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TRIBULATION

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Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jun 16, 1881

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 7, No. 23.

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TRIBULATION.

By Wayland Hoyt

THERE is a latent poetry in this word which, besides being very beautiful, will assist us to discover the use and design of tribulation.
It is an Oriental harvest time. There is the threshing floor. It is hard and smooth and broad—formed of the living rock or of earth closely trodden together. Here come the reapers bending beneath their loads of gathered grain. They cast the grain down upon that threshing floor. And here comes the tribulum—that is, the threshing instrument. It is a heavy wooden platform. On the under side it is studded thick with bits of broken flint or with savage iron teeth. Oxen are yoked to it. See, they drag it back and forth over the prostrate grain. Now look; all the wheat sheaves are sadly bruised and split. The wheat itself is broken out from the enfolding and useless straw. Every where on the threshing floor you can see multitudes of clean kernels. Now they push aside the straw. Now with fans they blow the chaff away. There lie the wheat kernels—the real thing they have been after through all the sowing and the reaping and the threshing, fit now to be ground and manufactured into bread for human use. But they could not have gotten the wheat had it not been for the tribulum.
Tribulation takes its name and meaning from that instrument—the tribulum. Tribulation is the divine threshing of man. And Christ tells us that in this world we must have it. The world is a threshing floor, and on every threshing floor, there is tribulation. Blows of pain must break off the evil husks, hindering what is good and noble in us. The useless straw must be beaten away from the golden kernel.
“Now no chastisement, for the present, seemeth to be joyous, but grievous,” says the Scripture. Threshing is never pleasant. “Nevertheless, afterwards it yieldeth the peaceable fruits of righteousness to them that are exercised thereby”—the true and valuable grain appears.—Rev. Wayland Hoyt, D. D.