Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of the End Times from Revelation 11
“I was given a reed like a measuring rod and was told, ‘Go and measure the temple of God and the altar, and count the worshipers there. But exclude the outer court; do not measure it, because it has been given to the Gentiles. They will trample on the holy city for 42 months. And I will give power to my two witnesses, and they will prophesy for 1,260 days, clothed in sackcloth.’
These are the two olive trees and the two lampstands that stand before the Lord of the earth. If anyone tries to harm them, fire comes from their mouths and devours their enemies. This is how anyone who wants to harm them must die. These men have power to shut up the sky so that it will not rain during the time they are prophesying; and they have power to turn the waters into blood and to strike the earth with every kind of plague as often as they want.
Now when they have finished their testimony, the beast that comes up from the Abyss will attack them, and overpower and kill them. Their bodies will lie in the street of the great city, which is figuratively called Sodom and Egypt, where also their Lord was crucified. For three and a half days men from every people, tribe, language and nation will gaze on their bodies and refuse them burial. The inhabitants of the earth will gloat over them and will celebrate by sending each other gifts, because these two prophets had tormented those who live on the earth.
But after the three and a half days a breath of life from God entered them, and they stood on their feet, and terror struck those who saw them. Then they heard a loud voice from heaven saying to them, ‘Come up here.’ And they went up to heaven in a cloud, while their enemies looked on. At that very hour there was a severe earthquake and a tenth of the city collapsed. Seven thousand people were killed in the earthquake, and the survivors were terrified and gave glory to the God of heaven. The second woe has passed; the third woe is coming soon.
The seventh angel sounded his trumpet, and there were loud voices in heaven, which said: ‘The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he will reign for ever and ever.’ And the twenty-four elders, who were seated on their thrones before God, fell on their faces and worshiped God, saying: ‘We give thanks to you, Lord God Almighty, the One who is and who was, because you have taken your great power and have begun to reign.
The nations were angry; and your wrath has come. The time has come for judging the dead, and for rewarding your servants the prophets and your saints and those who reverence your name, both small and great—and for destroying those who destroy the earth.’ Then God’s temple in heaven was opened, and within his temple was seen the ark of his covenant. And there came flashes of lightning, rumblings, peals of thunder, an earthquake and a great hailstorm.”
I indicated last week that this is a chapter that is perhaps the most disputed in the book of Revelation in the history of the church as to just what it means. There are many variations in interpretation, but basically they fall into one of two camps. On the one hand are those who take selective elements of this chapter in a very literal way. Nobody takes everything exactly literally. You can’t do it. Just work through and try it and you’ll see what I mean.
But there are those who take, for example, the temple here to be a reconstructed temple. In this view, there will be a reconstructed temple where the Mosque of Omar now is. They take these two witnesses to be literally two witnesses. Since they have similarities (we’ll see why in a moment) to Elijah and Moses, some think these are Elijah and Moses come back to life, quite literally, at the end.
This is the view not only of some dispensationalists, virtually all strong dispensationalists, but others like Kiddle and so forth, but there is another interpretation that, in my view, makes more sense, and it is the one I will defend here as we go through the chapter. In this view, once again you have heavy symbolism, which is so typical of the book of Revelation, but most of the symbolism is pretty understandable.
In every case where the symbolism comes out of the Old Testament, as we’ve seen again and again, the author does something fresh with it. It’s a bit flexible. It doesn’t just come right out and come over holus-bolus. We’ve seen, for example, that in chapter 5 the beasts around the throne aren’t just like the cherubim in Ezekiel and they’re not just like the seraphim in Isaiah. They’re a mixture of the two.
Again and again we’ve seen these passages that use the language of the Old Testament but give it another twist. Enough connections with the Old Testament to give you some idea of what it means. Enough independence to make this John’s book, not just a pastiche of quotations. So also here.
I will argue that the temple is the church, the two witnesses are that part of the church that must suffer martyrdom as they bear witness, and the great city represents this fallen world order, civilizations that finally are utterly alien to God and his will and are climaxed in destruction all the way to the very end when the witnesses, in fact, are justified before them.
Now last week, in discussing the end of chapter 10, the little scroll, I said there were two ways of taking the contents of the little scroll. One of them (which is the one I favor, though I’m not absolutely certain about this) has the content of the little scroll being chapter 11. The reason it tastes good is because it’s the Word of God, and the reason it is so sour in the stomach is precisely because once ingested, lo and behold, what does it mean? It means there’s judgment, suffering, and terror to come even on the church.
It’s a bit like the way the Word of God turns sour in Ezekiel’s stomach or Jeremiah’s stomach centuries earlier. The preachers, the prophets, have to ingest the Word of God, and it is a delight, but at the end of the day it is such a bitter message. Reread Isaiah 6. So now we come to the text. Remember where we are in the book. This is the second part of the break between the sixth and the seventh trumpet or between the second woe and the third, if you recall.
“I was given a reed like a measuring rod and was told, ‘Go and measure the temple of God and the altar, and count the worshipers there.’ ” Here we have John the seer as an active participant in the vision. Until chapter 10, that didn’t happen, but then in chapter 10, he becomes an active participant by taking the scroll and eating it. In the vision he’s now participating, not just watching.
Here he is invited to participate as well. Now he’s taking what we would call a tape measure (it would be a measuring rod of a certain standard length) and going out and measuring things. Biblical prophets not uncommonly in the Old Testament performed some kind of symbol-laden action, which helped to authenticate their message, make their message all the more powerful and colorful.
Thus, for example, Ezekiel digs through a wall in his house and carries out his luggage in the night in the sight of Israel as a symbol of the coming exile. They’re going to have to move. It’s a pretty dramatic thing to dig through a wall of your house to make a point. Ezekiel, chapter 12. Or Isaiah, chapter 20. Isaiah walks around naked and barefoot for a while to show what it means to be captured and dragged away into captivity as a slave.
In Acts 21, if you recall, the prophet Agabus takes Paul’s girdle and puts it around his middle and ties his hands up in it to show that the man who wears this belt is going to be carried off bound. So this kind of thing is not all that uncommon. Here you have some kind of symbolism. What does this symbolism mean?
