SOWING

^[p. 332] SOWING

Genesis 8: 22; Zechariah 10: 9; Hosea 2: 23; Galatians 6: 8

The brethren will observe that sowing is in mind; so I have read these scriptures. It is a sowing time. The passage in Genesis 8 contemplates this time; while the earth remains this time continues. That is to say, the time of sowing is contemporary with the age of the earth, the present age of it. No doubt most of us know there are to be a new heavens and a new earth wherein righteousness dwells. There are to be such but they are not yet. What is now is the present earth and God has granted it certain advantages which are to be noted. When it ceases these advantages will cease; that is to say, seed-time and harvest will cease; cold and heat will cease; summer and winter will cease; day and night will cease. Therefore, we are in limitations; we are not in eternal conditions; they are limited conditions, extending from the beginning of time till now. But still, in the mind of God that is not a very long period, but God is pleased to grant these advantages to the earth and we are enjoying them too. Christians are as well as others; Christians more; they are the only ones who really do enjoy the mercies of God. Others take them as if they should be, as if men had a right to them, whereas they have not. We have a right to nothing as men in the flesh. Of course, we do know something about the rights of men and the like, but I am speaking now of actual facts that God speaks of. They are found in the word of God, the scriptures; and so we do well as brethren to be humbled in the light of these things. If we are not Christians then we do well to learn to be humble about them, because it is as we are humble about the mercies of God that God may continue them to us. If they are just ^[p. 333] mercies they are not our rights; they are God’s rights.

Well now, as I said, among these things is the matter of sowing; seed-time and harvest; it is a question of the time. The Spirit of God uses the idea of sowing very prominently throughout the Scriptures and I call attention to the matter now to show how it applies to persons; persons sown. What is in the passage read refers doubtless to cereals and the like, vegetables, what is sown to produce a crop for men’s benefit; but then the thought is enlarged in the prophets, as you will see, in the passages read, to apply to men; men, women and children. And so in this remarkable passage in Zechariah Jehovah says, “And I will ^[p. 334] sow them among the peoples, and they shall remember me in far countries; and they shall live with their children and return”. This is remarkable, dear brethren. It has a peculiar sort of application today, although not literally, because this is prophetic and we are not living in the age of prophecy in this sense; not that prophecy has not got light for us, nourishment and food for us, but it strictly belongs to the earth and God’s purposes as regards the earth and this passage is included in that. The time is coming when the Jews, to be simple, will be sown. It does not say they sow themselves, nor does it say they are sown in a goodly position, but it is “among the peoples”. God will proceed on these lines presently and we who are instructed in the scriptures and who know something about prophecy, which we should, everyone of us, we know something about the prophetic map, to use a familiar phrase, a good one; so that we can put our finger on the part of the earth that any prophecy alludes to, because it does certainly allude to the earth, and we can put our finger on any part of it to which prophecy may refer. But here the allusion is very general. “And I will sow them among the peoples, and they shall remember me in far countries; and they shall live with their children and return”. God is doing the thing. It may be that He is beginning to do it already, but I would say that what I said is true: that the prophecies refer to the earth and they refer largely to Israel, although they refer to nations too, but they refer to the earth. What we see here is evidently future. We cannot go out among the nations — I have been over most of them myself and I do not know of any Jews that I can regard as sown among the nations. I know on good authority that a large number, maybe five millions of them have been destroyed during the past few years. It is an awful thing and God does not ignore it either. But it is not sowing; men are destroying men. When the sowing begins God will do it and He will do it presently. But it is a terrible thing that, we might say, Christians are responsible in a certain sense for the conduct of men generally. I mean to say, we cannot lift up our heads in the presence of these things without shame that the human race is capable of such a terrible atrocity as the destruction of five million or more people of a certain class, besides the others that are not mentioned. I was told fourteen millions were destroyed in the last war — not Jews — and I do not know that there are any less in this war. It is an awful thing that we have such hearts; men and women as they are here on this earth, that we have hearts capable of such conduct, such atrocity, such wickedness; but it is so, and it is well for us to face it before God and think of what the race is capable of.

