I am certainly not a farmer! (At least, that’s what I thought). I wouldn’t know a cotton picking machine from a plow! I am a big city girl born in Birmingham, Alabama! (The date shall remain a mystery!) But I enjoy gardening around my house and I love our small veggie patch in the back yard where we grow some green beans, a collard or two, tomatoes and peppers. However, farming on a big scale… no way!
But God…!!! I love that phrase in scripture, don’t you? It always points to what He has done or is about to do for us, in spite of us. Hang on, we are off and running on another ferret adventure!
My husband and I have been so blessed to be involved with Teen Challenge Prison Ministry Team for many years now and we have hosted wonderful men who have been delivered from indescribable darkness and transformed by the Holy Spirit. Each man is a walking miracle! Their testimonies are awe inspiring! One of those young men who stayed with us on numerous occasions was from the mid-west where he had grown up on a huge farm. He had such promise in his life but he lost his dad to cancer when he was in high school, then he lost a younger brother and the drugs took everything else away. When he gave his life to Jesus, the restoration began. God restored his relationship with his mother and gave him a future in ministry to others. Things were looking up!
Early one morning, Josh and I were talking before breakfast and he opened the door to our deck. I almost gagged and went to my knees but Josh breathed in deeply. The farmer at the end of our street had just fertilized his corn field with manure! (One man’s stink is another man’s perfume! LOL ) I asked him if he missed farming. He gave it serious thought before answering and then he simply said yes. There was no further conversation, it was as if that part of his life was over and I felt like he was mourning the loss of it. Being the perpetual “fixer” that I am, I wanted to give him a good answer to encourage him, but my mind went blank and I knew God had just shut my mouth! We just let it drop. In the next week, I found myself praying for Josh, wanting God to fill that void in his life and make it ok again. Little did I know that He had already done it!
I was reading in Matthew one morning and I came to Matt.9:37 …”the harvest is indeed plentiful, but the laborers are few.” Of course, a little farming! Jesus was speaking figuratively about the harvest, referring to the people who needed to be gathered into the Kingdom of God! Alright! I thought I’d e-mail Josh that little scripture to make him smile. Thank goodness I didn’t, because, looking back, it was sort of like putting a little band aid on a big boo-boo! Josh needed so much more and I had no more to give. But God…there it is again! He had so much more for both of us!
Before I knew it, the Holy Spirit led me into a new ferret tunnel and I found myself back on page 1 of my Bible…”In the beginning God created…“. By verse 11, God was preparing the earth for habitation by separating it from the water. Then he put in His irrigation system! What? God put in an irrigation system? Flash forward to Chapter 2: 4-6. This is a retelling of the creation story, filling in the gaps with more detail. In these verses, it describes the time between the division of water and land and the planting of the first vegetation, “…when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the earth and there was no man to till the ground. But there went up a mist from the land and watered the whole surface of the ground.” There it was, His irrigation system was an evaporation and condensation cycle, it was a beautiful biosphere! It dawned on me that God, not man, was the first farmer! He was preparing the land for feed crops! How cool is that? And not only that, but God was planning to create His man to help on the farm! OMG! We are all destined to be farmers! Who knew? Woop,woop! Ferret dance!!!
Then he planted His crops by speaking them into existence, His word was seed. (Don’t forget that!) He spoke to the earth and the earth responded. Gen. 1:11-12 “And God said, Let the earth bring forth vegetation; plants yielding seed and fruit trees yielding fruit whose seed is in itself….The earth brought forth vegetation…”. He harnessed light and created the sun to reflect the right amount of God’s glory to facilitate the healthy growth of His flora and fauna. When the food crops were in place, He populated the earth with beneficial animals, he stocked the waters with fish and the air with fowl. God had planted his crops, built his animal population and he named His farm Eden, which means perfection!
