Luke 8:11 Now the parable is this: The seed is the word of God. Just so is it with all truth, and superlatively so is it with the Truth. How often does the discoverer reap his first harvest in derision and loss! How often does the pioneer of some beneficent enterprise lay its foundation in his own wealth, health, and peace I How often does the patriot pay the penalty of living a purer and nobler life than his self-seeking contemporaries! Above all, what a countless army of men, "valiant for the faith and truth upon the earth," have had to water the seed of Christ's gospel by their blood and tears! How often in this and that land, and in none more than in our own, have those gospel institutions, which are God's Tree of Life for the world, had to grow up like a weeping willow and suck their first nutriment from the graves of their martyr-slain! The blood of Scotland's proto-martyr, the noble Patrick Hamilton, and the memory of his dying prayer, "How long, O Lord, shall darkness cover this realm?" fomented the young Reformation life over a comparatively silent germinating period of more than twenty years. Knox, and with him Scotland, kindled at the pile of George Wishart. Andrew Melville caught the falling mantle of Knox. And as with the martyrs under Popery in that century, so with those under the "black prelacy" of the next. When Richard Cameron fell on Aird's Moss — as if in answer to his own prayer as the action began, "Lord, spare the green and take the ripe!" — all the more strenuously strove Cargill, till he, too, in the year following, sealed the truth with his blood. And more followed, and yet more, through that last and worst decade of the pitiless storm known, as by emphasis, "the killing time." Through those terrible years Peden dragged out a living death, and, as he thought of Cameron now at rest, often exclaimed, "O to be with Richie!" Young Renwick, too, caught up the torn flag, nobly saying, "They are but standard-bearers that have fallen; the Master lives." Thus one after another, on blood-drenched scaffold or on blood-soaked field, fell the precious seed-grain to rise in harvests manifold, till just at the darkest hour before the dawn, Renwick's martyrdom closed the red roll in 1688, the very year of the Revolution, and the seed so long "sown in tears" was" "reaped in joy." Marvel not at this. He who is at once the sower and the seed had Himself to die that we might live. (T. Guthrie, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: Now the parable is this: The seed is the word of God. |
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