The Harvest Pattern of Jesus
7652 words long.
Published on 2024-04-17
Motivation
In the Fall of 1985, while in college, I programmed my computer to print out Habakkuk 3:17-19 every time I logged in. I knew nothing about spiritual growth, spiritual harvests, patterns of discipleship or the rest. I didn't know why that particular passage would help me. God must have given it to me, because it worked. In fact, I doubt that any other Bible passage better trumpets the anguished cry of the barren soul longing for a harvest. Habakkuk did more than complain; he praised. He praised the God whom he trusted would eventually set things right. So I did the same. It worked. Twenty months later, despite a screw up with my classes (I was short one class in my minor), despite a letter threatening expulsion if I didn't finish right away, despite living under a cloud of depression and loneliness, I graduated MIT.
I believe that in answer for praying over that passage for eighteen months, God rewarded me by revealing the Harvest Pattern over thirty years later. Before we get into the details, what is this pattern good for?
- Planning how to overcome a challenge or accomplish a goal
- Knowing the essential steps so you don't miss any
- Providing new insights into the Bible so that it will make sense
- Encouraging you to read the Word even when it doesn't make sense
- Introspecting, to be encouraged when you see the hand of God in your past where you never saw it before
Being old and doing things backwards, I am personally working my way through the list in reverse order.
Introspection. The Bible helps us make sense of our experiences. It can explain the meaning and purpose of the things that happen to us - if we understand it. Sadly, we lack analogies drawn from our own experience to which to connect some teachings in the Bible. Also, the long separation in time between cause and effect can hide from us how God's principles work. Here is an example.
In Fall 1985, I had a recurring dream in which I died by electrocution, as described in Dreams. Instead of being afraid or disappointed that I had accomplished nothing in my life, I was at peace. My last thought before I woke was that I would be with Jesus. The outcome of those dreams was that I was delivered from the fear of death and the existential fear of life. The latter fear is the fear that your life means nothing because you have done nothing with it. Suddenly, I was freed from the curse of ambition. Jesus accepted me just as I am.
For years, I considered those dreams gifts initiated by God without any prior causation. However, as I began to understand the principles of spiritual harvests, I made a connection. One month before the dreams started, my Bible study leader had us memorize Galatians 2:
I have been crucified with Christ.
It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.
And the life I now live in the flesh
I live by faith in the Son of God,
who loved me and gave himself for me.
I do not nullify the grace of God,
for if righteousness were through the law,
then Christ died for no purpose.
- Galatians 2:20-21
Those words from Galatians are about dying to self and receiving a new identity. They capture exactly what I went through. Thus the dreams did not spring out of nothing. They were the fruit of God's Word taking root in my soul.
But how is it that the seed was able to grow? I had just considered five thesis proposals. Three were unworkable and one I spent six months writing code for - even getting it to work - before being told that the topic was not suitable for the lab. Now I was working on the fifth, finally approved thesis topic. All that failure, all that suffering, was like the plowing of a field before you plant.
Then there is the twenty months of work that followed the dreams. I was not a disciplined student. I suffered depression. I could easily have given up, but the heart transformed by that dream and that Scripture had energy and focus which finally resulted in my thesis being accepted. The dream was like water for my soul, the focus was the pruning of discipline, and my graduation, the harvest.
Plowing, planting, pouring, pruning, then producing a harvest... Only decades later, looking back, could I see that all five of the central phases of the harvest were present. (There are two more, which we will get to.) As I reflect on other spiritual breakthroughs in my life, I have also been able to assemble their missing pieces and discern the rhythm of God's involvement in my life.
How is this useful? A scattered dream or answer to prayer communicates the message that God is there, but usually busy off helping someone else. However, assemble the whole picture and you see God's constant care stretching over months and years.
Memorization. It is not necessary to memorize the Bible in order to be blessed by it, but it doesn't hurt. What we most need to see is that the Bible works. Maybe you were taught these words:
so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
it shall not return to me empty,
but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.
- Isaiah 55:11
You say you believe them, then act like you don't. Once you recognize this pattern operating in your life, this will help you trust in the power of the Word. It was decades before I connected memorizing Galatians 2:20-21 to relief from fear of death. If I had only known sooner! I would have memorized many more Bible verses.
It was decades before I connected going to a retreat on Philippians and experiencing joy a month later. I left the retreat early because I couldn't understand the message. It was foreign to me. It was partly about the joy of joining a community, the church, and serving one another unselfishly. So what did I do a month later? I visited Ruggles Baptist Church and was filled with joy for a whole month! That was March, 1986. Thirty-eight years later, I am still going to that church.
