Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of the End Times from Revelation 7
… and of the various beasts he sends forth. We’ll see that later. But they face that wrath; they don’t face God’s wrath. So who then gets this mark? The answer is, “I heard the number of those who were sealed: 144,000 from all the tribes of Israel.” Then you have the listing of the tribes.
Now what’s going on here? I’ve struggled with this one back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, but I’ll tell you the conclusion I’ve come to, and then I’ll try and justify it, and then you can eat me alive. I’ve come to the conclusion the 144,000 are none other than the same as the great number of the redeemed a little farther on, who we’ll explore a little later. You have two different ways of looking at the same people.
After all, don’t you get the same kind of mixed metaphor even in the description of Christ? You announce the lion from the tribe of Judah, so John looks around, and what he sees is a lamb. There’s nothing wrong with that kind of mixture of metaphor. The question is.… Is that a reasonable explanation in this case and why and on what grounds? Well, let me offer some grounds, first of all.
First, virtually all sides but the most firmly convinced literalists will acknowledge that the 144,000 are symbolic of something or other, because numbers in the Apocalypse are regularly symbolic. What you have is 12 times 12 times 10 times 10 times 10. The Jehovah’s Witnesses have another explanation, but in point of fact, for most people, especially those who have done any reading in Jewish apocalyptic and the way numbers are used, 144,000 is so plainly symbolic you can’t escape it.
It is 12 times 12 times 10 to the third power, in which case what is it likely to symbolize? You get this 12 by 12 combination, and you discover that it crops up again and again and again in the book of Revelation. Not only in 144,000 later, but later the city, 12 by 12 on this or 12 by 12 on a cube or something. The 12 by 12 is the people of God in the Old Testament and the people of God in the New; the 12 tribes in the Old Testament and the 12 apostles representing the people of God into the New.
This 12 by 12 becomes a very common symbol in the book of Revelation for the wholeness of the people of God. Then the 1,000 is 10 times 10 times 10, and that’s completeness. So on the face of it, the 144,000 reads most easily that way. The only thing that complicates it is you then are told you have 12,000 from each of the tribes, but on the face of it, just from the 144,000, if you don’t worry about the tribes for a moment, I would want to argue there wouldn’t be any dispute at all.
Moreover, in the second place, I would want to argue that that really is the only responsible way of taking the 144,000 in chapter 14. Now I’m not going to anticipate my arguments there, but in my view, in chapter 14 there really can’t be any other interpretation that works very well there. I really think the 144,000 in chapter 14 have to be the totality of the redeemed.
So if this 144,000 is the same as the other 144,000.… A number of years ago, working on this book trying to sort out how it worked, I toyed with the idea of having two different 144,000 groups. I don’t think it works. I think at the end of the day, if you identify the 144,000 in chapter 14 the way I think you must, then it has some bearing back here.
Third, in terms of the sealing language (this is tied also to chapters 13–14), there too you get very explicitly the contrast. Everybody who’s on the Devil’s side is sealed with his seal, and everybody who’s on God’s side is sealed with his seal, and then you face the opponent’s wrath. Now if that’s the case here, because of that everybody thing, it’s not just an identification question with 144,000 in chapter 14. You’re dealing with part of the structure of the sealing language. Now part of that argument I’m anticipating chapters 13–14, so you’ll have to bear with me for two more weeks on that one.
Fourth, when you actually get the list of the 12 tribes, there are some anomalies in it. In the first place, you get Judah before Reuben, even though Reuben is older. The reason for that is probably pretty obvious. It’s from Judah that the Messiah springs. Already in chapter 5 Jesus has been identified as coming from Judah, but then instead of Dan, who’s nicely omitted, you get Joseph’s son Manasseh, which is rather interesting.
Have you ever learned the names of the 12 tribes? When I was a boy in Sunday school, you learned those sorts of things in song. “These are the names of Jacob’s sons: Gad and Asher and Simeon, Reuben, Issachar, Levi, Judah, Dan, and Naphtali—twelve in all but never twins—Zebulun, Joseph, and Benjamin.” You learn these things very early on. Put anything to a beat and a bit of rhyme, and you can memorize anything.
