Farmer Mort Gives the Talk: “The Earth Remains Forever”—as Only a Farmer Could

[TrueTomHarley]

We had Farmer Mort over to the house following his public talk. Before eating, we made him take the City Slicker’s Quiz:

If you want to eat, identify all eight items:

1. Credit card

2. Necktie

3. Shoe polish

4. Pictures of Wegmans (where food comes from)
5. Roll of toilet paper (replaces Sears catalog)
6. Kitchen faucet (where water comes from)
7. Refrigerator (where cold comes from)
8. Stove (where fire comes from)

We did this as payback because Farmer Mort had made everyone take the Farmer’s Quiz at that Grad Party on the Farm. “Identify all 5 items before eating,” it said, and nobody was able to do it—Come on! he had bags of individual seeds in there—soybean, corn, wheat—how’s anybody going to know that? In the end, he relaxed the requirement so that guests would not starve to death.

Farmer Mort has farming on the brain. He has been known to give people stalks of wheat, bagged and tied up with a bow, labeled “pre-donuts.” He puts it all to good use when his turn rolls around for public speaking—the title of his talk was: “The Earth Remains Forever.”

He pulled a plastic bag of seeds from the paper bag he had brought up front with him. It contained wheat seeds. If you drop one on the ground in late summer or autumn, chances are pretty good that you will get a wheat stalk next year that includes 125 of such seeds. “That’s not a bad deal,” he pointed out—125 for 1—and man has not been able to ruin that—yet—but if for some reason that deal is not good enough for you and you want a better one.... He pulled out a bag of soybeans, for which the ratio is 210 to 1. If even that deal is not good enough for you....he pulled out a bag of corn seeds—500-700 to one, he pointed out, once again with the reminder that man has not been able to ruin that....yet.

Then he branched off into how there is the UCS today, the Union of Concerned Scientists, raising the alarm of environmental abuses worldwide. And yet—if you just leave the earth alone, it is pretty good at healing itself. Pour oil on man-made concrete and it is there for a long while. Pour it on grass—(“Don’t do this!” he forbade everyone) and in short order the grass is lush and green again. Visit that abandoned factory after a few decades and you will say: “THAT was the parking lot?” Earth has reclaimed it. The earth has enormous powers of recovery, Farmer Mort pointed out, pretty much like we do—cut your finger and there is very little that you must do to it—it heals itself.

Then he turned his attention to wrappers that clog the landfills. “I sort of like the wrappers Jehovah made,” he said, as he pulled out a banana from his shopping bag. This wrapper—he pulled out one from a candy bar—takes 50 years to decompose, but that of the banana? Forget and leave a banana on the dashboard of your car—it goes black in a few days—toss it and, as to the contents within—you plow it back into banana bread. He likes other wrappers as well—wrappers Jehovah made—in each case superior to those of man—the husks of corn, the shell of nuts, the skin of fruits—that wrapper you can even eat. 

There is a spiritual crisis today, he observed as his talk unfolded, manifested in the shameful manner that humans treat the earth. He quoted Deuteronomy 32:5, about a “crooked generation” that is “not his children”—the “defect is their own” as they “act corruptly.” It will not always be. Farmer Mort read Psalm 37:29: “The righteous themselves will possess the earth, and they will reside forever upon it.”

(Incredibly, Russian authorities have declared this specific verse extremist—because it furthers the “propaganda of inferiority based on religious identity”—do they really wish to stick up for the “unrighteous” over there?)

What about when you take your family for an outing at the park? Farmer Mort presented the picture for us, and you see the sign of all the things you can’t do: no driving on the grass, no animals, no alcohol, no loud music, and so forth. “Well....I guess,” you say and as you enjoy that grass so lush that you don’t need shoes or socks, and—what is that delicious smell wafting in the air—honeysuckle? clover fields, linden trees?—and then it is all spoiled by the thunderous sound of choppers that spin out on the grass. Kegs are pulled out of the pickup truck. Raucous music blares from the speakers and...was that a shotgun blast? “Come on, kids. Time to go. It’s not safe.”

