HARVEST-TIME
REAPING AND RECEIVING WAGES;
GATHERING FRUIT AND REJOICING
It is written (Matt 20), “Why stand ye here all the day idle”. Again (Matt 13), “The field is the world”. And we know that the world is God’s world. It has passed through varied stages in its present position, that is, away from the God who made it and whose it is, but God has never renounced His claim to it. What is He doing with regard to it now? The harvest-time for Him is come.
The apostle John in his gospel looks at a new feature in its history. God has come into it in the person of Christ, see chap 1: 10, 11. This is a wonderful season for the world. The world has had its varied seasons, but the harvest differs from them all. They have come and gone, and man has deluded himself with the idea that he was improving under cultivation, but each season has left him pretty much as he was before. Time has been allowed to them all, but God speaks of this one as “the fulness of the time”, Gal 4. The filling up of the time, as I understand it. (And if so, what is left?) At this epoch in its history, Christ came.
This introduces us to the reaping time. The Lord is set forth in John 4 as a wearied man, but as the great Reaper for God. It is important for us to understand God’s present action with regard to man. I do not doubt we have come to the reaping time in the history of God’s ways with man. This passage, I think, shews it, and brings man in for the first time to share God’s own joy. It is a favour beyond all expression that the disciples should be called to this. “And he that reapeth receiveth wages, and gathereth fruit unto life eternal: that both he that soweth and he that reapeth may rejoice together”, John 4: 36.
An immense amount of toil and care and labour precedes, as every one knows, the reaping time. What has been seen in God from the moment sin intruded itself into His creation but this very activity? God has wrought in the field of the world all along the ages. The Lord says, “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work”, John 5: 17. Think of all the long, unwearied patience of God in the vain culture of Israel and in bearing with man for over four thousand years! But then comes a change. Christ came into the world, and became the Man under the eye of God. The reaping time for God then began. He never reaped satisfaction and good pleasure in man until that moment. But then His delight was made known in the utterance of Luke 2: 14 NT: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good pleasure in men”. Again it was repeated when Jesus came up from Jordan, and again at the moment of transfiguration.
Now the consequence of God having found His delight in Man is that God is revealed by that Man, so that man finds His joy in God. They are correlative, and the reaping time in which we live is seen to be both for God and man! Our only joy now is to reap. We reap that whereon we bestowed no labour. And “he that reapeth receiveth wages”, John 4: 36. God has been the great worker ever since sin came into the world. God never rested and never reaped from man what His own heart desired until Christ was here. But God has found His “ good pleasure in men”, and man reaps, he finds his “joy in God”, Rom 5: 11. It is all wonderful, but the clue to it all is Christ. I see a little picture of it in Luke 15. The joy in that scene is the joy introduced by the work of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, the joy of the Father. It is full, it is complete. The Father’s heart is satisfied, and surely so is the heart of the prodigal, and I hear the response in other words to the blessed words already quoted from Luke 15, “It was meet that we should make merry and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again, and was lost, and is found”.
Nobody could ever reap, but as the result of God’s work. He has gone before us, and the labour is all done. That all is done characterises the day we live in. Christ has come and laid the basis in His death and resurrection for the accomplishment of all God’s counsels. The Man of His good pleasure, owned as such on earth, has gone to the right hand of God. God’s good pleasure is in Him, that is, in the representative Man now, and we who on earth are finding our joy in God, are in the good of all that God has found in His blessed Son.
If God never reaped His good pleasure from man until Christ was here, it is clear that man could not reap. Why? He could not reap true joy till God was known. God was not revealed. Things were not ready for it. But the consequence of Christ being here is that God is revealed, and man is let into all the joy of the knowledge of God! The woman of Samaria is given as a specimen of one whose lot it was to reap joy in God and to be reaped for God’s joy. She learned something of the real nature of God’s joy as the giving God, and she was a receiver, and a worshipper, and she learnt of the Father what others have learnt ever since. “The Father seeketh such”, John 4: 23. The point before the Lord in this passage is that all was ready for the harvest. God wanted to be made known so as to have the heart of man for Himself. And there was much to be gathered out of the world for Him. God desired to be made known to man, and God’s satisfaction and delight in the work of Christ were for Him and for them. All this avails still, but it is of all moment that we follow Christ in making it known. The perfect Servant has gone before us in this, that we may follow Him in the matter and manner that we set forth.
There are present wages for present work. As we get the moral good into our souls of what characterises God’s attitude man-ward, we get great gain. We reap. A reaper takes possession of what is in the field. An idler is one who is not in the apprehension of the moment. He does not grasp the grace of God, and, of course he is not a reaper if he does not. God never reaped until Christ was here, and man could never “joy in God” until He was revealed.
Both are true today. To be a reaper is to be in the good of the moment. The good is the knowledge of God, as Christ the Son alone can reveal Him. Thence also to go out to men, as those who abide in the company of Christ, to seek to make known to them this attitude of God man-ward. I do not doubt that there would be much more of receiving, much more of gathering, and much more of rejoicing, were our souls more in the present good of reaping.
But another thing marks one who is in the good of the light of this passage. He gathers and does not scatter. He follows the Lord in this respect, as in the other, for the Lord as man was the great reaper for God, the receiver of joy, as man, and also the gatherer. The fruit is for God. He “gathereth fruit unto life eternal”. And then comes the day of the displayed joy. “That both he that soweth [God] and he that reapeth [man] may rejoice together”, v 36. God reaps today His own joy in man seen as in Christ, and man, knowing God as the Lord has revealed Him, reaps his own joy in God. He becomes a worshipper, and he goes out to reap, to convey the blessed light of all that God is, to this poor, dark world outside.
The privilege of the day that we live in is unfolded to us then in this passage. It is the reaping time for God with regard to man, and as for man, the time has come for him to enter into all that God is, as made known in Christ, so that he may joy in God. May all this characterise us more and more, so that He may be able thus to use us for others for His Name’s sake!
Lift up your eyes and look on the fields, for they are white already to harvest. And he that “reapeth receiveth wages, and gathereth fruit unto life eternal, that both he that soweth and he that reapeth may rejoice together”. May we go forth and reap, see 2 Tim 2: 6 NT.
It is well, I think, to maintain the connection of the terms referred to in this passage, and to note the blessing of the day. The reaping is the point before me as to the day in which we live, and I do not think that we can over-estimate the value of being brought to it. But we must use it. Connected with reaping is receiving. God will be no man’s debtor, and then we get the thought of gathering, which again is linked with rejoicing. We follow Christ, and Christ as man fully entered into all that was in the heart of God and lived in the joy of it. The more He went out to seek men, the greater His joy in God. This poor Samaritan sinner was the fruit of the activity of the Lord as man, His reaping. She was won for God. This is the subject of John 4, and in the passage that I speak of He calls the disciples to like work on earth. Let us not be either idle or weary. He calls us all today to enter upon the good of the present moment, and to be in our measure all, as He was, reapers and receivers of wages, gatherers and rejoicers, for we were never so near the hour of display, Christ’s presentation of the bride to Himself and the millennial ‘harvest home’, as we are to day! “Then saith he unto his disciples, The harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few; pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth labourers into his harvest”, Matt 9: 37, 38.
From Helps for the Poor of the Flock—vol 4, 1899
