon New Testament in his shirt pocket, he couldn’t bring himself to read it. His buddies were cut down around him, terror was building within him, and God seemed far away. His twentieth birthday passed, then his twenty-first. At last, he felt he couldn’t go on.
On January 1st 1863, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation which proclaimed freedom for all slaves in the ten states which were in rebellion. At the time, when U.S. Secretary of State Seward took the document to the President to sign, Lincoln took a pen, and held it for a moment. He then removed his hand and dropped his pen. Lincoln turned to Seward and said, “I have been shaking hands since nine o’clock this morning and my right arm is almost paralyzed. If my name ever goes into history, it will be for this act, and my whole soul is in it.” He hesitated, then took the pen, and without wavering, took the document and boldly signed it!