But that’s what’s anomalous here. Now why is Dan omitted and Joseph’s son Manasseh included? You could argue that the tribal lands broke up into Ephraim and Manasseh, but on the other hand, the tribal lands also had Dan. What tended to go was, in fact, Benjamin, which got subsumed under Judah originally. Instead of Ephraim and Manasseh, they have Joseph and Manasseh, which makes it even more awkward.
Now people have speculated that the omission of Dan may be because Dan succumbed most powerfully to idolatry at two or three points in Israel’s history, so it was dropped, but it’s just speculation. It is on any reading a very strange list. The next thing I would say about this list is by the time of the writing of this book it was already becoming impossible for anyone to say from what tribe he sprang.
Sacred records were kept of genealogies until the fall of the Jerusalem temple in AD 70. Thus, Joseph, the one who stood in as father of Jesus, and Mary could both give their genealogies all the way back to David. Today, no Jew can. None. I’ve mentioned that before. Now it comes home to roost. How on earth could you possibly say that you’re getting, with Walvoord, 12,000 from Zebulun, 12,000 from Gad, and 12,000 from Asher?
It won’t do to say, “Ah yes, maybe the records are destroyed, but at least God knows.” The reason that won’t work is because since the records have been destroyed, there was no attempt to keep up tribal purity. The lines are all mixed. There’s just no way you can untangle them. God does not undo history. God could tell you how the lines are mixed, but the point is the lines are mixed. You can’t possibly have 12,000 from this tribe and 12,000 from that tribe and 12,000 from the other tribe, because there are no tribal lines left.
That ties in with the general New Testament perspective that with the coming of Jesus, the barrier of hostility, to use Paul’s language in Ephesians, between Jew and Gentile is broken down in the new humanity, the people of God, the church. Then you remember some other lines that are taken up very strongly in the New Testament. Think of what Paul writes, for example, in Romans, chapter 2. This too is steeped in Old Testament roots that we won’t here explore.
Listen to this language in Romans 2. Verse 25: “Circumcision has value if you observe the law …” He’s writing to Jews. “… but if you break the law, you have become as though you had not been circumcised. If those who are not circumcised keep the law’s requirements, will they not be regarded as though they were circumcised? The one who is not circumcised physically and yet obeys the law will condemn you [that is, you Jew] who, even though you have the written code and circumcision, are a lawbreaker.”
Then this. Verse 28: “A man is not a Jew if he is only one outwardly, nor is circumcision merely outward and physical. No, a man is a Jew if he is one inwardly; and circumcision is circumcision of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the written code. Such a man’s praise is not from men, but from God.” Or again in 1 Peter. In the Old Testament, the people of God are called a kingdom and priests unto our God in connection with the Sinai covenant. Now that language is applied directly to Christians in 1 Peter.
What you often have, thus, is a kind of typological takeover, so that there is a sense in which the people of God now embrace Jew and Gentile. A distinction can be made for certain purposes, I would want to argue, but for other purposes, the antitype of Israel is Jesus, who is the true Israel, and all who were grafted into him. As in the Old Testament, Israel is the vine (Psalm 80, Isaiah 5, and many other passages).
Jesus then says he’s the true Vine, and those who are in him, thus, truly belong to this true vine, which has come from the old covenant community and are unto him. So I think this is a way of saying that you have a completeness of all of the people of God in all their proportionality coming. They constitute the true Israel of God.
That fits, in the fifth place, also with the language of Smyrna and Philadelphia, where you have this synagogue of Satan. Over against the synagogue of Satan, you constitute the true synagogue of God. Now I’m not absolutely positive that’s right. I’m sure it’s right in chapter 14. I think it’s right here. If it’s right, then what you have is a vision of the people of God seen as those who are conquering death when martyrdom is demanded of them, the fullness of their number coming in, and them being spared certain wrath from God because they are God’s people.
This becomes sort of an apocalyptic equivalent to what you find in the Pastoral Epistles. “The Lord knows those who are his. They’re sealed with his ring.” The Lord knows those who are his. That becomes a wonderful encouragement when you’re going through deep bouts of depression or persecution or family attack. The Lord knows those who are his. They’re sealed with his ring, and they will not face his wrath. They might face wrath from the Enemy, but, okay, whose wrath are you going to face?
