The writer of the Revelation, expanding and evangelizing the vision of Joel, saw “a white cloud,” and One “like unto the Son of man” sitting thereon, “having on his head a golden crown, and in his hand a sharp sickle.” “Out of the temple” an angel came and cried to him, “Thrust in thy sickle, ... for the harvest of the earth is ripe.” Whereupon he cast his sickle upon the earth, and “the earth was reaped.” In these words surely a reference is to be seen to the words of our Lord himself uttered in the hearing of John and recorded in Matthew xxiv, 14, 30, 31: “And this Gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come.... And they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.” This metaphor of the harvest as the result of the sowing of God’s word is one of the most common to be found in the Scriptures. “The sower soweth the word” (Mark iv, 14), or “the word of the kingdom” (Matthew xiii, 19), or “the word which by the Gospel is preached unto you” (1 Peter i, 25). “So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed into the ground; and should sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how. For the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself [that is, automatically and spontaneously].... But when the fruit is brought forth, immediately he putteth in the sickle, because the harvest is come” (Mark iv, 26‒29).