Catholic apologist Jimmy Akin joins Cy Kellett to discuss the meaning of the 144,000 sealed servants in Revelation.
Transcript:
Cy: In Revelation chapter seven, starting at verse two, it says, “Then I saw another angel ascending from the rising of the sun, saying, ‘Do not harm the earth or the sea or the trees, until we have sealed the servants of God on their foreheads. 144,000 sealed from every tribe of the sons of Israel.'” So my question is, who is that? Who or what is this verse talking about?
Jimmy: Well, you’ve mentioned one of two passages where the 144,000 are mentioned in Revelation, but there is another passage, and we need to read it if we want to get complete data about them. You need to read more than what you read from Revelation 7. Okay. And I heard the number of the sealed: 144,000 sealed from every tribe of the sons of Israel. And then he goes through a list of 12 tribes, which is actually not identical to any of the lists of the 12 tribes in the Old Testament. It’s a unique one. But he hears about 12,000 people from each of the 12 tribes. So the number 144,000 is 12,000. It’s 12 times 12 times 1,000.
But then you need to keep going because we need to read passages in context. And immediately after the listing of the 12,000 from each tribe, he says, “After this, I looked and behold a great multitude that no one could number from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb.” So that’s the relevant passage from Revelation 7.
Then there’s another passage in Revelation 14 where John says this: “Then I looked, and behold, on Mount Zion stood the Lamb, and with him 144,000 who had his name and his Father’s name written on their foreheads. And I heard a voice from heaven, like the roar of many waters, and like the sound of loud thunder. The voice I heard was like the sound of harpists playing their harps. And they were singing a new song before the throne and before the four living creatures and before the elders.” Those were groups that surrounded God’s throne in heaven.
“No one could learn that song except the 144,000 who had been redeemed from the earth. It is these who have not defiled themselves with women, for they are virgins. It is these who follow the Lamb wherever he goes. These have been redeemed from mankind as first fruits for God and the Lamb. And in their mouths no lie was found, for they are blameless.”
So that’s the data that we’re given about the 144,000, both in chapter seven and chapter 14. So we know a number of different things about them in terms of who they are. There have been a lot of proposals made. I’ll start off by giving you two proposals that I think we can demonstrate pretty readily that are false.
The first one is the view of the Jehovah’s Witness organization. They claim that the 144,000 are a literal group of 144,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses who will be given a heavenly destiny to rule with Christ from heaven for 1,000 years in the future. And these Jehovah’s Witnesses have it revealed to them by God. This is a form of private revelation that they are among the 144,000, and they are referred to sometimes as the anointed class of Jehovah’s Witnesses. And only they get to go to heaven. All the rest of the saved stay here on earth, so they get to be up in heaven with Jesus.
Now, this is a problematic interpretation for multiple reasons. The principal reason, though, is it just is not grounded in the text. You’ll notice that the only thing that the anointed class in Jehovah’s Witness theology has in common with the 144,000 as they’re described in Revelation is the number 144,000. You know, nothing else is literal. They’re not literally from the twelve tribes of Israel. They are not literally all male virgins. They presumably many of them have told a lie at some point in their life. So that is not literal, that they’ve never told, that no lie is found in their mouths.
There’s a whole bunch that is not interpreted literally except for the number 144,000. That’s the only thing that Jehovah’s Witnesses take literally. And that’s a problem. Now, Revelation is not always to be taken literally, but you could approach this text in one of two ways. You could say either all of the details are non-literal or all of the details are literal. But it’s hard to. It’s not a consistent position to say, “Well, this one detail is literal, but everything else is not.”
There’s also no basis in the text for saying God is going to privately reveal to people or that they’re Jehovah’s Witnesses as opposed to Jews, because that’s another thing they’re not taking literally here. And so this is a very problematic interpretation.
Another interpretation that is quite problematic is common in dispensational circles in Evangelical Protestantism. According to dispensationalists, now, they’re not. And what the Jehovah’s Witnesses do. They don’t take just one detail and say that this one detail is literal. Instead, what dispensationalists tend to do is say it’s all literal. So these are a group, according to dispensationalists, of exactly 144,000 Jews from 12,000 from each of the Jewish tribes. And they are male virgins. They have not lied, and so forth. And they will be active with Christ. I’m sorry, they will be active on earth during the tribulation period, that is in our future.
So before, in our future, but before the millennium, the future millennium that dispensationalists believe in. The problem with this, one of the major problems with this is that the 144,000 are described in Revelation 7 and Revelation 14. And those chapters in Revelation are not plausibly interpreted as applying in the literal sense to our future.