Then in the second part of this vision.… “After this I looked and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. And they cried out in a loud voice: ‘Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.’
All the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures. They fell down on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, saying: ‘Amen! Praise and glory and wisdom and thanks and honor and power and strength be to our God for ever and ever. Amen!’ Then one of the elders asked me …” Again, an interpreting angel. “ ‘These in white robes—who are they, and where did they come from?’ I answered, ‘Sir, you know.’
And he said, ‘These are they who have come out of the great tribulation; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. Therefore, they are before the throne of God and serve him day and night in his temple; and he who sits on the throne will spread his tent over them. Never again will they hunger; never again will they thirst. The sun will not beat upon them, nor any scorching heat. For the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd; he will lead them to springs of living water. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.’ ”
Now what do we learn from this element? If you just stay with the other vision, the first part, even if you grant that the interpretation is correct, you miss certain elements to it. You miss, for example, the explicitness of the comprehensiveness of the “Every tongue and tribe and people and nation” language, which we were already introduced to in chapter 1 and again in chapters 4–5, where the angels sing after the triumph of the Lamb, “You have purchased men to God from every tongue and tribe and people and nation.”
If you just look at the people corporately as fulfilled Jews or antitype Jews, you lose that dimension of things. It’s one of the elements that’s picked up. You miss the element of praise. You miss the sheer bliss of heaven. In other words, the main point of the first part of the vision (verses 1–8, the 144,000) is those who really are God’s are spared his wrath. The second part of the vision, but reconfiguring it in different terms, is the people of God enter into the wonderful bliss of God himself, seen in a variety of ways.
These two components are then sandwiched between the sixth seal and the seventh seal. So while you have this wrath being poured out on rebellious men and women, before you have the climactic seal, you have this alternative vision. “It doesn’t have to be this way. This is what happens to the people of God. They’re protected.” Not only are they protected but they are in the very presence of God himself.
Before I open it up for questions, let me draw your attention to a few of the elements in this passage. They’re wearing white robes. We’ve seen that before. They’re holding palm branches. That brings you up, of course, to the feast before Passover. A lot of joy and enthusiasm and remembrance for what God has done. “They cried out in a loud voice: ‘Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.’ ” There’s that formula again.
In other words, they are like the elders who cast their crowns before the Lord and acknowledge that everything they have is derivative. They’re from him. “Salvation belongs to our God and to the Lamb.” If we’re spared, it’s because of what God has done. It’s not because we’ve been wiser or better, because we are intrinsically superior, because we are fundamentally different from others who have been anarchic. No, salvation belongs to the Lord and to the Lamb.
Then you have this series of concentric circles, all of the angels standing around the throne and around the elders and around the four living creatures, all of the angelic myriads of heaven, and they’re all worshiping, and they’re saying, “Amen! Praise and glory and wisdom and thanks and honor and power and strength be to our God for ever and ever.”
But one of the elders wants John to have a better idea of who these people in white robes are. That is, this great multitude, because they’re the ones wearing the white robes in verse 9. Who are they? John very wisely says, “Sir, you know.” He says, “These are they who have come out of the great tribulation; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. Therefore …” Then you have the wonderful description in the next verses. What does that mean?
Now you get into another of the most disputed questions in eschatology. Later on, I will try to take a bit of time to lay out alternative systems so you can see how the systems work and what they base things on. If I had time to teach a whole course on eschatology, we’d have to work inductively through parts of Daniel and through the Farewell Discourse and so on, but again, all I have time for here is to give you a conclusion rather than trying to justify in detail. A couple of parts of this I want to justify a little later on.
For people who have bought into the whole premillennial, pretribulational, dispensational scheme.… If you think that is the way the Bible works, then the great tribulation is, in fact, the seven years before the millennium. So if this great multitude is the crowd that comes out of the great tribulation, then they are the converts out of the great tribulation who are not Jews, while the 144,000 are the Jews who come out of it. So you have an additive group.
It’s very important at least to admit that there is nothing in this passage that makes those distinctions about the seven years of the great tribulation. That’s not mentioned here. We’ll come to the seven and the three and a half years and the forty-two months later. I think you have standard apocalyptic symbolism there too, but we’ll come to that when we get to chapters 12–13. There’s nothing that says that here.
