REVELATION 4-6
SEGMENT III
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Statement 1: The Song of Moses – 1437 B.C.

“Jeshurun [A poetic name of endearment given to Israel. God used this name to indicate His affection for Israel, as though it were His pet.] Grew fat and kicked; filled with food, he became heavy and sleek. He abandoned the God who made him and rejected the Rock his Savior.  They made him jealous with their foreign gods and angered him with their detestable idols. They sacrificed to demons, which are not God – gods they had not known, gods that recently appeared, gods your fathers did not fear. You deserted the Rock, who fathered you; you forgot the God who gave you birth. The Lord saw this and rejected them because he was angered by his sons and daughters…’I will heap calamities upon them and spend my arrows against them. I will send wasting famine against them, consuming pestilence and deadly plague; I will send against them the fangs of wild beasts, the venom of vipers that glide in the dust. In the street, the sword will make them childless; in their homes, terror will reign. Young men and young women will perish, infants and gray-haired men…’” (Selections from Deuteronomy 32:15-25, insertion and italics mine)

Statement 2: Concerning the Destruction of Jerusalem – 586 B.C.

“The word of the Lord came to me: ‘Son of man, if a country sins against me by being unfaithful and I stretch out my hand against it to cut off its food supply and send famine upon it and kill its men and animals, even if these three men – Noah, Daniel and Job – were in it, they could save only themselves by their righteousness,’ declares the Sovereign Lord. ‘Or if I send wild beasts through that country and they leave it childless and it becomes desolate so that no one can pass through it because of the beasts, as surely as I live,’ declares the Sovereign Lord, ‘even if these three men were in it, they could their own son or daughters. They alone would be saved, but the land would be desolate.’ Or if I bring a sword against that country and say, “Let the sword pass throughout the land,” and I kill its men and their animals, surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, ‘even if these three men were in it, they could not save their own sons or daughters. They alone would be saved.’ Or if I send a plague into the land and pour out my wrath upon it through bloodshed, killing its men and their animals, as surely as I live,’ declares the Sovereign Lord, ‘even if Noah, Daniel and Job were in it, they could save neither son nor daughter. They would save only themselves by their righteousness.’ For this is what the Sovereign Lord says: ‘How much worse will it be when I send against Jerusalem my four dreadful judgments  - sword and famine and wild beasts and plague – to kill its men and their animals!’” (Selections from Ezekiel 14:12-21, italics mine)

God says that He has four deadly judgments that He uses to cauterize the growth of sin. God also says that He is reluctant to implement these judgments, but He is moved by divine justice (Genesis 15:16; Leviticus 18:24) when the cup of sin becomes full. (For a more thorough study of the full cup principle, review Chapter 2 of the Warning! Revelation is about to be fulfilled.)  The Bible says that God destroyed the world in Noah’s day because man’s thoughts were constantly evil. (Genesis 6:5) The Bible indicates that God destroyed Sodom, Gomorrah and Jerusalem because of degenerate behavior. (Genesis 18, 19; Ezekiel 5) Therefore, Bible history leaves no wiggle room on this matter: God’s patience with sin and sinners has a limit. God destroys people; cities and nations when extended mercy cannot produce repentance, reformation and redemption. (Genesis 19; Leviticus 18; Colossians 3:5,6; Revelation 18 and 20) Unfortunately, we do not hear much about the wrath of God these days and this silence has led many people to diminish their accountability toward God. Several texts in the Bible highlight God’s dreadful judgments within a punitive context. (Read Leviticus 26, 1 Chronicles 21; Jeremiah 14,27,44; Ezekiel 6.) Now that you have a little background information on God’s four deadly judgments, we will return to the attempt of Christians to interpret and locate the breaking of the fourth seal.

History Cannot Produce a Fulfillment

For twenty centuries, Christian expositors have made various claims of fulfillment for the fourth seal, but no one has stepped forward with a solution that has gained widespread acceptance. The problem with the fourth seal is the scope of destruction. The scope is huge and the destruction has to happen between the breaking of the third seal and the breaking of the fifth seal. The absence of a clear and convincing fulfillment should have caused more concern among Protestant expositors, but alas, prophetic details require distortion when things so not add up.

If the fourth seal was broken in past ages, what year was the fourth seal broken? When did Jesus punish the world by killing 25% of its people? A few Christians have argued the bubonic plague that swept through Europe in the sixth, fourteenth and seventeenth centuries was a fulfillment of the fourth seal. These epidemics were horrible, but the rate of death in each of these cases did not exceed two million people per year and these epidemics were local to Europe. Was the bubonic plague sent as a punitive judgment from God or was the bubonic plague a consequence of poor sanitation and standing filth? The ravages of the bubonic plague did not kill 25% of the world’s population.

