Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of the End Times from Revelation 6:9–17
… verse 21, which suggests that, in some ways, the exile is a kind of type of judgments to come, just as the flood in 2 Peter, universal as it is, or just about universal, is a kind of type of the ultimate judgment to come. “If that generation did not escape, how do you think we’ll escape fire at the end?” Peter asks.
Likewise, the language of judgment with respect to Jerusalem at the time of the exile is picked up again now in an apocalyptic vision of what still comes. Thus, we read in Ezekiel, chapter 14, verse 21, “For this is what the Sovereign Lord says: How much worse will it be when I send against Jerusalem my four dreadful judgments—sword and famine and wild beasts and plague—to kill its men and their animals!”
Probably this represents an intensification of what has been mentioned by the other three seals. In the ancient world, evil beasts are often what take over the land once you have some war and devastation. There was always some sort of contest between human beings and wild animals. There were lions in Israel in those days. Archaeologists have found their bones.
So when we read of Samson, for example, who fought a lion, there were lions there. There were creatures like that. You were taking your life in your hands in the wild. Just as there are parts of northern Canada where.… You don’t mind meeting a black bear, but you don’t want to meet a grizzly. There are parts of the far north where there are still packs of wolves. Wolves normally will keep a good distance from you, but you get a pack that’s hungry at the end of a long cold winter, and you wouldn’t want to be out there alone without a weapon.
We’re not so familiar with these categories, but one of the things that happened is once society broke down, once the troops left, once you got only slaves in and too few of those because a lot of people were transported, well, then the jungle encroaches again, as it were, and the animals encroach again. [Audio cuts off] the next one. It’s worth stopping a minute here to think just what is going on, what this has to say for us today.
These are not the categories in which we normally think. We’re so used to thinking of God in loving terms, intervening to bring about his salvation. Moreover, when we look at things like war and famine, when we look at pestilence.… Maybe not wild animals today but AIDS, a whole new generation of microbes that are coming about, enough evolving of all kinds of bacteria that our carefully wrought defenses are beginning to prove useless.
I go overseas now, and they give me all of these shots to stop this and that and the other, and then they tell me in the fine print, “Of course, they don’t work for this strand or that strand or the other strand.” Yes, I get my malaria shots, but there are some strands of malaria where they don’t have any shots. I got a typhoid shot when I was in England, went to Africa, and got typhoid anyway. I’m more or less protected against some forms of hepatitis. Other forms, you take your chances.
What does that mean from a Christian point of view? Is it all to be explained in terms of social dynamics and chemical reactions and natural evolution? Can’t we look at World War II and sort out what’s happening? After all, the injustice of the imposed Treaty of Versailles after World War I and terrible, terrible inflation, power vacuum, loss of self-respect, millions out of work, devalued currency, hunger.
Along comes a strong man and brings order, self-respect, a certain history of racism, in any case. Can’t we examine the social dynamics and see what’s going on? We don’t think in terms of God doing any of this, do we? I want to tell you quite frankly that not to think of God in these events is fundamentally unfaithful. It is fundamentally anti-Christian. It is fundamentally sub-biblical. It is fundamentally pagan.
If you believe that God really is in charge, if he really is sovereign, however much this God works through means, however much there are evil men out there who must give an account for themselves, at the end of the day, God speaks in the language of judgment as he speaks in the language of the cross. I don’t see how anybody can intelligently read the Old Testament and not see that. I don’t see how you can read the Apocalypse and not see that.
That means that when we look at World War II, we ought to be asking ourselves some questions. If God is speaking to us in the language of judgment, what is he saying? It’s remarkable, isn’t it? Think about it. The most sophisticated, most educated, most brilliantly evocative nation on the face of the earth (that’s what the Germans were; their universities were excellent beyond compare) was also the land of the Reformation. It sacrificed it all to liberal theology, to unbelief, to secularism, to naturalism.
There was the mighty British Empire on which the sun never set. It experienced mighty revivals, times of reform, church planting, but it also pushed slavery and exploitation. Although it had been voted out eventually, there was a whole heritage of it. There, too, despite the wonderful Christian heritage, largely sacrificed universities to spiritual wasteland, still talking, nevertheless, in glowing optimistic terms.
