“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.” (Matthew 5:7, ESV)
There is a law in nature—in God’s cosmos—that says you reap what you sow.
Paul reminded the Galatians of this law when he told them: “Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap.”
Reaping what you sow may be a good thing or it could be a bad thing, depending on what a person has sown, obviously.
Yet, this is only part of the law. The law also teaches us that we reap after we sow; we reap more than we sow; and, we reap in proportion to how much we’ve sown.
Here’s what that would look like for a corn farmer.
The farmer first plants the corn, and later he reaps it. It doesn’t happen the other way around.
If he plants corn, he’s never concerned that he’ll get lentils; he knows it will be corn because that’s what he planted.
For every seed of corn that’s planted, the return is exponential: one seed yields one stock with one or two ears, but each ear yields around 700 kernels.
Think of that: a seven-hundred-fold return on his sowing. That’s a lot by anyone’s standards.
And depending on how many acres of corn the farmer plants, he’ll reap proportionately (i.e., one acre sowed yields one acre to reap, two acres yields two, and so on and so forth).
In light of the Law of the Harvest, suppose we consider the words of Jesus in his famous Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.”
Can you expect a bumper crop?