At one point, a friend tried to persuade me of the value of memorizing Scripture. I was skeptical and devious. I had a good memory and figured a quick Bible read every now and then was good enough. The effort to memorize would add little to my faith. So I took the challenge, but chose to memorize one of the least useful, least spiritual passages in the Bible: Joshua 9:12-34. That passage is a list of all the kings that Joshua defeated. To aid in memorizing and to make sure I didn't miss any kings, I counted them off. When I finally had the list memorized, I made the connection. There were thirty-one kings. Thirty-one victories over thirty-one kings matches the thirty-one days of the month. The Bible promises victory to the faithful every day of the month. I was humbled. I learned something even from a useless list of dead kings. That realization prompted me to memorize the entire Sermon on the Mount. Now that was a victory!
From all this introspection and my recognized difficulty at discerning the good effects of Bible reading until long afterwards, I learned a powerful truth from Mark:
And he said, “The kingdom of God is as if a man
should scatter seed on the ground.
He sleeps and rises night and day,
and the seed sprouts and grows; he knows not how.
The earth produces by itself, first the blade,
then the ear, then the full grain in the ear.
But when the grain is ripe, at once he puts
in the sickle, because the harvest has come.”
- Mark 4:26-29
Even when we do not understand what the Bible is saying, it works. Philippians brought me joy, even though it made no sense to me. Galatians set me free from the fear of death, even though it made no sense to me. Truly the seed sprouts and grows though we know not how.
If the words of God begin to change you even if you do not understand what they mean or how they work, shouldn't that encourage you to read the Bible more?
New Insight. Once I discovered the Harvest Pattern (and others, like the Growth Pattern), it helped me understand some parts of the Bible better. Once you recognize the pattern in a Bible passage, you can carry over meaning from the other places where it is found. For example, I have found that the Harvest Pattern shows up all over Matthew. So far I have found seventeen places where it appears, sometimes in reverse, as in the case of Judas, whose life was a reverse harvest, ending up in the barrenness of the grave. The pattern also pops up in some Psalms, parts of Genesis, and forms the overall structure of Job.
Thoroughness. The Harvest Pattern can be used as a diagnostic. If you are stuck spiritually, it can narrow down the source of the problem. Failure to regularly study the Bible, read Christian literature, or listen to sermons is easiest to spot. If you don't plant the seed, you can't expect the harvest.
Ignoring or defying the counsel of the Holy Spirit is a little harder. Are you being challenged over your heart's desires? If your spirit feels dry, you have a problem with the pouring phase.
An obvious but challenging stage at which to fail is the plucking phase. Do you recognize the need to change schedules, priorities and habits of action? Are you implementing those changes? The pivotal time in any harvest cycle is when it becomes clear what you must sacrifice to move forward. The sacrifice may be money, time, your comfort, a cherished ambition, a wrong belief, or your reputation. Not until I added sacrifice to the definition of the plucking phase did its importance click with me. I looked back and saw some of the sacrifices I have made for my faith and how integral they were to my progress toward maturity. At the time, I didn't appreciate that some of them were sacrifices, but they were. You may find it is the same with you. Not all the things we give to God can be loaded onto a debit card.
Knowing where and why you went astray is essential if you are to get back on track. This pattern can be one of your tools for doing that.
Planning. This brings us to the last motivation for learning and applying this pattern to your life. If you know the path to growth, you can count the cost, prepare your mind for action and get the help you need to reach the goal. You can increase the odds of success. I haven't done this yet. I am a poor planner. I am working now on how to marshal the spiritual resources to achieve my next goals.
History of the Harvest Pattern
That is it for motivation. Now for the history. After I finished writing Job Rises, I looked at my chief findings. There were too many ideas, they were not well enough structured, and they weren't formulated so that they could be acted on. After I wrestled with them for awhile, I noticed some concordance with ideas in Jesus' Parables. I whittled the ideas down to five, then expanded them to seven. That was when I noticed that the whole book of Job conforms to this Harvest Pattern. I considered writing a book about it to use when teaching a Bible study. I composed a whole outline for the book, but then my iPad locked up and I lost most of my notes. In the meantime I had begun research for Peace, like Solomon Never Knew. Sure enough, I not only discovered a Growth Pattern in Ecclesiastes, I also saw how the two patterns were intimately connected. Thus it was in Peace that I worked out both the Harvest and Growth patterns.
