A FIELD WHICH THE LORD HATH BLESSED - Alexander Maclaren

‘The earth, which drinketh in the rain that cometh oft upon it, and bringeth forth herbs meet for them by whom it is dressed, receiveth blessing from God. — Hebrews 6:7.

This is a kind of parable or allegory in which echoes of many scriptures are gathered up. The comparisons of the process of forming character to the growth of a plant, of divine influences to the rain, of the discipline of life to husbandry, of holy deeds to fruit, are common to all languages; and recall many sayings of lawgiver and prophets, as well as many of the parables of our Lord. Especially there seems to be allusion here to the two parables of the Sower and the field that brought forth wheat and tares. But the old illustrations appear here with a somewhat new setting. The writer extends his vision beyond the fact of growth and fruitfulness to that which precedes it and to that which follows it. For fruitfulness there must be the drinking in of the rain from heaven. And if there be fruitfulness, there will be God’s blessing.

Then, further, in His estimate there are only two kinds of soil, one which bears wholesome fruits, and on which falls the perpetual dew of heaven’s benediction, the other which brings forth thorns and briars, and on which fall the lightnings of a curse that burns it and its miserable crop. Both soils are typical of professing Christians; in one or other of them each of us finds His likeness.

So then consider, first, the eager reception of divine influences.

In these Eastern lands all that is wanted to turn the desert into a paradise is irrigation. In the human heart what is wanted to bring forth fruit is, first, the reception of God’s gifts and help. That goes dead in the teeth of a great deal of what we call ‘culture,’ and for want of believing it, and acting on it, much of the so-called culture is only elaborate vanity. It is no use trying to grow fruits in the desert until, as the men who made the Suez Canal did, you first of all bring the ‘sweet water,’ and then you will get your garden. Productivity, to use long words, begins with receptivity. You must first take in what God sends upon you before you can bring forth what God asks from you. The earth that ‘drinketh in the rain’ is the earth ‘that bringeth forth the fruit.’

What is this rain that cometh oft, the reception of which is the indispensable preliminary to all true fruitfulness? If there be, as I suppose there is, some echo and reminiscence here of Isaiah’s word about ‘the rain coming down and the snow from heaven,’ then the metaphor points to ‘the Word of God that goeth forth out of His mouth.’ And though I by no means take that to be the exclusive or even the principal application of the symbol, I cannot help dwelling upon that view for a moment. And in that aspect it comes to be this, if a Christian man wants to be fruitful let him begin by receiving, with interest and attention, into his heart the truth in God’s word. One main reason for the defects of our modern Christianity is that the average Christian man cares so little about his Bible; and has no real deep grip of, nor absorbed interest in, the great truths that it sets forth. No man gets any good out of a book or of a truth to which he does not attend with awakened interest and quickened curiosity. Look how you read your newspapers, and how interested you are in some trashy fiction, and contrast that with the way in which you read your Bibles. Do you drink in this Word, do you long to know more of the deep harmonies, of the profound mysteries, of the flashing illumination which it brings to all hearts that long for it? Can you say ‘I have desired Thy testimonies more than all hidden riches? My brother, there will be but few and shrivelled and immature fruits upon our lives unless they are ‘planted by the rivers of water,’ that is to say, as the psalm interprets it, unless we ‘meditate on His law day and night.’

But there is a wider application to be given, as I take it, to the figure. The rain ‘which cometh oft upon’ the fruit-bearing earth, is a symbol for the whole sum of divine influences affecting mind, heart, conscience, will, and the whole inner mare From God there is ever streaming down upon His world, and especially upon His Church, spiritual influences reducible to no external agency, which find their way into the inmost heart. These come, not like the inadequate symbol of my text, in occasional showers, but they come rather as the rays come from the sun, by continual pulsating outwards, and perpetual efflux. So the prime requisite for fruit-bearing is the eager reception of all God’s influences upon our spirits.

I venture to put what I have to say about this matter into four simple precepts. Desire them; expect them; welcome them; use them. So we shall drink them in.

Desire them. If there is a continual flowing out from God, by reason of His very nature, of these gracious influences to enlighten and to strengthen and to purify, then to desire them is to possess them, and without desiring them there is no possession. The heart opens when it desires, and the water finds its way, as is the nature of water, into the narrowest chink that it meets as it flows. Wherever there is a tiny crack there will be a little stream, and the wider the opening the fuller the blessing. Desire brings God; and they whose hearts are opened are they whose hearts are filled. Do you want the rain that comes down? Have you any wish to be made any better than you are. Would it be inconvenient to you if there came to you the efflux of the divine power, that would make you ashamed of your present Christianity, and would lift you up into heights of consecration, of daily honesty, and transparent business purity which perhaps do not mark you at present? Dear brethren, if many Christian people would be honest with themselves they would more often find out that, in spite of all their prayers, which come from their, teeth outwards, they do not want more of God’s influences, and would feel it extremely inconvenient to be laid hold of by a sanctifying power that should deliver them from the sins that they like. Desire, and you possess.