There’s just a reference to the great tribulation. It doesn’t say how long it is or where it is or who’s in it. It doesn’t say any of that. In other words, what you are really doing is assuming the validity of the system. Granted the validity of the system, then that makes most sense here, but so far as this text is concerned, it doesn’t establish the system. That merely makes good sense once you’ve bought the system, which means the system itself has to be established elsewhere.
The second thing that should be said is that the actual description of these people is exactly the same categories as you get for the description of all of the people of God in the new heaven and the new earth. The sun doesn’t beat down. The Lord God and the Lamb are the temple. God will wipe every tear from their eyes. Read chapters 21–22.
In other words, there’s no special category for them here. The only thing in this entire description that might make you think they’re a subset of all of the redeemed is this one phrase, “They came out of the great tribulation,” if you think the great tribulation refers to a subset, a sub-period of seven years or something else.
If you don’t assume the great tribulation is a little seven-year period from which these people come and you simply look at the description of them here, the description is exactly the same description you get of the people of God in the new heaven and the new earth in Revelation 21–22. In fact, there it’s fuller, but exactly the same categories, which brings you to start trying to do inductive biblical study as to what great tribulation means.
Now I’ll tell you my conclusion without justifying it. I’ll try to justify some of it later. I would want to argue in the strongest possible terms that tribulation and even great tribulation is not a technical term with a narrow univocal meaning. You have to check the context. It means different things in different places. It can be sort of generic, not referring to a particular period at all.
For example, Paul elsewhere can say, “All those who want to live godly lives in Christ Jesus will suffer tribulation.” Same word, thlipsis. That does not necessarily mean they’ll go through the tribulation, but it doesn’t mean they don’t either. It just is a way of proving that the term thlipsis, tribulation, does not always have the same narrow technical term for this particular period. You have to check the context in every instance in order to establish what is being meant.
Second, I will argue later when we get to chapters 12–13 that the three and a half years and the seven years and the forty-two months come out of standard Jewish apocalyptic. The numbers are symbolic, and they’re well-known symbols. You’ll have to take that one on faith until we get there. I think I will be able to convince most of you, but let’s wait until we get there.
In the third place, and most important of all, I would want to argue in a number of important passages, including the eschatological discourse (that is, the discourse of Matthew 24–25, Luke 21, and Mark 13, the so-called Olivet Discourse), that there the tribulation refers to the entire period between the first coming of Jesus and the second.
Now to prove that would take me a little more time than I have in Matthew 24–25. I have argued the case at length in my commentary on Matthew if you want to read it, if you’re into that sort of debate. I would argue that that’s not always the case in the New Testament but that there are a number of passages, besides the eschatological discourse, where that makes the most sense of great tribulation.
It is bound up, again, with a variety of related notions. It’s bound up with the notion of the birth pangs of the Messiah. Before the Messiah comes back, there are birth pangs you go through, tribulation, but during what period do you wait for Messiah to come back? Well, from the time he went away. That’s the whole period of tribulation. In my view, it’s tied also to a lot of the teaching of Jesus. “In this world you will have tribulation, but be of good cheer. I have overcome the world.”
It is a category of expectation. Yes, all of those who live godly lives in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution, tribulation. That’s a common theme in the New Testament. It is expected that there will be opposition, and it is tied up even with the notion of Antichrist (Antichrist figures later; we’ll see who he is in due course), where you do have more and more explicit reference toward the end.
But there too you remember what John said about Antichrist in 1 John, chapter 2. He says, “My little children, it is the last hour …” Did you hear that? It is the last hour. “… and as you have heard that Antichrist is coming, so also now there are many antichrists.” That is, whatever particular tribulation comes along with the Antichrist at the end (about whom I’ll say more later), there are antichrists wherever there’s Christ in this fallen world.
During this whole period between the first coming and the second coming, while you have Christ reigning but now still contested, you have antichrists. Where Christ puts down his flag, there Antichrist puts down a counter-claim. That is the way it has been from the beginning. It is the way it will be until the end. That’s the truth of the matter.
Now that doesn’t mean there is no final outbreak of antichrists. In fact, the whole logic of 1 John 2:18, which I just cited, is predicated on the assumption that there is an Antichrist at the end who is the model of all of the antichrists when we get there. It is not saying, “You may have heard that Antichrist is coming, but I say to you that antichrists run throughout the whole period.” It doesn’t say that.