Well, there are instances of measuring in the Old Testament. In the vision of Ezekiel 40–48, you do have this measuring of the temple. If here the temple does stand for the people of God, which is not an uncommon New Testament thing (see, for example, the closing verses of 1 Corinthians 6 or Ephesians 2:19–22) …
If that is what is meant, then the measuring of the temple is taking the measure, if you like, of the people of God, but the interesting thing is (verse 2): “… exclude the outer court; do not measure it, because it has been given to the Gentiles.” That is to say, when Solomon’s temple was built there were only two courtyards (1 Kings 6), but in the time of Herod (which would be the temple these people were more familiar with, even if by this time Herod’s temple has been destroyed) there were three courts.
Apart from the area right around where the priests themselves alone went in, there was the court of the women, the court of the Israelites, and the court of the priests. Then beyond that, there was the outer court, the court of the Gentiles, and there were huge signs posted saying that there was death to any Gentile who walked in there. That sort of thing is found in all kinds of first-century sources.
What then is this court of the Gentiles? What does that mean? “They will trample on the holy city for 42 months.” Some have argued that John is making a distinction between the true church (the inner courts, the real temple) and the outer court. That is, all kinds of people who are called church but really belong with the Gentiles. Many have argued that.
The problem with this view is that it is the outer court that gets trampled, whereas in the book of Revelation the believers get trampled. They are faithful in their being trampled (in the next chapter we’ll see this very clearly) and how they overcome in all of this, but at the end of the day, it is the true church, those who refuse the mark of the Beast, who then have to suffer the wrath of the Beast. That’s the whole point of the end of chapter 13 and the beginning of chapter 14.
So to say that the outer court, which is where the trampling takes place, is the mark of the false church, the spurious church, in my view, doesn’t work in the theology of the book as a whole. One must remember that from the point of view of first-century Jews (and Christians who knew Jewish symbolism) it was the whole temple complex, including the Gentile court, that was the temple.
In other words, there was not only the temple building but all the courtyards, including the Gentile court, where Gentile proselytes and Gentile God-fearers could go and worship. All of that was part of the temple complex. I think what is being said simply is that part of the people of God do get trampled. They do suffer.
“They will trample on the holy city for 42 months.” What does that mean? Now you’ve changed your metaphor again. It sounded in the first place as if the trampling takes place in the outer court. You exclude the outer court, and now suddenly they’re trampling on the Holy City. I would want to argue it’s one of those places where if you read on through the whole book, it becomes clear.
In the last vision, which we’ll look at on the last night, you have the New Jerusalem, the new heaven and the new earth, and the Holy City. There’s no temple there, but the whole thing is the temple. And you know what? It’s all the same thing. In other words, it’s not that there’s a new heaven and a new earth and in this new heaven and a new earth there’s a city and in this city there’s a temple. That’s not the way it is.
In the last vision, the whole new heaven and the new earth is the place where God lives with his people. The New Jerusalem is the place where God lives with his people. The Holy City is the place where God lives with his people, and the whole thing is the temple. In fact, the whole thing is built like a perfect cube.
What would that mean to anybody who’s steeped in Old Testament background? It’s not just the temple; it’s the Holy of Holies. That’s the only perfect cube in the Bible. The perfect cube is the Most Holy Place, where God meets with his people. It’s another way of saying the whole thing is the very presence of God. You’re never outside the presence of God.
So you can look at the final status from a variety of perspectives. From one perspective it’s a whole renovated universe. From another perspective it’s the community of the saints, the Holy City, Jerusalem, the antitype of the Jerusalem in the past. From another perspective it is the temple. There is no other temple there. The whole thing is the temple. In fact, it’s the very Holy of Holies of the temple, because that’s where God is. You’re in the presence of God, the unshielded glory of God forever and ever.
So to try to take those bits and make them into geographical bits, like these cubes where one fits in another and one fits in another and one fits in another, so that you put the Holy of Holies in the temple and the temple in the city and the city in the world and the world in the universe.… It misunderstands the nature of the symbolism. It’s all the same thing in terms of its referent, but the different pictures contribute to the whole.
We’ve seen apocalyptic doing that already several times, and it was that kind of commonality that drives me, likewise, earlier in chapter 7, where you have the 144,000 and then the great multitude. I think they’re referring to the same thing, but they’re looked at from a different perspective. So also I think that’s what’s going on here.
You have the temple of God and the altar, and count the worshipers there. The whole people of God, and then count the people who are there. Taking the measure of the church. You exclude the outer court. It has been given over to the Gentiles. That is, part of this is going to suffer. That’s what’s going to happen. In the sovereignty of God, some of it’s going to suffer. To look at it another way, they will trample on the Holy City for 42 months. The Holy City is the people of God.
Now we come to the first reference of 42 months. This crops up several times in chapters 12–14, and we need to stop and think about it. Forty-two months on an idealized month of 30 days is the same thing as 1,260 days, so it comes up pretty often … 1,260 days or 42 months or three and a half years. It’s all the same thing. Also time, times, and half a time. That’s the same thing. Time (one year), times (two more years), and then half a time.
So 1,260 days, 42 months, three and a half years, and time, times, and half a time are all the same time. The question is.… What do they mean? Is this an exact historical referent? There are some people who think it is, that this is a measure of three and a half years during which certain things will take place. On the other hand, we have seen already that numbers are used symbolically again and again and again in the book of Revelation. Time is sometimes schematized.
So one asks oneself, to a first-century Jewish Christian, to someone who’s steeped in this kind of literature, who knows Jewish history, whether Jewish or Christian, what would spring to mind with the three and a half years mixed out in judgment and so on? I think there’s a solid answer to that. In fact, the dominant interpretation in many periods of history has been the one I’m giving you, although there have been times when it has been denied.
Do you know how in certain periods of history something stands out in just about everyone’s mind? For example, for those of you who were, let’s say, 15 and older in 1963 (for those of you who are younger, forget what I’m about to say), can you remember where you were when you heard that President Kennedy was shot? It was a defining moment.
Because it was a defining moment for anybody who lived through it or anybody for whom this is part of a history, you can just make an allusion.… You just say, “November ‘63, Dallas.” You don’t have to say any more than that, and all of the emotions of the time come back. Where you were, to whom you were talking, and what was going on. Isn’t that correct?
