Please turn with me to Jeremiah 5. Jeremiah 5 is a long discourse on Judah’s rebellion. We won’t go through all of it, but verse 24 contains something that relates:
It is the phrase, “the appointed weeks of the harvest,” that caught my attention. It does not say it directly, but the wording relates to the Feast of Harvest, the Feast of Weeks. The Hebrew word translated “appointed” here is typically translated as “statute” or “ordinance.” In other words, God is saying that the time of the harvest, meaning the number of weeks, is ordained by Him, appointed by Him, or by His decree.
We understand this on a physical level, especially if we have ever grown something. There are consistent spans of time between when something is planted and when it will be ready to be picked. If you plant barley in the late fall, as the Israelites did, it is always going to be harvested in the spring—not in the middle of winter or in the summer. There may be some variation, depending on local conditions, but the spans of time are well-known and dependable. Those weeks are by divine appointment.
But we need to think of this in terms of our own lives—not just in terms of the length of our lives, but also in terms of the weeks as a type of the time God allots for evaluation to see what we will do in a given circumstance. In this metaphor, when the appointed weeks are complete, God evaluates what has been produced. With agriculture, the weeks are known. But in our lives, only God knows how long the appointed weeks will last. We don’t know how long we will be in a circumstance before God fulfills His purpose for the situation.
