REVELATION 4-6
SEGMENT III
page 2 OF
5
Statement 1:
The Song of Moses – 1437 B.C.
“Jeshurun
[A poetic name of
endearment given to Israel. God used
this name to indicate His affection
for Israel, as though it were His
pet.] Grew fat and
kicked; filled with food, he became
heavy and sleek. He abandoned the God
who made him and rejected the Rock
his Savior. They made him
jealous with their foreign gods and
angered him with their detestable
idols. They sacrificed to demons,
which are not God – gods they
had not known, gods that recently
appeared, gods your fathers did not
fear. You deserted the Rock, who
fathered you; you forgot the God who
gave you birth. The Lord saw this and
rejected them because he was angered
by his sons and
daughters…’I will heap
calamities upon them and spend my
arrows against them. I will send
wasting famine against them,
consuming pestilence and deadly
plague; I will send against them the
fangs of wild beasts, the venom of
vipers that glide in the dust. In the
street, the sword will make them
childless; in their homes, terror
will reign. Young men and young women
will perish, infants and gray-haired
men…’” (Selections
from Deuteronomy 32:15-25, insertion
and italics mine)
Statement 2:
Concerning the Destruction of
Jerusalem – 586 B.C.
“The word of
the Lord came to me: ‘Son of
man, if a country sins against me by
being unfaithful and I stretch out my
hand against it to cut off its food
supply and send famine upon it and
kill its men and animals, even if
these three men – Noah, Daniel
and Job – were in it, they could
save only themselves by their
righteousness,’ declares the
Sovereign Lord. ‘Or if I send
wild beasts through that country and
they leave it childless and it
becomes desolate so that no one can
pass through it because of the
beasts, as surely as I live,’
declares the Sovereign Lord,
‘even if these three men were in
it, they could their own son or
daughters. They alone would be saved,
but the land would be desolate.’
Or if I bring a sword against that
country and say, “Let the sword
pass throughout the land,” and I
kill its men and their animals,
surely as I live, declares the
Sovereign Lord, ‘even if these
three men were in it, they could not
save their own sons or daughters.
They alone would be saved.’ Or
if I send a plague into the land and
pour out my wrath upon it through
bloodshed, killing its men and their
animals, as surely as I live,’
declares the Sovereign Lord,
‘even if Noah, Daniel and Job
were in it, they could save neither
son nor daughter. They would save
only themselves by their
righteousness.’ For this is what
the Sovereign Lord says: ‘How
much worse will it be when I send
against Jerusalem my four dreadful
judgments - sword and famine
and wild beasts and plague – to
kill its men and their
animals!’” (Selections
from Ezekiel 14:12-21, italics mine)
God says that He has
four deadly judgments that He uses to
cauterize the growth of sin. God also
says that He is reluctant to
implement these judgments, but He is
moved by divine justice (Genesis
15:16; Leviticus 18:24) when the cup
of sin becomes full. (For a more
thorough study of the full cup
principle, review Chapter 2 of the
Warning! Revelation is about to be
fulfilled.) The Bible says that
God destroyed the world in
Noah’s day because man’s
thoughts were constantly evil.
(Genesis 6:5) The Bible indicates
that God destroyed Sodom, Gomorrah
and Jerusalem because of degenerate
behavior. (Genesis 18, 19; Ezekiel 5)
Therefore, Bible history leaves no
wiggle room on this matter:
God’s patience with sin and
sinners has a limit. God destroys
people; cities and nations when
extended mercy cannot produce
repentance, reformation and
redemption. (Genesis 19; Leviticus
18; Colossians 3:5,6; Revelation 18
and 20) Unfortunately, we do not hear
much about the wrath of God these
days and this silence has led many
people to diminish their
accountability toward God. Several
texts in the Bible highlight
God’s dreadful judgments within
a punitive context. (Read Leviticus
26, 1 Chronicles 21; Jeremiah
14,27,44; Ezekiel 6.) Now that you
have a little background information
on God’s four deadly judgments,
we will return to the attempt of
Christians to interpret and locate
the breaking of the fourth seal.
History Cannot Produce
a Fulfillment
For twenty centuries,
Christian expositors have made
various claims of fulfillment for the
fourth seal, but no one has stepped
forward with a solution that has
gained widespread acceptance. The
problem with the fourth seal is the
scope of destruction. The scope is
huge and the destruction has to
happen between the breaking of the
third seal and the breaking of the
fifth seal. The absence of a clear
and convincing fulfillment should
have caused more concern among
Protestant expositors, but alas,
prophetic details require distortion
when things so not add up.
If the fourth seal was
broken in past ages, what year was
the fourth seal broken? When did
Jesus punish the world by killing 25%
of its people? A few Christians have
argued the bubonic plague that swept
through Europe in the sixth,
fourteenth and seventeenth centuries
was a fulfillment of the fourth seal.
These epidemics were horrible, but
the rate of death in each of these
cases did not exceed two million
people per year and these epidemics
were local to Europe. Was the bubonic
plague sent as a punitive judgment
from God or was the bubonic plague a
consequence of poor sanitation and
standing filth? The ravages of the
bubonic plague did not kill 25% of
the world’s population.
