Under His Vine and Under His Fig Tree

hammondovi/iStockphoto

Under His Vine and Under His Fig Tree

Few comprehend the vast changes that society and the environment will shortly undergo to permit every man to sit under his own vine and fig tree.

There’s a deeply thought-provoking prophecy in your Bible that foreshadows a time of great social and environmental revolution.

It speaks of a complete transition from our bloated city-centered society—driven by its excesses of urban development which have created a hugely imbalanced physical environment and a rat-race social mentality—to a calm, peaceful, largely rural habitat given to man’s concentration on creation and Creator.

We read of the global outcome of this coming revolutionary change in the prophecy of Micah: “But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid: for the mouth of the Lord of hosts hath spoken it” (Micah 4:4).

Perhaps the closest we have ever come to this is the society based on old rural England.

In their enlightening book Rural England—Our Countryside at the Crossroads, Derrik Mercer and David Putnam paint a picture of Southeast England which is sadly fast diminishing in scope as each decade goes by: “It is a cosy countryside where village greens echo each summer to the sound of cricket and polite applause. Overlooking the green will usually be the village church, still a place of architectural and spiritual homage in this more secular age. Church and inn, manor house and cottages, together they reflect a story of man’s impact on the land which frequently goes back a thousand years or more.”

Occasionally, during our five-year period of residence in Britain back in the 1990s, my wife and I would stay at an inn set in just such an idyllic, traditional English village. It made for interesting reflection on a way of life in the old country that, as the above-mentioned authors stated, “goes back a thousand years or more.”

The Industrial Revolution commenced a change to that millennia-old way of life, a change that was to bring massive progress in man’s technical capacities but begin to denigrate his long-held comfortable attachment to the land and its seasonal rhythms.

Some sad results of that disruption to society have been the dramatic escalation in stress-related diseases, the rapid spread of mental illness and the concomitant evolution of a rampant drug culture. These are all signs of a distressed society in the throes of a self-inflicted demise. Ample evidence exists through many a worthy study to prove this point.

Jesus Christ, the greatest prophet of all, forecast that the way of man would bring humankind to the brink of extinction (Matthew 24).

America is just about due to fall off the fiscal cliff. The plain fact is that the U.S. administration has run out of ideas and viable options to save the national economy from the train wreck toward which it is hurtling.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg concerning the fall of Anglo-Saxon society at large. Wherever legislators turn, they are today faced with a basket of unfixable economic and social woes within the English-speaking nations.

What the Industrial Revolution started back in the early 19th century has now run full course. Years ago, greed priced our labor out of the market resulting in our industrial capacity being shipped overseas to even former enemy nations. This does not bode well for our future.

Already certain key components of our military machine—the sole means of our defensive security—are being manufactured by former and potential enemy nations, a position that the U.S. vowed would never occur again after its armaments supplies were put at risk during the Revolutionary War due to reliance on foreign production.

Added to these woes is the fact that the United States became a net importer of food last decade. Reliance on foreign supply of staples removes another traditional leg from the once strongly independent platform on which the U.S. economy thrived to the end of the 20th century.

America is increasingly dependent on the largesse of foreign nations for its daily existence. This is the road to the decline and fall of American society, the once famous American way of life after which the whole world once seemed to lust.

In the process of all this emerging chaos, America is fast losing its peace of mind. More Americans daily are subjected to the phenomenon of personal terror. Not just the prospect of another attack by Islamist extremists, but the rising terror that one feels when the next morning brings with it no job or income prospects, the potential loss of home, the prospect of family break up. All this was prophesied to befall the American people and their English-speaking fellows thousands of years ago by the God who predicted the results of their rebellion against Him and His laws (Leviticus 26:16).

The American way of life is barely two centuries old and already it is rapidly falling into decay.

Yet for over a thousand years, a traditional way of life existed in rural England, the last vestiges of which can be still experienced today.

What’s the explanation of the two phenomena?

To a major extent it is bound up in that prophecy of Micah, which speaks of a planetary future where “they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid: for the mouth of the Lord of hosts hath spoken it.”

Note that there are two elements to this vision of the future—a rural-based economy promoting the economic independence of man, and its conformity with the will of God!

The English discovered the value of the organized rural economy and built a society around it during the first millennia a.d. To a certain extent, history demonstrates that the seasonal rural principles they followed conformed by and large to biblical tenets, till broken at the Industrial Revolution by chemical farming methods, with the inevitable destructive result.

Developing much later on the scene—post-Industrial Revolution—the U.S. has broken both these key elements to a stable society, which guarantee an equitable distribution of national wealth to all, from almost its beginning as a nation. The other Anglo-Saxon nations are hell-bent on the same course and in time will reap the same outcome.

So just how are the Anglo-Saxons—and ultimately all nations, for that matter—going to extricate themselves from their present catastrophic fall to enjoy the prophesied future forecast in Micah 4:4?

They won’t.

They can’t.

The task is simply beyond them. It is going to take the mighty hand of God to intervene and seize control of the society of humankind to effect such a powerful change. A change from today’s state of global confusion—with too much wealth concentrated in too few hands profiting from systems of mass production—to the simplicity in Christ that is bound up in the prophecy of Micah 4:4 with every man having the potential to capitalize and maintain his own independent farmlet.

Believe it or not, the education toward implementation of that process is happening right now!

Read and prayerfully study our booklet Micah—God’s People Rise Up as His Enemy to find out how. That booklet will also help you understand just how you personally can have a vital part in this coming great solution to mankind’s present ills.