Carl picked up the Bible and read, “‘Then another angel came out of the temple which is in heaven, he also having a sharp sickle. And another angel came out from the altar, who had power over fire, and he cried with a loud cry to him who had the sharp sickle, saying, “Thrust in your sharp sickle and gather the clusters of the vine of the earth, for her grapes are fully ripe.” So the angel thrust his sickle into the earth and gathered the vines of the earth, and threw it into the great winepress of the wrath of God.’”

“Okay, what happened here?” John asked.

Carl paused to think, then responded, “There seems to be another harvest. This time an angel did it with grapes. He then threw the grapes into a crushing mechanism that represents God’s wrath.”

“So, what do we have here, then?” John asked.

“I see it!” Lori exclaimed. “They are harvests of people! One is a good harvest, which Jesus Christ conducts. He’s bringing people to love and forgiveness. When that is over, God sends an angel to bring people who disobey His laws to some kind of punishment.”

Before John could answer, Carl broke in. “Remember, Lori, that novel by Steinbeck called The Grapes of Wrath about the dust bowl and the migrant farm workers? He must have taken the title from this part of Revelation.”

Lori nodded in agreement.

John didn’t want to be distracted by a discussion of American literature, so he turned to Lori with a smile. “Lori, that’s exactly what God made clear to me in 1995. He showed me that the good harvest was almost over. I was led to believe that there must be one supreme, massive effort to mobilize the resources of the Christian church to win people to Jesus Christ all over the world.”

“I felt that we had only five years before indescribable judgment was going to hit the earth. And now we have this terrible tragedy taking place on the West Coast.” He was silent for a moment, thinking. Then he said, “I have to tell you, I find no satisfaction at all in realizing that I knew in advance what was coming.”

Dave Busby had been silent through most of this discussion. Now he had some questions of his own. “So, you had five years to work. Do you feel you got the job done?”

“Only God knows everything that was accomplished during those five years. I believe over one billion people accepted Jesus Christ as their Savior. There wasn’t one continent that did not feel God’s power.

“The big news was in Asia. In 1995, there were at least seventy-five million Christian believers in mainland China. When the Communists began to welcome Christian beliefs as a counterbalance to Hollywood, another two-hundred-fifty million Chinese became believers. China quickly developed the largest and strongest Christian church in the world.