Expect and you will get. God cannot disappoint, and never did disappoint, expectations which turn to Him with the consciousness of need and the yearning for supply. But we limit His gifts because we limit our expectations of them; and instead of widening these to the large infinitude of His bestowments, we shrink His bestowments to the miserable narrowness of our expectations. Suppose a king were to send out a proclamation that any man might come to his treasuries, and take away as many sacks full of gold as he liked, and the more the better; do you think he would consider himself most honoured by the man that brought a wagon or by him who brought a basket? We bring our little vessels to the great fountain, and we put it to shame by the smallness of the expectations with which we meet the largeness of the promises. Expect the gift, and the gift will answer and vindicate — ay! and put to shame — your expectation. Desire them; expect them.

Welcome them. There is a vulgar old proverb that says, ‘Put out your tubs when it is raining.’ Be sure that when the gift is falling you fling your hearts wide for its acceptance. Such welcome will not be given unless there be a profound sense of need, an almost painful consciousness of deficiency and failure, and unless there be above all a firm and confident expectation and faith in His bestowments. If we desired eagerly the coming of the blessing, how our hearts would leap when the blessing came. It should be a tree of life, as the Book of Proverbs says about hopes fulfilled. But alas! alas I the bulk of professing average Christians-of this day are liker the soaked and saturated soil of this summer, which takes in no more of the rain that falls, but lets it stagnate on the surface. Everybody that has ever watered a dry garden knows how the liquid treasure sinks in, and how every particle of earth seems to have a mouth to grasp it, and to make it its own. Do you welcome in that fashion, my brother, God’s gifts so lavishly bestowed upon you, or do you let them lie on the surface stagnating and unprofitable as far as you are concerned? Desire them; expect them; welcome them.

Use them. Because in using them you will use them up, and that will leave room for more; and ‘unto him that hath shall be given.’ And he that has faithfully. utilised the smallest measure of God’s gift to him, receives a larger; just as you trust your children with halfpence before you trust them with shillings, and proportion the amount you have put in their hands to what you have seen of the wisdom of their use of the smaller amount.

So, dear friends, to sum it all up, here is the condition of all fruit-bearing. The prime characteristic of a Christian heart ought to be this hungering and thirsting after larger bestowments of God’s influences. Alas! alas! for the professing Christians who are impervious to the rain that comes oft upon them. For God’s gifts are never inoperative. In countries where the timber has been unwisely felled, and the hillside stripped, the rain has nothing to lay hold of, and nothing to do, and it sweeps down the mountain side in a tawny torrent, bearing away the little superfluous soil that still clings to the rocks, and after a while these stand up gaunt and bare, neither sunshine nor rain can stimulate vegetation on their naked precipitous face, but only crumble them into slow decay. So either we are welcoming God’s influences into our hearts, and turning rain into fruit, or they are denuding the soil still more, and making us yet more infertile. The land’ that drinketh in the rain’ bears the fruit; the land that does not is thereby cursed into more barren barrenness.

Now note secondly, and only a word about that, the tillage.

My text speaks of ‘them for whom’ (not as our Authorised Version has it, ‘by whom’) it is dressed. And possibly there may be a distinction between those, whoever they may be, who are supposed to receive the fruit of the field, and those who carry on the labour of cultivation. If so, we should have a parallel thought to the many both in the Old and in the New Testament which represent God’s ministers and messengers as being labourers in His vineyard. But more probably the distinction between the owner and the labourers is neglected in our text, and we are simply to think of the ‘dressing’ as referring to another department of the divine operations. God not only pours upon us as from above these gracious skyey influences, which are to be received into our hearts, but He deals with us in our daily life, by external providences and discipline. So the text reminds us of ‘My Father is the husbandman,’ and of Paul’s word, ‘Ye are God’s husbandry,’ and the tillage that is here spoken of is the whole sum of the external circumstances of our lives, as contrasted with the rain, that represents the whole sum of the spiritual influences brought to bear upon us within.

There is the true point of view from which to look on life. It is God’s husbandry. The ploughshare has a very sharp edge, and it is dragged with unsparing accuracy in the straight, deep furrow; and it cuts through stiff soil, and sometimes turns up and divides hidden treasures that lie beneath. Nobody likes to have his fallow ground broken up; nobody likes to have the ploughshare of sorrow driven through the little warm nest that lay below the surface; nobody likes the discipline, but it is God’s husbandry. If there were no ploughing, if there were no harrows with their cruel multiplied teeth to be dragged clean across quivering hearts, there would not be any harvest. Do not lot us misunderstand the meaning of our sorrows. God by them is ‘dressing’ His own fields, and let us take care that, when we are thinking of the means by which He seeks to promote our fertility, we do not forget to set by the side of the gracious rain that distils from the heavens the better discipline that is exercised upon the earth.

