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What About the Harvest? How Can There be Two Harvests?

 

 

If God has concluded the entire Gentile Age in unbelief as He did the Jewish Age--if He indeed will not find much faith in the earth at his return--then how can we say there will be two harvests? Specifically, how can we say that there will be a harvest of true faith at all? It would seem there can only be a harvest of unbelief. "That's all your teaching here leaves room for!"

 

I agree. This appears problematic. There is a promise of age-ending harvest and revival still awaiting us. How can we reconcile this promise with the premise here that the Lord has concluded this age in unbelief and will not find much faith in the earth at his return?

 

This question actually accents a paradox that the scriptures raise themselves. Note Paul's quote from Isaiah in Romans 9:

 

27 Isaiah cries out concerning Israel, "Though the number of the sons of Israel be like the sand of the sea, it is the remnant that will be saved;"

 

We have heard much about the coming harvest over the last few decades. What we have heard has been filled with great hope and promise of expectation. Our concept of harvest is conceived in the expectation that multitudes will finally confess Christ as Lord.

 

But sometimes we can hear so much about something over time from one perspective that we lose the capacity for ongoing perspective development that embraces all the Lord wants to show us. For instance, in our eagerness for the harvest of faith in Christ, there's been little discussion of the negative harvest of destruction. (Vice versa, those who concentrate on the negative harvest are oft blind to the hope of the positive harvest--which is why we have to answer the question about the positive harvest from the perspective of this article.)

 

The question is, if God has concluded this age in unbelief, how can there be a positive harvest? If the age has been concluded in unbelief, how can there be a harvest of faith? And how can the Lord even return? Of what substance is that faith?

 

Let's preface the answer with a worthy observation. If the belief surrounding the Lord's first coming is any indication of what belief is to be like surrounding His return, then it's a virtual certainty that even now, we do not adequately grasp what is to happen in the outworking of His return, and that there is much we will not understand until after the fact. What is more of a certainty is that the kind of harvest and revival we have heard prophesied and predicted for generations now, and which the Scriptures themselves predict, will  not be fulfilled on the terms of expectation by which they are made.

 

Hardly ever has eschatological prophecy been fulfilled according to expectation. When Yeshua first came, almost no one recognized Him for who He was! Yet His coming fulfilled every prophecy. Similarly, when the Holy Spirit energetically prophesies of Harvest and Revival, and the Book of Revelation speaks of these also, we can be sure that there is a wide gap between what we expect in our unbelief attached to the prophecies and what the Spirit will actually bring to fulfillment.

 

The solution is this: Yes, there will be a harvest. But it will not be a harvest of Christianity! It will not be a harvest of Zionism! There will be no reconstructive restoration of either the Mosaic system or the apostolic church, nor of the nations associated with these in their ages! Yes there will come a true harvest of faith, but it will come as the mysterious paradoxical conclusion of an age of unbelief!

 

Indeed, the prophecies already tell us the age will conclude in unbelief as well as a harvest of faith. They predict that multitudes will fall away from the faith, never mind that there will be few survivors left on the earth! The irony is that the heritage-amalgamating unbelief that has passed for the "true faith" throughout this age will be at the root of the apostasy and the virtual wipe-out of earth's peoples.

 

Well then, if so, of what will be the substance of the true faith behind the true harvest?? It is simply this: That out of the crucible of the failed religious unbelief among the warring parties of Christianity, Zionism, Islam, Communism and everything else combined, the Lord will work a miraculous eye-opening to the truth of the New Covenant mystery Paul proclaimed from the beginning. There will be a remnant people whose eyes are at last opened to the futility of heritage worship mingled with the faith of Christ. They will awake out of every nation, and they will arise to preach the truth, and they will be translated to new life, and they will host the Next Revelation of Christ to the earth.

 

The Great Revival to come will not be one of Americanized Christianity or Jewish Zionism, but for the first time a truly transcendent faith according to the yet unveiled Mystery of the Gospel whereby a remnant of both Jews and Gentiles from all nations will surrender their heritages to become one true New Man in Christ at His coming. In other words, despite the fact that in the main Jesus will not find faith when He returns, at the same time, He will find faith! After all, if He were to find no faith, to what would He return as a Kingdom?

 

Let us take heart then. There is "good news." There is a true harvest and revival at hand--even if it will be nothing like what most now prophesying it expect it to be. The Lord's word-seed will never return to Him void. And despite all the unbelief in which the Age has had  to be concluded, He will still receive a reward for His intercessions throughout this age, the fruit of which will be revealed ("harvested") at His coming.

 

 

Part 16





Chris Anderson
New Meadow Neck, Rhode Island

First Love Ministry
- a ministry of Anglemar Fellowship
http://www.firstloveministry.org

05/06



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