20 Bible Verses About Autumn

Genesis 8:22

“While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.”

Reflection: The Lord says this “in his heart” after Noah leaves the ark and offers burnt offerings (Genesis 8:20-21). In the same breath he says he will never again curse the ground because of man, “for the intention of man’s heart is evil from his youth.” Seedtime and harvest head the list of pairs that “shall not cease” while the earth remains.

Ecclesiastes 3:1

“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.”

Reflection: The verse opens the Preacher’s list of paired times, and the second pair in verse 2 belongs to the farm: “a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted.” The list sets each activity beside its opposite, with sowing and gathering each given its own time.

Jeremiah 5:24

“They do not say in their hearts, ‘Let us fear the LORD our God, who gives the rain in its season, the autumn rain and the spring rain, and keeps for us the weeks appointed for the harvest.’”

Reflection: Jeremiah charges Judah with “a stubborn and rebellious heart” (5:23): the people never stop to fear the God who sends the rain on time and keeps the weeks of harvest. The ESV’s “autumn rain” translates yoreh, which the Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon places from the last of October to the first of December, and “spring rain” translates malqosh. Deuteronomy 11:14 calls the same two rains “the early rain and the later rain.” Verse 25 adds that the people’s iniquities “have turned these away.”

Psalm 65:9-11

“You visit the earth and water it; you greatly enrich it; the river of God is full of water; you provide their grain, for so you have prepared it. You water its furrows abundantly, settling its ridges, softening it with showers, and blessing its growth. You crown the year with your bounty; your wagon tracks overflow with abundance.”

Reflection: The heading calls this a psalm of David, and it praises God as the one who waters the land and provides the grain. Verse 11 speaks of the year crowned with bounty and wagon tracks that “overflow with abundance,” and by verse 13 the valleys “deck themselves with grain” and “shout and sing together for joy.”

Deuteronomy 16:15

“For seven days you shall keep the feast to the LORD your God at the place that the LORD will choose, because the LORD your God will bless you in all your produce and in all the work of your hands, so that you will be altogether joyful.”

Reflection: Moses sets the Feast of Booths “when you have gathered in the produce from your threshing floor and your winepress” (16:13), after the grain is threshed and the grapes are pressed. Verse 14 lists who is to rejoice: sons and daughters, male and female servants, the Levite, the sojourner, the fatherless and the widow. Leviticus 23:39-43 sets the feast on the fifteenth day of the seventh month and has Israel live in booths for seven days to remember the exodus from Egypt, and Exodus 23:16 calls it the Feast of Ingathering, kept “at the end of the year.”

Proverbs 3:9-10

“Honor the LORD with your wealth and with the firstfruits of all your produce; then your barns will be filled with plenty, and your vats will be bursting with wine.”

Reflection: A father tells his son to honor the Lord with his wealth and with “the firstfruits of all your produce.” The promise attached is agricultural: barns filled with plenty and vats bursting with wine.

Joel 2:23-24

“Be glad, O children of Zion, and rejoice in the LORD your God, for he has given the early rain for your vindication; he has poured down for you abundant rain, the early and the latter rain, as before. The threshing floors shall be full of grain; the vats shall overflow with wine and oil.”

Reflection: Joel speaks after a locust plague has stripped the land (Joel 1:4), and after the alarm of 2:1-11 the Lord “had pity on his people” (2:18) and answers with promises. The rain comes first, “the early and the latter rain, as before,” and then the harvest: threshing floors full of grain and vats overflowing with wine and oil. The next verse promises to “restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten” (2:25).

Proverbs 20:4

“The sluggard does not plow in the autumn; he will seek at harvest and have nothing.”

Reflection: The Hebrew word the ESV translates “autumn” is choreph, which the NASB renders “winter” five times and “autumn” once; the Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon reads this line “a sluggard ploughs not after harvest.” The man who skips the plowing when the season calls for it goes looking at harvest time and finds nothing.

Hosea 10:12

“Sow for yourselves righteousness; reap steadfast love; break up your fallow ground, for it is the time to seek the LORD, that he may come and rain righteousness upon you.”

Reflection: Hosea uses the farming year to call Israel back. Ephraim had been a trained calf that “loved to thresh” (10:11); now Judah must plow and Jacob must harrow. Breaking up fallow ground means turning land left unworked, and the verse joins it to “the time to seek the LORD,” with God answering in rain. Verse 13 gives the people’s actual record: “You have plowed iniquity; you have reaped injustice.”