Because the Protestant
reformation grew out of persecution,
numerous reformers in the
seventeenth, eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries claimed the
fourth seal covered a period of a
thousand years – when the Church
of Rome persecuted all who refused to
obey its laws. The total number of
martyrs during the Dark Ages (around
A.D. 500 to A.D.1500) has been
estimated to be as low as ten million
and as high as fifty million. When
this figure is divided by a thousand
years, the rate of martyrdom is a
maximum of 50,000 people per year. No
student of Protestant history doubts
the persecution of the saints during
the dark Ages was horrible, but this
interpretation does not begin to
satisfy the specifications given in
the fourth seal for two reasons.
First, the Bible indicates that
God’s four judgments, sword,
famine, plague and wild beasts, are
punitive. They are directed at wicked
nations who have filled up their cup
of iniquity – not at faithful
martyrs standing firm for God’s
truth. Therefore, the fourth seal
does not apply to the saints who were
burned at the stake or imprisoned for
their faith. Second, the Bible says
that when the fourth seal is broken,
God’s four judgments will kill
25% of Earth’s population. Even
if the Catholic Church put fifty
million saints to death, this could
not meet the specifications of the
fourth seal. The scope of destruction
presented in the fourth seal is just
too large.
A few Christians have
suggested the fourth seal was broken
around 1918, when at the height of
its deadly grip, the world’s
worst outbreak of influenza killed
twenty five million people in a
single year! (From 1914 to 1918, nine
million people died from World War
I.) The influenza outbreak was
horrible, and it was accompanied by a
horrible war, but both events sis not
come close to killing 25% of the
world’s population. In short,
history cannot produce a fulfillment
of the fourth seal because the scope
of the fourth seal is so large that
nothing in the past can measure up.
The second rule of apocalyptic
prophecy says that a fulfillment
occurs only when all of the
specifications of a prophecy are met
and there is no event in history that
meets the 25% specification.
Understanding The
Word
Now that the
specifications of the fourth seal are
known, and since there is no evidence
of a historical fulfillment, please
consider the following solution. The
breaking of the fourth seal will mark
the beginning of the Great
Tribulation. According to Rule One of
apocalyptic prophecy, the fourth seal
has to be broken after the third seal
is broken. Let us assume for a moment
that Jesus was found worthy to
receive the book in 1798. Let us
assume the third seal was broken in
1844. (This timing will be
demonstrated in the next segment.)
Since 25% of Earth’s population
has not been killed with divine
judgments since 1844, the breaking of
the fourth seal would be next. The
breaking of the fourth seal could be
called “the shock and awe
campaign” of God’s
destructive power. The books of
Daniel and Revelation indicate that
Jesus is about to declare war on
Earth. The king of kings is about to
impose a regime change on this
planet. Jesus is about to release His
deadly judgments against planet Earth
because we have become a degenerate
world and Earth’s cup is full.
Jesus said the days during the last
generation would parallel the days of
Noah. (Matthew 24:37) As God’s
wrath breaks out, 25% of Earth’s
population will perish (Revelation
6:7,8) during a period of perhaps
thirty to sixty days. (This sequence
of events is described at length in
the Warning! Revelation is about to
be fulfilled study.)
The Keys to
the Solution
Because Revelation 4-6
says nothing about timing, we have to
use four keys to unlock the timing of
the convocation described by John:
Key 1.
The dates of Daniel 7:9,10 and
Daniel 8:14 have to be understood.
Key 2.
The exaltation and empowerment of
Jesus in Daniel 7:13,14 have to be
understood.
Key 3.
The subject of cleansing
Heaven’s temple has to be
understood.
Key 4.
The doctrine of parallel temples
indicates the High Priest had to be
found worthy on the Day of Atonement
before He could cleanse the earthy
temple.
When these four keys
from Daniel are applied to Revelation
4-6, the mystery of timing can be
resolved. Of course, if we correctly
determine the date of the convocation
in Revelation 4-6, the meaning of the
seven seals will easily support this
date, because the seals are broken in
chronological order after Jesus
receives the book. Remember, the
intended meaning of apocalyptic
prophecy cannot be determined without
valid rules of interpretation.
Throughout the ages, expositors have
distorted scripture in an effort to
make sense of the prophecies.
1798 Becomes a Key
Date!
When these four keys
from Daniel are applied to Revelation
4-6, the mystery of the timing can be
resolved. Daniel and John, separated
by seven hundred years, were shown
pieces of the same event from two
different perspectives. This is not
unusual in the Bible. For example,
the rise and fall of Earth’s
kingdoms was revealed to King
Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 2, and
similar information was revealed to
Daniel in Daniel 7. These two men had
visions fifty years apart. They were
shown the rise and fall of the same
kingdoms from two different
perspectives. God chooses repetition
and enlargement to make His visions
succinct and concise. King
Nebuchadnezzar saw an image of
various metals and Daniel saw a
chronological sequence of strange
beasts. The point is that various
metals of the image and the wild
beasts represent the same kingdoms.
The beauty of this process is that
once a student of prophecy has enough
data to ensure that both visions
apply to the same event, the matrix
takes over because there is
chorological order in both
prophecies. The details in one vision
compliment the details in another.
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