Ep 798 – Isaiah 28:20-29

When a farmer plants, he does so with the expectation that one day he will be able to reap. Otherwise, there would be no reason to go through all the effort of preparing the soil and sowing the seeds. Planting is done because reaping is the expected outcome. And the same is true of God and His chosen people. In the 28th chapter of Isaiah, verses 20-29, God reveals through His prophet that a day is coming when He will reap the fruit of righteousness from the people of Israel. While their current spiritual condition was more like an unfruitful field full of weeds and incapable of producing any kind of harvest, God was not done with them. In fact, He was going to have to prune and cultivate them in order that, one day, they might yield the fruit for which they were made: The fruit of righteousness. God is always about the outcome. He focuses on the long-term and, because He is all-knowing, He has an unobstructed view of how things are going to turn out. And while He was forced to thresh His disobedient children to prepare them for future fruitfulness, He did so with the harvest in mind.