Millpond Musing – What Withers? What Fades?

“The grass withers, the flower fades.” This passage of Scripture is found in Isaiah, Chapter 40, and reiterated in 1 Peter Chapter 1. I’ve long thought that this passage told of the physical death of a man. One day our end would come, and that truth served as warning of a great and awful coming judgment. Of course, true enough, death and judgment will come. We shall die. We shall die and those who die apart from the blood of Christ will surely be judged. Still, that particular application of the verse to man’s death is not how C.H. Spurgeon interpreted and applied the verse in his three discourses: ‘Spring in the Garden,’ ‘Spring Follows Winter,’ and The Grass Withereth, the Flower Fadeth,’ which were published in his book, ‘The Teachings of Nature in the Kingdom of God.’ In those discourses, he suggests that what ‘withers and fades’ is the sinner’s-soon-to-be-saint’s resistance to the workings of the Holy Spirit in revealing our true eternal state. What withers and fades in a sinner’s life is the vitality and life of sin in the sinner. Really? Huh? But what withers and fades comes at winter!

What then is the winter of a man’s soul? It is that time when the sinner learns that the things of earth… his sin… its supposed loveliness and attractiveness to others, must wither and fade… yes, die… before the coming spring. Pastor Spurgeon wrote, “The withering before the sowing was very marvelously fulfilled in the preaching of John the Baptist,” who heralded the coming Messiah. Pastor Spurgeon then said of John, “It was not his work to plant, but to hew down.” Thus, spring followed a short winter in the life of those who heard Jesus’ preaching… when he sowed the seeds of His Father’s garden. That is true today. We too must usher in a short winter, when sinners find their affections of the world withered… faded.  How? By preaching what the sinner does not want to hear… as John the Baptist preached to hew… but also, in the fulness of Christ and His Spirit, to lovingly point out the One, Jesus, whose goodness far exceeds what the world could possibly offer. Indeed, the quickened eyes of men soon see… astonishingly… incredibly… that the flower of one’s own beauty – withered and faded – is seen as it sin truly is: nothing but thorns and nettles.