Days of Vengeance - The Preterist Archive

7:4-8
thousand from each of the twelve tribes. The number
144,000 is obviously symbolic: twelve (the number of
Israel) squared, then multiplied by 1000 (ten and its
multiples symbolizing many; cf. Deut. 1:11; 7:9; Ps.
50:10; 68:17; 84:10; 90:4). St. John pictures for us the
ideal Israel, Israel as it was meant to be, in all its
perfection, symmetry, and completeness; the holy
Army of God, mustered for battle according to her
thousands (cf. 1 Chron. 4-7). The “thousand” was the
basic military division in the camp of Israel (Num.
10:2-4, 35-36; 31:1-5, 48-54; 2 Sam. 18:1; 1 Chron.
12:20; 13:1; 15:25; 26:26; 27:1; 28:1; 29:6; 2 Chron.
1:2; 17:14-19; Ps. 68:17). This is the significance of
Micah’s famous prophecy of the Nativity: Even though
Bethlehem is too small to be counted “among the
thousands of Judah,” too insignificant to be considered
seriously in the nation’s military strategy, yet “from you
One will go forth for Me to be Ruler in Israel,” the King
who will establish God’s justice and peace to the ends
of the earth (Mic. 5:1-15). It is in terms of this Biblical
imagery that St. John hears the names of the tribes
shouted out: He is listening to the military roll-call of
the Lord’s Hosts. In this case, each of the twelve tribes
is able to field twelve full divisions, a numerically
perfect army of 144,000 soldiers of the Lord.
St. John’s vision of an Israelite army is thus, in Milton
Terry’s words, “an apocalyptic picture of that ‘holy seed’
of which Isaiah speaks in Isaiah 6:13 – that surviving
remnant which was destined to remain like the stump
of a fallen oak after cities had been laid waste and the
whole land had become a desolation – that ‘remnant of
Jacob,’ which was to be preserved from the ‘consumption
determined in the midst of all the land’ (Isa. 10:21-
23). It is the same ‘remnant according to the election
of grace’ of which Paul speaks in Romans 9:27-28; 11:5.
God will not destroy Jerusalem and make the once holy
places desolate until He first chooses and seals a select
number as the beginning of a new Israel. The first
Christian Church was formed out of chosen servants of
God from ‘the twelve tribes of the dispersion’ (James
1:1), and the end of the Jewish age was not to come
until by the ministry of Jewish Christian apostles and
prophets the gospel of the kingdom had been preached
in the whole world for a testimony unto all the nations
(Matt. 24:14).” 8
St. John comforts his readers: Judgment will assuredly
be poured out upon the apostates of the Old Covenant,
but the Church herself is not in danger. Indeed, the
true Covenant people are safe, whole, and entire. Even
though God is about to destroy Jerusalem, annihilating
every last vestige of the Old Covenant world-order and
system of worship, Israel endures. The Covenant
promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are not
jeopardized in the slightest. In fact, the outpouring of
God’s wrath in the destruction of Jerusalem will only
serve to reveal the true Israel in greater glory than ever
before. Jerusalem is sacked and burned, its inhabitants
killed and scattered; but Israel – all of her people, in all
of her tribes – is sealed and saved. “Judgment thus is not
only the other side of the coin to salvation, but it is also
an act of grace and mercy to the people of God.
However devastating the fall of Jerusalem was to the
faithful remnant, without that fall no remnant would
have remained.” 9
The Order of the Twelve Tribes in Revelation
[I have set this out as a separate section because it
will undoubtedly be the most wearying part of the
book to read. The reader who tires easily should
give it a brief glance and move on. While I have
tried to simplify the discussion as much as possible,
I fear it still looks exceedingly complex. All this
would be much easier if we knew our Bibles as well
as the children in the first-century synagogues: If
we knew by heart the names of Jacob’s sons and
their mothers, and the twenty or so different orders
in which they are listed in the Old Testament (and
the reasons for each variation), we would almost
immediately understand what St. John has done
with his list, and why.
Some remarks by Austin Farrer are especially
pertinent here: “The purpose of symbols is that
they should be immediately understood, the
purpose of expounding them is to restore and build
up such an understanding. This is a task of some
delicacy. The author had not with his conscious
mind thought out every sense, every interconnection
of his imagery. They had worked in his
thinking, they had not themselves been thought. If
we endeavor to expose them, we shall appear to
over-intellectualize the process of his mind, to
represent an imaginative birth as a speculative
construction. Such a representation not merely
misrepresents, it also destroys belief, for no one can
believe in the process when it is thus represented.
No mind, we realize, could think with such
complexity, without destroying the life of the
product of thought. Yet, if we do not thus intellectualize,
we cannot expound at all; it is a necessary
distortion of method, and must be patiently
endured by the reader. Let it be said once for all
that the convention of intellectualization is not to
be taken literally. We make no pretence of
distinguishing between what was discursively
thought and what intuitively conceived in a mind
which penetrated its images with intelligence and
rooted its intellective acts in imagination. . . .
“The reader who perseveres through the analyses
which follow may naturally ask, ‘How much of all
this did the congregations of the Seven Churches
comprehend, when the apocalyptic pastoral of
their archbishop was read out to them?’ The answer
is, no doubt, that of the schematic analysis to
which we resort they understood nothing, because
8. Ibid., pp. 341f.
9. Rousas John Rushdoony, Salvation and Godly Rule (Vallecito, CA: Ross House Books, 1983), p. 141.
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