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The Seven Seals are a symbolic portrayal of a literal reality; the removal of heavenly restraint on earthly forces of sin and destruction, leading to God's intervening wrath and Christ's climactic judgment at His Second Coming (Seal 6). The Seven Seals span the entire seven-year end time.
Seal one commences with the Jewish Covenant which inaugurates Israel's Seventieth Week. Seal 6 is a depiction of the Day of the Lord which concludes the Seventieth Week. Thus the Seven Seals present a panorama of the end time as described in Revelation 6-19, its summary version, the Olivet Discourse of Matthew 24, and their one verse time-frame commentary in Daniel 9:27. Here is the evidence that the first four seals portray the Birth Pang stage of the end time as described in Matthew 24:7,8.
1. Seal one parallels the pre-"rise" phase of peace implied in Matthew 24:7.
2. Seal two harmonizes with the next phase- nation is against nation- or global warfare.
3. Seal three is the famine (and possibly earthquake) phase.
4. Seal four fits the plague phase (Luke 21:11).
Further confirmation of harmony between Seals one through four and the Birth Pangs of Matthew 24:7 is the agreement in both that the next movement is mass martyrdom of the saints (Mat. 24:9; cmp. Seal five). Since the Birth Pangs are called the "beginning" of end time events (Mat. 24:8), then the first four seals are that beginning, and occupy much of the first half of Israel's Seventieth Week.
Second, since Seal two takes peace from the earth, then Seal one must picture a conquest through peaceful means (6:2; bow without arrows). There are only two times of "peace" in the end-time prophetic scenario. The first is the Jewish Covenant which signals the beginning of the end time. It is terminated by war among men (Mat. 24:7; Rev. 6:4). The second is a brief period of "Peace and safety" (I The. 5:2) proclaimed by the followers of the Antichrist. But it is not terminated by war among men; it is terminated by the armies of Heaven in the Day of the Lord at the end of the seven years. Therefore, Seal one, being at the beginning of the Birth Pangs, represents the Covenant that the Assyrian makes with Israel (Dan. 9:27).
The third reason that the first four Seals of Revelation 6 must describe the Birth Pangs of Matthew 24:7,8 is that they are obviously still to come. They cannot represent any sort of historical fulfillment or age-long process because the scope and magnitude of one-fourth of the earth's population being killed is without historical parallel. Seal four pictures just such a scale of death. "And when He broke the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature saying, "‘Come.''" And I looked, and behold, an ashen horse; and he who sat on it had the name Death; and Hades was following with him. And authority was given to them over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword and with famine and with pestilence and by the wild beasts of the earth." (Rev. 6:7,8; emphasis mine ) Since "Hades" is the repository of the unsaved dead, then Christians are not among those killed in Seal four. 58/105:63/106 This indicates the absence of all saved people at this early juncture of the final seven years, and is evidence for a recent Rapture having occurred . The only exception is the 144,000 "first fruit" Jewish saints. Responding to Christ after the supernatural destruction of Russia (Eze. 39:7), they are specially protected for the purpose of producing spiritual "offspring" (Rev. 7:1-3,12:17).
It is clear, though, that the first four Seals far surpass in scope any event or set of events in history. The deaths of 1/4 of the world's population is unique in all of history. Therefore, the 7 Seals represent future events. |