After Peace, I wrote Plague, Precept, Prophet, Peace and discovered more patterns. To integrate all my ideas in a single place, I summarized the lengthy treatment of the Harvest Pattern that appeared in Peace into a few pages. The rest of this article is mostly copied verbatim from the chapter "Preparing for a Harvest" in Plague, Precept, Prophet, Peace.
Preparing for a Harvest
What is a plague?
In the case of Egypt, the story of the ten plagues as told in Exodus does not give us just any plagues. These plagues serve a purpose. They share common themes. One of those themes is that the items involved in each plague, such as the Nile, frogs, cattle, locusts and even the sun, were objects of worship to the Egyptians. Thus the plagues were God’s way of saying that those gods are no gods at all. They brought harm to Egypt, not health and wealth.
That is not the right place to start to understand the plagues. The Egyptians made those things into idols for a reason. Their reason was that they wanted an abundant harvest. Turning to false gods to accomplish that goal was foolish, but the goal was not. Their goal is our goal. We may not be farmers growing grain, but we all desire a fruitful life. We want our efforts to produce a crop that can feed and clothe us and our families and provide for the needs of friends who are in trouble. We would like to become wise enough to advise others how to find the right path, such as our children and our children’s children. This wisdom is the fruit of a different kind of harvest, a spiritual one.
How do we plan for, work towards and reap a bountiful harvest? Jesus tells us how. Yet before he does, he tells us that we must “hunger and thirst for righteousness”. That thirst is primed by the barrenness we endure first. The road out of the house of bondage and into the promised land passes by ruined fields. Let’s take stock of how much of an anti-harvest the plagues on Egypt were.
When I was a child, the plague story was mysterious and exciting, but I saw no rhyme or reason to them. They accomplished God’s goal and forced Pharaoh to set the people free, but why? Why those plagues? The Egyptians worshiped hundreds of gods. Even knowing that the plagues were sent to prove that those idols were not gods was not enough. God had a strategy, and it was based upon the facets of their agricultural system. Let us enumerate the elements needed for a good harvest and see what God did to each.
Draught animals. Without oxen, you can’t plow. Gathering the crop and threshing the grain also rely on the beasts God gave us as helpers. Three plagues struck at the animals: the plague of gnats, the plague on livestock and the plague of hail and fire.
Seed. Without seed to plant, there will be no harvest. The plague of locusts consumed not only the food for this year but the seed for the next.
Soil. It is essential to have fertile soil. God made gnats to come out of the dust to torment the people.
Water. Water failed the Egyptians twice. First, the Nile turned to blood. Second, water fell as hail and destroyed one crop.
Sun. Too much sun will wither the crop while too little will keep it from growing. The plague of darkness brought a drought of light.
Workers. In most cases, workers meant children. The plague of boils made it painful to work. The plague on the firstborn destroyed the human harvest and robbed families of the labor they needed to bring in their agricultural harvest.
Food. The harvesters for this year’s harvest need to eat last year’s grain for strength. The plagues of frogs and flies invaded homes, got into kneading troughs and spoiled today’s food with maggots and disease.
Seen in this light, though the plagues were against ten worthless idols, they were against one goal. The plagues systematically attacked every facet of the agricultural system of Egypt. God displayed great wisdom in how He chose those plagues, like a general marshaling his troops for war. Wouldn’t you rather the Lord fight for you and not against you?
Note: Learning from a preacher that there was a logical reason for the particular plagues on Egypt was my first step towards realizing that all theories of eschatology were flawed. When a speaker visiting my church could not give a similar answer regarding the purpose behind the specific plagues listed in Revelation, I discounted all he had to say. If you don’t know “why”, how can you convince me you know “when”? Applying this metric to other eschatological theories demolished them as well.
Scriptural Basis for the Harvest Pattern
The importance of good harvests and the pain of bad ones is a pervasive theme in the Bible. However, for a systematic treatment of the subject here are the best places to turn:
- Job
- Genesis 3 (The Fall of Adam & Eve)
- Psalm 23 (The Lord is my Shepherd)
- Psalm 126 (Bringing in the sheaves)
- Habakkuk 3:17-19 (Praise amid barrenness)
- Matthew 4:1-11 (Temptation of Jesus)
- Matthew 9:35-38 (Pray to the Lord of the Harvest)
- Matthew 10 (Sending out the Twelve)
- Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23 (Parable of the Soils)
- Mark 4:26-29 (The Parable of the Seed Growing)
- Romans 5:3-5 (Suffering produces perseverance)
One does not discover the complete Harvest Pattern all at once. There are passages that illustrate the full pattern but they do not say that is what they are doing. Then there are passages that explain pieces of the pattern, but they skip over steps. Some of the explanations are negative, telling what can go wrong, while others are positive. It is like a jigsaw puzzle. We shall show it here fully assembled. Before that, however, a word on the models of humanity and the Trinity is in order.
