I've been shaking off my preconceptions about the Book of Revelation based on the Pre Trib eschatology and just trying to think it through as it presents itself to me. When I do that I find first of all that the Sixth Seal of Revelation Six sounds like the beginning of the Great Tribulation, its announcmeent. Now I'm finding it hard to understand how we have been supposed to understand it as coming in the middle of the tribulation sequance IF that sequence IS to be understood as the seventieth wek of Daniel.
Certainly the seals must represent God's judgments on the world, that's the whole point. Jesus qualified to open the book that unleashes this judgment on the world because He died to restore us to our pre fallen state. The Creation iself is redeemed in that act. Well I'm going to get into territory I don't understand well enough if I keep going in this direction so I'll stop it at this point.
But that is so clearly a beginning point, a very dramatic beginning point, not just a switch from an earlier form of llighter judgment to the outpouring of Godd's wrath, or so it seems to me as I read it. A great earthquake, the sun going black, the mooon turning to blood, stars falling from the sky, men hiding themselves for fear of the wrath of Him who sits on the throne and the lamb. It's hard to see this drama coming as a sort of puncutation in the middle of the Tribulation as I've been trying to do, it is so clearly a beginning.
The first five seals COULD occur within the last week of Daniel but I keep thinking that since they don't have to, it makes sense that they might not have, but represent god's judgments over the milennia since Christ's death, resurrection and ascension. I've had a problem with the martyrs under the alter in the Fifth Seal for some time. If all those first seals occur within a very short time period, two or three years, it's hard to fit all those martyrs into that framework. And I don't understand how we can separate out sdifferent groups of martyrs. The Middle Ages produced milions of martyrs under the hand of the papacy, fifty million proto Protestants plus seventeen million Jews and others. It's hard to see them as having been absorbed into the Rapture, which of course they must have been if the Pre Trib story is correct, while some other group is formed within a few years of the Tribulation as if they were some special group of martyrs.
But mostly I'm concerned with the fact that the Sixth Seal seems so clearly to be announcing the Wrath of God, and it is the first mention of it in the opening of the scroll. That makes the Seventh Seal the Wrath itself, and since it opens in Chapter Eight with a half hour of silence in heaven it seems pretty clear that here we are hnow for the first time in the time period of the Wrath, and that nothing before it really fits that designation.
The first four seals do seem to describe pretty ordinary events on earth throughout history. The firth seal does seem to refer to the martyrs of the first two millennia. And point to martyrs yet to come. to join the mm. And if they are to join them that wmeans the REapture can't have occurred yet. This does make quite a garbled mess of the Pretrib system but I can't help it.
So from Revelation eight on we are in the period of God's Wrath which I take to be THE Great Tribulatgion as described by Jesus in Matthew twenty four and foreshadowed as well in the book of Daniel among other scripture messages.
In Chapter eight we get the first four trumpets of the seventh seal which destroy trees and affect the sun and the waters of the earth. In chapter nine which I have to study more we get the fifth and sixth trumpets which are also called the first to three woes, locusts that stin g like scorpions and I forget the rest. Now we are up to the last tru mpet of the last seal and in chapter ten an angel comes down to assure us that with this final outpouring God's wrath will come to an end.
I'm not sure how to put together the next few chapters s far as the timetable is concerned. In eleven we get the measuring of the temple with the trampling of the outer court by the Gentiles for forty and two months. Then we get the preaching of thte two witnesses for the same period of time though referred to as a thousand two hundred and sixty days. After this we get the announcment that the last trumpet is about to sound, the third and final Woe and when it sounds there is jubilation in heaven as we hear that God' now possesses the kingdomes that had belonged to the earth before the judgment.
But first we are apparently taken back to the historical context, if that is the right way to look at Revelation twelve as we see Israel giving birth to the Messiah and the dragon who is Satan trying to devour her child the Messiah who is to rule the world, and her being protected for that same three and a half year period we heard about in chapter eleven. But I strt to lose my sense of things in this part of it.
I d do still have to note that after all the judgment THEN we hear the announcement of the marriage suppoer of the lamb and that for me just blasts the whole idea of the pre trib rapture of the Church to be in heaven durin gall these events, during which supposedly we experience that marriage suppoer. Perhaps some pretribber can show me how I'm misreading this timing but at this point I'm stuck with it. I still have NO idea when to think of the Rapture as occuring as I read all this.
Ah well. I still want to believe the pre trib rapture tna dhtat very soon we will all be snatched off this ever worsening worldly planet.
But I got ahead of myself. In Chapter twelve after the woman we get the dragon and then in chapter thirteen we get the beast from the sea which has the same seven heads and tten hors of the dragon and the characteristic of rhte fourth empire of Daniel's vision of the four empires in Daniel eseven, plus the information that this represents a man identified by the number six hundred and sixty six. ]
That is revealed with the arrival of the other beast, the one with the horns olike a mab who spaks like a dragon and causes the world to worship the beast from the sea which is identified by the number 666. Antichirst and false prophet. We are being ingroduced to the players in this drama but I'm still have trouble knowing where to place them in the times scheme. The extreme threat to the saints is emphsized with the description of the beast from the sea, the great patience of the saints, this is apparently part of God's wrath? ut iI thought for some reason that what the Antichrist does is to be understood as man's wrath and not God's. So I'm confused about that too.
I grasp who the players are at least, the Antichrist and later the woman who rides the beast in Revelation seventeedn but putting it all together eludes me.
Al well, I'm into the part of Revelation where I need to study a lot more so paerhaps I should end this heare.
Woopsie. Just had the whimsical thought that a nuclear bomb is going to explose in my neighborhood right now and I won't have to bother figuring out the end times scenario, where the rapture fits into it and all that.
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