Revelation Chapter 7 (New Jerusalem)

After this I saw four angels standing at the four corners of the earth, holding back the four winds of the earth so that no wind could blow on earth or sea or against any tree. I saw another angel ascending from the rising of the sun, having the seal of the living God, and he called with a loud voice to the four angels who had been given power to damage earth and sea, saying, "Do not damage the earth or the sea or the trees, until we have marked the servants of our God with a seal on their foreheads." And I heard the number of those who were sealed, one hundred forty-four thousand, sealed out of every tribe of the people of Israel:

From the tribe of Judah twelve thousand sealed,
from the tribe of Reuben twelve thousand,
from the tribe of Gad twelve thousand,
from the tribe of Asher twelve thousand,
from the tribe of Naphtali twelve thousand,
from the tribe of Manasseh twelve thousand,
from the tribe of Simeon twelve thousand,
from the tribe of Levi twelve thousand,
from the tribe of Issachar twelve thousand,
from the tribe of Zebulun twelve thousand,
from the tribe of Joseph twelve thousand,
from the tribe of Benjamin twelve thousand sealed.

After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. They cried out in a loud voice, saying, "Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!" And all the angels stood around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, singing,

Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.

Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, "Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?" I said to him, "Sir, you are the one that knows." Then he said to me, "These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. For this reason they are before the throne of God, and worship him day and night within his temple, and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them. They will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes."

When Lord When?

So we're confronted by these meek and mild Christians living under the altar in heaven screaming for blood and we sort look at this and say, hey, wait a minute.

Larry calls the behaviour sub-christian. But then doesn't go on to explore any metaphorical implications that may help unpack this sub-christian behaviour.

Let me try.

First let's recall these guys are dead and from a mythic standpoint the rules for dead folks is different. DZ Phillips points this out in his books on prayer and immortality (good stuff BTW -- especially the one on prayer). Their cries for vengeance are kinda like Abel's blood.

Genesis 4:10 And the LORD said, "What have you done? Listen; your brother's blood is crying out to me from the ground!

We can also draw on Forrest's anthropological analysis of "wrath" -- not emotional anger -- but social obligation. As martyred saints they're God's kinfolk now and God has an obligation of propriety to them.

Let me continue by linking this passage with two others that have little to do with one another in a logical connect the dots kinda way.

First consider Abraham as he haggled with God over the fate of Sodom. Suppose there are fifty upright people in the city. Will you really destroy it? Will you not spare the place for the sake of the fifty upright in it? he asks God in Genesis 18. He haggles God all the way down to ten and then gives up -- afraid because he doesn't think God will find ten honest men in Sodom.

Matthew 5:13 "You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot."

Now salt, is a preservative before there were fridges. We cured bacon, pickled meat, and in the process we toughened it and kept it from going bad. In a sense, by being the salt of the earth we function like the ten righteous men in Sodom. When when those ten righteous men get murdered by the multitudes of wicked folks living there? The salt is gone, the meat begins to rot. And the blood of Abel cries out from thee earth.


Its kinda like the fate of world is being weighed in the balance of the scales of justice. While in this world, the righteous keep this world from the judgment of God. When this world murders us, that self-same righteousness testifies against this world.

Biblical Interpretation

In an old post Forestt wrote "I think the people in the one synagogue I attended briefly were typical in treating the reading for each week as an event which was still occuring. Moses was still leading them out of Egypt, bringing the Torah down from Sinai, etc."

I've never attended a synagogue, but that's the only way I find scripture meaningful nowadays. These are eternal (timeless) metaphors pointing to spiritual realities that cannot be properly described in material terms, only poetically described.

I guess it was Blake who taught me to do that, emancipating me from any need to consider the literal meaning; the poetic meaning is what matters.

Those O.T. stories describe things that are happening in our lives day by day. Expressed differently we are invited to 'live into' the scenes we read about, and the way each of us lives into it will be unique to each of us.

I'm Confused ...

When he broke the fifth seal, I saw underneath the altar the souls of all the people who had been killed on account of the Word of God, for witnessing to it. They shouted in a loud voice, 'Holy, true Master, how much longer will you wait before you pass sentence and take vengeance for our death on the inhabitants of the earth?' - Revelation

"You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect." - Matthew


- angels rolling up the heavens, fresco at Gracanica monestary

How Long?

Those people under the altar, asking, "How long, how much longer?" None of us (far as I remember) have been killed for witnessing to the Word of God. But we have observed what's being done in the world; we hunger and thirst to see righteousness prevail--and we don't see it. Every now and then we're shown some righteousness --like that Italian secret service man who threw himself over the escaping journalist a year or so ago--It was a beautiful act, and he did prevail, in the sense that his death protected her until the troops stopped firing. But none of the journalist's words have been enough to stop the war. So this question unavoidably comes to us.

And then I wondered: What is the relation, between all this and "seals"? There's a recurring pattern to the story: A seal is opened, something nasty results--Why?

A "seal" vouches for the authenticity of a document. In this case, as each seal is opened, an event follows to confirm that the author of the document is the One who can make such things happen.

The trouble is, we have too much of such confirmation. The sort of events the horsemen bring are all too familiar; they are exactly what people have done for as long as we've known them--and even before that, God was said to have drowned humankind because "the Earth was filled with violence from them."

Tyranny, warfare, greed, death [influences of Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Saturn]--and from under "the altar" (a specific constellation, "Autel") martyrs demanding vengeance "on the inhabitants of the Earth." And then, once they've been told to be quiet a little while longer, that vengeance evidently commences.

Malina & Pilch say, "As in Israel's traditions, our seer considers the sky a large, rolled-out scroll. The stars in their configurations are like writing on the scroll from which one can obtain positive or negative communications from the divinity. When the sky is rolled up, God has nothing more to say, so to speak." What was once promised or threatened is being carried out.

The "wrath of the Lamb" that people flee sounds odd to us, not at all what we would consider "in character" for a "Lamb." But it doesn't mean there's bad feelings involved. In the society that produced this book, "'Wrath' is part of the vocabulary of honor and shame interactions. Wrath... is about revenge or vengeance that a person must take on one who dishonors in order to prove that one is honorable and thus maintain honor. The term does not connote anger or rage. Its focus is not the offender and the offense but the onlookers who acknowledge a person's honor."

The sixth seal signals the onset of vengeance; the seventh (coming soon!) leads to a seemingly endless series of calamities, worse by implicaton than the old familiar efforts of the four horsemen. Can that confirm this book as a true prophecy? Does it really vindicate God's honor? I think not. While every disaster that ever came along may have served to authenticate it for some readers, we'll just have to see what this scroll has to say for itself.

In our contemporary News Reality, we've reached a point where divine vengeance might be a blessing. The longer that things go on as they've been, the farther into hell our world threatens to sink. God's continued mercy seems only to enable further outrages.

I am frankly bewildered by all this. We'd better go on.