The reason is, or among the reasons, are that we’re told both at the beginning of Revelation that it is to reveal what will happen soon. And we’re also told at the end of Revelation that the book reveals what will happen soon. Now, soon is to be judged from the perspective of John’s original audience, which was alive 2,000 years ago. And if you’ve got a big gulf of 2,000 years, that ain’t soon. You can try to fidget around that. But the fact is that the Book of Revelation clearly begins in the first century, because in chapters two and three, we have the letters to the seven churches that existed in the first century.
But then at the end of the Book of Revelation clearly applies to the eternal order. So somehow we’ve got to, in Revelation, get from the first century to the eternal order. And we would thus expect that somewhere in the Book of Revelation we ought to encounter a long period of time that would let us bridge the gap between the first century and the future.
Well, okay, we do. And it’s in chapter 20. It’s the millennium. And a thousand is a symbolic number. It doesn’t need to be taken literally. It’s like when God in the Psalms says, “The cattle on a thousand hills are mine.” He’s not implying that there’s a thousand and first hill where he doesn’t own the animals. He means all of the animals on all of the hills are mine. And that symbolized by a thousand.
Well, in the same way, most Christians throughout history have understood the Revelation, have understood the millennium of a thousand years to be a long period of time that bridges the beginning of Christian history with the bulk of church history, and then we get the future. So there is a long period of time in Revelation that we would be living in right now. That means that the material before Chapter 20, including Chapters 7 and 14, would apply to the beginning of Christian history before the millennium arrives. And that means that the 144,000, whatever they are, should have existed in the beginning of Christian history, either in the first century or the first few centuries.
Now, there are other proposals about who they are, but I’ll tell you the one that I tend to prefer.
You’ll notice that I’ll point out two things. The first one is a clue in Revelation 7. And in Revelation 7, we first hear about them before we even hear the number of the 144,000. We first hear about them when that angel from the sunrise says, and I’ll get the exact quote here, he says, “Do not harm the earth or the seas or the trees until we have sealed the servants of our God.”
Okay. We’re then going to later find out that the servants of our God that get sealed are the 144,000. But if you just read the book in literary order, you know, you come to our first identification of this group of people, and they are called the servants of our God. So, Cy, if you’re reading a Christian book and it refers to a group known as the servants of our God, who’s it probably talking about?
Cy: Christians.
Jimmy: Yeah, all of them.
Cy: Yeah.
Jimmy: And then we notice that after we have this enumeration of 12,000 from each tribe of Israel. By the way, is there any connection between the number 12 and the Christian community in the first century that you can think of?
Cy: I can think of one group.
Jimmy: Those apostles.
Cy: Yeah, the 12 apostles.
Jimmy: Okay. So then we go through the listing of 12,000 from each tribe, and then we get to that verse I wanted us to read where John says, “After this, I looked and behold a great multitude that no one could number from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, ‘Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne and to the Lamb.'”
So this great multitude that no one can number, that’s clearly the worldwide Christian community. So here in Revelation 7, we have the 144,000 identified first as the servants of our God, which John hears about. And then he turns. After he hears about the people who are sealed, he then turns and looks and sees an innumerable multitude.
So the description of the 12,000 from each tribe is sandwiched between these two descriptions of the servants of our God and the innumerable multitude of Christians. Now, why is that significant? Well, if you go back to Revelation chapter 5, we find God before the throne in heaven. And he says, “In the right hand of the one seated on the throne, that is God, he sees a scroll written within and on the back.” So it’s what’s known as an epistograph. It’s got a scroll with writing on both sides sealed with seven seals.
And an angel says, “Who is worthy to open the scroll and break its seals?” And nobody is found who’s like that. And John starts to weep because no one is found worthy to open the scroll. But then one of the elders around the throne of God tells him, “Weep no more. Behold the lion of the tribe of Judah, the root of David has conquered so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals.”
So John has just heard about the lion of the tribe of Judah. So John might expect to see a lion, a conquering beast, you know, a really violent animal. But instead he says that. And after being told about the lion of Judah, he looks and says, “I saw a lamb standing as though it had been slain.” So instead of a vicious predator, John sees an herbivore that has itself been killed. And yet everybody recognizes that the lion of Judah and the lamb that has been slain are both Jesus Christ.
So you have this violent imagery associated with Jesus’s conquering imagery that’s then associated with Jesus’s passive nature. The way he conquers is through the cross. So notice John first hears about this figure, then he sees the figure, and it’s something surprising.
Yeah. And that’s what we have going on in Revelation 7. First he hears about the 12,000 from each tribe of Israel. Then he looks and sees the innumerable multitude. And so a great many scholars, and I would be one of the people who support this position, have concluded that the 144,000 are in fact the innumerable multitude and the servants of our God in general. The same way that Jesus Christ is both the lion that John hears about and the lamb that he sees.
Cy: Wow, Jimmy, thank you so much. I did not expect to get all that from you. Thank you very much for that.
Jimmy Akin is our guest. We better take a break. And we will come right back with lots of questions. Two lines open: 888-318-7884.