How was World War I described? “The war to end all wars.” Then we had a great depression and a war, and then a cold war. What is God saying through Vietnam? It’s not enough, regardless of your politics, to think either left or right. It’s not enough to say, “Those crazy right-wing people. The protesters were right. At least those protesters were good and moral people, weren’t they?”
Or on the other hand to say, “If we had just gone in there, we could have won. All we had to do was bomb and mine Haiphong Harbor, go and send in the B-52 Stratofortresses over Hanoi, and we would have stopped that thing. Our military fought with one hand behind its back. That’s the lesson you learn from it.”
There’s some truth to all of that. Either way, for that matter. It’s also a sub-Christian analysis, for what you have is judgment … judgment on our arrogance, judgment on our self-sufficiency, judgment on our pride, licked and shamed by a Third-World banana republic. Aren’t there any lessons to learn there anymore?
It is vital that we understand that God is in charge, and although it’s not easy to read the lessons of providence, which should never be learned and read off too quickly, too easily, too lightly, there are, on the grand scale, some huge moral lessons to learn, and to fail to learn them is to be as blind as the people in Scripture when these things happened to them.
Now we come to seals five and six, and now the pace changes, so we need to take these two a little separately. Instead of one, two, three, four horses, now we find things a little different. This is the one seal that is not taking place on the earth.
“When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God and the testimony they had maintained.
They called out in a loud voice, ‘How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?’ Then each of them was given a white robe, and they were told to wait a little longer, until the number of their fellow servants and brothers who were to be killed as they had been was completed.”
The scene changes then, and now there’s an altar in heaven of some sort. The idea of heaven as the temple of God … not as if God is living in a temple in heaven but all of heaven being the temple of God … is a common enough one. Think of Habakkuk 2:20: “The Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him.” It is not entirely clear whether that means his temple in Jerusalem or his holy temple in heaven.
It’s probably unimportant here to decide whether or not this is the altar of incense or the altar of sacrifice, the altar of burnt offering. It’s just picking up the language of Old Testament temple-ness. The same imagery can be used in another way, and is, as we’ll see in the last lecture, in chapters 21–22, where the whole point of the new heaven and the new earth is that there’s no temple there. We’ll come to that in due course.
Perhaps the reason for mention of the altar here is that these martyred Christians are viewed as a kind of sacrifice. They’re not a sacrifice that takes away sin or anything like that, but they have sacrificed themselves. The reason they’ve been sacrificed, we’re told, is because of the word of God and the testimony they had maintained.
What is meant by the word of God here is because of the message of the gospel. In other words, they had been so sold out to it, so committed to it, they wouldn’t flinch, they wouldn’t budge, they weren’t going to compromise it, so because of their testimony, because of the integrity with which they held intact the word of God, they suffered.
Morris writes, “John’s words are a reminder that throughout history there has been a persistent hostility toward deeply committed Christians on the part of those wielding power.” Every two or three weeks, those of us with some missionary channels know of pastors and Christian leaders in Iran who are being slaughtered. Since the Ayatollah has taken over, that small Christian community has grown from just a few hundred to thousands and thousands and thousands, all underground. The pastors and others are now being slaughtered.
In one part of the world or another, some slaughtering is going on. There have been more Christian martyrs in the last 150 years than the previous 18 centuries. That’s the truth. At the same time, what is interesting here is their cry. “How long, O Lord, until you avenge our deaths?” There have been many, many commentators who have struggled with this. Do Christians talk about vengeance? Isn’t this sort of denial of the Sermon on the Mount?
Many is the commentator who says, “Let us be quite frank. This might be apocalyptic and it might be Jewish, but it’s not Christian.” I think that’s a bit too easy. The point is not that these people are simply bitter or trying to get tit-for-tat justice or eye-for-eye satisfaction. That’s not the point at all. The point is because they are the Lord’s people they do see the necessity for justice. If God, finally, is not just, if there is not payback time to the unjust, then the whole moral universe collapses.
