Separating the wheat from the chaff

As we were driving through the countryside the other day, I saw something you never see in America. There are lots of things going on here that you never see in America, but I was particularly interested in this. There were a group of guys standing over a pile of wheat, on what would be known as a threshing floor, and they were scooping up the wheat and tossing it in the air. The wheat fell back to the ground on the other side of the floor in a new pile of “clean” grain and all of the trash would blow away in the wind. I have watched this process up close before and it is not a quick procedure. I could never have imagined that people still separated wheat from the chaff this way.

As I saw it this time, I was reminded of several passages in the Book that talk about wheat being separated from the chaff. Ps. 1:4 says, “The wicked are not so, but are like the chaff that the wind drives away.” Mt. 3:12 says, “His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” And then another, Lk 22:31 says, “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you that he might sift you like wheat.” I had read each of these passages before, but I guess never truly visualized what that meant until I saw it with my own eyes. Seeing these guys literally separating the wheat from the chaff brought a new understanding to those passages that I had previously skimmed over with little comprehension of what that would look like.