What do the soldier, athlete and farmer mean in 2 Timothy 2:3-6?

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Whosoever Will · Accepted Answer

Whosoever Will, Three Men Who Cannot See the End: The soldier fights a war he will not see won today. He takes orders from a commander whose whole strategy he cannot see, in a campaign whose outcome will be decided somewhere he is not standing. He does not get to know. He obeys and endures hardness in the dark. The athlete trains ten months for one afternoon. That is not a figure of speech. Competitors at the ancient games swore an oath before the statue of Zeus that they had trained the full ten months, and the word Paul uses for striving lawfully, nomimōs, covers the training regimen and not merely the conduct of the contest. Ten months of diet and drill and sweat for a garland he does not hold, may never hold, and cannot see from where he is standing. The farmer works the hardest of the three and waits the longest. He breaks ground in one season and eats in another. Between the plowing and the bread there is nothing to look at but dirt. Paul says the husbandman that laboureth must be first partaker of the fruits, and the word carries the order: the labor comes first, and the eating comes after, and there is no arrangement in which a man gets the harvest before he does the work. There it is. Three men, one condition. Every one of them is laboring in the gap between the work and the reward, and not one of them can see the end from where he stands. Scripture, King James Version: 2 Timothy 2:3-6, "Thou therefore endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ. No man that warreth entangleth himself with the affairs of this life; that he may please him who hath chosen him to be a soldier. And if a man also strive for masteries, yet is he not crowned, except he strive lawfully. The husbandman that laboureth must be first partaker of the fruits.".

What do the soldier, athlete and farmer mean in 2 Timothy 2:3-6?

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