Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 284 · October 11
Seedtime and Harvest
“While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.”
"While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease." This promise comes beside Noah's altar, with the floodwater barely gone from the ground, after his family has watched the world drown.
The reason God gives is the most surprising sentence in the chapter, and He says it in His own heart: "I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake; for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth."
Go back two chapters to see why the flood came: "And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually." It is the same fact in nearly the same words, and now it does the opposite work. Before the flood, the evil in the human heart was the reason for judgment. After it, the same evil becomes the reason for patience. Noah's family stepped off the ark with the same hearts they had carried onto it. What changed was what God decided to do about them, and He tied His promise to the one thing a flood had not fixed.
So this is a promise about things staying regular. It has four pairs, and together they are the plainest description of an ordinary year. Later, through Jeremiah, God calls it "my covenant of the day, and my covenant of the night," and He stakes His promise to David's throne on it never being broken. Jesus points to the same steady order and names who keeps it running: "he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust."
Nobody thanks anybody for the sun coming up. You have had thousands of mornings, and every one of them was this promise being kept. So here is a plain question: when did you last thank God for a sunrise? Tomorrow's will come because He said it would, and the God who keeps the seasons will keep every other word He has spoken.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 284 is A Pleasant Land (Jeremiah 3:19).