Lifting the Curse

“The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose” (Isaiah 35:1). “For six thousand years the earth has been under the original curse. The earth is a deep and fruitful matrix. It is filled with seed. It is ever in travail, ever it seeks to bring to the birth. Were it not restrained and hindered and held in check it would bring forth in such abundance that neither ache of back nor sweat of brow would be required to reap and eat and drink of all the wealth of bounty it could bestow. But God ordained its fruitfulness should be limited. The sin of man brought the seed of woe and filled earth’s flanks with evil and with poisonous things. Henceforth there should be weeds and briars and thorns and trailing vines to strangle and choke the good seed, to dwarf and kill the fruit. No care is needed for these hindering things. Weeds and thorns and poisonous vines will come up in the night. They will grow in the desert and flourish in the flinty rock; but if you would have the good seed grow, you must toil and labor and water it with your sweat and encourage its tardy growth with your painful care. Rain or drought, chill winds and frost will little hinder the worthless thorns and weeds; but the good seed must be shielded from burning sun, from torrential rain, from mildew, from blast, from east winds that blow unwelcome storms and from insects which like heartless marauders, like the enemy in the dark, go forth to spoil with bite and sting the hoped-for, toiled-for yield. But in the new day when Christ comes the ban will, indeed, be lifted, and then will the desert blossom as the rose, the orchards will bend low with freighted fruit, the vines will hang their purple clusters in the sun, the earth shall be as the Paradise of God, and man its happy keeper.”

(I.M. Haldeman, Ten Sermons on the Second Coming, 1916, p. 191)

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