ChristadelphianBooksOnline
Harry Whittaker
Revelation - A Biblical Approach

Chapter 10 - The Seals

Following the method indicated in the previous chapter, it soon becomes very clear that a mass of Biblical evidence requires an application of the Seals to the Last Days of the Jewish State in the First Century and again to the Last Days of the Jewish State in these closing times of the Gentiles. To reject either of these is to lose much of value in the prophecy.

First, then, a comparison of the Seals and the Olivet prophecy:

	Revelation		Matthew
6:2	Conquest.	24:14	(?).
6:4	War.	24:6, 7	“wars and rumours of wars.”
6:5, 6	Famine.	24:7	“Famines.”
6:8 (R.V.)	Death by the sword, famine, pestilence, and wild beasts.	24:7	“Pestilence.”
6:11	Persecution. to be afflicted” (R.V.: “ unto tribulation”).	24:9, 10.	“They shall deliver you up
6:11	“A little season.”	24:9	“Immediately after the tribulation of those days.”
6:12	Signs in the sun, moon and stars.	24:29	Signs in the sun, moon and stars.
6:13	The fig tree, unripe figs, summer nigh.	24:32	The fig tree, his branch tender,
6:14	“Heaven departed as a scroll.”	24:35	“Heaven and earth shall pass away. ”
6:16	“And they shall say to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us.”	Lk. 23:30	“Then shall they begin to say to the mountains, Fall on us; and to the hills, Cover us.”
6:16, 17	The wrath of the Lamb...the great day of his wrath.	Lk. 21:23	“Wrath upon this people.”
6:17	“Who shall be able to stand?”	Lk. 21:36	“Watch ... and pray...that ye may be able to stand before the Son of Man.”
7:1	Four angels, four winds of the earth.	24:31	“He shall send his angels to earth. gather his elect from the four winds.”
7:3	Servants of God sealed in their foreheads.	Lk. 21:28	“Lift up your heads, for your redemption draweth nigh.”
7:9,10	“Great multitudes with palms in their hands ... Salvation to our God.”	21:9, 10	“Great multitudes ... branches from the trees (palms, John 12:13) ... Hosanna (save now) in the highest.”
7:9	“Stood before the throne and before the Lamb.”	Lk. 21:36	“Worthy to escape ... and to stand before the Son of Man.”
7:14	“The great tribulation.”	24:29	“The tribulation of those days” (and R.V., verse 9).
7:16	“They hunger and thirst no more.”	25:37, 40	“Hungry ... thirsty ... the least of these my brethren.”
7:17	“The Lamb in the midst of the throne” (cp. v. 10).	25:31	“Then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory.”
8:3	The prayers of the saints.	Lk. 21:36	“Pray always that ye may be accounted worthy” (and Lk. 18:7).
8:13	R.V. An eagle in mid-heaven.	24:28	“There will the eagles be gathered together.”

Even if the validity of some of the resemblances suggested here be in doubt, there remain so many items which arc indisputable that the conclusion is bound to follow that these Scriptures set side by side are, in the main, prophecies of the same set of events.

The view usually held of the Olivet prophecy is that it requires to be considered in two sections: vv. 4 - 22 foretelling the troubles connected with the fall of Jerusalem; v. 29 onwards concerning the return of Christ. This is broadly true, but there is more to it than that.

There is good reason for believing that the first section of Matthew 24 vv. 4-22 will also find further fulfilment in the day of the Lord’s return:

1.	“Let him that is on the housetop not come down to take anything out of his house: neither let him which is in the field return back to take his clothes” (Matthew 24:17, 18). Jesus used almost identical words concerning “the days of the Son of man” (Luke 17:31).
2.	“For then shall be great tribulation such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be” (Matthew 24:21). Yet Old Testament prophets had already made the same portentious declaration regarding the Last Days: “a time of trouble such as never was” (Daniel 12:1; Joel 2:2; Jeremiah 30:7). This evidence almost seems to require the conclusion that the real fulfilment of Matthew 24:21 has not happened yet!
3.	“He that shall endure to the end, the same shall be saved” (24:13) has been interpreted in more than one-way: (a) he who keeps the faith till the temple is destroyed? (b) he who keeps the faith to the end of his life? (but this is a truism valid for every disciple in every age); (c) he who clings to the faith in the Last Days in spite of extreme discouragement? This presents least difficulty.
4.	“Immediately after the tribulation of those days ...” (24:29) ceases to be a problem if the preceding section also has an application to the end of the present age.
5.	“Then let them which be in Judaea flee to the mountains (24:16). In Luke 17:28, 29, 32 Jesus pointed to an emphatic parallel between the Last Days and the deliverance of Lot. These words also echo Lot’s experience (Genesis 19:17).
6.	“And the gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness to all the nations; and then shall the end comc” (24:14). These words seem to require a further, more complete, fulfilment beyond that already suggested with reference to the First Century.
7.	In Daniel “the abomination of desolation” is apparently given reference to the Last Days as well as to the overthrow of Jerusalem (9:27; 8:13; 12:11). Jeremiah 25:18 reinforces this view.
8.	The warning against false Christs and false prophets (24 :23-26) comes also in Luke 17:20-22 with reference to the coming of the Lord.
9.	“Jerusalem trodden down of the Gentiles” (Luke 21:24) is quoted from Zechariah 12:3 LXX, a Scripture that has every appearance of “Last Day” application.
10.	There is a remarkable set of similarities between the first part of the Olivet prophecy and Zechariah 14.