Or if I say to an American citizen, “Fourscore years and seven,” what do you think of? Don’t you think of Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, Civil War? If you’re Canadian or some other kind of foreigner, you may not know about that. I’ve lived here long enough and read enough American history. I read Gary Wills’ book on the Gettysburg Address, so I know something about that. On the other hand, it’s easy to have cultural symbols that mean nothing to somebody else.
Over my desk at work, just behind my seat, embroidered from my wife in a nicely framed little thing, I have the words, “He is not a tame lion.” Where is that from? C.S. Lewis. Not everybody knows that, but a lot of people in the West know that. It’s a wonderful passage. It’s from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in the Narnia tales.
Aslan, the lion, who’s a figure for Christ, dies to bring death backwards because of Edmund’s sin. He has rebelled. Aslan dies, the stone cracks, the magic works backward, and he comes back to life again. Then the children still want to play with him. They can’t find him, and they’re upset. They know he has come back to life. They’re very happy, but they can’t play with him.
They’re told, “You must understand. Although he is a wonderful lion and a loving lion, he is not a tame lion. He’s in nobody’s pocket.” It’s a wonderful image of the independence of the exalted Christ. “He is not a tame lion.” Now I’ve had Korean students come into my office, sit there in front of my desk, and look up at me. Their eyes go up. “He is not a tame lion.” “Sir, is that referring to you?”
I know I have a rough reputation for marks and all of that, but I didn’t even think of that when I put up that sign. I mean, I’m not trying to frighten international students, but I succeeded in doing that with quite a few of them with that little thing. It’s not because they’re dumber than we are. Far from it. It’s simply because that’s not part of their cultural baggage. Very few of them have read much C.S. Lewis.
So when you refer to certain events in a people’s history, they may be very significant to them, but they may not be significant elsewhere, and it’s important to try to get inside their frame of reference, their skull, to try to make sense of it all. In Jewish history, one of the defining moments is the Maccabean Revolt.
At the end of the canonical Old Testament, you have the Jews scattered throughout the entire Mesopotamian area, with a small number of them back rebuilding the temple under Nehemiah and Ezra, the post-exilic prophets like Haggai calling the people back to rebuild and so on. You’re in the Persian period, and then you turn over a couple of pages and you’re in the New Testament, there are no Persians around, and the Romans run the show. What has gone on?
What has gone on is that the Medo-Persian Empire was finally taken over by the Greeks. I don’t know how good your ancient history is, but Alexander the Great and his marauding riffs went around the empire, got as far as India, and then, according to legend at least, he died at the age of 33 because he had no more worlds to conquer.
Regardless of whether that bit is true, certainly his band of marauding riffs did go right through the Middle East. They took over Egypt. They took over the whole north shore of the Mediterranean. Then they moved east through Persia, through Arabia, all the way to the borders of India. Then he died, and the empire was broken up into four bits, four chunks, each controlled by one of his generals.
The two generals that were important from our point of view were Ptolemy, who gained control of Egypt and founded the Ptolemaic dynasty, and the Seleucids in the north in what is now Syria. These two generals.… The rest of them too, for that matter, but these two in particular got into fight after fight after fight, and guess what’s right between Syria in the north (which extended farther up into the old area of Assyria) and Egypt in the south? Israel.
So for 150 years, you have this border going back and forth, back and forth. Whenever the Ptolemies take control, they demand utter allegiance, and whenever the Seleucids gain control, they demand utter allegiance. It goes back and forth, and it’s a terrible mess. Inevitably, the Jewish population in what is now Palestine was divided as to how to handle this. Some were conservatives and some were Hellenizers themselves and some wanted to go with one side and some with the other. Just a terrible mess.
In this period, one of the Seleucids came to power. We now call him Antiochus IV Epiphanes. He came to power in the north at a time when what is now Palestine was under Seleucid control. He was a passionate pagan. In consequence of this, partly because he was simply anti-Jewish as well, he made it a capital offense to own any part of the Hebrew Bible.
He made it a capital offense to observe any Jewish religious rite. He made it a capital offense, for example, to observe the Sabbath. He made it a capital offense to go up to the temple on Yom Kippur. In fact, what he did was bring in his troops and sacrifice pigs, which were unclean, on the altar and dedicate the whole thing to a pagan god. This was a time of savagery and butchery.
The date was 167 BC. There was one old priest by the name of Mattaniah living in a village who, when one of the emissaries came by, refused to do his homage and, in fact, took out a spear and killed him. He had two or three sons. The most famous was Judas Maccabeus, which in Semitic tongue means Judas the Hammer. The Maccabean Revolt was the revolt of Judas the Hammer.
So far as our records go, he invented guerrilla warfare. I’m told by former military types who have come to Trinity after they’ve done their 20-year stint, people who have been to West Point and then have come to Trinity after they’ve done their stint and are training for the ministry or the like.… One West Pointer told me it is still on the curriculum at West Point to read the Jewish historian Josephus, who gives an account of the Maccabean Revolt, precisely because it is the first known account of guerrilla warfare.
They got together bands of Jews who were full of animosity against this dictatorial control from the North, and they hid in the Judean hills and in the Samarian hills. They attacked here. They attacked there. They fled away. They melted away. They came in and attacked and fled away, avoiding all pitched battles as their numbers grew up and the other side grew weaker. It’s classic guerrilla warfare under Judas Maccabeus.
Eventually, Judas was killed and a brother took over and so on, but that was the Maccabean Revolt. The whole thing was over by 164. They won. They rededicated the temple. Antiochus IV Epiphanes was beaten, and that was the end of the Seleucid hegemony over this whole area. The whole thing lasted three and a half years, and it was a defining moment for the Jews. It’s still a defining moment for the Jews.
You ask any Jew, no matter how secular he is, to tell you about the Maccabean Revolt, and he’ll tell you about it. It is part of the self-identity of the Jews and was so even more in the first century. It was so much closer. So it came to be identified with a period of extreme suffering that would only last for a period of time and then it stopped. In that sense, it’s unlike seven from a numerical point of view. A perfection of things? No, it’s an acute of period of time, and then you cut it off.
