THE 144,000 AND THE GREAT MULTITUDE, WHO ARE THEY? AN IN-DEPTH BIBLICAL STUDY ON THE BOOK OF REVELATION BY DR. DIEGO SAUSA Who will compose the 144,000, the survivors of the great tribulation and triumphant redeemed saints described by John in Revelation 7:1-8 and 14:1-5? And who are the victorious great multitude described by John in Revelation 7:9-14? These are quiescent but resurgent questions in the church for a long time. Even in the days of the pioneers this was a hot topic but knowledge on the subject was apparently limited. Even church pioneer E. G. White admitted she had no light on the subject,1 although she was quite confident that earnest students of the Bible “will in a short time know[about the subject] without question.”2 John in his vision, recorded in Revelation 7:1-8,sees four angels ready to destroy the earth in the final judgment, but then an angel stops them saying, “‘Do not harm the land or the sea or the trees until we put a seal on the foreheads of the servants of our God.’ Then I [John] heard the number of those who were sealed: 144,000 from all the tribes of Israel” (Rev.7:3-4, NIV, italics mine). Then John hears the names of the twelve tribes of Israel comprising the saved with numbering exactly 12,000 people from each tribe. After hearing this, John looks and sees something else, he says, “After this I looked and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands” (Rev. 7:9-10, italics mine). Then in his vision John is told by one of the elders that this great multitude standing before God’s throne in front of Christ are those who “have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb” (7:14). So who are these two groups of saved people, namely the 144,000 from the 12 tribes of Israel and the great multitude? Should the number 144,000 be taken literally, that is, 12,000 coming out from each of the 12 tribes of Israel? If so, then major difficulties will occur. One major difficulty is coming up with 12,000 pure-blooded representatives of each of the twelve tribes. It is impossible because the majority of the pure blooded 12 tribes of Israel which was part of the Northern Kingdom of Israel was already effectively obliterated by the Assyrians through assimilation by making the northern Israelites intermarry with the Gentiles after the Assyrians conquered the Northern Kingdom in 722 B.C.. It is true that there were a few members of the 12 tribes who escaped to the Southern Kingdom of Judah, but the problem is, no pure blooded member of any tribe could possibly exist because of intermarriage among the 12 tribes. C. Mervyn Maxwell rightly points out that“already by the time of Jesus the twelve tribes were largely amalgamated….Almost every Jew was a ‘son of David.’”3 And when John wrote the book of Revelation in around A.D. 90, any record of who belonged to which tribe had been already destroyed with the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in A.D. 70.4 The difficulties disappear when the number 144,000 is perceived as symbolic, that is, the twelve tribes are symbolic of God’s people worldwide. Afterall, the book of Revelation is apocalyptic, that is, as a norm, things described should be considered symbolic unless the context demands that they should be treated as literal. Indeed James addresses all the believers in Christ as “the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad”(James 1:1). And Paul tells us that we are Abraham’s seed and heirs according to the promise if we are in Christ”(Gal. 3:29). The geographic distribution of the twelve tribes is implicitly revealed in the first few verses of Revelation 7. The impending end-time divine judgment is universal (i.e., “four corners of the earth,” Rev. 7:1), but before the four angels could implement God’s worldwide judgment, God’s messenger (angel) from the east (symbolic of Jesus) tells them with a loud voice not to destroy the earth until the 144,000 are sealed (7:3). In other words, Christ stops the worldwide destruction of the earth until His own people from around the world are secured from that final worldwide destruction. R. H. Charles aptly writes, “the sealing must be co-extensive with the peril, and must,therefore, embrace the entire Christian community, alike Jewish and Gentile.”5 In other words, since the destruction is worldwide, the geographic constituency of the 144,000 must also be worldwide since they are to be saved from that worldwide destruction. The group 144,000, therefore, is not exclusively Palestinian or any other group but symbolic of the totality of the saved from all over the world. The next question is, if the geographical constituency of the twelve tribes is not literally from the twelve tribes of Israel but rather symbolic of the worldwide company of the saved, what about the quantity, the number 144,000? Will there be exactly only 144,000 people from all over the world who will be saved? Does God fix a quota of the saints who will be saved and stop working in the hearts of men once that quota is reached? “We are accustomed to thinking of God as extending His grace to everyone freely and accepting all who choose to respond. Knowing this, and knowing human nature, we are amazed that precisely 12,000, no