EPISODE 260 REVELATION CHAPTER 7 "Key Word: UNTIL"

Welcome to Share the Word. So we're moving right along with chapter 7 of Revelation. But my question is this: Does it have to be political out there? Zionists, Israel, and what about the placement of the seal of the living God? You know what? That's all I'm going to say.

I'm going to turn it over to Pastor Paul. Oh, and thanks for listening. Revelation chapter 7, keyword until. Chapter 7 of Revelation will answer the question left hanging at the end of chapter 6. The great day of God's wrath has come, and who is able to withstand it? While those locked in unbelief and rebellion against God are looking for places to hide to protect themselves from the wrath of His judgments, finding none, there are others who are boldly standing, many of them actually.

Chapter 7 then begins like this: Then I saw four angels holding back the four winds, and they did not blow on the earth or the sea or even on the trees. I saw another angel coming up from the east. He was carrying the seal of the living God, and he shouted to those four angels, Wait! Don't harm the land or the sea or the trees until we have placed the seal of God on the foreheads of His servants. The seal of God on their foreheads. This is obviously something different from the seals that have been broken one after another on the heavenly scroll in chapter 6, but they are rooted in the same concept.

At that time, clear up to almost modern times, seals were used to mark ownership and authority. Documents like scrolls were sealed, as we've seen, by placing hot wax over the open edge and impressing a signet or a rolling small cylinder into the soft wax with the identifying mark of the owner. But it wasn't just documents. Another example of the New Testament is when Pontius Pilate, his seal was placed on the stone covering Jesus' tomb. Remember that? That imprimatur meant no one should move the stone, no one should disturb this tomb, because it was under the authority of the Roman governor.

As this chapter opens, it's not tombs or documents that are being sealed; it's people, and they are called God's servants. Four powerful angels that are about to initiate the next round of judgments on the earth are told by a messenger from God, Hold up. Don't do anything until we place the seal of God on the foreheads of these His servants. I don't think it will be a blob of wax or anything physical, probably, but the point is that some will be sealed by God during the tribulation time, marked as belonging to Him and under His special protection. And they, to answer the haunting question of those trying to hide from God's wrath, they will be able to stand during those awful days unashamed and unafraid and represent God. This brings up two memories for me.

One is of a missionary friend of my family, a man named Florent Toriac, who I've spoken about before. He worked in Haiti and the Dominican Republic almost a hundred years ago now. I remember reading in his memoirs descriptions of times he went into some dangerous places, taking the gospel to remote areas where voodoo was very entrenched and witch doctors had a lot of authority, both over people who feared them as well as in the spirit world, for real. A witch doctor who later became a Christian and renounced voodoo and the dark side told him once that they had no power over him because they could see that he was sealed by the Most High God. In some way, he was marked as protected. And believe it or not, I remember once long ago walking into a diner with a friend and seeing some lady I knew.

The lady actually owned that diner, sitting near the back in deep conversation with someone. I went back there just to say hi, and before anything else, the woman she was talking with turned to me and said, You're a born-again Christian, aren't you? And I said, Yeah, I am. And she said, I can see that. You are marked by God on your forehead. I'm not sure how she could see that, but I'm glad she could.

Similarly, this chapter reveals that during the tribulation, there's going to be a group of people, evangelists really, who are sealed by the Most High God, who Satan and the Antichrist cannot touch. Their role is only hinted at, but they are probably those who are proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom after the rapture, which we saw in Matthew and Mark was, Repent, the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Later, in chapter 14, John describes this same group as those who follow the Lamb wherever He goes, who have been purchased from among men as, listen to this, the firstfruits to God and to the Lamb. Like sealed, firstfruits is another concept to understand to make sense of this passage. Firstfruits was the term used for the first produce of a harvest that was dedicated to God. This is described in Leviticus chapter 23 and also in Deuteronomy chapter 26.

The first grain to ripen was to be given as an offering to God in anticipation of the harvest to follow. This practice became a metaphor and is used in the New Testament several times. In Romans 16, when the apostle Paul is greeting Christians he knows at the end of that letter, he names some people and calls them the firstfruits of Achaia. He meant they were the first Christian believers from that province, and many more followed them. In 1 Corinthians 15, Jesus is called the firstfruits of those who rise from the dead, meaning he was the first to be resurrected with the new immortal body. But a lot more of us, all who believe in him, will follow him in that.