Humanity and Trinity
The Harvest Pattern is a procedure that makes no sense unless you understand the agents involved. Those agents are us (humanity) and God (as a Trinity). The internal makeup of people is too complex and unwieldy to describe in detail and relate to the Harvest pattern in all its phases. Instead, we shall use a simplified model of three parts. As you become familiar with the patterns, it will become clearer how the smaller psychological and spiritual aspects of people relate.
A person has three major capabilities or spheres of activity: mind, heart and hand.
The mind includes intellect, the abilities to listen and speak, and rational thought. Among the virtues that attach to the mind is truth.
The heart includes the soul. It encompasses the emotions and desires. Its virtues include holiness, love, hope and faith. Its actions include giving and receiving wise counsel.
The hand stands for the body performing actions that manipulate the physical world. It reflects the sequencing of many steps to perform tasks and of those sequences becoming enduring habits. It is sensible of the passing of time. The hand is also the area of strength.
The economy of the Trinity is impossible to summarize without appearing heretical. The three persons participate and cooperate in all things. My model does not so much describe their essence as their reputation. Father, Son and Holy Spirit each honor the other two by giving them credit for certain events, accomplishments, and modes of relationship to humanity. Each has a distinct sphere of activity delegated to them.
For the Son, that sphere is the mind, for Jesus is the Word. He is the embodiment of truth. Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (John 14:6, ESV)
For the Spirit, that sphere is the heart, for the Spirit is the Comforter and the Counselor.
For the Father, that sphere is the hand. The Father is the cause of physical miracles like flood and fire. The Father is also in charge of time, for
“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God,
“who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.”
- Revelation 1:8
Recall when the disciples questioned Jesus about when the kingdom of Israel would be restored.
“He said to them,
‘It is not for you to know times
or seasons that the Father has fixed
by his own authority.’ ”
- Acts 1:7
The father sets the priorities and through discipline creates habits of action.
With these twin models for humanity and Trinity, we can see that the Son speaks to the human mind, the Spirit to the human heart, and the Father prepares the human hand for action and supervises the schedule by directing the course of time. With this understood, the Harvest Pattern will make sense, for it is from that pattern that the models were derived.
The Sevenfold Harvest Pattern
The pattern has seven steps. Each step has a distinct purpose and poses different challenges. The challenges revolve around spiritual warfare and Satan’s attempt to thwart your spiritual growth. In the following, many of those challenges are drawn from Jesus’ Parable of the Soils in Matthew 13. A common way to look at that parable is to identify the soils as four types of people. Three fail to produce a harvest and one succeeds. A more helpful way to understand the parable is as outlining a process with three failure modes at the early, middle and late stages of a harvest. By looking at the whole of the process we can identify more than what might go wrong at each stage; we can discover what spiritual resources are available to us to overcome the challenges and reap a bountiful harvest.
(1) Preparation
At the start of a harvest season, the farmer must prepare his tools. That means sharpening the plow, mending the yoke, training new oxen or horses, and removing stones from the field. In Job, this was the man’s early life in chapter one, where he learned basic morality and religion and matured as a person. In Jesus’ case, this was his being baptized by John the Baptist and the Holy Spirit coming upon him and directing him toward the desert. In our case, this is learning the Ten Commandments and other basics of the faith up to accepting Jesus as your Lord. (Your first harvest is salvation.)
Goal: The Fear of the Lord. Accepting the Lordship of Jesus Christ. (Salvation itself is the first application of an entire harvest pattern. Once a person is saved, all that led up to that constitutes their preparation for subsequent harvests.)
Challenge: Legalism. A person tries to follow God’s law on their own strength and fails. Discouraged, they give up instead of turning to Christ for the power to uphold the law.
Assets: Parents. The Ten Commandments and the rest of the Law. The Psalms, which are a meditation on the Law.