I was ready to get going with the creation of His man, but there was a nagging question in my “IMAGE-ination”. What does it mean for the earth to “spring or bring forth”? Hum! I assumed it meant that plants would pop up out of the soil, it sounded right to me. But I was wrong!!! AGAIN!!! In the Genesis 1 account of creation the words “spring forth” or “bring forth” are repeated over the land, water and air. However, they are different words! When God spoke to the earth (the ground) the words “bring forth”, daw shaw’ in the Hebrew, He meant that life would come out from the earth as a part of it. If you think about that, it makes sense because every living thing is made of dirt! When it dies it returns to the dirt. Right??? (Science confirms that the chemical composition of living things and dirt is the same!) It totally gives new meaning to the phrase “you are what you eat”. LOL! The other references to “bringing forth” are the Hebrew word shaw rats’ which means to team or wriggle with life. So, from the earth would spring forth the life in animal forms and the waters and air would team or wriggle with the abundance of their presence. In the Targum the writers describe this so beautifully, they say that the Holy Spirit hovered over the elements of creation, impregnating the earth with a life force from which all other life would spring. Isn’t that amazing? Some of these writers were recording their revelations more than a thousand years ago but they had such powerful understanding! Little chair dance here! Woohoo!!!
Oh my! Back to the adventure… The only thing God had left to do was to create His man to till the ground, to guard and keep the garden, to propagate it and to take dominion over it (we all know how that turned out! ). So God stooped to the earth and from the life-infilled ground, he scooped up the wet ruddy clay and formed His man. At this point mankind, Adam, was alive with a soul (NePhesh’- biological life) that sprang from the earth. But when He breathed into his nostrils, man was filled with the divine essence of God (NeShamah’). To quote a Targum writer, Rabbi Onkelos, “And the Lord God created Adam from the dust of the ground and breathed upon his face the breath of lives, and it became in Adam a discoursing spirit”. Man, like no other living thing, was able to think, reason, create and most importantly, speak (remember that)! He was equipped to farm God’s way.
Wow! Do you see it? God created and designed mankind to be farmers! It has always been the call on our lives. We are all farmers in God’s Kingdom! Now, to connect some dots… Hint…. We are more than farmers.
Look at Genesis 2:7 “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life…”, man is made of dirt! Yup! We are made of the very ground that God impregnated with a life force and from which all living things spring. Think about it! We are certainly farmers but we are also earthen fields ready to receive seed. Can you picture all of humanity as fields that need to be farmed? Whoa!
On to the New Testament, to Luke 8:5-18… Jesus’ parable is the key to understanding all other parables and it is certainly the key to understanding how the Kingdom of God operates. A sower went out to plant his field and as he scattered the seed some fell in places that were not ready for the seed but the soil that was prepared and ready received the seed and produced a large crop. When asked about the meaning of the parable Jesus said…”The seed is the Word of God” and the ground was the heart (imaginagion) of mankind with ears to hear. So, the sower, who was obviously sowing the Word of God was a human being, speaking the Word to someone who was listening. A “speaking spirit” was planting the Word in the ground of mankind. (Now you see why I wanted you to remember that mankind speaks! )
I finally saw it! Josh is still a farmer! The fields belong to the Father and He provides the Good Seed in His Word. We plow up the ground of men’s hearts by touching them with the goodness of God which leads to repentance. We plant the seeds into the plowed ground, we hoe up the weeds of misunderstanding and the words that the world planted in the same soil, and we feed the seedlings by discipling and God gives the harvest. ICor. 3:6 Paul explained…”I planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the harvest.” And Jesus, looking into the future saw the farm “…Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white to harvest. And he that reaps receives wages and gathers fruit unto life eternal: that both he that sows and he that reaps may rejoice together. ” (John 4:35-38) Bottom line… we are all farmers who farm in humanity.
That revelation took my breath away! I had to move off of my old paradigm and see the family business with new eyes. When it all sunk in, I didn’t just send Josh an e-mail, I wrote him a letter sharing what God had shown me! “Josh!… you are still farming! God has put you in charge of the fields around you. Your work, on His farm, is much more glorious than you can imagine with eternal crops to be gathered. Keep going, do not grow weary in well doing because you will reap if you faint not!”
Woop! Woop! Ferret Dance!!!!
Ferret of Faith 