All who neglect the godly upbringing of their children "sow the wind." There are well-meaning heads of households who fail to maintain a firm and resolute as well as kindly family government. Or, from profane history, such illustrations as the Stuart kings of England, the Bourbon kings of France, and the fate of the two Napoleons, Some tyrants have foreseen the harvest before it began to be gathered in like Louis XV., when he said to his courtiers, "After me, the deluge." g., from sacred history such cases as Pharaoh, Ahab and Jezebel, Sennacherib, Haman, Herod. Universal history teems with illustrations of the fact that those kings and grandees of the earth who will not give God the glory are doomed to reap a harvest of whirlwind. The tyrant makes an idol of his own evil will, and "sows the wind" of ambition, and pride, and vain-glory, and disregard of the rights of others. All heathendom, moreover, "reaps the whirlwind' still as the fruit of its idolatries - a harvest (as Paul tells us in Romans 1:18-32) of moral corruption and vileness, overhung by the storm-cloud of the Divine wrath. And ever since that time the idolatries of Israel had been a standing grief to Jehovah their Redeemer ( Psalm 81:8-16) until at length there was nothing for it but the two hurricanes of captivity, which respectively swept the ten tribes into Assyria, and the remaining two into Babylon. ![]() "There fell of the people that day about three thousand men" ( Exodus 32:28). The generation that came out of Egypt seven centuries before had reaped a sad harvest from the calf-worship at Horeb. The people of the ten tribes were "sowing the wind" when they prayed to the golden calves for abundant harvests and they would presently "reap the whirlwind" in the three years' siege of Samaria by Shalmaneser, in the successive deportations into exile, and in the final ruin of the nationality of Ephraim. It is of such that the prophet is more immediately speaking. The whirlwind of the desert tears along with a roar like a cataract, and carries in its wings violent and sweeping destruction it is, therefore, a fit metaphor for the issue of a career of sin Let us inquire who are some of those that thus reap. ![]() It suggests the folly and unprofitableness of a life of sin those who live such a life "sow the wind." And it emphasizes the fact that while the harvest must be the same in kind as the seed sown, the increase will be tremendous, both in strength and volume. ![]() Jerdan The figure here is extremely striking it is one of the most forcible and vivid of Hosea's images.
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