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In the following commentary, words in CAPS indicate the biblical text, while words in lower case indicate the commentary on that text.

Studies in Revelation

by Dr. John H. Roller

Chapter 7

Introduction

Chapter 7 is an interlude between the sixth seal (most, if not all, of which has already been fulfilled) and the seventh seal (which relates to the Second Coming itself and certainly has not been fulfilled). This interlude is a description of two groups of people. The people in both groups are saved and will be in the Kingdom of God, but there are some differences between the two groups. These are descriptions of two different groups of people within the true Church of God.

Revelation 7:1

AFTER THIS, I SAW FOUR ANGELS STANDING AT THE FOUR CORNERS OF THE EARTH (we know, and John, the author of this book, knew, that the earth doesn’t literally have “corners” – it’s not a square; it’s a sphere – but this is a common way of speaking, and we use it ourselves, just as he used it, to mean “all around the world”), HOLDING (back) THE FOUR WINDS OF THE EARTH (the north wind, the south wind, the east wind and the west wind), SO THAT NO WIND WOULD BLOW ON THE EARTH, OR ON THE SEA, OR ON ANY TREE. This statement speaks of a pause – a delay – in the vision. Before we move from the sixth seal to the seventh seal, the angels are commanded to hold back the winds of judgment and keep everything calm while the next few events take place.

Revelation 7:2

I SAW ANOTHER ANGEL (in addition to the four angels mentioned in verse 1) ASCEND FROM THE SUNRISE (the east), HAVING THE SEAL OF THE LIVING GOD (in his hand). HE CRIED WITH A LOUD VOICE (shouted) TO THE FOUR ANGELS TO WHOM IT (the power) WAS GIVEN (by God) TO HARM THE EARTH AND THE SEA (by releasing the winds and allowing them to blow),

Revelation 7:3

SAYING, “DON’T HARM THE EARTH, NEITHER THE SEA, NOR THE TREES, UNTIL WE HAVE SEALED THE BONDSERVANTS OF OUR GOD ON THEIR FOREHEADS!” We will hear more about people being “marked” with a “seal” on their foreheads in a later chapter, but there it will actually be a parody of what has happened in this chapter. There, it will be the Antichrist who demands that a “mark” (or “seal”) be placed on the foreheads of his followers, but God was there first (here in chapter 7), putting a “mark” (or “seal”) on the foreheads of His servants. The forehead, of course, is closely related to the brain, which has to do with the processes of thought. A “seal” (or a “mark”) on the forehead indicates a protection of one’s thought processes and beliefs. These are people whose mental capacity is under God’s control and is directed toward Him. These are true believers. They are known to be true believers by this “seal” on their foreheads, which is a feature of John’s vision, not a literal, visible seal that people in this world can actually see.

Revelation 7:4

I HEARD THE NUMBER OF THOSE WHO WERE SEALED, ONE HUNDRED FORTY-FOUR THOUSAND, SEALED OUT OF EVERY TRIBE OF THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL:

Revelation 7:5

OF THE TRIBE OF JUDAH WERE SEALED TWELVE THOUSAND, OF THE TRIBE OF REUBEN TWELVE THOUSAND, OF THE TRIBE OF GAD TWELVE THOUSAND,

Revelation 7:6

OF THE TRIBE OF ASHER TWELVE THOUSAND, OF THE TRIBE OF NAPHTALI TWELVE THOUSAND, OF THE TRIBE OF MANASSEH TWELVE THOUSAND,

Revelation 7:7

OF THE TRIBE OF SIMEON TWELVE THOUSAND, OF THE TRIBE OF LEVI (this is a bit of a surprise, since the Levites were not usually included in the lists of the twelve tribes that we find in the Old Testament; correspondingly, for some unknown reason, the tribe of Dan is omitted from this list) TWELVE THOUSAND, OF THE TRIBE OF ISSACHAR TWELVE THOUSAND,