Psalm 126:5-6

“Those who sow in tears shall reap with shouts of joy! He who goes out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, bringing his sheaves with him.”

Reflection: This Song of Ascents remembers the Lord restoring the fortunes of Zion (126:1) and asks for it again: “Restore our fortunes, O LORD, like streams in the Negeb!” (126:4). In verses 5-6 the sower goes out weeping with seed and comes home with shouts of joy, bringing his sheaves.

John 12:24

“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

Reflection: Some Greeks at the feast ask to see Jesus (John 12:20-22), and his answer begins, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” The grain of wheat that dies and bears much fruit follows directly from that statement about his hour, and verse 25 applies the same pattern to his followers: “Whoever loves his life loses it.”

Galatians 6:7-9

“Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap. For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life. And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up.”

Reflection: Near the end of his letter to the Galatian churches, Paul states the farmer’s rule that a person reaps what he sows and then divides the field in two: sowing to the flesh reaps corruption, and sowing to the Spirit reaps eternal life. Verse 9 adds the wait, “in due season we will reap, if we do not give up,” and verse 10 turns it into instruction: “let us do good to everyone.”

Isaiah 64:6

“We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.”

Reflection: The prayer that opens “Oh that you would rend the heavens and come down” (Isaiah 64:1) turns here to confession. The people describe themselves fading like a leaf, with their iniquities as the wind that carries them off, and verse 7 says no one calls on God’s name.

Jude 1:12

“…fruitless trees in late autumn, twice dead, uprooted…”

Reflection: Jude is describing people who feast with the church at its love feasts while feeding only themselves, and he piles up pictures of emptiness: waterless clouds, wild waves, wandering stars. “Late autumn” translates phthinoporinos, which appears once in the New Testament; Thayer’s lexicon explains it of trees leafless and without fruit. At the end of the fruit season these trees have nothing, and Jude calls them “twice dead, uprooted.”

1 Peter 1:24-25

“For ‘All flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord remains forever.’ And this word is the good news that was preached to you.”

Reflection: Peter quotes Isaiah 40:6-8, where the grass withers “when the breath of the LORD blows on it.” He sets the fading of all flesh against the word that remains, and then says which word he means: the good news his readers heard. Verse 23 has already told his readers they were born again “not of perishable seed but of imperishable.”

Psalm 1:3

“He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers.”

Reflection: The first psalm compares the man whose delight is in the law of the Lord to a tree planted by streams. It yields its fruit “in its season” and its leaf does not wither, where Isaiah 64:6 has a people fading like a leaf. The wicked in verse 4 are chaff “that the wind drives away.”

Jeremiah 8:20

“The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.”

Reflection: Jeremiah hears this cry from his people: the harvest has come and gone, summer has ended, and no rescue has come. The prophet answers with his own grief, “For the wound of the daughter of my people is my heart wounded” (8:21), and asks, “Is there no balm in Gilead?” (8:22).

Matthew 9:37-38

“Then he said to his disciples, ‘The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.’”

Reflection: Jesus says this after seeing crowds “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” (Matthew 9:36). The crop in his picture is people, and the shortage is of workers, and he tells the disciples to pray to the Lord of the harvest to send them.

John 4:35

“Do you not say, ‘There are yet four months, then comes the harvest’? Look, I tell you, lift up your eyes, and see that the fields are white for harvest.”

Reflection: At Jacob’s well near Sychar, a town of Samaria (John 4:5), Jesus quotes a saying that harvest is still four months off and contradicts it: the fields are white already. Verses 36-38 extend the picture to sower and reaper rejoicing together, and to the disciples reaping “that for which you did not labor.”

Revelation 14:15

“And another angel came out of the temple, calling with a loud voice to him who sat on the cloud, ‘Put in your sickle, and reap, for the hour to reap has come, for the harvest of the earth is fully ripe.’”

Reflection: In John’s vision one like a son of man sits on a white cloud with a sharp sickle, and an angel from the temple tells him the harvest of the earth is fully ripe. Verse 16 says the earth was reaped. A second reaping follows in verses 17-20, of grapes thrown into “the great winepress of the wrath of God.”