(2) Plowing
Plowing means suffering, as attested by Psalm 129:3 and Isaiah 28:24-29. The first calamities struck Job’s family as the oxen were plowing (Job 1:14). All three persons of the Trinity participated in the plowing phase of Job’s life by withdrawing a measure of their support. The process was initiated by the Father, who granted permission to Satan to attack Job’s family and possessions, which is the physical cause of suffering. Some of it occurred by the hands of men. Then Job’s wife, siblings, neighbors and others rejected Job. This relational abandonment is in the sphere of the Holy Spirit, whose withdrawal deprived Job of the emotional comfort that we rely upon family and friends to provide. Finally, God’s silence amidst all this was the withdrawal of the Son and his words of reason, explanation, and justice from Job’s life.
In Jesus’ case, the plowing was fasting for forty days. The plowing phase teaches us that we need a savior and what that savior must do for us.
Goal: Perseverance.
“Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings,
knowing that suffering produces endurance,
and endurance produces character,
and character produces hope,
and hope does not put us to shame,
because God's love has been poured into our hearts
through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”
- Romans 5:3-5, ESV
Challenge: Bitterness, despair, escapism and surrender. Solomon warns us about the choice we have to make.
“The heart of the wise
is in the house of mourning,
but the heart of fools
is in the house of pleasure.”
- Ecclesiastes 7:4, NIV
Translation: avoid illicit sex, drugs, alcohol and the empty pursuit of pleasure as means of dealing with grief, loss and suffering.
Assets: God’s hedge of protection. (See Job 1:10 and 1 Corinthians 10:13.) He will not allow you to be tested beyond your ability to endure.
(3) Planting seeds
Jesus tells us in the Parable of the soils that the seed is the Word of God, the gospel message. The best outcome of this phase is a mental transformation. The worst outcome is rejection, facilitated by the work of Satan, the bird eager to snatch that seed. The Son is the member of the Trinity most evident in this phase.
In the story of Job, this phase lasts from chapters three to thirty-one. Those chapters contain Job’s debate with Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar. They serve the cause of Satan, trying to get Job to lose hope that a savior will rescue him. Job’s insights prove that he is hearing words from God through his suffering even though he can’t recognize that fact.
In the story of Jesus’ temptation, this is the first temptation, where Satan tries to get Jesus to turn stones into bread and break his fast. Jesus says,
“It is written,
‘Man shall not live by bread alone,
but by every word that comes
from the mouth of God.’ ”
- Matthew 4:4
Thus Jesus affirms that the seed – the Word – is more important than material comforts, hence does not let the devil trick him into failing during the planting phase.
The clue that Job and Jesus are on the same page is found in this verse:
“I have not departed
from the commandment of his lips;
I have treasured the words of his mouth
more than my portion of food.”
- Job 23:12
A negative example is found in Genesis 3, when Eve treasures the forbidden fruit more than God’s command.
Goal: A Transformed mind.
Challenge: Being tricked by Satan into rejecting the Word of God. This corresponds to the first soil in Jesus’ parable.
Assets: Jesus. Read the Bible. Listen to sound preaching. Read Christian books. Listen to Christian music. Memorize Scripture.
(4) Pouring water
The parable of the soils speaks not of water, but of its opposite, the scorching heat of the sun. This represents persecution and hardship. The battleground for this phase of the Harvest Pattern is the heart. The principle member of the Trinity at work here is the Holy Spirit. The refreshing of the Holy Spirit is often compared to water.
“As a deer pants for flowing streams,
so pants my soul for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
When shall I come and appear before God?”
- Psalm 42:1-2
Water baptism is a symbol of the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Water washes away filth and produces holiness. In Job chapters thirty-two to thirty-seven, Elihu speaks words of comfort on behalf of the Holy Spirit. The climax of his speech is about how the water of the Holy Spirit can be for discipline, for “his Land”, or for love:
“He loads the thick cloud with moisture;
the clouds scatter his lightning.
They turn around and around by his guidance,
to accomplish all that he commands them
on the face of the habitable world.
Whether for correction
or for his land
or for love,
he causes it to happen.
- Job 37:11-13
Satan attempts to scare Jesus into making a mistake and mistrust the Father’s love, attacking his heart by telling him to jump off the temple roof to force the Father to prove His love.