Do you remember what Jesus said in the Olivet Discourse? “For the sake of the elect those days will be stopped.” Instead of going to a full number, you cut it off at three and a half. It came to be a useful symbol in a whole lot of ways. I think that’s what is picked up. I think in every instance of the 42 months or three and a half years or time, times, and half a time or 1,260 days …
I think in every instance where it shows up in the book of Revelation, that is the background reality that now serves as a symbol for a period of time of terrible suffering, which is finally brought to an end. We’ll see that again in the next two or three chapters, so bear that in mind if you have your doubts. I think it’ll become a little clearer later.
Now we come to the two witnesses who are then introduced. Again, let me be the first to acknowledge that there are many different points of view on this matter, but let me give you some hints that the view I espouse is correct. “I will give power to my two witnesses. They will prophesy for 1,260 days, clothed in sackcloth.” We’ll skip the olive trees and the lampstand a moment. “If anyone tries to harm them, fire comes out of their mouth.” They have a certain kind of prophetic power.
Then when they’ve finished their testimony, the beast that comes up from the Abyss attacks them, and they’re killed. They’re martyred. Now note whatever this city is that is called “Sodom and Egypt, where also the Lord was crucified” (we’ll come to that in a moment), for three and a half days (there’s that three and a half again, but now it’s days not years; we’ll come to that in a moment too), people from every tongue, tribe, language, and nation gaze on them.
If you take that text seriously, there’s no way that took place in the first century or in any other century. There are no two witnesses and no city where you get people from every tongue and tribe and people and nation looking on these people, all coming by in a period of three and a half days. For example, were any Kikuyu there from Kenya? Were any Nali there from Papua New Guinea? No? No Neo-Melanesian languages? None of the 800? No.
If on the other hand you do see that these witnesses represent (for reasons I’ll try to justify in a moment) the witness martyr community (that is to say, that part of the people of God who, in fact, die for their faith), then there is a sense in which when they die people from every tongue and tribe and nation gaze on them in scorn. It has happened again and again and again.
That only makes sense if the two witnesses are symbols for more than just two who happen to die in a particular city at a particular time. Now there are other elements in here where I think that makes sense. When they come back to life again, they’re escorted to heaven. In the first place, I don’t think it makes sense to say that this all happens in AD 70. I don’t think it makes sense either simply to assign it to some unforeseen event in the future when a real Moses and a real Elijah come back.
Are these chaps going to come back, now not in a resurrection body but in an ordinary body, preach for a prescribed period of time, get bumped off again, and then come back to life? Is the temple going to be rebuilt when the whole of New Testament theology argues that it points to Christ and the sacrifices of the temple are fulfilled in him?
Are you now going to rebuild it and say, “Well, now they look backward to the way before they look forward”? It misunderstands all of the book of Hebrews. It misunderstands the thrust of New Testament theology. Christ our Lamb has been sacrificed for us. He’s our Passover. I think that misunderstands the nature of apocalyptic and misunderstands the nature of New Testament theology and misunderstands John. It doesn’t handle the language properly.
But if you fit it into a broader scheme in which in every tongue, tribe, and nation you get Christian witnesses who get bumped off and people gloat but then at the end they are brought back to life, who has the last say? Now they give glory to God, but it’s a bit late. It reminds you of Philippians, chapter 2. “Every knee shall bow.” In other words, I think what you have again in this passage is a Christian way of looking at things under highly symbolic categories.
Now let’s try and work through some of the symbols and see if this makes sense. “They will prophesy for 1,260 days.” Still this 42 months, this three and a half years. If I am right in arguing that this is another way of referring to sustained tribulation that does take place between the first advent and the second advent, which is I think the way it has to be understood in the next two chapters …
It’s not, then, that these two individuals live for the whole period of church history. It’s that these two witnesses come and bear witness to the gospel, to the truth, to Jesus. Look at how they’re described. Clearly, they are modeled in certain respects after Moses and Elijah. Shutting up the rain, for example, reminds you of Elijah. Consuming enemies with fire (2 Kings 1). Like Moses they turn water into blood (Exodus 7). They smite the earth with plagues (Exodus 8).
That there are two witnesses in this view may stem from the well-known law in Deuteronomy 19, which requires a minimum of two witnesses for something to be true. They’re bearing witness to the truth. The period of their ministry, then, this 42 months, 1,260 days, and so on is exactly the same period as the trampling of the city. Isn’t that significant?
While part of the city is being trampled, they continue to bear witness. Do you see the point? There is persecution, and the church witnesses. The whole church doesn’t die. Part of the city is trampled. Part of the temple place is trampled, and there is prophecy. As long as they are prophesying, as long as God gives them this, they prophesy, and they may actually call judgment down.
Of course, the most dramatic examples are given from the Old Testament, but you cannot read long in the history of Christian mission or the history of Christian preaching in times of revival not to know other times when terrible judgment has been called down. I almost hesitate to give you one or two of these examples, because they’re pretty dramatic.
Do you recall how under certain cases of church discipline in 1 Corinthians, chapter 5, the church is told in the name of Jesus to cast certain people over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh? I’ve mentioned in one or two other classes a seminary professor who taught me 30 years ago, who himself had been a pastor in the outback of Australia in a fairly small community where there was only one church.
Although it was a Baptist church and, therefore, in theory, in the believers church tradition, in fact, a lot of people in town went to it just because it was the community church. He went there as a young man, his first charge, and he found that a lot of people weren’t converted in it. People were sleeping around in it. There was embezzlement in the community, and some of those people were members of the church.
You couldn’t exercise church discipline, because the leaders were up to their eyeballs in this stuff as well. There was no will for holiness. There was no heritage of godliness, no distinction of what the gospel really meant. You could preach it, but it was sort of polite patter. That’s all. This young man who was still single, still in his 20s, was exceedingly discouraged. He preached and he prayed and visited and tried to evangelize for two or three years, and nothing happened.
Finally, very, very discouraged, he began to prostrate himself before the Lord in prayer. Every day he cried to the Lord for a period of three months. “This is a mistake for me to be here. A strong man might handle it, someone with a great personality, a great unction from you. I’m not the man to handle this.
