Rain in Due Season

What would it do to you to live somewhere you could not water your own fields?

Deuteronomy asks that seriously. Four verses earlier, Moses draws the contrast on purpose. First there is Egypt, "where thou sowedst thy seed, and wateredst it with thy foot, as a garden of herbs." In Egypt the farmer watered his fields from the Nile through channels and gates, by his own work, even with his feet. He opened a gate, and the river went where he told it. Then there is the land they are walking into: "a land of hills and valleys, and drinketh water of the rain of heaven." There is no river to turn aside and no gate to open. The water comes from above, or it does not come at all.

Everything in the promise sits inside that picture: "the rain of your land in his due season, the first rain and the latter rain." The first rain softens the ground so that a plough can go in at all. The latter rain comes late and fills out the grain that is already standing. If either one is missed, the year is lost, and neither one keeps a calendar a farmer controls. So God is promising timing, kept in His own hand, more than plenty whenever you want it. And He gives it in a country He chose on purpose, so that His people would have to look up.

They had been slaves in the land where you could control the water. Freedom, it turns out, meant moving somewhere you could not.

So the promise is that the two rains will come in their order, and that order is kept by Someone who does not take instructions about it. Egypt is behind them now, and there is no gate left to open. Yet Moses says this is "A land which the LORD thy God careth for: the eyes of the LORD thy God are always upon it, from the beginning of the year even unto the end of the year." Whatever you cannot control this year, His eyes are on it from the first day to the last.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 325 is The Fiftieth Year (Leviticus 25:10).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna