The two witnesses and the last trumpet

Revelation 10-11. Gentiles will again occupy the land of Israel, while two prophets teach the Jews about their Messiah and testify against the world. After three and a half years they are killed and rise again.

When John saw Jesus Christ at the beginning of the book, he hardly recognised him, so terrifyingly different was he from the man he knew in his youth. Here Jesus seems even more distant. It is left for us to recognise who he is, by the enveloping cloud (1:7), ‘the’ rainbow (an attribute of the throne of God, 4:3), the sun-like radiance of his face (1:16), the fire extending even to his feet (as in Ezekiel’s vision), his voice like a roaring lion’s (5:5). The details are not incidental: they allude to the phenomena that will precede and accompany his appearance when he comes down from heaven ‘with a shout of command, with voice of archangel and with trumpet of God’. ‘Mighty angel’ (first at 5:2) seems to be another term for archangel.

As with the seven spirits, the seven thunders are a kind of divine plural rather than successive claps. John is forbidden to disclose the message, apparently because time has run out; the six trumpets of warning have passed and he must mentally seal what he has heard. What the angel cries is also not recorded, but he roars along with the thunder, Father and Son together. As in the gospels, the voice from heaven is the voice of God, which can itself seem like thunder (Ps 18:13, John 12:29).

The mystery of God, which goes back to the Creation, is about to be realised. The world’s wise will continue to assure us that there is no Creator. They will continue to maintain that the universe of two trillion galaxies arose from a ‘singularity’ the size of a pea, that the power to move at will can be reduced to the properties of atoms, that DNA is a program without a programmer and therefore, if we do wonder at the wonders of Nature, we must do so unthinkingly. But God is God, and his purpose will be fulfilled. In the Old Testament the word ‘mystery’ occurs only in Daniel, and refers to the king of Babylon’s dream about how all human kingdoms would be terminated by the kingdom of the Messiah. In the New Testament the word is used variously, but ‘mystery of God’ appears only once elsewhere, referring simply to Christ (Col 2:2). ‘Also’ signifies that in the days (plural) during which the seventh trumpet will sound all remaining prophecy will be fulfilled.

The seventh trumpet is not blown until 11:15. The three and a half years during which the two witnesses prophesy, encompassed by 11.1-14, fall within, not after, the period of the trumpets. Accordingly, while the second ‘woe’ is clearly that of the penultimate trumpet (8:13), the woe does not pass until the end of their prophesying.

The small edible scroll (biblaridion, diminutive of biblion) recalls the ministry of Ezekiel, which began with a vision of the divine glory similar to that inaugurating John’s prophecy. After the vision, Yahweh handed him a scroll filled with lamentation and woe; it was sweet as honey in his mouth, but when he rejoined the exiles to whom he had to deliver the message he experienced bitterness. The ingesting and digesting of the scroll metaphorically enacted what prophecy was: assimilating and speaking the words of God, then writing them down. The same hand now gives John a scroll.

Peoples and nations have already been the subject of chapters 6-7. In this third allusion to Genesis 10-11 ‘kings’ is substituted for ‘tribes’, a reminder that God multiplied man’s language in opposition to the first king. Chapter 11 concerns Jerusalem’s occupation by the nations. Chapter 12 speaks of a Jewish king who will rule all nations. Chapter 13 concerns a Gentile king who will exercise authority over every tribe and language and nation in opposition to his yet-to-come Jewish counterpart. Chapters 15-19 concern the judgement of the nations.

Ezekiel, in the last part of his book, saw ‘a structure like a city’ and within it the house of God, including an altar. An angel showed him round the building, and as he went he measured each part, to emphasise in specific, physical terms (as in Jer 31:38-40 and Zech 2:1-5) that Jerusalem would recover from its destruction. God would set his throne and habitation there for ever, in the midst of his people. In AD 70 Jerusalem was destroyed a second time. Despite this apparent negation, John is to understand that the vision seen by Ezekiel will come to pass.

As rebuilt by Herod, the Temple precincts were divided into four courts, collectively known as the holy place or area (hagia). The three nearest the Temple were reserved for the priests, for Jewish men, and for Jewish women. Surrounding them was a court open to the Gentiles. The Temple proper, naos, consisted of an outer Holy Place (hagia) and, behind a curtain, the inner Holy of Holies (hagia hagiωn). The Temple as a whole, courts and building, was the hieron.

In Revelation, references to the temple are always to the heavenly dwelling. Just as there is only one altar, so there is only one temple, and those redeemed by the blood of Jesus worship there (Heb 10:19-22). Indeed, they are the temple (I Cor 3:16f), and in the sense of measuring someone by a standard (II Cor 10:12), it is they who are measured. The court outside represents the holy city (Dan 9:24) surrounding the earthly temple area. The nations about whom John has been told to prophesy will occupy Jerusalem for three and a half years, the ‘time, times and half a time’ during which Daniel was told a blaspheming king would oppress the Jews before his dominion was taken away and the kingdom given to them.

Near the end of his ministry Jesus warned that a day would come when the city would be surrounded by armies and Judaea’s inhabitants fall by the sword and be led captive out of the land. The encirclement of Jerusalem would be a sign that its devastation, or desolation (eremωsis can mean either), was near. These would be ‘days of vengeance, to fulfil all that is written’, following which Jerusalem would be ‘trodden by the nations until the times of the nations’ were fulfilled (Luke 21:24). Was this, as some interpret, a reference to the revolt against the Romans in AD 67-70? Many were slaughtered, others were deported and sold as slaves, and Jerusalem laid waste. In the reign of Hadrian the city was rebuilt, from which time the city was ruled by non-Jews until the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, when Israel became a state and the western part of Jerusalem came under Jewish control. In 1967, following another war, Israel took over the eastern part.

Since the reference to Daniel would have meant nothing to Gentile readers, Luke omits what Jesus said about the abomination of desolation. Instead, he fills the section with details omitted by Matthew. Two elements remain identical: the warning that those living in Judaea should flee to the hills and the warning that women slowed down by their children would be particularly vulnerable.

‘Vengeance’ is a key word in Old Testament prophecy, and refers primarily to the retribution God will exact on his enemies in the last days (e.g. Deut 32:43, Isa 34:8). ‘Trodden’ (from pateω) is another key word. While it links with ‘trampled’ in Daniel 7:7 and hence with the destruction by the Romans, it also links with the vision in this chapter. Speaking about the end, Zechariah says, “I will make Jerusalem a trampled stone for all the nations: every one that tramples on it will mock it, and all the nations of the earth will gather against it” (Zech 12:3 LXX, where the verb is katapateω, ‘tread down’; also in the Peshitta text). ‘Times of the nations’ verbally links with the ‘time, times and half a time’ in Daniel 7 and 12 and Revelation 12:14, again referring to the end. For these reasons, it seems better to interpret Luke 21:20-24 as referring to a crisis yet to occur.

The events are to fulfil ‘all that is written’. That the land will be resettled but then come under Gentile occupation before the Messiah returns is clear from many Old Testament prophecies besides Daniel.

The Jews were expelled from their land because they had rejected their Messiah (Luke 19:27, 44, 20:16). They still have not accepted him, even though their return in the years up to and after 1948 cannot be construed as other than providential, and God was clearly with them in the wars of 1967 and 1973. He has therefore not granted them absolute title to the land. Indeed, he seems to have denied them control of the Temple Mount precisely to prevent the rebuilding of the Temple. Moreover, the Palestinians who were living there before them also have land rights. “The one law shall apply to the native and to the stranger who sojourns among you” (Ex 12:49).

The nations and kings that conquer Israel will be a confederation of Muslim nations. As we have seen in the way the self-styled Islamic State of Iraq and Syria treated Christians and Yazidis, they will sell the Jews into slavery, kill them, rape them, lay their cities waste, and send them out of their land. Western nations will be unwilling or unable to intervene (Isa 63:5).

The olive trees and lampstands recall the one lampstand and two olive trees that Zechariah saw after waking from his previous vision. In design the lampstand was the same as the gold menorah in the outer part of the Tabernacle, whose seven lamps were like the seven ‘eyes of Yahweh, ranging through all the earth’. But in Revelation there are two lampstands, and the prophets themselves are sources of divine light. When Zechariah asked what the olive trees were, he was told, “These are the two sons of oil that stand by the Lord of all the earth.”

Moses and Elijah appeared at at Jesus’s transfiguration to bear witness to who he was. The disciples with him were drowsy, ‘heavy with sleep’, and initially, like the rest of Israel, they did not see his glory (cf. Isa 29:10, Jer 31:26). He charged them not to tell anyone what they had seen until he had risen from the dead. Perplexed, they asked him, “Do not the scribes say that Elijah must come first?” He confirmed Malachi’s prophecy. “Elijah does come first and he will restore all things.” But it was also true he had already come in the person of John the Baptist: not that John was a reincarnation of Elijah but that he had come in Elijah’s spirit and power (Luke 1:17).

So it will happen that two men will appear in the power and spirit of these two prophets. They will bear witness for the same length of time that Elijah stopped rain from falling in the reign of Ahab (I Ki 17:1, Luke 4:25). They will call upon the Jews to wake from their sleep (Zech 4:1, Isa 52:1) and give heed to what is written (Isa 8:20). They will recall the ten commandments of Moses, including the commandment not to bow down before the image of anything or anyone in heaven or on earth; for there is only one image of God. They will point out the large stone which Joshua set up at Shechem, modern Nablus, as a witness of Israel’s renewal of the covenant before he dismissed them each to his inheritance (Jos 24:26). God had told Moses, “I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among your brothers.” Yeshua, they will explain, was that prophet, the one whom they pierced. They will warn that the glorified Messiah is coming to gather the wheat into his barn and burn the chaff with fire. They will open up the words of the book of Daniel. In response, many will hear (Isa 29:18) and ‘purify themselves and be made white and be refined’ (Dan 12:9f). They will be gathered up when the other saints are gathered and sit with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob at the great banquet in heaven. The remainder will find themselves shut out of the kingdom, banished to the darkness about to envelop the earth (Isa 8:22, Matt 8:12).

The prophets have power over all parts of the natural world. Like Elijah, they have authority to cause drought and, like Moses (I Sam 4:8 confirms the allusion), authority to poison the waters and afflict the earth with multiple plagues. As in Malachi 4:6, ‘earth’ could mean ‘land’ or the whole planet. The context of the holy city suggests land, for the purpose of the plagues is to bear down on the beast. On the other hand, some details suggest that the confrontation is being played out on a bigger, even global, stage. The possibilities are not mutually exclusive: Elijah may be speaking primarily to Israel, Moses to the Gentiles. That perhaps is why, at the end of Malachi, only Elijah is mentioned as sent to Israel.

The beast is a Satan-inspired individual who leads an alliance of ten national leaders (Rev 13). The inhabitants of the earth are those who do not worship in heaven’s temple but consider earth their home (cf. John 3:31). Because they refuse to repent, the prophets call forth torments on them, namely the demons released with the fifth and sixth trumpets. The beast is powerless to harm or silence the prophets until their testimony is over. ‘Make war’ implies a campaign against more than two persons; in parallel occurrences of the phrase the people warred against are the saints (the Jews, 13:7) and those who bear witness to Jesus (Christians beyond Palestine who reinforce the testimony of the two prophets). Their mission accomplished, the two witnesses in Jerusalem (Luke 13:33) and the 144,000 witnesses in the streets of ‘the great city’ are killed. Gentile-occupied Jerusalem where Christ was crucified is part of the archetypal great city. The city is called Sodom because of its pride, complacency and homosexuality (Ezek 16:49f) and Egypt because of its idol worship and persecution of the saints. The martyrs are spiritually one body, the body of Christ (Acts 9:5, I Cor 12:13) that lies dead on the city’s one street. Some will be crucified, as Christians were in first-century Judaea (Matt 23:34) and in Nero’s Rome; some will be beheaded (Rev 20:4). Those who are of the earth rejoice.

The two prophets’ coming back to life completes their testimony. Just as the testimony of John the Baptist and Jesus Christ continued for three and a half years, so does theirs. Just as the Father raised the Son from the grave after two and half days, so he raises them after three and a half days, one day for each year of ministry. And just as Christ ascended to heaven in a cloud while others looked on, so do they. Their resurrection attests that their testimony is true, for as with the Lamb, in their mouth no deceit is found (Isa 53:9, Rev 14:5).

Despite funeral sermons to the contrary, the Bible does not say that believers go to heaven the moment they die. They are raised corporately, on an appointed day, and nature manifests the event. When Jesus rose from the dead, an earthquake split the rocks, and the saints in Jerusalem rose with him out of their tombs. Another quake shakes Jerusalem as the martyred witnesses rise. Those not killed by it fear God and glorify him by repenting. The resurrection of other believers, and subsequently of all Israel, is yet to come.