Revelation 7:8

OF THE TRIBE OF ZEBULON TWELVE THOUSAND, OF THE TRIBE OF JOSEPH (usually called “the tribe of Ephraim” in the Old Testament) TWELVE THOUSAND, OF THE TRIBE OF BENJAMIN WERE SEALED TWELVE THOUSAND. Who are these people? What does John mean when he says that they are from the twelve tribes of Israel? Why the emphasis – again and again and again – on each specific tribe? Most of the book of Revelation is very obviously symbolic, and we interpret the things in it symbolically; we figure out what is indicated by any given symbol. We see horses; we hear souls crying out from under an altar; we see stars falling; and we try to figure out what these things mean. I think that these few verses are written in this unusual way to “clue” us not to try to do that. The specific reference to each tribe in these verses is there to tell us to keep the emphasis on the tribes of Israel. These people are really exactly what it sounds like they are – Jewish Christians – people who can literally trace their ancestry back to one of the twelve tribes, but who have received the Lord Jesus Christ as their Messiah and Savior. I think it’s interesting where this pause in the vision is placed in relationship to the fulfillment of the prophecy. We’ve been saying all along that these seals are fulfilled in chronological order. We’ve seen them work their way from AD 30 almost up to the end – almost to our own times. In fact, we’re just about ready for the seventh seal and the Second Coming of Christ when the “pause button” is pressed and now the subject of Jewish Christians is mentioned, right here. At what time in history have large numbers of Jewish people ever turned to Jesus Christ for salvation? Since the first century, that hasn’t happened in any century until the middle and late twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century. We have suddenly seen a dramatic increase in the number of Jewish people who have accepted Jesus as their Savior. When my father, who was Jewish, became a Christian (in 1943), it was very rare – almost unheard-of; and when he went to New York City to preach to the Jewish people that they should receive Jesus as their Messiah, he was thought to be crazy (the Yiddish word that they called him is “meshuggeneh”). Most Jews didn’t believe in Jesus. My father found just a tiny handful of other Jewish believers in Jesus in New York to fellowship with. But, now, we have Jews For Jesus, the Union of Messianic Jewish Congregations, Chosen People Ministries, Messianic Jewish Ministries and several other such major national and international organizations of Jewish Christians. It’s been estimated that there may be close to 500,000 Jewish Christians in the world, so that 144,000 is too small a number to represent them, instead of too large a number, as it would have been in my father’s time. The 144,000 then is a somewhat symbolic number, representing the full number of Jews who would turn to Christ at the time the prophecy is speaking of. It seems striking to me that this reference to what appears to me to be literal Jewish Christians should come at the very point in the prophecy that is being fulfilled in our own times, precisely when I would expect it to be. If I had been living back in 1900, and had held this interpretation, I would have been saying, “Chapter 6 has been fulfilled, but we haven’t seen this great turning of Jews to Christ. I expect that it will happen sometime within the next 100 years.” And I would have been right, because it has indeed happened.

Revelation 7:9

AFTER THESE THINGS I LOOKED, AND BEHOLD (“Look!”), A GREAT MULTITUDE (an enormous crowd), WHICH NO MAN COULD NUMBER (that sounds to me like many times more than 144,000; it’s easy enough to count 144,000 people – there are more than that in many hundreds of American cities), OUT OF EVERY NATION (not just the Jewish nation, but every Gentile nation, from Croatia to South Africa to the Philippines to Japan to Canada and the United States and every other country in the world) AND OF ALL TRIBES (not just the twelve tribes of Israel, but every one of the 500 American Indian tribes, and all the “tribal” people that live in the backwoods parts of India and Afghanistan and New Guinea and China and dozens of other countries), PEOPLES (“nations” that have no “country” of their own, like the Kurds and the Uyghurs and the Chechens and the Basques), AND LANGUAGES (there are over 12,000 different, mutually unintelligible languages in the world, and every one of them is represented by at least one person in this crowd), STANDING BEFORE THE THRONE (of God) AND BEFORE THE LAMB (Jesus), DRESSED IN WHITE ROBES, WITH PALM BRANCHES IN THEIR HANDS.