Meanwhile, these people apparently are aware of others suffering. If they’ve come through it.… The Bible doesn’t make it very clear whether the saints in heaven know very much about what’s going on among the saints of the earth, but they’ve lived through it and died because of it. In that framework, even if they don’t know much about what’s going on on the earth, they know enough to know that some of their relatives are facing the same things. “How long, O Lord?”
The intriguing thing is that the answer is not given in terms of some soporific like, “Well, things are getting better. It won’t be long now. Hang in there.” Rather, the end can’t come yet because there aren’t enough people who have been martyred yet. That’s what the answer is. That is, the number of those who still must die by martyrdom must be completed. God has that in his control too, and the end won’t come until that has been brought about. That’s what the text says.
When they approach God and say, “God, holy and true,” it is precisely because they recognize him to be holy, because they recognize that he must be faithful and true, that they do hold that judgment must come. Moreover, this whole stance has a whole heritage in the Old Testament. Isn’t that part of the burden of the prophet Habakkuk? Read Habakkuk. Habakkuk’s problem is not that God brings judgment to the covenant people.
Habakkuk’s problem is he can’t understand why God should bring judgment to the covenant people, even though they deserve it, by the hands of an empire that is even more wicked than they. “How long shall I cry for help? How long will you not hear?” Habakkuk asks (chapter 1, verse 2). The book of Habakkuk is then brought up as a kind of dialogue between God and Habakkuk crying for help.
It’s not just self-pity. It’s not as if he’s a whiner. It’s because from his perspective it looks as if God’s honor is at stake, his integrity, his holiness. “You’re the holy and true God, and this does not look fair.” Those who dwell on the earth becomes in the Apocalypse almost a semi-technical expression for human hostility against God. They dwell on the earth, and they don’t have heaven’s perspective. They’re finite. They’re rebellious.
In chapter 11, verse 10, which we’ll see next week, those who dwell on the earth are those who rejoice over God’s two witnesses. In chapter 13, those who dwell on the earth worship the Beast. In chapter 17, those who dwell on the earth are drunk with the wine of the fornication of the great harlot. In chapter 17, those who dwell on the earth are not written in the Lamb’s Book of Life. Those who dwell on the earth, therefore, are not just nice people who live here, your next-door neighbors. It’s the whole world in alienation against God.
To the martyrs, then, is given a white robe. Probably this is a way of saying they’re clothed with garments of light. They’re stored up in heaven. They are themselves purified of everything. Probably not much more than that. White robes are usually not symbols so much of triumph or the like as of blessedness and purity. The redeemed throng in chapter 7, verse 11, are arrayed in white robes.
In chapter 7, verses 13–14, those who come out of the great tribulation wash their robes white in the blood of the Lamb. They’re victory robes. They’re pure, like those in Laodicea. They’re counseled to buy gold, white robes, and eye salve. White robes, in other words, does not mean glorified bodies or anything like that, because certainly the Christians in Laodicea are not being counseled to buy glorified bodies. The point is simply that they’re going to be pure and blessed, cleaned up.
Now in terms of immediate historical reference, it may be that those who have died already are those who have died under Nero’s persecution, and now they’re pictured as crying out, and there are more who are about to die under Domitian’s persecution, Trajan’s persecution, and a string of persecutions all the way down to Constantine, and a lot of persecution since then as well. In other words, this may have had an immediate bearing on some of these people. They are told, in effect, to “control their impatience but to rest in the enjoyment of their blessedness,” as one commentator puts it. Isn’t that nicely put? That’s the fifth seal.
Now the sixth. “I watched as he opened the sixth seal.” Notice in five, six, and seven there are no more beasts or calling anything forward. There are only four beasts, and the four beasts say, “Come” to each of the four horsemen, so they’re not in view here at all. “There was a great earthquake. The sun turned black like sackcloth made of goat hair, the whole moon turned blood red, and the stars in the sky fell to earth, as late figs drop from a fig tree when shaken by a strong wind. The sky receded like a scroll …”
That’s where the line in “It Is Well with My Soul” comes from: “The sky be rolled back as a scroll.” This is the passage it is drawn from. “… rolling up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place. Then the kings of the earth, the princes, the generals, the rich, the mighty, and every slave and every free man hid in caves and among the rocks of the mountains. They called to the mountains and the rocks, ‘Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb!’ ”
Notice that linking again. “Him who sits on the throne and the wrath of the Lamb.” “For the great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand?” Now you have cosmic disturbances. There is no doubt that, at one level, you’re dealing with typical Hebrew apocalyptic poetry. When you get stars falling to the earth, at a literal level it’s not quite what happens, but you are getting shocking disturbances that frighten people in terms of earthquake and destruction.
