A Place In the Wilderness

6 The Coming End of the Age

surreptitious slander, sectarianism, and domination using manip- ulation, politics, pressuring tactics, and threats.

How sad, and even pitiful, our condition! Such a sad condi- tion is due totally to the shortage of the divine life. We have hindered the Lord’s second coming by our lack of growth and maturity. We have failed in our responsibility. If we would realize this, we would deeply repent to the Lord. Then perhaps we would begin to seek to gain only Christ and nothing else.

In spite of all this, the Lord Jesus is still working to ripen His harvest. In Matthew 16 the Lord told Peter and the disciples, “I will build My church.” This is not something for the next age. That age will be the Kingdom Age, not the Church Age. This prophecy is for today. Throughout all the past centuries there have been some individual believers like Paul, Peter, and John who have ripened to full growth. Yet, the harvest as a whole has remained immature. It is the Lord’s desire to bring all the believers into the same maturity that Paul, Peter, and John shared. The Lord will use every means to mature His many children into full-grown sons of God. If we consider the past two thousand years, we can see that the Lord employs trials, sufferings, persecutions, and even death to accomplish what is on His heart for His many children. Only by the growth in life is God manifested and expressed. Only through a church built up in the divine life is Satan put to shame. The Lord will obtain that which He desires.

The Approach of the Harvest

Though the harvest has remained green (i.e., unripe), over the last two thousand years there has been a small amount of ripening. This has been accomplished in spite of centuries of darkness. It has been realized through a slow recovery of the truths in God’s Word, which had been lost in the centuries immediately following the Lord’s ascension, and had lain buried throughout the Dark Ages. This ripening has also occurred due to a gradual recovery of the experience of Christ and of the proper church living.

Because of this slow maturation, in these past years the Lord has been arranging the outward circumstances in preparation for His return. The outward situation as seen in Israel and the world