Question 4

 Who are the 144,000 sealed in heaven (Revelation 7)?

The text says quite specifically that this is “the number of those who were sealed: 144,000 from all the tribes of Israel.”

The real challenge in explaining this passage lies in the meaning of the tribes of Israel.

A common interpretation of Revelation says that this is the number of the Jewish martyrs from the Great Tribulation. The number in this case derives from the number of the tribes, twelve, multiplied by 12,000: 12 × 1,000 × 12 = 144,000.

In Bible times, 1,000 was the largest number for which there was a special word. They had no need for the word million because they knew of nothing that numerous, except perhaps grains of sand, and they were considered countless.

The Old Testament used the word thousand the way we might use million, or one of the larger words our national debt has forced on our collective consciousness.

When God told Israel that He would, “keep[ing] his covenant of love to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his commands” (Deuteronomy 7:9). He wanted them to know that His faithfulness was everlasting.

Think about it. We frequently use such words as trillions or billions as if they meant infinity or eternity. And that’s the use the Bible makes of its largest number word. When the Bible uses 1,000 in a symbolic sense, it means all there is or all there could be.

The first twelve in our equation is simple to understand. Twelve is used throughout Scripture as the number for Israel, and it comes from the twelve patriarchs. That gets us up to 12,000. We could stop there, since the text tells us there were 12,000 from each of the tribes. Many commentators do. They’re the ones who identify these as the Jewish martyrs. They do this because their larger interpretive framework views all of Revelation, after chapter 3, as relating to Israel.

I disagree. Revelation gives pretty clear indication as to its attitude toward ethnic Israel. Christ spoke to the church at Smyrna and encouraged them in the face of “the slander of those who say they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan” (Revelation 2:9). This slander went beyond gossip and backbiting. It eventaully led to persecution and imprisonment. The church at Philadelphia received an even more direct statement about those who claimed to be Jews. Revelation 3:9 said they were liars.

In addition to the twelve tribes of Israel, another group of twelve figured prominently in the Bible, this time in the New Testament. That’s right. There were twelve disciples, later called apostles, who were known in the early church simply as “the Twelve.” Revelation includes the Apostles with the twelve tribes. The New Jerusalem bears the names of the tribes on its gates, and the twelve foundations bear the names of the apostles.

The New Testament doesn’t completely ignore Israel in a biological, ethnic sense. But often biological descent from the patriarchs was de-emphasized.

Paul talked about those who had Abraham for a forefather, “as pertaining to the flesh” (Romans 4:1, KJV). He talked about Israelites who were his kinsmen “according to the flesh” (Romans 9:3).

This qualifier is important in light of what Paul said in Romans 9:6–8. Paul’s intention here should be clear. Not all who are descended from Israel, that is, Israel after the flesh, are Israel. Not everyone who is Abraham’s descendant is his child. It is the children of promise, Paul said, who are Israel! He talked about the “Israel of God” at the end of Galatians (6:16), which is a particularly telling verse, because it comes at the conclusion of a book aimed at the heresy of Judaizing.

The Galatians had been told they must become observant Jews to be Christians. Paul attacked the idea in the most forceful way throughout the book. He ended by reminding them that the new creation which is in Christ was what really counted, not circumcision or uncircumcision (6:15). In other words circumcision, considered vital by Judaizers and the mark of the orthodox Jew, was irrelevant.

What mattered was that the Galatians had been made new creatures in Christ, the act that abolished the dividing wall between Jew and Gentile (Ephesians 2:14) and made the two one, so Paul could say that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek (Galatians 3:28). After negating the importance of biological descent, Paul showed the positive side: “If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise” (Galatians 3:29). He couldn’t have said it much more plainly. For many Christians the idea of the Church as spiritual Israel and heir to all the promises of God is anathema. But I am convinced that this is what the Bible teaches.

The problem with interpreting the 144,000 as Jewish martyrs lies in the assumption that Revelation uses Israel in a strictly literal sense. Those who take this literal view interpret other nations symbolically, but not Israel. Why insist that Israel must be ethnic Israel when Babylon has become Rome and then some ten-nation European super-state?

Why must Israel be ethnic Israel when so many places in the New Testament say that we are now under new terms of agreement between God and humanity. Under those terms, Israel is free to share with everyone else, but has no priority. If the Gentiles are now the seed of Abraham, and heirs according to the promise, why must we see Israel in Revelation?

In fact, there’s no hint whatsoever that the church has been removed at the beginning of Revelation. Some will argue that the call of John to come through the door into heaven is the Rapture. It takes some very inventive interpretation to make a case for that idea.

The speaker clearly identifies this vision as “what must take place after this” (Revelation 4:1). John records his observations as his own first-person-singular experiences. There’s no hint anywhere in the text that he represents the church.

Where has the church disappeared to in this book?

I suggest they haven’t disappeared at all. They make their appearance in the 144,000 of chapters 7 and 14.

We’ve established that the number is 12 × 12 × 1,000. We’ve also established that twelve is the number of Israel. Twelve times twelve is a number that signifies the perfection of itself. It stands for the perfect, ideal Israel.

That number may come from the multiplication of twelve tribes times twelve apostles. We see that combination in 21:12–14. One thousand is the number of completion. In other words, it stands for the totality of God’s people, Jew and Gentile, brought together under the banner of the Lamb in that last terrible, climactic moment when the forces of evil rise up in the violence of their death throes.

In the 144,000 we find the fulfillment of God’s eternal plan of redemption, the calling out of a people for His name, the creation of a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. The number is the symbolic representation of what Paul described in Ephesians. It’s the body in which race, gender, and social status are all irrelevant (Galatians 3:28). It includes the full number of those who will be saved, set aside for protection by the seal of God. The Body of Christ, in that generation, will stand complete.

Although the nations continue to rage against Christ and His bride, they have the assurance that they have been marked with God’s seal of ownership, and that “neither death nor life, angels, nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38–39).

David E. O’Brien, Today’s Handbook for Solving Bible Difficulties (Minneapolis, MN: David E. O’Brien, 1990), 102–105.