Because the Protestant reformation grew out of persecution, numerous reformers in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries claimed the fourth seal covered a period of a thousand years – when the Church of Rome persecuted all who refused to obey its laws. The total number of martyrs during the Dark Ages (around A.D. 500 to A.D.1500) has been estimated to be as low as ten million and as high as fifty million. When this figure is divided by a thousand years, the rate of martyrdom is a maximum of 50,000 people per year. No student of Protestant history doubts the persecution of the saints during the dark Ages was horrible, but this interpretation does not begin to satisfy the specifications given in the fourth seal for two reasons. First, the Bible indicates that God’s four judgments, sword, famine, plague and wild beasts, are punitive. They are directed at wicked nations who have filled up their cup of iniquity – not at faithful martyrs standing firm for God’s truth. Therefore, the fourth seal does not apply to the saints who were burned at the stake or imprisoned for their faith. Second, the Bible says that when the fourth seal is broken, God’s four judgments will kill 25% of Earth’s population. Even if the Catholic Church put fifty million saints to death, this could not meet the specifications of the fourth seal. The scope of destruction presented in the fourth seal is just too large.

A few Christians have suggested the fourth seal was broken around 1918, when at the height of its deadly grip, the world’s worst outbreak of influenza killed twenty five million people in a single year! (From 1914 to 1918, nine million people died from World War I.) The influenza outbreak was horrible, and it was accompanied by a horrible war, but both events sis not come close to killing 25% of the world’s population. In short, history cannot produce a fulfillment of the fourth seal because the scope of the fourth seal is so large that nothing in the past can measure up. The second rule of apocalyptic prophecy says that a fulfillment occurs only when all of the specifications of a prophecy are met and there is no event in history that meets the 25% specification.

Understanding The Word

Now that the specifications of the fourth seal are known, and since there is no evidence of a historical fulfillment, please consider the following solution. The breaking of the fourth seal will mark the beginning of the Great Tribulation. According to Rule One of apocalyptic prophecy, the fourth seal has to be broken after the third seal is broken. Let us assume for a moment that Jesus was found worthy to receive the book in 1798. Let us assume the third seal was broken in 1844. (This timing will be demonstrated in the next segment.)  Since 25% of Earth’s population has not been killed with divine judgments since 1844, the breaking of the fourth seal would be next. The breaking of the fourth seal could be called “the shock and awe campaign” of God’s destructive power. The books of Daniel and Revelation indicate that Jesus is about to declare war on Earth. The king of kings is about to impose a regime change on this planet. Jesus is about to release His deadly judgments against planet Earth because we have become a degenerate world and Earth’s cup is full. Jesus said the days during the last generation would parallel the days of Noah. (Matthew 24:37) As God’s wrath breaks out, 25% of Earth’s population will perish (Revelation 6:7,8) during a period of perhaps thirty to sixty days. (This sequence of events is described at length in the Warning! Revelation is about to be fulfilled study.)

The Keys to the Solution

Because Revelation 4-6 says nothing about timing, we have to use four keys to unlock the timing of the convocation described by John:

Key 1.   The dates of Daniel 7:9,10 and Daniel 8:14 have to be understood.

Key 2.   The exaltation and empowerment of Jesus in Daniel 7:13,14 have to be understood.

Key 3.   The subject of cleansing Heaven’s temple has to be understood.

Key 4.   The doctrine of parallel temples indicates the High Priest had to be found worthy on the Day of Atonement before He could cleanse the earthy temple.

When these four keys from Daniel are applied to Revelation 4-6, the mystery of timing can be resolved. Of course, if we correctly determine the date of the convocation in Revelation 4-6, the meaning of the seven seals will easily support this date, because the seals are broken in chronological order after Jesus receives the book. Remember, the intended meaning of apocalyptic prophecy cannot be determined without valid rules of interpretation. Throughout the ages, expositors have distorted scripture in an effort to make sense of the prophecies.

1798 Becomes a Key Date!

When these four keys from Daniel are applied to Revelation 4-6, the mystery of the timing can be resolved. Daniel and John, separated by seven hundred years, were shown pieces of the same event from two different perspectives. This is not unusual in the Bible. For example, the rise and fall of Earth’s kingdoms was revealed to King Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 2, and similar information was revealed to Daniel in Daniel 7. These two men had visions fifty years apart. They were shown the rise and fall of the same kingdoms from two different perspectives. God chooses repetition and enlargement to make His visions succinct and concise. King Nebuchadnezzar saw an image of various metals and Daniel saw a chronological sequence of strange beasts. The point is that various metals of the image and the wild beasts represent the same kingdoms. The beauty of this process is that once a student of prophecy has enough data to ensure that both visions apply to the same event, the matrix takes over because there is chorological order in both prophecies. The details in one vision compliment the details in another.

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