But then this a beautiful thought, I think. I just mention it for a moment. “And I will sow them among the peoples, and they shall remember me in far countries; and they shall live with their children and return”. So that we can comfort ourselves, which ^[p. 335] we are entitled to do as knowing God. He is the God of all comfort. There is no comfort outside of God, but God is infinite. So we have plenty of scope. God is infinite, but He is the God of all comfort. And, as I said, there is comfort in this thought that God is presently to begin to sow his earthly people among the countries. The devil sows too. The Lord Jesus speaks about Himself, sowing the good seed, the sons of the kingdom. The Lord Jesus speaks about sowing sons, the sons of the kingdom of God. It is presently said that an enemy sowed tares in the same field. Tares are a useless thing; a useless weed resembling wheat. They are an imitation of what God is sowing. That is to say, Christendom has persons who are like Christians to that extent, but they are absolutely useless or worse. The devil has sown them. Someone comes to the Master and says to Him, You have sown good seed in the field but there are tares coming up. These tares are coming up. The Lord says, An enemy has done it. Who is the enemy? The devil. At least he has those who are sown on the earth, in Christendom, and the Lord says to leave them alone. We cannot destroy them. There are those who would destroy the Jews and have sought to do it, but God has dealt the same to them. It is not for us to destroy these useless weeds or tares. God will do that. The angels of God will come presently and bind them in bundles and burn them. These are the things that God will do on the earth. He will burn them. They will be bound up. No doubt it refers to societies with wicked doctrines and the angels of God will come down and deal with them; bind them up in bundles and burn them. That is what the Spirit of God says.

But here we have sowing. “And I will sow them among the peoples, and they shall remember me..” That is the point, dear brethren, that will come out at that time. People will begin to remember God,

^[p. 336] instead of going in for all that this world yields. The Jews particularly go in for it; millions of them go in for what the world affords them. They have nothing else; they live in it, alas! But presently we have another seed which God sows, among the peoples too. They are still here and there among the nations; not back in their own lands, but God will begin to work in them where they are, as He does now with normal Christians. God begins to work in us as in the place where we are and presently we will return. That is what it says here: “And I will sow them among the peoples, and they shall remember me in far countries; and they shall live with their children and return”. That is very comforting. People go to the movies and take their children too. It is a terrible thing to see those children led to those terrible places where they are only dealt out the worst kind of thing to feed on. The parents are turning around and the children are turning around. The parents live with the children. What a changed world it will be, but it is going to come, thank God! That is what keeps us going — hope. The hope of the Christian is the going thing; it keeps us going. It is God. Hope fills our hearts, but never greater hope than I am now speaking of. I am not going to turn aside to dwell on the great things we can speak of in regard of hope, but what I am speaking of is very comforting, that God will presently begin to work in all those countries; here in America and in the whole of the British Empire and even among the heathen. Many of us here hardly realize the number of persons known as heathens. There are probably ten millions of people actual heathens. As soon as you think of these things you begin to humble yourself and to think, surely God will come in — this cannot go on forever, nor will it, for God is long-suffering, not willing that any should perish, and He is getting in the assembly the greatest ^[p. 337] thing in the universe. I am not speaking of that now; I am speaking of what God will do presently among the Jews and where they will be; whether they be in Christendom here or in heathendom, God will begin to work here and there and He will sow them. He says, “And I will sow them among the peoples, and they shall remember me ...”. What a change! Take for instance, where we are here in this town today, and we see the people moving along to some place where the Lord Jesus is remembered, where the Lord’s supper is celebrated, and where we see people moving in that track we would rejoice. But we do not see many. There are some who remember God. I hope there is no one here who does not, because this is the point of this meeting, that someone might be stirred up to remember God. If there is someone that does not remember God, if you have drifted away, do not stay there. Remember God. “And they shall remember me in far countries; and they shall live with their children and return”. That is, they are turning toward Jerusalem. Jerusalem will be the great objective now for the Jews when God begins to sow; when the sowing time comes for them. When He begins to sow in far countries they will begin to move. There will be regular flocks of them going toward Jerusalem, undoubtedly; but they shall live with their children and return. It is almost sure that if a man gets wrong, he gets wrong about his wife and his children; but here he gets right about his wife and his children.

Now I will go on to the next passage to confirm what I said. It says, “And I will sow her unto me in the land”. That is another matter. It refers undoubtedly to the land of Canaan, the promised land. God says, I spied it for Israel, as if a man were in an airplane and looked down and saw some land and saw it with such clearness it was delightful to his eye.

^[p. 338] He says, I want that land for my people. That is exactly what God has done. There is no other land like it. You say, it is not easy to show it now. Very likely; but it will be. God will make it just what He saw. He is going to see the thing presently just as He did see it before. The fact of the matter is, dear brethren, that we were all seen and taken account of by God away back in eternity. “But whom he has predestinated, these also he has called; and whom he has called, these also he has justified; but whom he has justified, these also he has glorified”. Romans 8: 30. These are divine things and they apply to everyone of us here. We are nearly all Christians, I believe, and each of us is taken account of in that way. Before we had any being at all God saw us and He made us according to that pattern, so to speak, so that we are seen of Him according to that pattern. Each one of us is to be conformed to the image of God’s Son. That is the pattern. We are taken up before we had any being at all, and then called, and then justified, and then glorified. That is what has happened. It is a most wonderful thing, really, and ought to fill our hearts, that God has so regarded us, and we are now under His eye according to what He has purposed, and He is conforming us to the image of His Son; all to be like Jesus.