Get it? Now, this group that is sealed in the tribulation time is also identified as firstfruits, firstfruits belonging to God and to the Lamb. The question is, firstfruits of what? Who are they the first of, of which many more will follow? That gets us right to today's big idea. Tucker Carlson, one of the most influential podcasters in the world today, who used to be a strictly political commentator, lately sees himself as a theologian and evangelist for a worldview that is opposed to America allying itself with Israel.

And he's on a crusade about it. He just posted, literally as I was writing this lesson, this came across my feed, Pray that the spell is broken and that we are all saved. If you don't follow his X feed or get his daily posts on your Facebook feed, you wouldn't know what he meant by that. But here's what he meant: that President Trump and other leaders of the U.S. government, he believes, have fallen under the spell of Zionists and are being led into World War III by Israel. Share the Word. It's not about politics, as you know.

But sometimes what's going on in the world overlaps so obviously with things going on in the Bible that I feel impressed to try to provide some clarity. This is one of those times, because right now the U.S. and Israel are in this conflict with the Republic of Iran, and the opposition to that rises from people's negative view of the nation of Israel and the Jewish people. They think we're in it for Jews, and they're angry about it. When you read Revelation 7 according to its normal meaning, you read that during the tribulation, this special group which will be sealed by God and protected, a group that will be doing His work during the very dark time just prior to Jesus' second coming, is 144,000 Jews.

And later at the beginning of chapter 14, it says about this same group, I looked, and behold, the Lamb was standing on Mount Zion, and with Him 144,000 having His name and the name of His Father written on their foreheads. Mount Zion? That's Jerusalem. Zionists, by the way, a term often used like a dirty word today, are those who believe the Jewish people belong in Israel, that they are God's chosen people in a special way, and that the land was eternally deeded to them by God since the time of the Abrahamic covenant way back in Genesis. Zionists, whether Jewish or Christian, also see the return of the Jewish people to Israel as the key fulfillment of many prophecies. And interpreters like me realize they must be there in the land for the end times events in the Bible to play out.

Now, here we are in Revelation 7 in the midst of the tribulation era, and 144,000 Jews are marked by God and representing Him in that tumultuous time. In case we're slow, the chapter actually defines that this group is made up of 12,000 from each of Israel's tribes, listing them out. You have to do some voodoo exegesis to ignore that these will be real live Jews, descendants of Abraham. Yet today, it's become somehow theologically deep for many, like Tucker and many others, to insist that the people who are in Israel today are no longer God's people in any special sense. And some are saying that those that are are not even connected historically or even genetically to the people we read about on the pages of the Bible.

And if you keep going down that rabbit hole, you start hearing age-old anti-Semitic propaganda, I won't repeat, by other self-appointed theologians of our time like Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes, people extremely popular on social media and in the podcast world. You know, there's always been an undercurrent of anti-Semitism in the world. Satan hates the Jews because God loves the Jews and chose to work out His plans in the world through the Jews. And it seems every few generations, anti-Semitism rears its ugly head again, as it's doing right now. It was really kick-started when Israel's armed forces retaliated against Hamas terrorists in Gaza after an unprovoked attack in southern Israel in October of 2023.

Palestinian terrorists crossed Israel's southern border and began killing people wantonly gathered for a music festival, and then it spread to nearby kibbutzes, small family farm communities. The terrorists killed more than 1,200 people, including 46 Americans, and kidnapped more than 250 more, who they carried back to Gaza, kids from a music festival who were then raped and brutalized, and many of whom subsequently died there. In response, Israel retaliated, and harshly, and they had every right to do that, because the terrorists dug in, hiding out in heavily populated civilian areas, and because they refused to return the living hostages, the operation by Israel went on and on. After warning civilian population it was coming, they bombed many areas they knew the Hamas strongholds were at, and non-combatant Palestinians were killed in the conflict in pretty large numbers.

This is unfortunately how war goes. Then, somehow, in America, especially on college campuses, there began to be large demonstrations against Israel and against America for backing Israel. Israel, as you probably know, is the only democracy in the Middle East and a key American ally. Suddenly, the narrative became that Israel was the bully. They were war criminals, completely forgetting, on purpose forgetting, that it was the Islamic terrorists who run Gaza who started that war. These same people also don't know or care that the only reason the Palestinians had a homeland in Gaza and on the West Bank and Israel is because the Israeli government gave it to them in peace settlements following wars that also were started by Arabs against Israel back in 1967 and again in 1972, wars which, again, the Arabs lost.