	Luke 21	Zechariah 14
a.	Jerusalem compassed with armies.	All nations against Jerusalem to battle.
b.	The desolation thereof.	The city taken.
c.	Flee to the mountains.	Ye shall! flee to the valley of the mountains.
d.	Great distress in the land.	Houses rifled, women ravished.
e.	Led away captive into all nations.	Half the city go forth into captivity.
f.	The Son of man coming in a cloud.	His feet shall stand in that day upon the mount of Olives.

Since, then, the first part of Matthew 24 is a prophecy of A.D. 70 and also will have further fulfilment when Christ comes, besides having a later section which speaks explicitly of the Last Days, the same could reasonably be true of Revelation 6 also. So it would seem that the Seals in particular are to be interpreted of the fall of Jerusalem and also of the yet future climax of human history.

SEALS - A.D. 70

Other arguments lead to the same conclusion. For instance, Revelation concerns “the things which must shortly come to pass.” Then must not at least the first part of the book’s prophecies relate to these things “shortly to come to pass” after the book was written in A.D. 66 or thereabouts?

Again, the words of ch. 6:8: “to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth” are a verbatim quotation from the Septuagint of Ezekiel 14:21, which describes “God’s four sore judgements on Jerusalem.” This by itself is decisive. The Seals must be given an application to war-torn Jerusalem either in the First Century, or the Twentieth, or both.

Similar language about war, famine, pestilence comes in many another Old Testament prophecy, and without exception they all have to do with divine wrath against an apostate Chosen Race: Leviticus 26 :24-26; Jeremiah 14:12 and 15:2 and 21:7, 9 and 2 Samuel 24:13. These should be given careful thought. The passages in Jeremiah read as obvious pronouncements concerning God’s retributive judgements upon Israel expressed through the agency of a Babylonian army, which was battering at the gates of Jerusalem even as he wrote. But it would be short-sighted to limit the application of these words to such events. Jesus didn’t. See, for example, how he used Jeremiah 7:11 in Luke 19:46, and Jeremiah 8:11, 12, 13 in Luke 19:42, 44 and 13:6.

SEALS - THE LAST DAYS

Whilst the last three paragraphs have given reasons for an A.D. 70 application of the Seals, there is other Biblical evidence to suggest a Last Day interpretation.

The four horsemen in the Seals are readily seen to be the drivers of the four-fold cherubim chariot, for each of the Seals 1, 2, 3, 4, is introduced by one of the cherubim saying, “Come.” These horsemen also figure twice in the visions of Zechariah, in ch. 1 and 6. In chapter 1 the prophet sees “red, grey, piebald and white horses (LXX) ... among the myrtle trees” (compare Isaiah 55:13). These at the Lord’s bidding have walked to and fro through the earth (the Land?), “and behold, all the earth sitteth still, and is at rest.” Then comes the appeal which is echoed in the 5th Seal: “How long, O Lord, wilt thou not have mercy on Jerusalem ...?” The answer is a prophecy of Christ’s Kingdom: “Therefore thus saith the Lord; I am returned to Jerusalem with mercies: my house shall be built in it, saith the Lord of hosts, and a line shall be stretched forth upon Jerusalem. Cry yet, saying, This saith the Lord of hosts: My cities through prosperity shall vet be spread abroad, and the Lord shall yet comfort Zion, and shall yet choose Jerusalem” (Zechariah 1: 16, 17).

In Zechariah 6, both vision and context are similar. This time chariots with red, black, white and grisled bay horses go forth to the four corners of the earth, and they have “quieted God’s spirit” in the north country and in the other parts to which they have gone.

The context is significant. The preceding vision describes in figure the casting out of apostasy represented by the woman in the ephah (compare the harlot of Revelation 17), to make way for the re-institution of the pure worship of God.

The vision that follows is of Joshua (Jesus) the high-priest, “the man whose name is the Branch,” who shall “sit and rule upon his throne, and he shall be a priest upon his throne.”

With the horsemen of Zechariah associated with such clear pictures of the end of the Age, there is every reason to believe that the horsemen of the Apocalypse appear in connection with the same glorious work.

Further incidental details, particularly in connection with Seals 5, 6 will later reinforce these conclusions.