Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 153 · June 2
Fallow Ground
“Sow to yourselves in righteousness, reap in mercy; break up your fallow ground: for it is time to seek the LORD, till he come and rain righteousness upon you.”
Fallow ground has been farmed before. It was worked, then left, and it has set: a crust across the top, roots through the crust, weeds that answered to nobody. Breaking it is the hardest work in the farming year and none of it shows.
Hosea is talking to people who were already farming. Ye have plowed wickedness, ye have reaped iniquity; ye have eaten the fruit of lies. Nobody in that indictment is idle. It is a going concern producing the wrong crop. One verse above, the picture is an animal that likes its job. Ephraim is as an heifer that is taught, and loveth to tread out the corn. That is the pleasant end of the work, walking on the threshing floor and eating as you go. What gets announced next is a yoke and a field.
The instruction divides into what is yours and what never was. Sow to yourselves in righteousness, reap in mercy; break up your fallow ground. Then: for it is time to seek the LORD, till he come and rain righteousness upon you. You break the crust. Nobody schedules rain. A century later Jeremiah says the same sentence to the other kingdom, Break up your fallow ground, and sow not among thorns, which tells you that ground goes hard more than once.
The only timing the verse offers is on your side of it: it is time to seek the LORD. The rain has no date attached and the passage does not invent one. What it says about the crust is that it is yours. It can be broken. Nothing goes into the ground until it is.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 153 is Excellent Lovingkindness (Psalm 36:7).