This is a mess. It’s a shocking disgrace. In the name of the gospel, we’re justifying all kinds of sin. We’re a laughingstock to decent-minded people. Your name is being dragged in the mud, and I’m not the man to handle this. Take me out of here. Give me something my size. Bring in somebody who’s strong or else you clean it up.”
So he prayed in tears for three months that way after he had been there for some time, and then he started to have funerals in the church. In three months, 34 deaths, all leaders in the church, and the next year he baptized 200. I don’t think that’s the sort of thing you ought to do too fast. I know some ministers who if they prayed that might be the first to go.
One does not play around with God as if he’s a bit of magic you can turn on or turn off, but at the end of the day, we have such a domesticated, happy-yappy view of God in the West that we forget he is also a God of judgment, and sometimes he has given in response to his people calling down terrible judgments to stop this or that or the other. Just read first-class missionary biographies and you will find instances of it.
So the thing is cast in terms of the language of Moses and Elijah, but it’s not as if those things stopped entirely then. No, during the time they are prophesying, we’re told, as if God has said, “I will protect you as long as you have your work to do,” or as many a preacher has said, “I am immortal until my work is done …” During all that time, while the city is getting trampled, the preachers preach on. The prophets still declare the Word of God and sometimes bring down judgment.
If anyone tries to harm them, fire comes from their mouths and devours their enemies. At the end of the day, what do we have other than the word of their testimony? We’ll come to that one next day as well. This is not the sword of the state or something like that. No, no, no. They finish their testimony. The time comes when they do, and the powers of hell attack them, and they’re killed. In other words, this is that part of the church that, in its faithful witness, is martyred.
“Their bodies lie in the street of the great city, which is figuratively called Sodom and Egypt, where also their Lord was crucified.” What does that mean? Well, there are basically three views. One view says that this just has to be Jerusalem. Otherwise, what do you make of the last clause in verse 8, “Where also their Lord was crucified”? Jesus was not crucified in Rome. There is only one city that clause fits. Therefore, this city must be Jerusalem.
There are many postmillennialists who take that view, incidentally. Those of you who are interested in theonomy and that sort of thing, the theonomy movement takes this view dogmatically. Their whole system will fall if they’re wrong on this point, in fact. So they have written on it extensively and, in my view, not convincingly.
They think this whole thing was, in fact, accomplished in AD 70, that the book of Revelation was written before AD 70 and this part was fulfilled there, so that it’s not against Rome or paganism or the Roman Empire but against Jerusalem, which has now become Sodom (proverbial for licentiousness) and Egypt (proverbial for its enslavement of the people of God), and it’s identified for us by this last clause, “Where also the Lord was crucified.”
Well, it sounds convincing until you start examining the counterarguments. I don’t think it will work. First of all, Ezekiel 16:46–49 has places where Jerusalem is called Sodom, but it has been pointed out (for example, in the Isaiah passage) that it is the Jewish people who are there called Sodom, not the city, and in Ezekiel 16, Jerusalem is being compared with her sisters, Samaria and Sodom. It’s not directly called Sodom. And nowhere in the Old Testament is Jerusalem ever designated Egypt.
More important is the fact that this expression “the great city” crops up again and again in the book of Revelation, and in the seven other occurrences (16:19, 17:18, and 18:10, 16, 18, 19, and 21).… In every instance, it just has to be Rome. “The city on the seven hills,” for example. To anybody in the ancient world, what would that mean?
People have tried to argue, “Well, you can count seven hills around Jerusalem.” You can also count eight or ten or three or two, depending on how you count them. I mean, you can always find a few bumps in the ground that will do. The Judean landscape is littered with hills. It’s not hard to come up with seven hills.
There are one or two references where that sort of language is used elsewhere, but in the Roman Empire, the city with seven hills, and with all the pagan connections clearly connected with this reference, the pagan connections bound up in the letters to the seven churches, and the pagan symbolism, the emperor worship that is bound up.… Oh yes, it makes much more sense to take this as Rome. So that’s the second interpretation, that this is simply Rome.
There is a third interpretation, and it’s the one I favor. Namely, that although the immediate referent is Rome, Rome becomes a symbol for all of civilization against God. We’ve already seen hints of this elsewhere in the book. That is to say, the immediate target is Rome. The immediate symbolism is drawn from Rome, yet at the same time you’re looking at things that extend beyond Rome. We will see this now becoming very clear in chapter 13.
In that framework, the inclusion of a reference to the crucifixion of Jesus is not given to establish a geographical identification, it seems to me, but to illustrate the response of the human heart, human civilization … first of all pagan Rome, but in principle “pagan” Jerusalem … to the Messiah when he came. After all, it is a simple axiom of New Testament theology that you can look at the death of Christ from two quite different perspectives.
On the one hand, the people who actually hung Jesus on the cross were a handful of people who manipulated a lot of others, a few Jewish leaders, Pontius Pilate, Herod by not taking responsibility, a few Sadducees, a corrupt court system. That’s it. On the other hand, from the perspective of New Testament theology, what put Jesus on the cross? Wasn’t it my sin? Wasn’t it your sin?
In that sense, as someone has well said, this city is every city and no city. That is, it’s no specific city. The symbolism is drawn from Rome, but it is the human city, what Augustine would call the city of man, against the city of God. It’s the great city over against the Holy City earlier in the chapter. The Holy City is being trampled on.
Later on, we find that same kind of language showing up. Somebody said this book could be called (we’ll see this again in the next two chapters) “A Tale of Two Cities.” In Augustine’s terms, the city of God and the city of man. In the book of Revelation, it’s the city of Rome and the new city, the New Jerusalem, or it’s the city that is also Sodom; that is, replete with every form of uncleanness.
It is Egypt, which isn’t a city at all; it’s a country, but it’s used because it’s symbolic in the whole Jewish thought. Just as the whole Jewish thought looks at the Maccabean Revolt in certain ways, all Jewish thought looks at Egypt in certain ways. What is Egypt? It’s all the power that enslaves them. “Where also our Lord was crucified.” That’s right. The Lord himself came to this city, and it slew him.