The best outcome of this phase is a steady, faithful, trusting heart. Unruly passions are kept at bay, our fear is of God, not Satan, and our desires are set on things above, not earthly things. We listen to the Spirit’s counsel, not our own or Satan’s. The worst outcome is succumbing to fear and following Satan’s advice. The result is a heart of stone. This is the stony heart spoken of by Ezekiel:
And I will give them one heart,
and a new spirit I will put within them.
I will remove the heart of stone
from their flesh and give them
a heart of flesh,
that they may walk in my statutes
and keep my rules and obey them.
And they shall be my people,
and I will be their God.
- Ezekiel 11:19-20
In stories relevant to the Exodus, important crisis points involve water: the crossing of the Red Sea, the waters of Meribah (where Moses got angry and forfeited his right to enter the land), and the crossing of the Jordan into the Promised Land.
Goal: A pure heart.
Challenge: Persecution and hardship. Satan will try to scare you into abandoning your faith. This corresponds to the second soil, which is rocky.
Assets: The Holy Spirit. The church.
But encourage one another daily,
as long as it is called “Today,”
so that none of you may be hardened
by sin’s deceitfulness.
- Hebrews 3:13, NIV
(5) Plucking weeds
Jesus spoke of the danger of this phase as being thorny soil, choked by weeds and rendered unfruitful. Those thorns and weeds are the bad habits that spring from wrong priorities, which in turn may have been caused by accepting lies in the planting phase or forming and magnifying sinful desires in the pouring phase.
The Father is the person most active in this phase. In Job, this corresponds to chapters thirty-eight to forty-one, where the Father speaks from the whirlwind. What weeds does God pull from Job? How does God discipline and correct Job’s priorities? One weed is anxiety, which afflicted Job before Satan’s attacks. God speaks of his care for all his creatures, reassuring Job of his benevolent provision. Another weed is vengeance. Job wants the people who hurt him to be punished. God commands Job to forgive his friends and commands them to offer sacrifices to Job. Again, sacrifice is an act of the hand, confirming a change in the heart.
For Jesus, the temptation is to bow down and worship Satan in exchange for all the kingdoms of the earth. Jesus maintains his priority, which is worshiping the Father, not power, fame or a way to escape the suffering of the cross. Jesus trusted the Father and so knew that he would one day rule the nations anyway. What was really offered to him was a shortcut, but that would violate the times set by the Father. The greatest thorn that impairs us is our desire to do things on our schedule, not God’s. Remember King Saul. He grew impatient, didn’t wait for Samuel to arrive, and performed the sacrifices himself. For this he forfeited the crown. (See 1 Samuel 13:8-14)
Goal: Good habits, namely spiritual discipline and a focus on pursuing spiritual treasures, not earthly gain.
Challenge: Sin’s deceitfulness, such as the desire for wealth, sensual pleasures, fame and power. Satan will try to distract you with these things. This is the third soil, choked with thorns and thistles.
Assets: The Father. Practice the disciplines of prayer, fasting, the sacrifice of giving to the poor, meditation, hospitality, acts of mercy and all the other deeds encouraged by the Apostles and our Lord. Also, be accountable to your church and fellow believers.
(6) Producing a harvest
What is a harvest? There are many possible harvests. In my life, here are some that I have reaped:
- losing the fear of death
- graduating college
- being freed from depression to experience joy
- replacing anxiety with peace
- completing a successful project at work
- gaining deeper insight into God’s Word
For Job, the harvest brought reconciliation with family and friends, more children, restoration of wealth and status, and long life.
For Jesus, the harvest was a respite, as angels attended him with food.
All three persons of the Trinity participate in the harvest, but one stands out.
Then [Jesus] said to his disciples,
“The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few;
therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest
to send out laborers into his harvest.”
- Matthew 9:37-38
Pray to whom? Is Jesus referring to the Father or himself? In the very next chapter, Jesus calls his disciples and sends them out to the cities of Judah as workers in the harvest. Since Jesus sends them into the harvest, that makes him the Lord of the Harvest.
Be warned: the harvest time is not always without conflict. Wheat must be threshed. Recall Jesus’ words to Peter:
“Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you,
that he might sift you like wheat,
but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail.
And when you have turned again, strengthen your brothers.”
- Luke 22:31-32
Goal: A spiritual (or material) harvest.
Challenge: Pride. This was Peter’s downfall. This is like the recovering alcoholic who mastered one stressor that led him to drink and was sober for five years only to succumb to a second stimulus and relapse.
Assets: The whole Trinity. The angels, who are said by Jesus to participate in the final harvest. The church. One sows, another waters, and a third gathers in the crop. We are not laboring alone. (See John 4:37-38.)
