Keep the feast of weeks.
The Feast of Pentecost
(a Harvest Thanksgiving sermon):--
I. The sacred character of the harvest. Indicated by time appointed for it--fiftieth day after Passover. As God hallowed the seventh day, so He hallowed the harvest fields of the world.
II. The great trouble God took to impress His people with the significance and meaning of common things. We walk along streets of gold, set with jewels, as though they were granite cubes. In the hand of Him who saw the kingdom of God everywhere and in everything, a grain of corn contained in its suggestiveness the deepest mysteries of the kingdom.
III. This feast was a providential mirror in which to see again all the way in which the Lord their God had led them. Happy, thrice happy, is the man who, in the land of plenty, has a wilderness history on which to look back. There is nothing more sublime to the mariner in the haven of rest than the conflicts with the tempests in mid-ocean through which he passed.
IV. This feast was a new bond of brotherhood forged in the fires of the ever-new and never-ceasing love of God. They were to call the Levite, the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow. Plenty in some natures petrifies, but this is not its legitimate effect. It should enlarge the heart, and broaden and deepen the sympathies of a man.
V. This feast was to be a time of great moral and spiritual rectification on the part of the people. Repentance. Thanksgiving. (H. Simon, Ph. D.)
Harvest home a national festival
Harvest to the Jews was an event of great and general interest. It was the occasion of one of their grand national festivals. This feast was called by different names--the Feast of Weeks, the Feast of Harvest, and the Feast of First-fruits. From commencement to close, their harvest festivities included seven weeks.
I. The harvest home was a season for national gratitude. What they offered conferred no favour on God, it was His own; but it expressed the sense of their obligation and the depth of their gratitude. Three things are necessary to the very existence of gratitude towards the giver.
1. That the gift should be felt to be valuable.
2. A belief that the favour is benevolently bestowed.
3. A consciousness that the favour is undeserved.
II. The harvest home is a season for national rejoicing. Where there is gratitude, there is joy, will be joy; gratitude is praise, and praise is heaven. The revelation of the Creator in the harvest field may well make human hearts exult. The God of the harvest there appears, mercifully considerate of the wants of His creatures; as a loving Father, with a bountiful hand, furnishing the table with abundant supplies for His children. There He appears punctual to the fulfilment of His promise. There He appears rewarding human labour.
III. The harvest home is a season for national philanthropy (see Deuteronomy 24:19-21).
1. Where God gives liberally, He demands liberality.
2. The liberality demanded is to be shown to the poor. God has planted the poor amongst all peoples, in order that the benevolence of the rich may have scope for development. (Homilist.)
Rejoice before the Lord thy God.
Thanksgiving Day
I. We may be thankful for this day of thanksgiving, on account of its happy religious influence. It is a day which, in all its appropriate exercises and enjoyments, presents to us our life as a blessing, and our God as a Benefactor; the seasons as a circle of elemental adaptations to our comfort, and the Regulator of the seasons as the Almighty Being who takes care for our varied good; the course of our rolling days, as a series of lessons and opportunities, and the Everlasting and Uncreated One as the Friend who crowns our days with His loving kindness. Thus a great deal is done every year, by a common and hearty expression of thankfulness, to break up, or at least to modify the alliance brought about by several causes in many minds, between religion and great strictness and gloominess. We find that “it is a good thing to give thanks unto the Lord; yea, a joyful and a pleasant thing it is to be thankful”; for when we dwell on the causes of thankfulness, our gratitude must needs flow naturally and spontaneously out of our bosoms, and go to swell the general stream of praise and gladness which spreads over the land. And we find that it is not at all inconsistent with thankfulness to God for the bounties of His providence, that we should enjoy those bounties freely and honestly and smilingly.
II. We have reason to rejoice in our feast, on account of its happy domestic influence. The day is peculiarly a domestic day; a day for the reunion of families. The houses of the land are glad on this day.
III. Our festival is to be honoured, on account of its happy political influence. If it exerts a happy influence on our religions sentiments and on our domestic relations, it cannot but act with a benign power on those relations which hold us all together in one community. A genial nationality is fostered by that mingling together of prayers, and common interests, and pleasant hospitalities, which occurs on this day. And so far as our nationality is brought about in this manner, there is nothing repulsive or exclusive in it. (F. W. P. Greenwood, D. D.)