more and no less,would respond from each of the twelve tribes. Nothing like this has happened before.”6 In the apocalyptic books of Daniel and Revelation,numbers 3, 4, and 12 are used as symbols of completeness, universality and perfection. If the geographic constituency of the 12 tribes is symbolic of the totality of God’s people worldwide, then the numeric constituency of the saved numbering 144,000 must also be symbolic. Jewish scholar Jacques B. Doukhan explains: Their number 144,000,composed of 12x12, is symbolic. The number 12 represents the number of the covenant between God and His people (4,number of the earth, x3, number of God)….Each tribe consists of 12000 people. As for the number 1000, which multiplies 12,it symbolizes…also the tribe. In Hebrew,the word elef (thousand) stands for the tribe, the crowd, the clan, or even the regiment. The number 12,000 thus depicts the tribe inits totality.7 We therefore concur with Hans K. LaRondelle that “the true Israel of God is not limited to 144,000 literal Jews, but is symbolic of the totality of spiritual Israel among the human race.”8 The next question is, if both the geographic and numeric constituencies of the 144,000 are symbolic of the multicultural, multinational people of God who have gone through great tribulation on earth, how is it related to the multicultural, multinational innumerable great multitude that John saw celebrating victory over tribulation with Jesus Christ in heaven (Rev.7:9-14)? When one reads the apocalyptic chapters of the book of Daniel and the apocalyptic book of Revelation, he will notice that the authors are carried from the scenes of great tribulation on earth that the saints would undergo to the scenes of ultimate victorious celebration in heaven. Leslie Hardinge describes this pattern of movement of events from earth to heaven as the “hinge.”9 It reminds the reader that the tribulation of the saints is not the finale of the story, but rather, the victory of the saints in heaven is. Revelation 7 shows this pattern. Verses 1 to 8 (described as the 144,000) portray God’s people going through sealing in the final judgment, while verses 9 to 17 show God’s triumphant people (described as the great multitude) in heaven. These two scenes revealed to John portray God’s people’s sequential progress in salvation history from earthly tribulation to victorious celebration in heaven with Christ. The first scene on earth “represents the church militant, the second scene the church triumphant.”10 The number 144,000 that John heard symbolic of the multicultural,multinational saints going through sealing in the final judgment on earth (Rev.7:1-8), are, therefore, the same as the innumerable multicultural,multinational great multitude that John saw when he turned to look, celebrating victory in heaven. It is important to note that John did not seethe 144,000, he heard the number. But when he turned to look, he saw a multiracial, multinational innumerable multitude. This pattern of hearing and seeing in the book of Revelation is perspicaciously explained by LaRondelle: The pattern of hearing and then turning to see, was used by John in Revelation 1:12,13. What John heard is then further clarified by what he actually sees. Another instance is found in Revelation 5. He hears an elder declare: “See the Lion of the tribe of Judah…has triumphed” (5:5). But when he looks to see the Lion, he saw a Lamb, “looking as if it had been slain” (5:6). What John saw was a clarification of what he had first only heard.11 In other words, the symbolic group 144,000 that John heard, which represented the totality of God’s people here on earth, is the same group that John saw when he turned and looked that was celebrating victory in heaven. The church militant on earth is the same church triumphant in heaven. We, therefore,concur with Doukhan when he concludes that “The 144,000 depict Israel marching as a whole. It is the ‘all Israel’dreamed by Paul (Rom. 11:26), the ‘complete’ number of the saved, as alluded to in the fifth seal (Rev. 6:11). Also it is the great multitude, multicultural and multinational survivors of the oppression (Rev. 7:14; cf. 6:9,11).”12 Everyone then who is saved through the blood of the Lamb from Adam until the last generation, belongs to the group 144,000 which is the great multitude, the totality of the saved in heaven. _____________________ 1 C. D. Crisler, Letter to E. E. Andross, Dec.8, 1914. 2 SM, book 1, 175. 3 C. Mervyn Maxwell, God Cares 2 (Boise, ID: Pacific Press Pub. Assn., 1985), 212. 4 Jacques B. Doukhan, Secrets of Revelation (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald Pub. Assn., 2002), 71. 5 Quoted in Hans K. LaRondelle, How to Understand the End-Time Prophecies ofthe Bible (Sarasota, FL: FirstImpressions, 1997), 149, author’s italics cancelled. 6 Maxwell, 212. 7 Doukhan, 71. 8 LaRondelle, 149. 9 Leslie Hardinge, Jesus Is My Judge (Harrisburg, PA: Review and Herald Pub. Assn.), see author’s examples in pp. 128, 150,and 172 among others. 10 LaRondelle, 148. 11 Ibid., 149. 12 Doukhan, 72. 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Posted on: Tue, 11 Mar 2014 16:46:22 +0000
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