In other words, I think we have gotten into all kinds of trouble trying to identify this city with one particular city and then come up with dogmatic positions in all kinds of interesting ways that have missed the point of fundamental Christian theology. Not only is there a tale of two cities, but somebody has said the subtitle for the book of Revelation could also be “The Harlot and the Bride,” for later on in chapter 17 we’ll see another way of looking at this mess is the harlot who rides on the beast.
“Whore! Whore! Babylon the Great.” Another city, and yet the bride of Christ in the last chapter, the people of God married to the Lamb, which is a strange mixture of metaphors. Most brides don’t want to be married to lambs. It’s apocalyptic. So you have two cities. You have two women. You have two worlds. You have two marks, the mark of Christ or the mark of the Beast. What the apocalyptic symbolism is doing is dividing humankind, and the division is a gospel division. That’s going to become powerfully clear in the next chapter.
If this is the case, then, it is in line with the suggestion that the suffering that is going on is against all of God’s people and the two witnesses represent those elements of God’s people across the whole period of tribulation who witness faithfully even to the point of death. Wherever this happens, people look at them and gaze at them. From every people, tribe, language, and nation, they gaze on their bodies and refuse them burial, which in the ancient world was the worst form of opprobrium.
Do you remember when Saul dies and he and his sons are hung up and exposed? It’s a form of terrible insult and curse. The men of Jabesh Gilead go and raid the city at night, take down the bodies, and bury them. David thanks them for it. They’re honoring the dead. In other words, the Christians are martyred and despised. It is still worth your reading Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. It’s an old book now, but it is still worth reading.
I recently read a book on pre-revolutionary France and something of the history of the Huguenots. I don’t how much you know about the Huguenots. They’re sort of French Reformed Protestants that grew to be quite a powerful bunch. Estimates of their number vary between about 300,000 and 2 million. Probably it was closer to 600,000 or 700,000. Their sufferings were unbelievable.
The Catholic Church, which controlled Louis XIV, Louis XV, and then Louis XVI until the French Revolution (by that time the church’s power was beginning to wane; that was part of the problem with the French Revolution).… They would billet troops in many of the Huguenot homes with the explicit orders to rape the women in it unless the people recanted, and then they forbade them the right to leave the country.
If they wanted to be Baptists, okay, drown them. The sufferings were phenomenal. They corralled them in church buildings and then burned down the buildings. It was unlawful to build a building, so this was their punishment and destruction of the building at the same time. Just disdained. “… gaze on their bodies and refuse them burial. The inhabitants of the earth will gloat over them.”
This also shows you.… Look, the inhabitants of the earth. Is this just the people of one particular city? The language is itself giving you hints about the symbolism that is going on. The inhabitants of the whole earth are involved in this. That is, it’s those who dwell on the earth, the book of Revelation’s constant way of referring to people in this world who do not know God. What do they do? They have a party. They celebrate by sending each other gifts, because these two prophets had tormented those who live on the earth.
Isn’t that the way radicalized unbelievers view gospel preachers? “You torment us.” God knows there are some brands of preaching that deserve a little torment, but that’s another issue. On the other hand, John the Baptist comes along and says to Herod, “You can’t do that. That’s adultery. It’s sin, and you mustn’t do that.” What does Herod say? “Oh yes. Thank you for pointing out the error of my ways. I will repent.” Is that what he says? No, he slops him into Machaerus. Off with his head.
In other words, from their point of view, these are nitpicking busybodies, self-righteous clowns, who make life miserable for the rest of us, and if they’d just leave us in peace and everyone does his own thing, we’d all be happier, wouldn’t we? So when you get rid of them, you hold a party. It’s sort of like a pagan Christmas. You give gifts.
“But after the three and a half days …” So apparently they’re dead for three and a half days. That’s all. So you have a party going on. Again, the three and a half days has to be symbolic in some sense. In some sense, the three and a half days are simply the response to the three and a half years. You get a similar sort of connection in some things in the life of Christ.
Do you remember how Jesus is brought out into the desert and fasts for 40 days and 40 nights (Matthew 4 and Luke 4)? Well, in the context of his temptations, after the 40 days and 40 nights, the Scripture texts he quotes all come from the wilderness experience of the Jews. The Devil comes to him, and Jesus says, “No, no, no. Have you not read, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God’?”
That comes right out of Deuteronomy 8, where Moses says, “The Lord led you these 40 years in the wilderness in order that you might learn that man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” All three of Jesus’ quotations from the Old Testament have something to do with the wilderness experience, and it becomes part of the Matthean theme in which Israel went through the period in the wilderness to be taught these lessons and failed.
Jesus as the true Israel, as it were, comes along and as the kind of antitype of Israel passes through similar experience but learns the lesson. The Word of God is more important than keeping your belly filled. Thus, you start looking around in the book of Matthew, for example, for this Davidic typology, this Israel typology, in which Jesus is the true David, the true Israel. The nation failed. Jesus is the true Israel. You get the same thing in the gospel of John.
Again and again and again in the Old Testament, Israel is called God’s vine. In Isaiah 5, for example, the prophet, quoting God, says, “I’m going to sing you a little song of the vineyard.” Referring to God, he says, “My beloved planted a vineyard. He walled it all around and he nurtured it and he looked for it to bear fruit, and all it produced was stinkers. So what is he going to do? He’s going to tear it all down.”
This is all in poetry. Isaiah is singing a song. He strums along with a guitar and brings out the second verse. He says, “Now who is this vineyard? Isn’t Israel the vineyard? I saved you. I nurtured you. I put you in a safe place, put a wall around you, and I looked for righteousness, and what do I get?” Every time Israel is called a vine in the Old Testament, every time where there’s an extended use of this language, Israel doesn’t produce. Read Psalm 80.
Then along comes Jesus, and he says, “I am the true vine.” There’s a whole typology going on. The real locus of the people of God is now bound up with those who are connected with Jesus. Sometimes, thus, you get these typologies where the numbers hold, in some ways, as in the 40 years of Israel in the Old Testament, the 40 days of Jesus, but it’s not exactly the same period. There’s some sort of connection. That’s all.