In part, this too is bound up with Old Testament passages in which God comes down, and when he comes, instead of the day of the Lord being a time of revival and blessing, it turns out to be a terrifying time of judgment. When he comes to Sinai, you get earthquakes, and the mountain shakes, and there’s thunder and lightning, and the people are afraid and ask Moses to mediate for them. When God comes close, it’s not just a happy time. Unless we are ready to meet this God, it is a terrifying time.
Thus, Isaiah prophesies in chapter 2 that people will hide in caves from the terror of the Lord when he arises to shake the earth mightily. It’s from passages like that that this sort of thing is drawn. Or Haggai, chapter 2, verse 6: “Once again in a little while I will shake the heavens and the earth.” The sun turning black as sackcloth of hair, the moon becoming as blood, the earthquake that accompanies it.
There are passages like this that are quoted by Paul on the day of Pentecost, with another slight twist, coming from Joel. “The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon into blood.” The stars of heaven are pictured as falling to the earth like unripe figs in a winter gale. That is, before they can be plucked properly. A winter gale comes along, and down they come. If you have a fruit tree or you’ve ever lived on a farm, you sometimes see that. Before they’ve actually been harvested, in comes the wind, and there’s terrible destruction and damage. That’s what’s going on.
Isaiah 34 speaks of the host of heaven fading away as a leaf falling from the fig tree. However you understand all of the judgments that take place here, and there is, in my view, a mingling of poetic language and real disaster, like earthquakes that really do shake you up every once in a while. Think of the kind of humbling that has gone on in Japan about the wonder of all of their engineering in light of the tragedy of Kobe.
Eventually, what happens? You get verses 15–17. Reread those verses. They are astonishingly bleak. Nor is it just reserved for the rich and the powerful, but the rich and the powerful and the slaves, the wealthy and the poor, all of them crying, “Hide us from the wrath of the Lamb.” There are some who treat this as being a picture of the judgment at the end and only at the end, but in my view, the author purposely here is still not trying to specify.
There have been times again and again in church history when there have been sufficient judgments that people do start crying out to God. It’s amazing how often people in trenches find religion. It’s often noticed. When you start having many, many disasters and judgments and deaths, not only at the individual, psychological level but even in nations, do not people start crying, “Hide me from the wrath of the Lamb”? But that is prefiguring what happens on the last day as well.
When I was a boy, I learned a piece. It was a sung hymn. On the level of poetry it’s a bit of a doggerel, but it’s quite powerful just the same.
I dreamed that the great judgment morning
Had dawned, and the trumpet had blown;
I dreamed that the nations had gathered
To judgment before the white throne;
From the throne came a bright, shining angel,
Who stood on the land and the sea,
And swore with his hand raised to heaven
That time was no longer to be.
And, oh, what a weeping and wailing,
As the lost were told of their fate;
They cried for the rocks and the mountains,
They prayed, but their prayer was too late.
The rich man came to the judgment
His wealth had all melted away;
The poor man stood in the docket,
His debts were too heavy to pay …
The soul that had put off salvation,
“Not today; I’ll get saved by and by,
No time now to think of religion!”
At last he had found time to die.
The good man stood in the judgment,
But his self-righteous rags would not do;
The men who had crucified Jesus
Had passed off as mortal men do …
And, oh, what a weeping and wailing,
As the lost were told of their fate;
They cried for the rocks and the mountains,
They prayed, but their prayer was too late.
Those themes are so unpopular in our postmodern, relativistic society that we squirm when we hear them, let alone say them. I don’t see how you can read your Bible and not see it. God holds us to account. This theme will get a lot worse in the book of Revelation before it gets any better. The most horrific passage on hell in all of the Bible is Revelation 14.