Rebels have destroyed the beautiful park—they always do—rebels who cannot obey the rules—but God will get rid on the rebels. Revisiting the promise expressed at Psalm 37:29 that everyone can read except for those in Russia, Farmer Mort read Proverbs 2:21-22: “For the upright are the ones that will reside in the earth, and the blameless are the ones that will be left over in it. As regards the wicked, they will be cut off from the very earth; and as for the treacherous, they will be torn away from it.” Farmer Mort loves the earth and he looks forward to that time.

Furthermore, “you will see it” when it happens. “Hope in Jehovah and keep his way,” says Psalm 37:24, “and he will exalt you to take possession of the earth. When the wicked ones are cut off, you will see it” Humans cleanse things on earth with “Arm and Hammer,” he said (did he pull out a box of that, too?), “but Jehovah has something called “Armageddon” that will get the job done much more thoroughly and, most important of all, lastingly.

What is it with this guy? Why did I enjoy this talk so much? Is it that I could picture Jesus doing it this way—spinning parables all having to do with rural life that his listeners could get their heads (and thereby hearts) around? Was it Farmer Mort’s low-key but indestructible enthusiasm —he retained the excitement he had from Day One upon discovering God’s purpose. 

It had created shock waves in the community when his family embraced Jehovah’s Witnesses. Staunch church members—known and highly regarded by everyone—there is even a street named after Mort’s forefather—they had not been unhappy. His wife in particular had been fully involved in her traditions of the rural community. Only one thing nagged at her—a hunger to understand the Bible—a hunger that she was unable to satisfy anywhere but in just one place—and she resisted that conclusion for the longest time—how could it be Jehovah’s Witnesses, who were so ill-regarded? As for Farmer Mort, he was always busy out hauling the hay—“We used to plow all this land for the Temeris family,” he told me as we drove about in field service. When he saw his wife accept Bible teachings from the Witnesses, he finally took notice, and embraced it in a heartbeat, blanketing his community with such zeal that some thought he had taken leave of his senses. It is a perception that may remain to this day—“a prophet is not unhonored except in his home territory,” Jesus stated at Matthew 13:57—and when Farmer Mort and I worked in service in our territory, he exclaimed: “Wow! People are actually listening to me! I may have to start making sense!” 

The joyful task of those post-Armageddon will be to transform the abused earth into paradise, he continued in his talk. They will have plenty of company, “Even though he dies he will come to life,” Farmer Mort quoted Jesus at John 11:25. He referred to God’s mandate—“being a plowboy, I have to look up words like ‘mandate,’” he said, and enthused over how “God is not a mere man who tells lies”—and how ademic conditions will cover the entire globe. Disobedience may work in the short run, he said, but not in the long run. 

In the resurrection, people will appear who will say: “I was a Danite...I was a Ruebenite...I was a Simeonite.” Farmer Mort suggested what his reply to them might be: “Um...we really didn’t do it that way.” Did he really suggest that he might say: “I was a Trivialite?”

“Oh, and this one is worth getting out your glasses for” (which he did), as he read a quote from a 30-year old Watchtower publication—never repeated that I know of:

“To all eternity our earth will bear a distinction that no other planet throughout endless space will enjoy, though the earth may not be the only planet that will ever be inhabited.[underlining mine] Uniquely it will be where Jehovah has indisputably vindicated his universal sovereignty, establishing an eternal and universal legal precedent. It will be the only planet on which Jehovah of armies will have fought “the war of the great day of God the Almighty.” It will be the only planet to which God sent his dearest Son to become a man and die in order to recover the planet’s inhabitants from sin and death. It will be the only planet from which Jehovah will have taken 144,000 of its inhabitants to be “heirs indeed of God, but joint heirs with Christ.”

He was like a little kid on Christmas morning, Farmer Mort was. Later on he identified almost all of the items on my City Slicker’s Quiz. I was bummed. I had hoped to flummox him like he had flummoxed us with his Farmer’s Quiz. He missed only #6—the kitchen faucet—which he incorrectly identified as a grab bar in the event of an earthquake. I think he was just pulling my leg. I think he really knew what it was. He just saw my spirits sink as he effortlessly ticked off the correct answers and threw me that one as a bone.

[James Thomas Rook Jr.]

