Proverbs 10:5
He that gathereth in summer is a wise son:
but he that sleepeth in harvest is a son that causeth shame.
To sleep at the time when the harvest is to be gathered is the utmost foolishness. Such a lazy farmer is doomed to bankruptcy. Yet, as we reflect on this proverb, let us also rise to the level of its spiritual interpretation.
The author of the Bible is an agrarian God. He wrote it through an agrarian people living in an agrarian society. Today, we who have become urban have lost touch with the rhythm of the earth and of its season. Because of it, we are in fact slightly Bible illiterate.
The wise author of these words lived in Israel. He knew that the harvest season started around the end of the month of March at Passover with the barley harvest. It continued with the wheat harvest in June at the festival of Pentecost. The Feast of Trumpets in September saw the sifting of the grains before it was gathered into barns around the Festival of Tabernacles at the end of the month. To sleep during this season would be unthinkable.
God used this rhythm of the season of an agrarian society to give us His message. Jesus came at a time when there hadn’t been a prophet for a while in Israel. This famine of the Word, without the ‘Sun of Righteousness’ in the spoken Word of God was like a spiritual winter. John the Baptist, who announced the coming of the greatest Farmer of all time who would gather the harvest of humanity into God’s barns, was born during the Passover season. Jesus was born six months later, around the time of the Festival of tabernacles.
The death and resurrection of Jesus signaled the beginning of the harvest of the earth. For centuries God had seeded the earth with the words of the prophets, with the sample Israel had been to the world. Now God sent His son to reap the harvest. Jews have always believed that the September Festival of Trumpets signaled the actual coming of the Messiah, the end of the great human harvest, the sifting of God’s people: The great Tribulations. The Feast of Trumpets leads us straight into the season of tabernacle, when, as the grain is stored into the barns before winter. At that time we, the great human harvest of God, enter God’s barn into the peace of the Kingdom of Heaven.
Since Jesus came to the earth, each area of the world has seen its season of revival in its own generation. The Sates had its great times of revivals; one of the last one was among the youth in the 60’s and 70’s. We have seen a great harvest in Russia during the Perestroika. We have seen the opening of China and the flourishing of the underground Church. Through the dynamics of modern-day politics we see now the spiritual awakening of many in the Muslim closed countries of the Middle East. Even in Israel, which is definitely anti Jesus, the Messianic movement is now growing by leaps and bounds and that my friend is a sign of the soon return of the Lord: when the Jews start seeing their savior.
\We, the workers of the Chief Farmer of all times need not to be found sleeping during this harvest. It may be the last hour of the day, but the Husbandman of the earth is still looking to hire those who haven’t found a field to harvest. He will still pay us for the full day’s labor; are you on, sickle in hand? Or are you like the lazy son who sleeps in the harvest?
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