So also here, if we are right in saying that the two witnesses represent believers who are martyred for their witness during this whole period of tribulation, which is finally cut short, who are mocked at and despised by the people of the whole earth from every tongue, tribe, people, and nation, nevertheless, after the set period, three and a half days …
It’s not going to be the whole three and a half years, because some die here, some die here, some die here, and some die here, but after the set period (they call it three and a half days, so it has echoes of the former, yet it’s a shorter period), they’re brought back to life. Now as far as I can see at this point, the bringing back to life does not suggest immortality but resurrection. They stood on their feet.
Nor are they brought back to life so they can have another go at them. These are resurrected preachers; they’re really going to put the fear of God in them. No, it doesn’t say that. It doesn’t say that these people are terrified because these people come back and preach to them and they see that they’re alive again. No, it doesn’t say that.
No, they’re resurrected. A voice from heaven says, “Come up here.” They go to heaven. Their enemies look on. At that very hour, there’s a severe earthquake. The whole system is crumbling. People die. Seven thousand people in the city are killed. (That would be about one-tenth of a good-sized ancient Near East city. Seventy thousand was a good-sized city in the ancient Near East.) Survivors were terrified, and they gave glory to the God of heaven.
In this framework, I don’t think gave glory to the God of heaven means, “Oh yes, now they were convinced and they all became Christians.” The point is exactly the same as you find at the end of Philippians, chapter 2. Yes, Christ dies, but he rises from the dead and is vindicated. He’s seated at the right hand of the majesty on high, and one day, the texts say, every knee shall bow and every tongue confess Jesus is Lord to the glory of God the Father. That does not mean that everybody is going to become a Christian, but every knee shall bow.
I’m not keen on bumper-sticker theology. It’s too cutesy by half. But the one bumper sticker I’ve seen that I really do like is simply a little cross and then “Every knee shall bow.” Within this framework, then, this is a way of saying that these people who have been martyred come back to life. They are seen to be exonerated. They are called up into heaven, and then the enemies of the truth and of the gospel look. For them there is only destruction and terror, and they cry to God.
It becomes very much like the tone that is taken at the end of chapter 6, if you recall. They cry for the rocks in the mountains. “Save us from the wrath of him who sits on the throne and of the Lamb.” They pray, but their prayer is too late. Now that’s a very difficult passage. I acknowledge that. But I think it’s the way to read it that makes most sense of the theology of the rest of the book and fits in with primary gospel themes across the whole New Testament canon. Do you want to raise questions or come back at me?
Question: [Inaudible]
Answer: Oh, I don’t know if you have to identify them exactly. I mean, in terms of the theology of the book, they’re the people who belong to the wretched city. There are only two cities. You either belong to the people with the mark of the Beast or the mark of the Lamb a little farther on. So it’s just they. It’s those who aren’t here. You’re either in this city, you’re either in this temple, or you’re outside. So it’s everybody outside. I don’t think it’s more than that. There’s such an antithetical dimension to the book of Revelation that they just means everybody who’s not us.
Question: [Inaudible]
Answer: In my view it does not, but there are many people who disagree. I have one small caveat to that. If the question is raised, “Is there anything about Israel qua race in New Testament hope?” I think the answer is yes. That is to say, although there is this tremendous typology that I don’t think can easily be denied, and most dispensationalists nowadays acknowledge it’s there everywhere in the New Testament, the thing most amillennialists will do at this point is say that all of Jewish significance is bound up in the antitype, who is Christ, and through him the church.
I would want to argue instead that that is a major way the Bible is fit together. It is a major structuring device, but it’s not the only one. There are some bits left over that you have to do something with. One of them, it seems to me, is what you do with Israel in Romans 9–11. In my understanding, there is more hope for Jews qua Jews to come in in very large numbers to the true Israel, the one olive tree (to use the language of Romans 11), the branches being grafted back on (to use the language of Romans 11), before the end of the age in very large numbers into the church.
That raises all kinds of fundamental questions about the nature of immanency, a correct definition of which I can affirm, an incorrect definition of which I can’t. Within that framework, Israel qua nation may play some part. If, on the other hand, someone asks if I think the return to the land is the fulfillment of the return prophecies in the Old Testament, I think that misunderstands them rather badly.
Those return prophecies in the Old Testament, as far as I can see, are either bound up entirely with the return after the exile or, in a typological structure, are bound up (for example, in Ezekiel 36, which is a new covenant passage) with a return to God that is a part of new covenant fulfillment on a typological scale.
Question: [Inaudible]
Answer: No, I’m historic pre. I will unpack the structure of these things in a couple more weeks, if I may. For some people, this is bread and butter. They’ve been arguing these things all their lives. But others here don’t have a clue what we’re talking about, and I’d rather try and lay out some of these structures later. I was brought up in an amillennial camp but, in fact, moved to what is usually called historic premillennialism.
Question: [Inaudible]
Answer: Yes, of Daniel? I’m reluctant to tackle that one here, just because to do that one properly I have to do quite a number of things in Daniel. Maybe sometime I’ll come back and teach Daniel, but to unpack that one would require that I spend too much time away from the book of Revelation. In the same way, what I would really like to do is take quite a bit of time to walk you through Matthew 24–25. That really is quite critical to a whole system of eschatology, but I just don’t have time. On Matthew 24–25, I wrote a Matthew commentary. On Daniel I have not written. On the book of Revelation I’ve written odd bits but not on this bit.
“The seventh angel sounded his trumpet.” In the sequence of things, the seventh angel sounding his trumpet should be the same as the third woe. If you recall, the three woes overlap with the last three trumpets. The first woe is the fifth, the second woe is the sixth, and the third woe is the seventh. So we’ve now come out of the hiatus, the thing I’ve refused to call the interlude and prefer to call the excursus, where you’re looking at what’s going on from a Christian point of view.
You’re not just looking at judgments now; you’re looking at things from a Christian point of view, and the seventh angel sounds, but there’s no mention of woe. What do you with that? In fact, there is no mention of woe. This whole scheme is now dropped, and the next time the sevens start to pick up again, it’s seven bowls. So you’re dropping this. Why, then, is there no mention of woe? I am not sure. I’ve wrestled with this one and gone back and forth and back and forth and back and forth.