I never knew that the paragraph you just quoted was EVER in the Watchtower, but I do know, and entirely from memory, that it came out in the book "Things in Which It Is Impossible For God To Lie", on page 384, paragraph 24.   I used to know entirely from memory when that same paragraph, verbatim, ( slightly different from the one you quoted) was quoted 20 years later in the book "Life Everlasting in the Freedom of the Sons of God", or the book "Worldwide Security Under the Prince of Peace, if I even got that correct, also toward the end of the book, but my memory is not what it used to be.

Spoing!

I just remembered the address of where I lived when I was 9 years old, and ..... page 184, paragraph 10.

The only "Farmer's Experience" I ever heard that I remember was about the old farmer who used a section of garden hose to repair his milking machine, and the connection broke loose and blasted him across the farm yard with a jet of hot milk. 

It might  have killed him, had he been lactose intolerant.

 

 

[TrueTomHarley]

My quote comes from “Worldwide Security.”

[James Thomas Rook Jr.]

Hmmm.... seems a bit off .... did you check it word for word before posting?

I am just guessing, and it has been a half- century or so., starting around 1966.

 

[TrueTomHarley]

14 hours ago, James Thomas Rook Jr. said:

Hmmm.... seems a bit off .... did you check it word for word before posting?

I am just guessing, and it has been a half- century or so., starting around 1966.

 

I did check. It is word-for-word accurate. (surprising even myself)

I did not know that the same passage had appeared elsewhere, give or take. I was very taken with one article long ago (and I wrote a post on it) that ‘we are not so presumptuous so as to think that our personal salvation is the central issue of the universe’—this after pondering the vast outstretches of space. Much of Christendom, especially the evangelical variety, does think this way.

[Patiently waiting for Truth]

I was very taken with one article long ago (and I wrote a post on it) that ‘we are not so presumptuous so as to think that our personal salvation is the central issue of the universe’—this after pondering the vast outstretches of space. Much of Christendom, especially the evangelical variety, does think this way.

But of course your GB /Org do believe that ONLY BAPTISED JWs WILL GAIN SALVATION'. 

 

[TrueTomHarley]

22 minutes ago, 4Jah2me said:

But of course your GB /Org do believe that ONLY BAPTISED JWs WILL GAIN SALVATION'. 

The point is that our personal salvation is not the central issue before all creation. It is a relative detail. God has bigger fish to fry and we do not imagine that it is all a about us. This is not the case with some faiths, at least, judging from the preponderance of their writings.

[James Thomas Rook Jr.]

TTH:

That's the way I look at it ... I am happy to be alive now, in this time... and in this place ... and with my wonderful wife, dogs and chickens, who somehow we all eat regular, and have superb medical care ... and if Jehovah remembers me, all the better.

If he does not, well, I have had a good run, and somehow survived with my hand on the doorknob to death's door more than a hundred times, and am somehow still here, and I know that people much better than me in every way have lived short lives of hardship and calamity, and are gone forever.

I pray for God's Kingdom to come, even if I don't make it.

But then again ... I have always considered myself expendable.

The PURPOSE of the Universe, is women and children.

The REASON we exist at all is our entertainment value to Jehovah God.

..... and that experiment with the Dinosaurs just wasn't working out, so God dropped a big rock on them.

[TrueTomHarley]

 

33 minutes ago, James Thomas Rook Jr. said:

happy to be alive now, in this time... and in this place ... and with my wonderful wife, dogs and chickens, who somehow we all eat regular, and have superb medical care ... and if Jehovah remembers me, all the better.

STOP SAYING THINGS LIKE THIS!!!

I make up my mind to take you out as with a bazooka and then I read a remark like this and lose every bit of steam.

[James Thomas Rook Jr.]

Could be worse ... the Dinosaurs lost all of their WD-40.

[Patiently waiting for Truth]

1 hour ago, TrueTomHarley said:

The point is that our personal salvation is not the central issue before all creation. It is a relative detail. God has bigger fish to fry and we do not imagine that it is all a about us. This is not the case with some faiths, at least, judging from the preponderance of their writings.

I agree with you totally on this. That Almighty God is vindicated and His name (whatever it may be) is made clean. Those are the important issues. And that those in the heavens as well of those here on Earth have been given an answer once and for all times. We should all know that it is not about us. We are as dust. So indeed as you say 'God has bigger fish to fry'.