Revelation 7:10

THEY CRIED WITH A LOUD VOICE (shouted), SAYING, “SALVATION BE TO (rather, “comes from”) OUR GOD, WHO SITS ON THE THRONE, AND TO (rather, “from”) THE LAMB (Jesus)!” These are people who are saved because they understand and believe that salvation comes only from God and from Jesus, God’s Son, and they have put their trust in Him.

Revelation 7:11

ALL THE ANGELS WERE STANDING AROUND THE THRONE, THE ELDERS, AND THE FOUR LIVING CREATURES (described in chapter 4); AND THEY FELL ON THEIR FACES BEFORE HIS (God’s) THRONE, AND WORSHIPED GOD,

Revelation 7:12

SAYING, “AMEN (‘So be it!’)! BLESSING, GLORY, WISDOM, THANKSGIVING, HONOR, POWER, AND MIGHT (seven separate things!), BE(long) TO OUR GOD FOREVER AND EVER! AMEN (‘So be it!’).”

Revelation 7:13

ONE OF THE ELDERS (described in chapter 4) ANSWERED (responded to this statement), SAYING TO ME (John, the author of the book of Revelation), “THESE WHO ARE ARRAYED IN WHITE ROBES, WHO ARE THEY, AND FROM WHERE DID THEY COME?” I’m sure we would like to know the answer to that question, and I’m sure it was on John’s mind, as well, when he received this vision.

Revelation 7:14

I (John) TOLD HIM (the elder), “MY LORD, YOU KNOW (implying, ‘I don’t know’).” HE (the elder) SAID TO ME (John), “THESE ARE THOSE WHO CAME OUT OF (or, ‘safely through’) THE GREAT TRIBULATION (or, ‘terrible persecution’ – but I have to tell you something about coming safely through a terrible persecution. It’s not as comfortable as it may sound to us at first glance. We tend to think that the phrase ‘come safely through the terrible persecution’ means that while the persecution rages all around us, and thousands of other people are tortured and killed, somehow God protects us, and it’s quiet right where we are, like in the eye of a hurricane; and, at the end of it all, we emerge untouched. That’s not at all what the elder meant. He went on to explain what happened to ‘those who came safely through the terrible persecution’). THEY WASHED THEIR ROBES, AND MADE THEM WHITE IN THE LAMB’S BLOOD (They maintained the purity of their faith in the midst of the terrible persecution. Every martyr who has ever been burned at the stake – anyone who has ever given his life for Christ, no matter what torture, or what kind of death, they experienced – can be said to have ‘come safely through the terrible persecution’ – not ‘safely’ physically, but ‘safely’ spiritually. If you persevere to the end, and your faith is not diminished, and you do not give up because of the persecution, and you die in that condition of faith, you have ‘come safely through’ – that’s what he really means).

Revelation 7:15

THEREFORE (because they have maintained their faith, right up to the end of their lives, even despite the suffering that they have endured as a result of doing so) THEY ARE (standing) BEFORE THE THRONE OF GOD (in this vision), THEY (will) SERVE HIM DAY AND NIGHT IN HIS TEMPLE (in eternity). HE WHO SITS ON THE THRONE (God) WILL SPREAD HIS TENT OVER THEM (not while the persecution is going on, but after they have ‘come safely through’ it, there will come a time – after the resurrection, and in the new world – when God will protect them and there can be no further persecution – or any suffering at all, for that matter – as we will see both in the next verse, and in the final chapters of the book).