If it weren’t for the word woe, if it were just the seventh trumpet, I think I would have the right explanation. You see, the seventh in the series of seals turns out not to be a great disaster but silence in heaven. It breaks the pattern. It seems to be now the opening of the scroll and the onset of the new series, but because this seventh trumpet is also in principle called, earlier on, the third woe, you would expect not something that is ambiguous and neutral; you would expect more terror and judgment and fire.
Of the various proposals that have been put forth to explain this, I’ll tell you the one I think is most likely, but I’m not sure. Do you recall that in the series of seals between the sixth and the seventh you have this excursus that looks at things from the perspective of God’s people? You’ve had the same sort of thing in chapters 10–11. Now you have the seventh but as a way of telling you that, after all, these things are part of the whole picture.
It’s not that you have this sequence and then it stops and now you talk about the people of God and then it stops. If this interpretation, for example, of chapter 11 is correct, chapter 11 is going on even while the woes are going on, all the way up to the very end, and at the end you have the witnesses raised again. It brings you to the end.
So although the symbolism is in terms of Rome; nevertheless, because it takes you to the very end, Rome becomes a symbolism for all of civilization. Now that the seventh trumpet is introduced, you still look at things from the point of view of the people of God before you expand into the whole tension between the people of God and the people of the Devil in chapters 12–14, but within that expansion there is terrible judgment that finally ends in hell.
In other words, I think that under this seventh trumpet, under this third woe.… At the end of chapter 11, you still look at things from the point of view of the people of God as they come to the very end. Then in chapters 12–14, it’s cast in terms of the Devil (chapter 12), the two beasts, the Antichrist and the False Prophet, a holy triumvirate against God, issuing into a division with the 144,000 with Christ on Mount Zion (top of chapter 14) and everybody else going to hell, the ultimate in suffering. We read, “And the smoke of their torment goes up forever.”
So the seventh trumpet, the seventh woe, does lead into the worst possible kind of thing, but now it’s in terms of a clear bifurcation of the two peoples, hinted at already by going back and forth from the woes of the six seals to the people of God in the excursus and then the seventh woe. Then you have a whole new series of sevens, and you go back to the people of God.
Then you come to the seventh, but the seventh one keeps up this look at the people of God while you’re looking on at what’s going on in the world, precisely because the author wants you to understand that both are going on at the same time and issue finally in the final judgment. If that’s the case, then, the seventh trumpet is here and the woe side of it begins to be unpacked in the whole flow of the narrative from 12–14. That’s the best I can do. If you don’t like it, think of a better one. I think it fits the structure at least.
Now then, the seventh angel sounds his trumpet. “There were loud voices in heaven, which said, ‘The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he will reign for ever and ever.’ ” That could be understood in one of two ways. There is a sense in which Christ enters into his kingdom at his coming, death, resurrection, ascension, and exaltation to the right hand of the majesty on high.
He says already, “All authority is given to me in heaven and on earth.” Paul writes in 1 Corinthians, chapter 15, that all of God’s sovereignty is mediated through Christ. “He shall reign,” the text says, “until he puts all of his enemies under his feet,” and the last enemy he puts under his feet is death. Then he hands over the completed thing to his Father. That’s the picture of 1 Corinthians 15.
In that sense, Christ is already reigning. That is, Christ is God’s mediatorial King. All of God’s sovereignty is mediated through Christ. The alternative is that the onset of the kingdom here is the consummation, for although Christ reigns … all of God’s sovereignty is mediated through Christ now … yet his reign is being contested. Under his sovereignty, the Devil still operates. Evil still is prevalent.
In the new heaven and the new earth, in the consummation, Christ reigns, but there’s no further contesting. It’s all over. Now which is meant here? Or both. What is meant? Now look at the text. “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ …” Another way of referring to him who sits on the throne and of the Lamb. “… and he will reign for ever and ever.” This is probably the voice of the 24 elders or the angels in heaven or some group like this rather than of believers, because it’s not normally the way believers would refer to our Lord and of his Christ. In the New Testament, they speak of our Lord and the like.
“The twenty-four elders, who were seated on their thrones before God, fell on their faces and worshiped God, saying: ‘We give thanks to you, Lord God Almighty, the One who is and who was, because you have taken your great power and have begun to reign. The nations were angry; and your wrath has come. The time has come for judging the dead, and for rewarding your servants the prophets and your saints and those who reverence your name, both small and great—and for destroying those who destroy the earth.’ Then God’s temple in heaven was opened, and within his temple was seen the ark of his covenant.”
I think what you have here is a picture of the ultimate bliss just beginning. You get peeps of it again and again in the book of Revelation, and then it’s all unpacked gloriously in the last two chapters. The time has come for God to take up his reign in the sense that it is now the uncontested reign. It is the time when the dead are judged (verse 18, second line), for rewarding the saints, for destroying those who destroy the earth.
Then heaven is opened. The temple is seen in the ark of the covenant. In other words, it sounds like final vindication, but at the same time, the language may be as ambiguous as it is because there is a sense in which some of the destructions that come on the earth come already. Haven’t we seen that already in chapters 7–9? The destruction has already begun to come on the earth.
It is as if just as the saving kingdom of the consummation has been brought back into this age (we call it inaugurated eschatology or realized eschatology), so the ultimate judgments at the end are brought back into this age. There is a kind of inaugurated judgment. You get that kind of language elsewhere in John. For example, John, chapter 3, verse 36. On the one hand are those who obey the Son, but those who do not obey the Son, the wrath of God is already abiding on them, as if the wrath is already there. It has come already.
First John, chapter 2: “Yes, the Antichrist is coming, but as you have heard that Antichrist is coming, so now also there are many antichrists.” The judgment of the end has already come back, just as the salvation of the end has already come back. Everything is stepped up in terms of urgency, proximity, nearness. The drama is being played out. There is something decisive that has happened with the first coming of Christ, and we’re unraveling quickly toward the end.
I think perhaps some of the language here is ambiguous on purpose. I think, on the one hand, there are hints here of the final vindication of the people of God, but some of the eschatological judgments are already falling. The people of God are, in some ways, already being preserved, already being vindicated. They die, and they are vindicated before God.
