The army of God (Ch. 7)

Chapter 7

After the dramatic actions of the last chapter there are a few things that need to be settled:

• How will the church handle all of this overwhelming action?
• Should the church just wait and endure or does it have an active role?

The protection of the church

The chapter starts with the description of sealing. An angel is requested to wait until the saints are sealed. This activities are the plagues of the trumpets. Espacially the fifth trumpet is important as here all people are excluded who are sealed.

This is the plagues where people loose all hope and want to die but can not. We are the saints are spared from this which means we are facing trouble but we get the strength to endure this and be a testimony to others.

The task of the church

At this time it is not so clear what the church should do, but the church is described in a very interesting way because in the apocalyptic literature of this time the Messias was always expected to come as a military leader and the faithful will join him and together the defeat the enemies with military power. But this is very different here.

On the one hand it is described as an army (the counting reminds on the counting of the army during the exodus). And the army is 12.000 from each tribe of Israel led by the tribe of Judah where Jesus is from. After all the tension we see in the book John reminds us on our roots in Israel.

But this is only what John hears. But the reality he sees is very different. It is a uncountable number of worshippers, that come out of the Great Tribulation.

This does sounds like a very strong tension. We should be victorious, but we are in our worship (loyalty to God) and our faitfhul endurance (testimony to others). In all this we doing this in the presence of the lamb (Jesus).

The Great Tribulation

What is the Great Tribulation? Will it still come?

The Great Tribulation started when Jesus died on the cross and Satan was kicked out of heaven.

Until this time the people of God as a community only had to suffer when they sins. Now this changed. We are even suffering without doing anything bad.