So as I have said, the land of Canaan was spied by Him. He says, I spied it and selected it; and He says to His people Israel, I am going to give it to you. I will just read a verse in Deuteronomy 8, that you may get some idea of the land that God has in His mind for them. It says in verse 7, “For Jehovah thy God bringeth thee into a good land, a land of waterbrooks, of springs, and of deep waters, that gush forth in the valleys and hills; a land of wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig-trees, and pomegranates; a land of olive-trees and honey; a land wherein thou shalt ^[p. 339] eat bread without scarceness, where thou shalt lack nothing; a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose mountains thou wilt dig copper. And thou shalt eat and be filled, and shalt bless Jehovah thy God for the good land which he hath given thee”. Well now, you see, this is the divine word and you say, Well, I cannot find it. I certainly should not attempt to find it save as it is here as in the mind of God. It is there. That is enough. It will all come out in its perfection, and we shall see these same people that are sown in the countries now in that same land sown by God presently. That is what we get in the passage I read in Hosea 2, “And I will sow her unto me in the land; and I will have mercy upon Lo-ruhamah”. That is what will happen. It will be a land like that presently in the same confines as we have in Asia. The land of Canaan is a very small piece of land. If men were sent out to judge its value and knew all the different parts of it as the spies of old did, we should perhaps today find very little. I should say any bit of good land in this country is equal or better; any good bit of land in England is equal or better, and so in France, and so in Germany, but I am concerned about God’s mind. That is pure gold to me, that mind of God. He can bring things about; He can call things that are not as if they were. He can bring things about; it is nothing to Him. Job says, “I know that thou canst do everything”; and so do I, and so does every Christian here who is really so. I will say again that God can do everything. Sometimes we may say a thing like that and forget that it refers to oneself. Whatever His mind is as to me He can do it. What is His mind as to all of us here, dear brethren? It is to raise us up and make us like Jesus. That is what His mind is: to conform us to the image of His Son. That is the scripture in Philippians 3. So that you see how well off we are, and what I am saying now is just to ^[p. 340] make us feel we are well off and that wonderful things belong to us, and that we are ourselves wonderful according to the mind of God. We do not need anything more than that. God will bring it to pass; confide in Him. This beautiful passage I have read in Deuteronomy is one of the most beautiful you can get in regard to the land. No need for any more iron ore or gold, South African gold, or those diamonds down there in the mines, thousands of feet down; no more need for these. The land of Canaan will have everything that man needs on this earth. God will show that. He will show how it can be brought about that all the best things according to man are found in the land of Canaan. He has spied it for them and it is all going to come about. I think what I am saying is just to try and encourage our hearts as to the great things that are designed for us and the great things we are designed for; for those who form the assembly are the very highest conception of what I am saying. The assembly is the greatest thought in the whole universe and we belong to it, dear brethren. Everyone of us Christians here is part of it.

