God’s providential care

Exodus 23:16 “Celebrate the Festival of Harvest with the first fruits of the crops you sow in your field. “Celebrate the Festival of Ingathering at the end of the year, when you gather in your crops from the field.”

Isn’t it interesting that in this reading the celebration of harvest thanksgiving is about the first fruits and not what we have left over. But have you thought, that in speaking of the first fruits, it implies that there is more to follow.

C.S. Lewis says, "When first things are put first, second things begin to increase". What does it mean to be first? First is preceding all others in time in order of importance. If you go out and run a race by yourself, you come in first, because there was nobody else running against you. So if you really are number one, there has to be a sequence of somebody behind you before you can make that declaration. First does not mean number one. It does not mean the only one. Nothing can be first unless there's something else to be first of.”

First fruits in the context of our verse is the offering of the first grain harvested in Israel. If you did not bring your first fruits to the house of the Lord, God instructed Israel that there would be no additional fruit for the harvest: therefore, whenever you as a farmer, in the time of Israel, did not have the blessings of God because you refused to bring the first fruits to the house of God, you were in trouble. 

In other words God is the Lord of all or he's not Lord at all. In a hymn Frank von Christierson (1900-1996), puts it this way

As saints of old their first-fruits brought 

of vine-yard, flock, and field

God, the giver of all good, 

the source of bounteous yield;

So we to - day

our first - fruits bring: 

the wealth of this good land,

of farm and market, 

shop and home, 

of mind and heart and hand.

Prayer

Father, how can we ever understand the miracle of your ways?

We see your creation and we know you are God.

Yet we saw your mighty kingdom formed with the humility of a servant.

Faith and acts of kindness grow into great good.

We will never comprehend how your kingdom comes,

but we recognise its fruit.

We see it in unexpected places: in sickness, in poverty, in conflict.

We see it the places we wouldn’t want to live.

Sometimes we see it in our own lives.

Your kingdom come, Lord – in us and in your world. Amen