And another angel emerged from the temple sanctuary, crying with a loud voice to the one seated on the cloud: ‘Put your sickle in and reap, because the hour has come to reap, for the harvest of the earth is thoroughly ripe.’

Rev. 14:14-16.

8. How is the “Son of man” pictured in Revelation 14:14, and so after what event must the harvest have begun?

⁸ Here we see the “Son of man,” Jesus Christ, not as a sower sowing “fine seed in his field” but as a crowned king moving into action for the “harvest of the earth.” His being seated on a cloud symbolizes his invisible presence. (Acts 1:9-11; Rev. 1:7) The “harvest” must, therefore, take place during Christ’s presence, after he is crowned and receives “rulership and dignity and kingdom” from Jehovah, the “Ancient of Days.” (Dan. 7:13, 14) So the harvesting began sometime after 1914, the year that marked the beginning of the “time of the end,” or the “conclusion of the system of things.”

9. When did the separating work begin?

⁹ When, after 1914, did the Son of man “send forth his angels” to separate the “sons of the kingdom” from “the sons of the wicked one,” the imitation “wheat,” that is, “persons who are doing lawlessness” and who include the “man of lawlessness,” the religious leaders of counterfeit Christianity? The answer must correspond with the facts, and these show that it was in 1919 that the spirit-begotten, anointed “sons of the kingdom,” symbolized by the “wheat,” began to be freed from the “weeds,” or false Christians, that had overrun the religious field of mankind. The “harvest of the earth” was ripe and the time had come for the “Son of man” to thrust in his sickle and reap. The parable reveals that he did this by means of his “reapers,” angels.