So this verse says, “And I will sow her unto me in the land; and I will have mercy upon Lo-ruhamah; and I will say to Lo-ammi, Thou art my people; and they shall say, My God”. You see what beautiful language there is there between God and us. We are His people and He is our God. He is our God. That is the position that these verses put us into, dear brethren. I have just read them, and now I go back to my verse in Galatians, which is, perhaps, a different view-point, but necessary to speak of now, that we should be concerned about this matter of sowing. I have presented to you the bright side of my subject, and I think you will agree it is a bright side too. Now I want to come to the searching side, and yet not without its brightness as I shall show. It says in verse 8, “For he that sows to his own flesh, shall reap corruption from the flesh; but he that sows to the Spirit, from the Spirit shall reap eternal life”. I have been speaking about sowing in countries; I have been speaking about sowing in Canaan, and now I have read about a person sowing to his own flesh. I stop at that to cause you to think a little bit. How are you going to sow to your own flesh? You know, naturally we like our own flesh. We speak of our relatives as our own flesh and blood. We speak of our children as our own flesh and blood. Of course we like them. How are we to sow to them, to our own flesh? I am not speaking of your relatives now, your children, I am speaking of your own personal body, my own body. How am I to sow to it? I do not know of anything more searching. I hope it is searching to everyone of us. Oh, how we do naturally love ourselves; lovers of ourselves, lovers of our own selves. How we love to look in the glass and if there is any little bit of beauty to admire it. Or, if there be any little bit of ability to admire it; poetical ability or whatever it may be, to admire it. I know what that is and you do, I am sure. Everyone here knows what that means. It is a most searching matter. You turn over the picture of your own self in your drawing-room or your dining-room or your bedroom and you see the things you like; looking at pictures, photographs and the like. It is a great matter, this thing over the shoulder — taking pictures, taking photographs. It is one of the greatest things now with travellers. Everyone likes to have something strung over his shoulder with photographic accoutrements. It must be there, and it is to bring out the beauty of the things that be. You know I am not saying that the brethren are not beautiful in a moral sense and that beauty shows in the photographs, but I do say there is too much of it. It is not worth the trouble. But then I am talking about that and making allowance ^[p. 342] for all that; in the drawing-room and the dining-room and bedroom — wherever it be — these are brought out and there are the persons. What is to be seen? Presently I turn the page over and I find this word from the verse I read, “For he that sows to his own flesh”, there is no mistake as to what is meant. It is not simply his sons or daughters; it is his own flesh; it is himself. “For he that sows to his own flesh, shall reap corruption from the flesh”. That is to say, that same old flesh; “shall reap corruption”. See what you make of that. You say, anybody can talk like that and belittle other people and talk against persons; anybody can do that. And that is true; but I am seeking to tell the truth just as it is, and it is the Spirit of God I am quoting; no less than the Spirit of God. “For he that sows to his own flesh, shall reap corruption from the flesh”. It is as sure as anything can be. You say, is it God’s truth? It is God’s truth. It is the actual word of God Himself, and He is telling us that if we sow to our own flesh we shall of that same flesh reap corruption. The passage in Genesis refers to seed-time and harvest, and it is the harvest I am now speaking of. The reaping is corruption, and, of course, all these things happen on the earth. Corruption comes out but we soon cover it over, or try to; but before God, there it is; not only the physical but the moral side. We read of loving our Lord Jesus Christ in incorruption. How real that is. “In incorruption” refers to my state; I love Him in incorruption. My state in loving Him is incorruptible. I do not claim it and not have it real; the love I have for Christ is to be real. But then, think of what my own flesh is that I pride myself in as an unconverted man and, maybe, as an unspiritual Christian too; what I have to admit that I have reaped now that I have got older; because, you know, the reaping time is then. Personal beauty and ^[p. 343] personal ability are affected by age, and all that goes with youth and manliness comes down. Age affects it. It is very solemn that age affects everything. Beauty goes, the marvellous intelligence that we sometimes speak of, and the poetic power and all that goes. Age will affect all that. Man goes to his long home. That is how it reads. The mourners go about the streets. It is a most sorrowful thing to see people ignoring all this, and yet there is nothing truer than that age will bring about these conditions, so that corruption is present. It is to be reaped. As middle-age passes some may know it, and then partially old-age and then old-age and then dotage. These things happen but they begin early. The reaping begins early. It is reaping after the sowing. Where one sows to his own flesh it is corruption. I do not wish to occupy you unduly with it, dear brethren, but still it is needed that our Christianity should become real.

So the other side is beautiful and glorious and stimulating. “But he that sows to the Spirit, from the Spirit shall reap eternal life”. So that now you come to the open flowers of Solomon’s type; the half-open flowers. It is a question of life. Life is seen in flowers particularly and, of course, in all creation the type is there. But I can hardly undertake to picture eternal life, the word is so marvellous; “eternal life”. ‘Everlasting’ is hardly as strong as ‘eternal’. ‘Eternal’ carries its own meaning with it. You might say it is a word coined by the Spirit of God to treat of that great subject, namely, eternal life. “For the wages of sin is death; but the act of favour of God, eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord”. Wages on the one hand, gift on the other. Eternal life is a gift.

So I would just leave you with that, if I may. The time is coming as to this matter of reaping eternal life after the sowing. You say, well, I thought it was gift.

^[p. 344] It is gift, but at the same time it is a product of sowing, and gift is one thing and sowing is another. If you sow for a crop you get eternal life, if you sow for it you will surely get it. It is the same eternal life that God gives, but nevertheless it is peculiarly precious. It is the fruit of my own sowing. God says, there it is; it is what you have been sowing all these years. I am going to give it to you in heaven. It is going to shine there in relation to all the saints. I am going to give it to you here even. “And the end eternal, life”, Romans 6: 22. Apply it at the present time. So that we are enjoined to lay hold of eternal life. Where is it? It is in Christ. But it is possible to get it by sowing. It is worthwhile understanding, too. I do not feel that I am boring you to seek to put it upon you to understand it. There is such a thing as sowing to the Spirit and reaping eternal life. It is the most precious crop I can name that becomes a yield to us from the sowing, and the sowing is to the Spirit, the blessed Spirit of God, sowing to Him. What a range of things to our minds, to our affections, to throw out our seed into that soil, the rich soil of the Spirit of God, and the crop coming back in due time. It is a question of sowing. “He that sows to the Spirit, from the Spirit shall reap eternal life”. It comes exactly where you sow it. The Spirit of God yields it so that it comes back to you. I have a precious thing of my own sowing, my own commodity, as it were, and God would so regard it, so that we can enjoy it. It is His gift, but nevertheless it is brought about this way: namely, it can come from your sowing. May God help us, dear brethren, according to His mind, in all these matters.