He That Tilleth His Land Prov 12:11 CLICK TITLE FOR AUDIO

He that tilleth his land shall be satisfied with bread.  This is a proverb that hearkens back to the days when men had a piece of land that they utilized to feed themselves.  For the most part, folks don’t do this anymore.  They work a job and then use the paycheck to buy groceries at the store.  But the proverb can still be applied today.  The proverb distinguishes the hard working man that produces something with his labor from the fellow that makes his money by following vain persons [people having no real substance, value or importance].  Remember the elder son who stayed on the farm to work while the prodigal son followed vain persons to his total waste.

By using the proverb as a basis for evaluating what’s going on in society today, let’s look at how our society has “progressed?”!!

America started out so that a family could be self-sustained on their own piece of land by farming and ranching, hunting and fishing.  They made their own clothes, tanned their own leather, milked their own cows, collected their own eggs, raised their own livestock, and grew their own vegetables and fruits.  They bartered, they made their own soap, washed their clothes by hand, and they did all this without electricity, TV, microwaves, cell phones, fast cars, convenience stores, DVD’s, and computers.  They worked and didn’t mind hard labor.

We spent our childhood summers doing some of this stuff.  Friends of mine put themselves through school and bought their vehicles with hides they got from hunting and trapping.  Did they have an easy time of it?  No, they had to sweat and toil diligently to eek out a living.  But back then they were called the salt of the earth.  They were close to the Lord.  Those who tried to get around the hard work tried to find ways to make a buck off these guys.  They followed the gold rush.  They set up banks [that failed once already].  They insured them [insurance buildings are the biggest buildings in town].  They sold liquor.  They did anything to keep from working on the farm.  They wanted to get off the land and off the horse and off the buggy.  They wanted more money, more quickly and for a while this scheme has worked only because there are more and more people who have wanted to go along with it.  But the scheme has an end.

We’ve moved from the rural to the urban.  Therefore we are dependant upon an urban economy to eat.  You can’t eat dollar bills, gold, or bank accounts [numbers printed by a computer on a piece of paper].  The back yard isn’t big enough for more than a casual garden of a few tomato plants and peppers.  The retirement accounts are in mutual funds and growth portfolios.  While these are good for the people that have benefited so far, they will eventually capitulate to a crash in the market.  Most of the businesses in an urban economy don’t produce or manufacture anything; they simply sell things [furniture, clothes, food, appliances, building materials, supplies, sporting goods, automobiles and so forth].

The urban economy is built on transportation [trucking, rail, air, car – they have to transport the stuff to the store and then you have to drive to the store to buy it – therefore you are absolutely at the mercy of fuel and whatever price they want to charge to sell it to you] and communication [telephone, computer].  To enter the urban economy you have to have an education unless you want to do outdoor manual labor and that education will cost you 4-5 times your starting gross annual salary.  So you have to have a scholarship, go to a cheaper school, have parents or grandparents pay the bill or go so deep into debt that you’ll spend the first 10 years of your work just paying off student loans.  And what have they learned after all of that education?  How to make a living in the urban economy, how to drink, how to smoke, how to use drugs, how to play video games, how to gamble and how to talk with a little bigger vocabulary.  They’ve not learned much of any real value.

Sports and entertainment are some of the highest paying positions in the urban economy and they contribute absolutely nothing of real value to the economy.  They just cause more money to change hands [absolute vanity – Hollywood and professional sports].  In the urban economy, military progress has been made by computers and satellites which will be absolutely worthless after the solar storms of the tribulation and the nuclear bombs in the atmosphere.  Hand to hand combat [swords] and cavalry [horses] will win the war.

The urban economy has created an entire generation of people who are absolutely dependant upon the government for everything they have and eat.  They are absolutely helpless.  The consequences of the urban economy are crime, drugs, teen pregnancy, STD’s, murders, and rampant mental illness.  There are more lost people today as a percentage of the total population than during anytime in the church age.  The churches are in apostasy and they mistake huge pep rallies for spiritual revivals.  Success is measured in dollars and cents.  Growth in assets and dollars in returns measure the quality of management.

Having followed vain persons, we have proven that we are void of understanding.  It is only a matter of time until the reality of this overspent over borrowed economy reveals itself in a devastating crash and then how are the people going to eat?  They will have to follow the vainest person who will have ever lived, the antichrist, whose economy will be based on the mark.

We should have never left the land!!  We should have decided that working the land was the way of life (Gen 3) that we would suffer as a result of the curse and we should have stayed on it.  At least then we had something worth fighting for.  Today who wants to fight to save their apartment complex or their house on which they have borrowed more money than it is really worth?  Not many!  We have followed vain persons to our demise and now, because of the economy, unless you are one of those who struck it rich, you can hardly afford to buy any land that has any value.

I’m surely looking forward to the millennium.  Then they’ll work the land with God’s help.  There will be no bugs, plenty of rain and sunshine and bumper crops!!  Even so come Lord Jesus!