After those wars, though, Israel, they could have kept large swaths of land belonging to Egypt and Jordan and Syria, the countries that attacked them and who were defeated, but they didn't. They gave land back in the interests of peace. The keffiyeh-wearing, Hamas flag-waving college kids chanting death to Israel and from the river to the sea, a slogan meaning drive the Jews completely out of that land, are clueless. And worse, a surprising number of otherwise usually level-headed people seem completely blind to the history and, more importantly, to God's word regarding the Jewish people. Even conservative Christians are buying into the so-called replacement theory that God has abandoned the people of Israel after their leaders rejected the Messiah and replaced them in His plans with the church, that somehow now we are Israel. Not the Jewish people have been cast aside in God's plans.

I'm honestly astounded by the level of anti-Israel, anti-Semitic propaganda that is out there in the open right now. It makes me wonder, is this another of the lying narratives the world will buy into that enables what happens to the Jewish people in the tribulation time possible? Are we seeing the ground swell now that will culminate once again then in another attempt to annihilate the Jewish people by the Antichrist? Man, it does make me wonder. In case this all seems confusing to you, let me as briefly as I can overview Israel in God's program. This is the important context of today's controversy.

More than 2,000 years before Jesus' time, God chose Abram, a man living in what is today Iraq. He made a covenant with him that included specific promises, namely that his descendants were given the land of Canaan as their homeland, that out of him would come a great nation, and that the whole earth would be blessed through that family, which all believers in the Bible understand to be a reference to the coming Messiah, Jesus, very real Jewish man who lived 2,000 years ago. These promises we call the Abrahamic covenant, and they were unconditional. This was God's stated sovereign plan for the descendants of Abraham. The nation grew from his descendants through his son Isaac and his grandson Jacob. Jacob's 12 sons became the patriarchs of the 12 tribes of Israel, the tribes mentioned here in Revelation 7.

Think of them as large clans, but each one also later was allotted actual physical territory, and they became like states in Israel when the land of Canaan was conquered about 1,400 years before Jesus' time. Before they entered the land, then, they signed on for a conditional covenant, which spelled out in Deuteronomy, the Mosaic covenant I'm referring to. And part of that conditional covenant was that if they were faithful to God and His laws, God would bless them in every imaginable way. But if they became unfaithful and turned away from God and practiced the kind of things the pagans around them practiced, they would be driven from the land and dispersed throughout the nations. Israel reached its zenith under King David and his son Solomon about a thousand years before Jesus. But after that, things began to go downhill.

God sent prophet after prophet warning that if they did not return to faithfulness in Him and His Word, the consequences in the Mosaic covenant would trigger. They didn't turn around, and the first northern tribes were overrun by the Assyrians and then the southern tribes by the Babylonians. The nation of Israel went out of existence, although the Jewish people did not. And almost all the major prophets who were ministering around that time, Jeremiah, Daniel, Isaiah, Ezekiel, assured God was not done with them and foretold a day when God would resurrect and regather the nation to their promised land from all the places that they were scattered. These promises were associated with the promised coming of the kingdom of God on earth, the Messianic kingdom.

A small remnant of Jews was given permission to return to Israel and rebuild Jerusalem by the Persian King Cyrus about 500 years before Jesus. And then Israel became a small province under the Persian Empire, then under the Greek Empire, which succeeded it, and then under the Roman Empire, which succeeded it. And that was when the Messiah arrived. That is when Jesus' ministry played out in Galilee, and when he laid down his life as a Savior for the whole world, around 33 A.D. Are you still with me? The Jewish leaders of that generation rejected Jesus as their Messiah.

And Jesus himself said at the time that Jerusalem would be overrun and destroyed again, as it was in 70 A.D. after a Jewish rebellion against the Romans. Jesus foretold that happening during his famous Olivet Discourse, his most complete prophetic teaching. As we learned and as we studied then, his predictions extended well past the destruction of Jerusalem in the first century and on to future events that would mark his second coming. The Olivet Discourse in Matthew 24 and 25 was told to Jews in Jerusalem, and much of it, if not most of it, is about God's plans for the Jewish people. I've given you this fascinating overview of Jewish history to get to this point. When Jesus was ready to leave his disciples and return to heaven, the ascension, they asked him, this is Acts chapter 1, verse 6 and following, Lord, is it at this time that you're going to restore the kingdom to Israel?

