We’ve heard a lot about harvest over the last few decades. It’s been a popular word among “cutting edge” ministries. But there is a lot of confusion over the meaning and significance of the harvest, especially in the (North) American church.

 

For many, harvest has been about nothing but the bringing of massive numbers of converts into the kingdom through new birth in Christ. This idea has been a twin concept with that of “revival,” which has generally envisioned the same thing. In this sense, “revival” and “harvest” have been held synonymously.

 

For this same number, harvest has only been seen in one context, a context of salvation. But the apostolic vision of harvest is not only of salvation, but also of destruction and judgment. The scripture is clear: there are two end time harvests, not one. This is the contrast between the “wheat” (God’s kingdom people) and the “tares” (the non-redeemed world). God’s kingdom does not just rise in the earth. The statue of Nebuchadnezzar also has to come down—and that first! The tares are burned first. (Mt. 13:24-30)

 

From a third minority perspective, the harvest has been taught relative to the translation of the saints into glory, focusing on the redemption of our bodies. This stream of conceptualization based in I Corinthians 15 has been amplified through the Latter Rain Movement, and is one I am extremely committed to. God has a people he wants to bring into the harvest of immortalization. You of course are already familiar with the works of brother Earls at this site who so soundly exposits all this.

 

But now I want to look at a fourth concept of harvest. It is the concept of identity separation. This is the concept presented to us through the picture of the “wheat” and the “chaff.” (Mt. 3:12). Notice the subtle difference between “chaff” and “tares.” The two pictures are not exactly the same. The tares are separate entities from the wheat which are gathered and burned. But the chaff is that which surrounds the wheat and through which the wheat grows up until the chaff is threshed off it and burned. Until burned, it is part of the wheat.

 

From this fourth perspective, we understand that the chaff is the “flesh.” It is everything we as God’s people have remaining in us from the first Adam  It is our very natural life blood and identity among the peoples of the world. That is what I want to talk about here.

 

The two guest articles just released to you offer a tremendous picture of the harvesting of the American church from out of its own chaff. The Storm Harvest article on the American empire is about the chaff that surrounds God’s kingdom people in America. That chaff is coming to an end. The Wiebold article is about the kernel kingdom identity of God’s people that is growing up and out of the fleshly chaff identity of its American surrounding.

 

Interestingly, when prior to harvest the chaff is ready to come off the wheat, or the husk off the corn kernels, we speak of the wheat or corn in a confused way, identifying it by its outermost skin. The truth is that, though from a distance the whole conglomeration is called wheat or corn, the chaff is not “the wheat”, and the husk is not “the corn.” (If I want wheat bread or corn bread, there better not be any chaff or husk in it!)    

 

This same confusion has existed over the church throughout the centuries prior to harvest. The outer husk of human nationality is always confused with the separate holy invisible internal kingdom identity of God’s people. That is why both the world and the church confuse Americanism with Christianity, and why we remain saddled with the confusion over the meaning of “Christian nation.” (Even the Storm Harvest article innocently offers this confused statement: “God wanted his people to know, their day in the sun is ending; the sunset is coming”—as if God’s people and Empire America are the same.)

 

But as we approach the harvest, what we are really seeing in these two articles is the statement that the chaff of American identity is about to be removed from God’s kingdom people within America, to where God’s kingdom, not America, will begin to get the attention in the earth. And this is what we have been waiting for and laboring toward.

 

For those of us in the kingdom that have yet to have our identities purged of our nationalism, the news that America’s time in the sun is coming to an end is a cause of great consternation. Uncrucified intercessors will continue to beg God to “save America.” But it is His Kingdom that God is saving and redeeming men toward, not America, not carnal Israel, not any nation. And when it is all said and done, what we will be left with is the clear delineation between what it means to belong to God’s kingdom in the earth and to remain a mortal national identified by the race of the first Adam.

 

The third and fourth visions of harvest described in this article go together. The closer we get to immortality, the more we should be expecting to lose national affinity and identity. As the chaff of our corrupt bodies prepares to be shed, so is the chaff of our national identities prepared to be shed as well. You all can testify that I have been exhorting for years toward this.

 

There are still open questions as to how the decline and demise of outer America as we know it will play out. But that is not my main theater of interest. What I want to know is, how will our kingdom identity as God’s people amidst the nation play out unto immortality, harvest of identity and ascension to manifest power in the earth over what remains of the system.

 

Here is what I do know: As we watch the ongoing external demise of the husk of American society, the kingdom people who are devoted to the Bridegroom are going to hear the separating word and will begin to receive the new apostolic class revelation of what that separation is to look like and how it will be exercised in the here and now.

 

I can tell you right now that God is moving in a powerful though still hidden way to effect the separation of God’s American people from their trust and dependence on American economy and culture, and to liberate them from the bestial system of commercial debt that has arisen from the sea to overtake the American law of the land and system of justice.

 

God is hearing the cry of his people under their bondage to debt, foreclosure and the absolute regulation of every aspect of their lives from health care to education to business. But there is a heavy price to pay in order to participate in that liberation. As past wishful prophetic declarations crumble before our eyes, paradigms of the inner man are shifting.

 

A lot of sifting is going on and searching of hearts as the saints determine whether they will surrender their affection for the American system and gamble on God’s deliverance into an unknown wilderness of faith, or whether they will keep trying to hold on and shore up and put a spiritual face on a corrupted system determined to destroy them.

 

Believe me, the groans, silent screams and howls are going up from innumerable heart chambers in hidden desperation under the pressure. God is hearing, and a Moses movement is in development. There will be a deliverance. You can read about it in Revelation 15.

 

Don’t be dismayed then by what you see on the outside. For you, it is not about what’s happening on the outside. It’s about what God is doing with you on the inside. Sure, you are hurting now. We all are. But it is a good hurt, a necessary hurt that leads to true salvation.

 

You’re getting what you always prayed for. You just didn’t know this was the way it would come or what it would cost. Still, God took you up on the dare that He use you for His glory and make of you the most He could make out of a believer. And He’s doing it.

 

Take heart “my fellow American.” (Ha!) Your chaff is being burned now. You are in process of being harvested!