Comments or questions on this before we press on?
Male: Based on verse 16, are we to interpret that before this time mankind’s eyes were still closed as to why all these things were happening, but now mankind’s eyes are open, so to speak?
Don Carson: I’m sure that ultimately on the last day that will be seen, but on the other hand, it happens in some measure again and again. It doesn’t take much reading of church history to recognize how when disasters come many people turn to the Lord. In the darkest days of war, really horrible war, the churches are filled.
It’s because you’re forced to deal with issues of life and death then, when it’s your son, your husband who could die, when you’ve wiped out a tenth of that generation’s young manhood, and then a quarter, which is what happened in the First World War, and then a third, when your cities are being bombed and flattened.
See, I don’t think we understand enough about this, because in North America we’ve been spared the worst kind of ravages of modern warfare because we’ve been removed by an ocean or two. People understand when I talk about these things in Europe. There are a lot of sayings that came out of World War I. “There are no atheists in a foxhole.” It’s overstated, but there’s some truth to it. It doesn’t mean they repent. It means in bitterness and rage they cry to be saved from the wrath of the Lamb.
Now obviously, if this is a picture that doesn’t nail it down to one time or place, then obviously it finds its ultimate fulfillment in the ultimate disclosure of the wrath of the Lamb, but the text itself does not sort of lay out and specify just when the light dawns in this respect or something like that. It just isn’t interested in doing that yet. Other questions?
Male: [Inaudible]
Don: I will be saying a little bit more about it when we start with the trumpets, because then you’re being forced into structural questions. Do the trumpets succeed the seals? Are they parallel to them, or do the trumpets collapse into the last of the seals? You start to be forced to that kind of thing, but at the moment, I’m trying to work through inductively so I don’t force the issue too soon and sort of channel you in a certain direction.
I want you to see as you read through this stuff how it would be read, on the one hand, by people in the first century who’ve just gone through Nero and are facing Domitian, and on the other hand, how it is something that happens to be true again and again and again in the history of the church, and on the other hand, how it’s climactically true at the end. As you turn these things over in your mind and you look at the text and say, “What is there here that forces you to one particular interpretation yet?” The answer is I don’t see anything. Not yet.
There’s more coming, but it seems to me that very often the most dogmatic answers in all of these areas have come about because of artificially imposed sequences and structures forced onto the text just a shade too early. It’s one of the reasons I’ve put off talking about structure until we have more text. There’s a sense in which you cannot reasonably talk about structure until you’re familiar enough with the text to know what the issues are. But I will deal with that in a little bit in the next hour.
We come now to chapter 7 which, I suppose, could be seen as a kind of interlude between the sixth and the seventh seals (many commentaries call it just that), but there is a sense in which interlude is not quite the right word. That sounds as if there’s sort of a slowing down of the process. There is no sense as you read this as if you come to the end of the sixth seal and now there’s a break; we’ll have something else, and then the persecutions and the sufferings start up again.
Rather, it’s while this is going on there is another whole side of things that is being looked at. Instead of all of the judgments now falling, you have the 144,000 and the great multitude around the throne. So now instead of looking at the people on whom all of the judgments fall, you’re now looking at, however you understand them, the people of God. You have a similar interlude in the seven trumpet sequence between the sixth and the seventh, but not, we’ll see later, in the seven bowl sequence. We’ll worry about that when the time comes.
Clearly, this chapter is divided into two parts, and a great deal of controversy in interpretation turns on how you relate those two parts. You have, in the first part, the 144,000, all nicely listed for you down to verse 8. Then after this, the great multitude that no one could count from every nation, tribe, people, and language, over against the 144,000, all drawn from the 12 tribes of Israel.
So how are we to understand these two groups? There are many, many opinions. The dominant ones are, first, the 144,000 represent Jews. If you’re a premillennial, pretribulational, dispensationalist Christian, they are 144,000 Jews who suffered martyrdom during the seven-year tribulation after the church has been raptured out of the way. Thus, they have no integral relation with the great multitude, which represents another group. We’ll come to them in a moment.