It says, “As you have heard that Antichrist is coming, so even now already there are many antichrists.” Thus, all of the antichrists, as it were, lead up to the Antichrist, which is part of the language also of 2 Thessalonians 2 in slightly different terms, and later we’ll see the two peculiar beasts, the False Prophet and the Antichrist, coming out of Revelation 13. We’ll get there in a couple of weeks.
So I think this notion of the great tribulation in many, many passages, and I would argue here as well.… Granted that this description of the great multitude is exactly the description of the people of God later on in the book, the most obvious way to take the great tribulation here is of the entire period between the two advents of Christ.
“Who are these people?” John asks. They’re all of the people who have washed themselves in the blood of the Lamb (aren’t they all Christians?) and have come out of the great tribulation. Jesus warned about exactly that. “They are before the throne of God and serve him day and night. Never again will they hunger; never again will they thirst. The sun will not beat upon them, nor any scorching heat. The Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd …” That comes out of Ezekiel 34. “… he will lead them to springs of living water.”
There it’s really quite a remarkable passage, though. It’s worth pausing on just that one passage. Take a moment. The Bible is so interwoven in apocalyptic, where you can mingle your symbols. Almost any of these lines I can take you back and show you the Old Testament antecedents that John clearly has meditated on as part of the writing of this book.
Go back to Ezekiel 34 for a moment. By now you’re seeing that the book of Revelation has a lot of antecedents to Ezekiel and to Isaiah and to Zechariah and we’ll see later Daniel and so on. There are a number of books that there are most antecedents in you see in the Old Testament. “The word of the Lord came to me: ‘Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel …’ ” He doesn’t mean the real shepherds. He means the people who are leading the people of God.
“Prophesy and say to them: ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Woe to the shepherds of Israel who only take care of themselves! Should not shepherds take care of the flock? You eat the curds, clothe yourselves with the wool and slaughter the choice animals, but you do not take care of the flock. You have not strengthened the weak or healed the sick or bound up the injured. You have not brought back the strays or searched for the lost. You have ruled them harshly and brutally.’ ”
In other words, these religious leaders were exploiters of people. They weren’t shepherds in any real sense at all. “My sheep.” You have to remember whose sheep they are. These are only hireling shepherds in any case. “My sheep wandered over all the mountains and on every high hill. They were scattered over the whole earth, and no one searched or looked for them.”
Verse 7: “Therefore, you shepherds, hear the word of the Lord: As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, because my flock lacks a shepherd and so has been plundered and has become food for all the wild animals, and because my shepherds …” Whose shepherds are they at the end of the day? They’re God’s sheep and they’re God’s shepherds, and the shepherds have not been acting faithfully.
“… my shepherds did not search for my flock but cared for themselves rather than my flock, therefore, O shepherds, hear the word of the Lord: This is what the Sovereign Lord says: I am against the shepherds and will hold them accountable for my sheep.” So then what will he do? He’ll remove them. Verse 10: “I will rescue my flock.” Then verse 11 and following. Listen to this language, repeated again and again. God speaking now.
“I myself will search for my sheep and look for them. As a shepherd looks after his scattered flock when he is with them, so will I look after my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places where they were. I will bring them out from the nations and gather them from the countries. I will bring them into their own land. I will pasture them on the mountains of Israel. I will tend them in a good pasture, and the mountain heights of Israel will be their grazing land.
I myself will tend my sheep and have them lie down, declares the Sovereign Lord. I will search for the lost and bring back the strays. I will bind up the injured and strengthen the weak, but the sleek and the strong I will destroy. I will shepherd the flock with justice. As for you, my flock, this is what the Sovereign Lord says: I will judge between one sheep and another, and between rams and goats.” “I’m going to clean this up.”
“Must my flock feed on what you have trampled?” Verse 20: “I myself will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep.” Verse 22: “I will save my flock. I will judge my sheep between one and another.” Do you get the point? Who is the shepherd here? Isn’t it Yahweh? Bam! You get to verse 23. “I will place over them one shepherd, my servant David.” That’s what the text says.