Revelation 7:16

THEY WILL NEVER BE HUNGRY (I can barely appreciated the significance of that promise. The moment my stomach gives me the slightest indication that I’m in need of food, I can quickly run to the refrigerator, or to a restaurant, and within minutes I have all the food I can eat, and I can’t be hungry again for several hours. But there are people in this world who are constantly hungry, day and night, all of their lives, who never get enough to eat to satisfy their hunger at any meal that they ever eat. I am sure that this promise means a lot more to them than it does to me!), NEITHER THIRST ANY MORE (the same could be said about thirst that is said about hunger); NEITHER WILL THE SUN BEAT ON THEM, NOR ANY HEAT (Where I live, if it gets too hot, I just go indoors and turn on the air conditioning; it’s hard for me to appreciate what a wonderful promise this is! There are many, many people who have to endure whatever tortures the weather throws at them, because they don’t have the kind of equipment, to shelter them, that I have);

Revelation 7:17

FOR (all of this is true because) THE LAMB WHO IS IN THE MIDST OF THE THRONE (Jesus) SHEPHERDS THEM (think of Psalm 23:1), AND LEADS THEM TO SPRINGS OF WATERS OF LIFE (think of Psalm 23:2). AND GOD WILL WIPE AWAY EVERY TEAR FROM THEIR EYES.”

Conclusion

I believe that this “enormous crowd” is a picture of the total Church of Jesus Christ – all the people throughout all the world at all times and in all places who have ever trusted (or will ever trust) in Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior and “come safely through” whatever experiences they have had (or will have) in life, dying (at last) in faith, looking forward to the Second Coming of Christ, and includes also those who will never die, because they will still be alive when Jesus returns. Someone has estimated that perhaps 10% of all the people who have ever lived have accepted Christ and have followed Him. How they made that estimate is beyond me, but it’s a figure that Billy Graham quotes, and I quote it quoting him. Someone else has estimated that since the creation of the world, approximately 140,000,000,000 people have been born and lived, and all but the last 7,000,000,000 of them have died. The “enormous crowd” of people that we have in the world today (about 7,000,000,000 people) are just all that is left of the 140,000,000,000 people that have lived at one time or another since the creation of the world. The other 133,000,000,000 are already dead. If it’s true that 10% of all the people who have ever lived have followed Christ, that means about 14,000,000,000 born-again Christians, and we expect to see them all on that great resurrection day that we so often sing about. “What a Gathering” that will be! Twice as many people as are alive in the world today will be raised from the dead to live forever. That’s an enormous crowd. It includes Jewish believers (those symbolically referred to as the “144,000”) who, in these last times, have turned to Christ, and also Jewish believers of previous eras and those Jewish believers who lived at a time when they could only look forward in faith to their promised Messiah. But the crowd is predominantly made up of the Gentile Christians from all over the world who have lived in the last couple of thousand years.

I’m sure that there are many other interpretations of chapter 7, but that’s mine, and I know that I haven’t dealt with every word or every verse in the chapter, but I think it fits in, and it’s an appropriate place to introduce the two pictures that we have of the people of God, because, chronologically, the 144,000 people of Israel come to faith in Jesus after the sixth seal and before the seventh, and the enormous crowd has been collecting all these thousands of years and is only completed just before the seventh seal and the Second Coming of Christ, so that the very next thing that we should expect to read about is the Second Coming of Christ itself. In Revelation 8:1, we will see a very strange, kind of anticlimactic, kind of suspenseful way of putting the Second Coming of Christ, because John really isn’t ready, at this point in his book, to unload the whole picture of the Second Coming to us.

In the letters to the seven churches, he didn’t mention the Second Coming at all. The last letter simply concluded with the last church age and the statement, “If you have ears, listen to what the Spirit says to the churches.” That closes the vision; there is no mention of the Second Coming; John goes on to tell of another vision. Now, in this second vision, when he reaches the seventh seal, he gives us just the briefest little hint of the Second Coming. As we go through this book, we will see that, cycle after cycle after cycle, each time we build up to the Second Coming, he gives us a bigger picture of the Second Coming, until, finally, in the last vision, it all sort of bursts through, and he devotes a whole chapter to telling us what that Coming itself will be like, and then he goes on to tell us what will happen after it. But, in Revelation 8:1, for the first time in the book, we have the first hint being given.