Another interpretation says these aren’t Jews (though they’re called Jews, it’s symbolic, for reasons we’ll see in a moment) but, in fact, 144,000 represent the proportion of martyrs. That is, they belong to the people of God, but they’re not the whole people of God; they’re just the martyred people of God. It’s not just that there have only been 144,000. There have clearly been more than those, but this represents the martyred proportion, whatever that proportion is.
Still a third interpretation holds that the 144,000 are the great multitude. That is, they’re different ways of referring to the same people. In fact, the discussion is complicated by the fact that the 144,000 show up a little later. Strictly speaking, you really need to integrate this passage with the other passage or else give a jolly good reason why not, which is also possible. We came to the conclusion that the white horse didn’t have the same referent in the two places where it shows up.
On the other hand, when you have the 144,000 cropping up just the way they do in chapter 14.… “Then I looked, and there before me was the Lamb, standing on Mount Zion, and with him the 144,000 who had his name and his Father’s name written on their foreheads.” That ties it back to these 144,000 so tightly it’s hard to deny that they’re the same people.
That means to come to grips with your decision on what this chapter is about, strictly speaking, you should try to link it to what chapter 14 is about. Well, let’s press on until we get to verse 4, the 144,000, and then I’ll come clean. There are other interpretations besides the one I’ve given you, but I’ll come clean in a moment.
“After this I saw four angels standing at the four corners of the earth, holding back the four winds of the earth to prevent any wind from blowing on the land or on the sea or on any tree. Then I saw another angel coming up from the east, having the seal of the living God. He called out in a loud voice to the four angels who had been given power to harm the land and the sea: ‘Do not harm the land or the sea or the trees until we put a seal on the foreheads of the servants of our God.’
Then I heard the number of those who were sealed: 144,000 from all the tribes of Israel. From the tribe of Judah 12,000 were sealed, from the tribe of Reuben 12,000, from the tribe of Gad 12,000, from the tribe of Asher 12,000,” and so on, all the way down. What are we to make of this? The four angels standing at the four corners of the earth should no more be taken as an indication of first-century cosmology than the depiction of the throne room of heaven should be taken as necessary physical dimensions and structure of heaven. You’re dealing with language.
It is not uncommon to this day to speak of the four corners of the earth, the four points of the compass, or the four winds of the heavens. I remember when I was only 9, 10, or 11, somebody wrote in to the Montreal Star, which we faithfully subscribed to and read in those days (it has since gone bankrupt) …
My father read out this long letter to the editor, which was pooh-poohing and dismissing and mocking all of these stupid Christians who held that their Bible was genuinely the Word of God when it had notions about the sun rising, when everybody knows the sun doesn’t rise; the earth rotates on its axis. Saying, that proves that the Bible is completely unscientific and anybody who believes that this is the Word of God is some kind of twit.
My father said to me, “What do you think of that, Don?” Well, I said, “I don’t know what to say about that. What am I supposed to say?” He said, “Look at page one.” He turned it over. It said, “Sunrise: 4:36 a.m.” You’re dealing with the phenomenology of language. There’s a great deal of the Bible that is in phenomenological language. That is, it’s the way things appear without any kind of ontological statement or claim being made. It’s very important to see that and not try to read in too much.
If you have four angels standing at the four corners of the earth holding back the four winds, what you are really saying is two things. First, these are all of the winds there are, and second, angels are regularly depicted in apocalyptic literature as agents in God’s hand controlling what goes on on the earth. That’s all you have.
Now these winds quite clearly in the context are potentially destructive. You get winds churning up the seas, and you have typhoons and floods. Just think of the kind of desperate damage that happens in the Bay of Bengal every once in a while. You get a good typhoon coming in, and you lose half a million people as tidal waves come through. It’s unbelievable.
Or they blow over the trees. It says, “Don’t let them blow over the trees until a certain seal takes place.” The point is, with many farmers around, you don’t want all of the fruit trees and so forth to be blown over, because then you’ve lost the whole value of the land and the income, and you have famine and destruction from another source. So that’s what’s going on. They’re given the power to hold back the wind.