Thirdly, note the fruitfulness.

There is only one crop from a man’s nature which God dignifies with the name of fruit. The rest, be it what it may, is thorns and thistles. One of the apostles talks about ‘the unfruitful fruit of darkness.’ Darkness has plenty of work; has it not? There are abundant results, some of them very satisfactory, very beautiful, very desirable, in a number of ways, from the lives of men who do not take in these divine influences. Are we not to call them fruit? Is every human life, except a life of consistent godliness and lowly faith manifested in works, a barren life? So the Bible says. And that cuts very sharp, and goes very deep, and rebukes a great many of us.

Culture is all very well. Refinement, education, business prosperity, taste, affection, etc., are all right in their places. If they come from, and are rooted in, faith in Jesus Christ, and obedience therefore to God’s will, they are fruit; if they do not, they are thorns, wild grapes and not true ones. The only thing that a man does that is worth calling fruit, because it is the only thing that will last, and the only thing that corresponds to his capacities and responsibilities, is that which he does for the sake of, and by the strength of, the dear Lord that loved him, and gave Himself for him. That is fruit; all the rest is sham — nothing but leaves.

Again, notice that great thought, that the deeds of a poor man, who has taken in these divine influences, are a harvest meet for, and acceptable to, the owner; or, to put it into words without metaphor, God delights in, and in some sense feeds upon, the righteous deeds of His children. That great thought is put in many ways and in many places in Scripture. ‘He came, being hungered, seeking fruit,’ on the fig-tree. ‘An odour of a sweet smell’ — another metaphor expressing the same idea — ‘acceptable to God.’ In the old ritual there was the singular institution of what we call the ‘shewbread,’ the ‘bread of the face,’ as the Hebrew means, which Was spread before God, and lay there in the sanctuary, typical of the righteous deeds of His children, which were offered up to Him. In the same sense my text speaks of ‘fruit meet for those for whom it is dressed’ — such a crop as corresponds to the desires of the owner, and to the care and husbandry that He has lavished upon His field.

A farmer is proud if the produce of his farm is taken for the royal table. Can there be a loftier conception of the possible greatness of the poorest, lowliest Christian service than this, that it is ‘meet for the Master’s use’; and that even He will find delight in partaking of it? And does not Jesus Christ say the same thing to us in other language when He says from heaven, ‘If any man open the door, I will come in and will sup with him’ — ‘He shall provide the meal, he shall spread the table, and I will partake of that which he brings.’ It is the highest motive that can be brought to bear upon us, to make our deeds, for His dear sake, pure and noble and lofty, that thereby they become, in His infinite mercy, not unworthy to be offered to Him, and capable of ministering delight to His heart. And it is a test, too, for if your work is not meet for Christ to accept, it is not meet for you to do.

Lastly, mark the blessing from God.

My text is spoken in immediate connection with the statement of the writer’s purpose, to lead his hearers from the elements to the perfection of Christian truth. Such progress he considers the proper result of the earlier stages, and the statement of that principle is embodied in the metaphor of my text. Stripping it of its figure, it comes to this, that in the narrower view righteousness give an insight into truth, and in the wider view, that fruitfulness is rewarded by progress in the Christian life. I have no time, nor is there need, to dwell upon the elements of this blessing from God; let me put what I have to say in just two or three sentences.

The fruitfulness which is the result of the reception of the divine influences has for its consequence the Blessing which is more of these divine influences, therefore more fruitfulness and consequently more work. Faithfulness in the use of the less leads on to the assured possession of the greater, as is true in all regions of life, as is true as between earth and heaven, and as is true in the growth of the Christian soul here below. And as the reception of the blessing makes capable of a larger blessing, so the larger reception of these divine influences results in larger fruitfulness. The reward of fertility is greater fertility, and that is the highest reward that God can give us for it. It is the reward that makes heaven, for that is a sphere in which, with larger capacities, we shall bring forth nobler results of service and of character. The plant that is here an exotic is taken there into its native soil, and spreads a broader branch, and opens a greener leaf, and bends down boughs laden with richer and more abundant fruit, and in the fruit is neither spot nor blemish nor any such thing. The blessing of God is, most of all, the larger communication of His own sweet and precious influences, and consequently the growing fruitfulness which brings growing glory to Him, and growing gladness to ourselves. The reward for work is more work, and a wider sphere for nobler service. Add to that the consciousness of God’s smile reflected in the quiet of an unaccusing conscience, and the tranquillity that comes from a submissive will and unselfish consecration, and we have at least some of the elements of that ‘blessing from God.’

So, dear friends, there is a picture of what is possible for every one of us. We may all make our lives like what the Pentateuch describes the land of Israel as being, ‘a land which drinketh in of the water of the rain of heaven, a land which the Lord thy God careth for, for the eyes of the Lord thy God are on it continually.’ If we receive the influences we shall bring forth the fruit, and we shall get the blessing.