(7) Peace
Job ended his days in peace. Jesus experienced peace following his victory over Satan. According to Paul in Galatians, peace is a fruit of the Holy Spirit. Anyone who reaps a good harvest knows peace.
Goal: Contentment.
Challenge: Covetousness. Do not compare your results to those of others.
Assets. Thanksgiving, praise, gratitude. The Apostle Paul writes more about peace than any other Bible writer. Read his letters.
When you think you know the process of the harvest you still don’t. What is the seed? That is the whole of the Gospel message. You do not learn that overnight.
What is the water? The ministry of the Holy Spirit is mysterious. Its fruits are in Galatians. Its ministry to and through the church is in Acts. The need to find balance and humility in exercising its gifts is found in 1 Corinthians.
What is the pruning? God’s discipline and sovereignty over our lives is often unseen. We do not understand His timing and it drives us mad. Long meditation on the Word and obedience to its teachings is necessary if you are to learn of these things. The growing season for the harvests in my life lasted months for embracing my mortality, years for escaping depression, and decades for overcoming anxiety. Every person and every harvest may operate on a different time scale.
Reverse Harvests
The Bible contains cautionary tales in the form of reverse harvests. They begin with a person in a state of peace with God and end up back at a place of preparation, not for a harvest, but exile or the grave. Peace lists at least four:
- Adam & Eve in Genesis 3
- Job’s Decreation story in Job 3
- Seven woes against the Pharisees in Matthew 23
- Judas’ betrayal
Each follows the seven stages of the Harvest Pattern in reverse. For example, Judas goes from fellowship with Jesus (peace) to a hangman’s noose. His priority is wrong: money. His emotions are wrong: fear of the government and religious authorities. He uses his lips for a corrupt purpose: to kiss the one he is betraying to identify him to the armed escort. Remorse torments his soul with suffering. Everything is backwards and he backs himself into the hell of a hangman’s noose.
Retracing Adam & Eve’s journey in detail is profitable.
- Peace. They begin in Eden, at peace with God and each other. Perhaps if they called for God to join the conversation with the serpent, things would have turned out differently?
- Produce a Harvest. The Serpent challenges Eve to eat from the tree, basically adding it to the basket of what one may take in during the harvest. When Eve succumbs, this is the progression of her thought:
So when the woman saw that the tree was
(1) good for food, and that it was
(2) a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was
(3) to be desired to make one wise,
she took of its fruit and ate,
and she also gave some to her husband
who was with her, and he ate.
- Genesis 3:6
- Plucking. Eve chooses a new priority, gaining strength through the materialistic consumption of food instead of from God. “Good for food” means it promises to make you physically strong, the area of the hand, which plucked it from the forbidden tree.
- Pouring. Eve embraces a new desire, “a delight to the eyes”. Because this desire appeals to the eyes, it only pursues the surface reality of deception, unlike the ears, which enter the realm of truth. As a sinful “delight”, an emotion, it is a corruption of the heart.
- Planting. The final deceit is that the fruit can “make one wise”. This is in the area of intellect, the area of the mind. It is a bad seed indeed.
- Plowing. Now the first two humans, who had never known suffering, are struck by it at last. The first prong of the attack is shame, followed by attempts to dodge responsibility and blame others. Recall the promise that people “will beat their swords into plowshares”? It goes in reverse. The angels appear bearing swords and thrust Adam & Eve out of Eden.
- Preparation. The exile from Eden begins mankind’s preparation for the journey back to Eden. It also prepares Adam & Eve to accept mortality and a long journey to the grave.
This retelling of Adam and Eve’s fall was as a harvest in reverse. God’s curse upon them also speaks to the Harvest Pattern and the Parable of the soils. The serpent misused its mouth, speaking lies and planting a corrupt seed. It was cursed to crawl on its belly and use its mouth, not to speak, but to eat dust. In the parable, Satan is the bird that steals the seed, so this correspondence is spot on.
Eve was told “Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” (Genesis 3:16) This indicates that women would be compromised emotionally, making them inordinately dependent upon men for their sense of security, leading to a power imbalance between the sexes. This is in the area of the emotions and the heart. Combined with the magnified pain of childbirth, this matches the persecution and hardship of the rocky soil in the parable.
Adam was told that the ground would be cursed with thorns, making his toil arduous. This literally matches the condition of the third soil of the parable, the one choked with thorns.
