No Good Is Done Without God’s Help

This very example you bring forward lets us prove still more clearly that the worker’s exertions can do nothing without God’s help. For not even the farmer, when he has spent the utmost pains working his land, can straightaway credit the yield of the crops and the rich harvest to his own exertions. He finds that these are often in vain unless timely rains and a quiet, calm winter help them. We have often seen fruit already ripe, set and fully matured snatched, as it were, out of the hands of those who were grasping it. The workers’ continual and earnest efforts did them no good, because they were not guided by the Lord’s help. [a]

Just as God’s goodness does not grant these rich crops to idle farmers who do not work their fields with frequent plowing, so too toiling all night long does the workers no good unless the Lord’s mercy prospers it.

But in this, human pride should never try to put itself on a level with the grace of God or mix itself in with it, so as to imagine that its own efforts were the cause of God’s generosity, or to boast that a very plentiful crop was the answer to the merits of its own exertions. For a man should consider, and weigh with the most careful scrutiny, that he could not by his own strength have put in those very efforts he earnestly made in his desire for wealth, unless the Lord’s protection and pity had given him strength for all the labors of farming. His own will and strength would have been powerless unless God’s compassion had supplied the means of completing them, since they sometimes come to nothing from too much rain or too little.

For even when the Lord has granted vigor to the oxen, and bodily health and the power to do all the work, and success in what he undertakes, a man must still pray that there may not come on him, as Scripture says, “a sky of bronze and an earth of iron,” and that “the grasshopper may not eat what the locust has left, and the caterpillar eat what the grasshopper has left, and the mildew destroy what the caterpillar has left.”

Nor is it only in this that the farmer’s efforts in his work need God’s help. They need it also to turn aside unexpected accidents, by which, even when the field is rich with the fruitful crops he expected, a man is not only robbed of what he hoped and looked for in vain, but actually loses the abundant harvest he has already gathered and stored on the threshing floor or in the barn.

From this we clearly infer that the beginning not only of our actions but also of good thoughts comes from God. He inspires us with a good will to begin with, and supplies us with the opportunity of carrying out what we rightly desire. For “every good gift and every perfect gift comes down from above, from the Father of lights.” He begins what is good, and continues it, and completes it in us, as the apostle says: “But he who gives seed to the sower will both provide bread to eat and will multiply your seed and make the fruits of your righteousness increase.”

But it is for us humbly to follow, day by day, the grace of God that is drawing us. Otherwise, if we resist with “a stiff neck” and, to use the words of Scripture, “uncircumcised ears,” we will deserve to hear the words of Jeremiah: “Shall he who falls not rise again? And he who has turned away, shall he not turn back? Why then has this people in Jerusalem turned away in stubborn rebellion? They have stiffened their necks and refused to return.”