They believed correctly that Jesus was the Messiah. They also believed that there was going to be a literal messianic kingdom in Israel that would extend across the earth that Jesus was going to be the leader of. Listen, Jesus did not answer them, Oh no, that's not happening. The Jewish leaders rejected me. I and my Father, we're done with those Jews. Forget that kingdom stuff.

The covenant promises canceled. We've decided to transfer them onto the Gentiles and call them spiritual Israel. No, he didn't say any of that. He said, It's not for you to know the times and the seasons which the Father has set. The kingdom is set in the mind of the Father. It's going to happen.

So, here's what happened after that. After Jesus was rejected, God did move His attention away from Israel for a time. Jesus gave His followers the Great Commission to proclaim the gospel to the whole world. Then this thing unknown to the prophets, this thing Paul called a mystery, something God had planned all along but had not revealed until then, was born: the church. And a new people of God from all tribes, languages, and nations became part of the church. Backing up for a moment to the Olivet Discourse, this is Luke chapter 21.

Jesus told His Jewish followers Jerusalem is going to be trampled under the feet of Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled. He said their house would be left to them desolate, meaning their land, where they lived, empty. But in the same teaching, he jumps forward within time's prophecies, promising they would yet one day see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven, clearly a reference to the second coming, and that He would return to Jerusalem. So, key word: until. Israel would be desolate and under the control of Gentiles until the time of the Gentiles was fulfilled, and that would be the time of His return. The apostle Paul wrote in Romans chapter 11, I say then, has God rejected His people, meaning the Jewish people?

May it never be! For I too am an Israelite, a seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin. God has not rejected His people whom He foreknew. Whom He foreknew? That means who He had a plan for before they ever knew they were His people. Then he goes on to say, and I don't even see how this can be misunderstood, a partial hardening has happened to Israel until, until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in, and so all Israel will be saved.

Key word again, until. After the Gentile thing God is doing, we call the church, after that's completed, then all Israel will be saved, just as it is written, Paul says. Then he quotes Old Testament prophets who promised the Messianic kingdom would in fact come. The Deliverer will come from Zion. He will remove ungodliness from Israel, and this is my covenant with them when I take away their sins. Do you get the picture?

Yes, Israel has been unfaithful to God time and time again, but they are His chosen people. He had a plan for them before they ever existed as a nation, and He still does. Although a partial spiritual blindness or hardening of their hearts has affected them during this church age, it won't last forever. It will only last until God is done doing what He's doing with the church and with the Gentiles, and then His focus will return to His ancient people. And that is exactly what's happening in Revelation chapter 7. The church has been raptured.

God has now raised up a large contingent of Jewish witnesses, 144,000 of them, to represent Him in this final period, the tribulation era. They have His seal on them, and they are protected by Him. That these are real ethnic Jews is clear because chapter 7 goes on to describe a different large group who will be saved during the tribulation from all nations. So these are God's ancient people, real, live, descended from Abraham, Jewish people, who He calls the firstfruits in chapter 14. You knew I'd get back to that. And I asked then, firstfruits of what?

The answer is the firstfruits of the return of all living Jewish people to God by the end of the tribulation era, because that's what the apostle Paul, as well as the prophet Zechariah, says will happen. When Christ comes to this earth the next time, the Jewish people will accept Him en masse. And when that nasty tribulation is over, they will enter into the kingdom of God that He has been prepared for them since the foundation of the world. And Jesus, their Messiah, will rule from Jerusalem over a kingdom that lasts 1,000 years. That's the story of God and the Jewish people. Thanks for listening.

This is Paul for Share the Word. Thanks, Paul. 1,000 years. So after listening to this episode, I'm wondering if you've accepted Jesus as your Lord and Savior. Have you put your faith and belief in Him? Because if you haven't, what are you waiting for? The discussion of everything that we're talking about is not a matter of if it will happen.

It's a matter of when. So, please don't wait. And if you'd like to talk about it, please send us an email at tony@sharetheword.org or paul@sharetheword.org. But again, don't wait.