There’s another angel who comes up from the east, having the seal of the living God. The seal is probably some sort of signet ring seal, but this is the seal of God, so anybody who’s sealed with this seal is owned by God. There’s an ownership thing here. Once a person is sealed with his seal.… That’s the imagery.
That he comes from the east.… Oh, people have speculated endlessly about that one. I’m not sure. It may be tied with the fact, for example, that in the vision of the temple in Ezekiel the glory of the Lord enters from the east or something like that, or it may be something as simple as the fact that if this is being written anywhere in the Mediterranean at all, except in Jerusalem, and it’s not being written there, then east is where Jerusalem is. East is where salvation has come from. It has come from Judea, from Judah, from Jerusalem. It may be as simple as that. I’m not sure.
Or it may simply be part of the drama language, just part of the structure, and you’re not supposed to read any more than that. I’m not sure. I tend to go for the second option, but I’m not certain. In any case, he calls out in a loud voice to the four angels who have been given power to harm the land and the sea. So they have the power either to send the wind or to hold it back. They’re in charge of the wind dimension, as it were.
What he says is, “Don’t harm the land until something takes place; namely, that the servants of our God are sealed on their foreheads.” This introduces a major theme in the book of Revelation, one that recurs again and again and again and one we’ll look at in great detail when we get to chapters 13–14. There is endless speculation about seals and 666 and all that kind of thing today. I think later on in chapters 13–14 the language is very clear as to what it means, but it’s introduced here, so let me say something about it at first.
The language is drawn from Ezekiel 9, and it’s worth looking at the passage. This is a vision of Ezekiel. “I heard him call out in a loud voice, ‘Bring the guards of the city here, each with a weapon in his hand.’ And I saw six men coming from the direction of the upper gate, which faces north, each with a deadly weapon in his hand. With them was a man clothed in linen who had a writing kit at his side.” You didn’t have pens or computers. A writing kit. So you have to have some sort of ink well or black and some sort of quill pen and different receptacles for putting your stuff in. You had a little kit.
“They came in and stood beside the bronze altar. Now the glory of the Lord of Israel went up from above the cherubim, where it had been, and moved to the threshold of the temple. Then the Lord called to the man clothed in linen who had the writing kit at his side and said to him, ‘Go throughout the city of Jerusalem and put a mark on the foreheads of those who grieve and lament over all the detestable things that are done in it.’
As I listened, he said to the others [the people with the swords], ‘Follow him through the city and kill, without showing pity or compassion. Slaughter old men, young men and maidens, women and children, but do not touch anyone who has the mark. Begin at my sanctuary.’ So they began with the elders who were in front of the temple.”
Do you see what’s going on there? God is bringing terrible judgment to the city, but before the judgments fall, they’re held back, as it were, until God sends in the man with the ink kit, with the writing kit, and goes in and puts an X on the forehead of all of the people who are righteous. Their righteousness is defined as grieving over everything that’s evil in the city, unable to change it but ashamed of it, grieving over it, loathing it, not participating in it. Then God says, “All right, go,” and the destroyers go in, and everybody is killed except these people.
Now the intriguing thing, to anticipate where we’ll go a little bit when we get to chapters 13–14, is that a little later on, the Devil, through his various agents, puts a mark on the forehead of all of his people, and there, unless you have his mark, you can’t buy and sell. You can’t survive. We’ll come to the significance of that in due course, but the point is that unless you have the Devil’s mark, you face the Devil’s wrath.
So you either have the Devil’s mark, and then you’re safe from the Devil’s wrath, but then, in the whole sequence of the book you’re open up to God’s wrath, or you have God’s mark, in which case you’re safe from God’s wrath, but then you’re open up to the Devil’s wrath. So in terms of the whole thrust and theology of the book, I think it becomes very clear in chapters 13–14 everybody has at least one mark, and you face the other wrath.
So the question becomes.… Whose mark do you have and whose wrath do you want? It’s as blunt as that. You can’t be neutral. So now, before this peculiar judgment from God, God’s people (this 144,000; we’ll worry about them in a moment) get a mark on them. The language is drawn from Ezekiel. It’s the same kind of thing. The judgments are spared until that mark comes on, so when the winds do come and there’s a lot of destruction and destroying and everything, they’re spared.