You have Yahweh speaking in the first person all through here, all of the things he will do to his sheep, and then he says in verse 23, “I will place over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he will tend them; he will tend them and be their shepherd. I the Lord will be their God, and my servant David will be prince among them. I the Lord have spoken.” Then you show that it’s covenantal language in verses 25 and following.
Do you see that? In other words, this is something I’ve mentioned briefly in the past, but it’s important now that you see it and see how John picks it up here. On the one hand, you have this expectation in which the day of the Lord, the day of ultimate salvation, comes about because God does something. This is God’s doing. It’s God’s intervention. God is the shepherd. God rends the heavens and comes down. God is the one who brings about this final day of triumph.
On the other hand, you have all of these passages that say God sent his servant David, and in some passages, almost in jarring juxtaposition, they come together. Now already in chapter 5 we’ve seen that the Lamb comes from the throne. He is one with God, but he’s also the root of David, and he comes from the tribe of Judah. He is great David’s greater son. He is simultaneously God and the one who fulfills that line.
If that Lamb of God in chapter 5 is the Davidic king and one with God, then it is appropriate to speak of him being the shepherd of the sheep, but here you’ve gone one stage farther. John, in apocalyptic, loves to mingle the metaphors. Listen again to what it says. “For the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd.” Doesn’t that language hit you? The shepherd shepherds the lamb. The lamb doesn’t shepherd the shepherds. The categories are breaking up.
Now the people of God are the sheep, but it’s the lamb who shepherds them. For, of course, it’s the apocalyptic Lamb. It’s the slaughtered Lamb. It takes the cross to make sense of it. It takes the bringing together of him who is God, him who is in the line of David, him who was the slaughtered Lamb, and then a mingling of your metaphors to make this work. Who shepherds the people of God in the last day? Who ultimately fulfills Ezekiel 34? The lamb becomes the shepherd.
The same language is picked up again in chapters 21–22, which we’ll see on the last day. What you have is a comprehensive vision of the ultimate blessedness of being the flock of God. Within that framework, I would want to argue in the strongest terms that the only reasonable way of taking the great tribulation here is to see it referring to the entire period between the first coming of Christ and the second. Now let me pause for questions or comments before we at least make a start on chapter 8.
Female: [Inaudible]
Don Carson: Because the symbolism is different. In other words, the 144,000 means the completeness of their number. It’s not giving you the precise number, precisely because it’s a symbolic number. Now there’s a great number that no one can count. Does God know how many they are? What it means is it’s a vast, vast, vast number that you can’t put in any package. It’s from every tongue and tribe and people and nation.
It’s like saying that the Israelites in the Old Testament would be uncountable, as many as the sands of the sea. Well, strictly speaking, with modern demographics, you can count the number of Jews within a few hundred thousand, probably a few tens of thousands. If somebody comes along and says, “Therefore, the Bible is falsified,” I would want to reply, “No, that’s not understanding the language.”
What it’s saying is from one man, Abraham, you have this vast crowd of Jews. So likewise, from this one God-man, you have not just 144,000 literally, but you have the completeness of the people of God or, to put it another way, a vast crowd from every tongue and tribe and people and nation. So it seems to me it’s using ways of describing the people of God in different sorts of literary categories.
Male: [Inaudible]
Don: Yeah, there have been a lot of people who have argued that bits and pieces here have been drawn out of Jewish apocalyptic sources at one point or another. All I can say is it’s conceivable but certainly not demonstrable. John is such a creative, God-inspired writer I’m not sure the poor fellow is just doing scissors-and-paste style, patching stuff in. It would be a lot easier to guess what he’s doing if we found other tribal lists with the same configuration and could figure what the symbolism is.
I’m pretty sure I know why Judah is first. I can at least guess why you have Dan, but then why, when you’re one short, do you have this peculiar way of remedying it, Manasseh and Joseph? People have actually suggested there might be a text critical solution. Maybe Manasseh had been abbreviated in some manuscript Dan, so it would have been Joseph and Dan. Dan was there, and you don’t have the problem. Man and Dan. The fact of the matter is there’s not a single manuscript that justifies that speculation. It is only speculation.
