- Isaiah 62:6-7
-
I have set watchmen on your walls, O Jerusalem; They shall never hold their peace day or night. You who make mention of the LORD, do not keep silent, And give Him no rest till He establishes And till He makes Jerusalem a praise in the earth.
- The Harvest
-
First we find that Jesus commands that we will be His witnesses to the ends of the Earth after we have been witnesses to Him where we live and in our surrounding communities. We read in Acts, "But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth." (Acts 1:8) Second we find that all families of the earth will be blessed we see this as far back as Genesis when God was calling Abraham (at that point Abram) to get up and leave his family and country. God promised that in him all the families of the earth will be blessed. "NOW the LORD had said to Abram: "Get out of your country, from your family and from your father's house, to a land that I will show you. I will make you a great nation; I will bless you and make your name great; and you shall be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, And I will curse him who curses you; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed." (Gen 12:1-3) This promise to Abraham is used by both Peter and Paul in the New Testament as a basis for the salvation of the both the Jews and Gentiles. "You are sons of the prophets, and of the covenant which God made with our fathers, saying to Abraham, 'And in your seed all the families of the earth shall be blessed.' To you first, God, having raised up His Servant Jesus, sent Him to bless you, in turning away every one of you from your iniquities."(Acts 3:25-26), "And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel to Abraham beforehand, saying, "In you all the nations shall be blessed." So then those who are of faith are blessed with believing Abraham." (Gal 3: 8-9) This author believes that the Dimili Kurds meet both of these promises living at the ends of the earth as well as being one of all the families of the earth. I don’t think we can argue they don’t deserve to have the gospel preached to them. My point is that under these two general qualifications they fit the description. This being the case, Jesus then warns us to not sit idle thinking we have plenty of time to get this done. In fact he says the time is now and now is the time of harvest. "Do you not say, 'There are still four months and then comes the harvest'? Behold, I say to you, lift up your eyes and look at the fields, for they are already white for harvest! "And he who reaps receives wages, and gathers fruit for eternal life, that both he who sows and he who reaps may rejoice together." (John 4:35-36) "Then He said to His disciples, "The harvest truly is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Therefore pray the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into His harvest." (Mat 9:37-38)
- Where is this harvest?
-
So where is this harvest that Jesus is speaking of? If there are an estimated 28 million Kurds in the world and roughly 4 million of them are of the Dimili culture then it could be safe to say that 14% of all Kurds are Dimili. For example if there are 100 Kurds living among us then fourteen of them could potentially speak Dimili. Lets take this a step further, the Kurdish Institute estimates that there are upwards of 1.09 million Kurds living in various countries in Europe and an additional 27,000 living in North America between the United States and Canada. Which means that there are potentially 156,000 Dimili Kurds living amongst us in our Jerusalem, Judea and Samarian nations. In which case it would be in our best interest to evangelize them here where we are, as is quoted in the following excerpt from Mission Frontiers:
Bob Blincoe a missionary working with the Kurds, recounted to me this fresh experience working with a Kurdish bicultural: "Abdulla and his wife and son fled Saddam Hussein's Iraq in 1975 with thousands of other Iraqis. They came as refugees to the United States, bracing themselves for what they would find. Was America 'dirty and godless,' as Abdulla had heard every Friday in the mosque? "When the plane landed and he and his little family debarked, who met him at the airport? Christians from a local church. Who took Abdulla to an apartment that was furnished and stocked with food? Who took his wife to see a dentist the following day, and got Abdulla enrolled in English as a Second Language courses? You guessed it--these same Christians from the community. "Abdulla had a world view change; he decided that American Christians were the nicest people he'd ever met. "Abdulla was baptized. The years went by. He took a job, proud that he never went on welfare for a single day of his life. When the curtain went up on Iraq following the Gulf War, God spoke through extraordinary circumstances, and Abdulla was obedient to his heavenly Father. Abdulla returned to Iraq to do the work of an evangelist. "Abdulla's success was more than all expatriate workers combined, and there were probably 100 expatriate workers. As he said to me, 'Bob, you can say the same words as I can, and your words bounce off the Iraqi people. But through me, Iraqis surrender to Christ.' This was not an idle boast but a factual observation. That is why I followed him around. "Abdulla knew instinctively that if hundreds or thousands of Iraqis were to follow Christ, they would have to do it while remaining Muslims. He invented the term 'Muslims of the Holy Spirit' to describe what happened to a person who began to follow Christ. We found our support from the Koran as well as from the Bible.”