Daily Manna · Day 325 · November 21
Rain in Due Season
“That I will give you the rain of your land in his due season, the first rain and the latter rain, that thou mayest gather in thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil.”
What would it do to you to live somewhere you could not water?
That is not a rhetorical question in Deuteronomy. Four verses earlier Moses draws the contrast on purpose. Egypt, where thou sowedst thy seed, and wateredst it with thy foot, as a garden of herbs: a land of channels and sluices and foot-pumps, where a man opened a gate and the Nile did what he told it. Then the land they are walking into, a land of hills and valleys, and drinketh water of the rain of heaven. No river to divert. No gate to open. The water comes from above or it does not come.
That is the whole picture, and everything in the promise sits inside it. The rain of your land in his due season. The first rain, which softens the ground so a plough can go in at all. The latter rain, which comes late and fills out the grain that is already standing. Miss either one and the year is gone, and neither is on a calendar a farmer controls. What God pledges here is not abundance on demand. It is timing, kept in his own hand, in a country deliberately chosen so that they 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 what is pledged is not a fuller barn. It is that the two rains come in their order, and that the order is kept by somebody who does not take instruction on it. Egypt is behind them now. There is no gate left to open, and there was never going to be one again.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 325 is The Fiftieth Year (Leviticus 25:10).