Likewise, even if John is drawing out a parallel list of something else, at the end of the day, because we have no knowledge of such parallel lists, we have no literary control. We have no way of being sure. So then I would start to argue if the interpretation I’ve given is correct, it may be less important to sort out exactly the reasons for this order than to see that this is a way of saying the fullness, the completeness, of the antitypical people of God, the covenant people of God.
That certainly is a great theme in the Apocalypse, and it is a theme certainly in chapter 14 that is bound up in the number 144,000 who are with the Lamb on Mount Zion. We’ll come to that passage in due course. So yeah, it leaves some loose ends, but they’re loose ends I can live with because I don’t think they affect anything centrally.
Male: Is dispensationalism as a school of thought losing ground?
Don: Yes.
Male: Rapidly?
Don: That depends very much on where you are in the country and what denomination and so forth. There are parts where it is still very strong indeed. I think in many places, even where it’s assumed, it is no longer a point of division, and that’s already a big change.
It means at least you can talk about it and debate what the texts said, whereas up until 30 years ago, whole denominations split on this. If a pastor changed his mind on this one, he was out. In my view, that’s an important place to draw the line for a heresy charge.
Male: What is a brief definition of dispensationalism?
Don: That’s a good question, because dispensationalism has meant many things to different people. Many people who call themselves dispensationalists would not have been recognized by the father of twentieth-century dispensationalism, Scofield, at all.
The most common form of dispensationalism that ruled in a fair segment of evangelicalism in this country, the kind of dispensationalism that is found in Hal Lindsey’s book The Late Great Planet Earth (that’s a very good pop summary of it), holds that God’s dealings with the world and with his people have taken place in a number of dispensations. That is, he has dispensed his grace. He has operated in various ways, and they haven’t all been the same.
The way he has set things up, the kinds of patterns between himself and his image bearers have varied from age to age, from dispensation to dispensation. It’s not just a time slot, though. It’s a time period with certain characteristics of the God-man relationship being peculiar in it. So the first was the dispensation of innocence before the fall, and then you work through and work through until you get to the dispensation of law, which is Moses to the coming of Christ.
Then the dispensation of the church or of grace, and then the dispensation of the kingdom, which is the millennium in this scheme, and there are seven dispensations. In the history of dispensational thought, some have had more, some have had less, some have had 13, and so forth, but the most common one is seven.
So in that school, there used to be all kinds of charts, where you’d begin with the garden of Eden, and then you’d chart all of history all the way through the new heaven and the new earth and the lake of fire in seven dispensations. We were always in number six, the church age, which is also sometimes called the parenthesis, and then seven is the kingdom age, and that’s the millennium, and then the new heaven and the new earth. You’re organizing it that way.
Once you believe that this scheme is biblically grounded, then everything in the Bible must be interpreted to fit into one or more of those dispensations. The way God deals with his people on all kinds of fronts may be quite different under those various dispensations. There would be commonalities but a lot of differences.
Within that framework, people would argue that the Sermon on the Mount, for example, does not belong to the dispensation of grace, the dispensation of the church. It’s bound up instead with the kingdom, the millennium, which, in fact, is rejected by Jews, and that’s why the church was interposed, so you cannot apply the Sermon on the Mount directly to Christians today. You might draw some moral judgments from it, but that’s all.
So it becomes not simply a little eschatological picture about the end … disputing a few little details back there … it becomes ultimately a hermeneutical key for interpreting your whole Bible. It’s an all-embracing system. Now there are relatively few people of front-rank line today who buy the whole system. It has been weakened on all kinds of fronts, but many people buy bits and pieces of it and not other pieces and yet still call themselves dispensationalists.
So it’s getting harder and harder to define what a dispensationalist is today, but in terms of these details at the end, they hold that the church is raptured out of the way before a seven-year tribulation, followed by the millennium. That’s part of the scheme, and there’s quite a large number of people who still hold that view even though they don’t hold the rigid structure of the seven dispensations. Before you knock it all off, it is important to recognize that, in some sense, every Christian is a dispensationalist unless you’re offering sacrifices at the temple.
In other words, you are recognizing that the way God has dealt with his covenant people differs from age to age. You might not use the term dispensationalist, but unless you’re not eating pig and are offering sacrifices, you’re a dispensationalist of some kind or another, but not as the term was normally used. Does that clarify the issue? I will try to lay out what some of these structures are a little farther on.
