Scripture Daily

Context No. 389 of 4322 · Isaiah

Context · Reflection

Isaiah 28:23-29: in context

23Give ear, and hear my voice! Listen, and hear my speech! 24Does he who plows to sow plow continually? Does he keep turning the soil and breaking the clods? 25When he has leveled its surface, doesn’t he plant the dill, and scatter the cumin seed, and put in the wheat in rows, the barley in the appointed place, and the spelt in its place? 26For his God instructs him in right judgment and teaches him. 27For the dill isn’t threshed with a sharp instrument, neither is a cart wheel turned over the cumin; but the dill is beaten out with a stick, and the cumin with a rod. 28Bread flour must be ground; so he will not always be threshing it. Although he drives the wheel of his threshing cart over it, his horses don’t grind it. 29This also comes out from the LORD of Armies, who is wonderful in counsel, and excellent in wisdom.

Isaiah turns, unexpectedly, to farming, and tells a little parable about a wise farmer, then says that the farmer's wisdom comes from God. Watch the two things he points out. First, the plowing. Does the farmer plow continually, Isaiah asks, does he keep breaking up the soil forever? Of course not. He plows for a season to prepare the ground, and then he stops plowing and plants, the dill and cumin and wheat and barley each in its proper place. Plowing is not the point; it is the preparation, and it has an end. No farmer tears up his field endlessly.

Second, the threshing, which is how the grain is separated once it has grown. And here the farmer suits the method to the crop. The delicate dill and cumin are not crushed under a heavy sledge or a cart wheel; they are beaten gently with a light stick, because that is all they can take. The tougher grain is threshed harder, but even then he does not grind it to powder or drive the wheel over it forever. Each thing gets exactly the treatment it needs and no more. And Isaiah says this whole calibrated wisdom comes from the LORD, who is wonderful in counsel and excellent in wisdom. In its context, the parable is about how God deals with his people. His plowing, the hard and disruptive seasons that break us up, is not permanent; it is a season aimed at planting. And his threshing is measured, suited to what each of us can bear, never crushing the delicate under the heavy sledge.

That is a picture of God's hard dealings I badly need when I am in one. In a painful, disruptive season I tend to assume the plowing will never stop and that God is being indiscriminately heavy with me. The wise farmer says otherwise. When God is breaking up my ground right now, can I trust that the plowing has a season and an end, that it is preparing me for planting, and that he is measuring the force of it precisely to what I can take?

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