What of the good soil that produces a crop? Genesis 3 does not leave us without hope. “Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living.” (Genesis 3:20, NIV) Our children are our hope for the future.
This story of our flawed ancestors tells us something about idols. To Eve, the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was an idol, because she invested it with the power and potential to do that which only God can do. In doing so, she and Adam forfeited a lifetime of trouble-free harvests. What does this tell us?
Idols destroy harvests.
What is our solution? We must ace the preparation phase. The commandments are not the whole of the harvest process, but they are a critical part of the first step.
God’s Law helps us prepare for an abundant harvest.
The Flaw
What happens if a secular person, someone from another religion, or even a new Christian believer translates the Harvest Pattern into terms that they understand? The result will likely be the opposite of what the Bible teaches. The story would go like this.
I have a problem. What should I do? I know, I’ll get a college degree, an internship or see a psychologist. Or maybe read a book. They will teach me helpful ideas to remove my ignorance. All those TV testimonials of how this information has changed lives will cheer me up. It will motivate me and give me hope. Then I will start to practice the new skills I just learned. Maybe I will hire a tutor or a personal trainer to keep me on track. After a few months or years going down this track, my life will be different. I will have built that stairway to heaven and reaped a good reward for my efforts.
Ignorance is the new sin. Education is the new religion. Self improvement is sanctification. None of this is gospel. The truths that transform us do not do so by our power, but by the Holy Spirit’s. In fact, we don’t even need to understand the Bible verses that transform us, at least not in all their depth. God arranged this so that we could not boast that our own understanding made it work.
So it was when I was delivered from the fear of death. I had only been a Christian six months. My Bible study leader asked us to memorize Galatians 2:20-21:
I have been crucified with Christ.
It is no longer I who live,
but Christ who lives in me.
And the life I now live in the flesh
I live by faith in the Son of God,
who loved me and gave himself for me.
I do not nullify the grace of God,
for if righteousness were through the law,
then Christ died for no purpose.
- Galatians 2:20-21
This passage is about receiving a new identity. Your old sinful identity dies and a new one arises, built upon Christ, who now lives in you. I had no idea what the words meant, but a month after committing those words to memory, the Lord took away my fear of death. The sign by which I recognized the change was a recurring dream. In the dream, I was shaving in bed. My electric razor then shorted and I was electrocuted. As the shock passed through my body, my last thought was not that I would die without having accomplished anything important. It was that I would go to be with Jesus. I awoke from the dream in perfect peace.
That is the power of the gospel. Barely intelligible words, through the hands of the Holy Spirit and within a heart of a faithful Christian, can reap a great harvest of peace. To back up my personal testimony, here is what Jesus had to say about this in Mark’s Gospel:
He also said, “This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain—first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it, because the harvest has come.” (Mark 4:26-29, NIV)
How does the Harvest Pattern operate? We don’t know how! Only in a miraculous framework can God’s law accomplish its intended effect. Most Christians know that the Ten Commandments were instituted by God through miracles announced by Moses. What most people do not know is that those commandments are miracles themselves. They are prophecies that predict and shape the course of empires. The power of the plagues against Egypt died long ago. The power of the Decalogue is very much alive.
Links to the other articles in this section:
Spiritual Growth Introduction to the articles about spiritual growth.
What are Life's Twelve Most Important Questions? If you can answer these questions, you know the way better than the Mandelorian.
What are the Heavenly Treasures? It is one thing to list these treasures, quite another to acquire them!
The Harvest Pattern of Jesus A tactical pattern for overcoming an individual obstacle and reaping a single spiritual harvest.
The Growth Pattern of Solomon Overview of a strategic pattern to help you plan your whole life.
There is a Season The chapter from Peace, like Solomon Never Knew where I first introduced the Growth Pattern.
The Apostle Paul's Discipleship Program Shows how the first seven letters of Paul to the churches are arranged according to the Growth Pattern.
Seven Facets of Spirit-led Discipleship The Sermon on the Mount conforms to the Growth Pattern.
The Motherhood Pattern A strategic pattern for women.
The Law Pattern of Moses The law does more than restrict; it also guides.
The Journey Pattern It is a long journey back to Eden.
Emotional Prophecies of the Psalms
Job and the Ways to Talk to God
Job Description for a Savior Job knew what he needed in a savior. Do you?
Dreams Dreams can guide you, paralyze you, or lead you astray. In my case, it was all three.
Spiritual Warfare Somebody IS out to get you.
