Gems in the book of Revelation
Part 139 - Revelation 7:9-17
The worshipping crowd
John sees a great crowd of the people of God, but he has a problem: are they ordered and countable or are there far too many of them for that? He doesn’t know so he describes them both ways.
If they can be counted how many are there? He chooses a number and since he has to describe them he does it in terms of the ancient people of God: the twelve tribes of Israel though he is no longer really drawing a line between Jew and Gentile. And how many are there? He has to choose a number. So he is careful to pick a number: 144,000, which is neither too many or too few. He will not have known how many followers of Jesus there were as he wrote. So he picks a stylised number made up of products of 10 and 12. Two twelves and three tens multiplied together will give him what he wants. That must have been at least two or three times as many as the number of followers of Jesus there were then. So, allowing for the rapidly increasing churches it is a number that means that no one who heard it would need to despair of being one of the chosen ones. But it is not such as enormous number that his hearers might think that they were automatically alright then and need do no more to get their seal on their forehead. Such a number will not do today; there are far too many of us now. At least one more 12 and 5 more 10s to take it up to over 17 billion would now be needed to get a small multiple of the known number of Christians now in the world.
So perhaps John’s second picture of an uncountable number in a great multitude is the better one. And we, you and I, are somewhere in that throng. If our eyesight in heaven is much the same as it is here on earth we wont even be able to see the throne and the Lamb because as comparatively late comers we shall be so much on the edge of the throng. But we shall still get the white robe that will signify that we are counted as pure, forgiven through the blood of the Lamb and thus partaking in his victory. Even if we are not very good singers here on earth - no matter - this praise and worship is to be spoken! Even if our voices are now old and shaky we shall then have ‘loud voices’ rejoicing in the fact that we have been saved. We shall hear the praises of the elders and the living creatures and, although it does not say this will happen, no doubt picking up the gist of what they are saying and joining in.
When John asks who are eligible to be in this great throng he is told that they are “those who have come out of the great tribulation”. All sorts of fanciful theories about what the great tribulation is, or will be, have been proposed. We don’t need to worry about it; in a throng so big there is bound to be room for little you and little me! WOW and hooray.
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