He Shall Wipe Away Every Tear

He shall Wipe Away Every Tear

Revelation 7:9-17

We are now come to the 4th Sunday of Easter this morning. As this is the Easter season (Eastertide), we reflect during this time the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead and its implications. Last week we looked at the text from Revelation 5. Today, we shall continue by looking at Revelation 7:9-17.

Revelation can be a difficult book to understand. Many well-meaning Christians as well as those who are less than well-meaning have proposed many different schemes to understanding this book. There are those who hold to the rapture of the church starting in Chapter 4 before a seven-year tribulation. Some hold to a rapture in the middle of the Great Tribulation. Some see a post-tribulation second coming of Jesus. Then there are theories about the millennium. Some are pre-millennial, others post-millennial. and yet others a-millennial. This refers to whether the 1000 year reign of Christ occurs before or after the Tribulation or whether the millennium actually will happen at all and reduces the millennium to a symbol. Then there is the identity of the 144,000, the relationship to the three sets of sevenfold judgments.

I guess at this point, I have to make some decisions about the context of this week’s passage. I want to state that I might be wrong here in my interpretation, seeing there are so many out there. I will do my best here, but I think in general, what I have to say is theologically sound, even if the details turn out to be different. Revelation, until recently, was thought to be written during a persecution by the Emperor Domitian in 96 AD. However, there are many who feel the book was written during the reign of the Emperor Nero prior to the fire in Rome in AD 64 which instituted the first major persecution of the church who was wrongly blamed for starting the fire. There are those who find 666 in the number of His full royal name. It was also written before the Jewish war of 66-73, a seven year war, which brought great tribulation to the Jewish state and resulted in the destruction of Jerusalem and final defeat at Masada in 73 AD. In the middle of this war, Nero was forced to commit suicide which resulted in several of his generals fighting to replace him, including Vespasian who was at that time encircling Jerusalem. The siege was lifted for a season while Vespasian’s army departed for Rome to fight and conquer his opponents to the throne.

The Jews thought this removal of Vespasian as the hand of God , and they celebrated this. But Jesus had warned His disciples to flee when they saw the return of Vespasian's army, now commanded by his son, Titus. Matthew tells us that they were to flee quickly. If they were on the rooftop or the field, they were not to stop inside to gather belongings. The church at this time fled for the city of Pella and escaped the destruction of Jerusalem. This was the middle of the Jewish Great Tribulation.

Jesus prophesied the destruction of Jerusalem and said that this was the punishment for the rejection of Him by the Jews. Many of the prophecies in Matthew, Mark, and Luke were fulfilled in the destruction of Jerusalem, This established the truth that Jesus was a true prophet. He said that this current generation (40 years) would not pass until all this was fulfilled. As He spoke this around AD 30, then 40 years makes AD 70 when the Temple was destroyed.

So much of the detail of the Apocalypse of Matthew in the 24th chapter has already been fulfilled. I am suggesting the same is true for the Book of Revelation. But at the same time, prophecy often had a twofold fulfillment, the first being a type of the second fulfillment. An example of this is the Immanuel prophecy of Isaiah 7:14. Isaiah made this prophecy during the rule of the wicked King Ahaz long before Jesus came in the flesh. The detail before and after this verse tells us that a deliverance would happen in Ahaz’s day, and that the kings of Israel and Syrian who were oppressing Judah would be dead before this special child was weaned. The context says that Isaiah married a prophetess who was a virgin at the time. By normal means, they had a child named Maherhalalhashbaz. This son is identified as Immanuel in Chapter 8. But is points to a greater deliverance that would happen hundreds of years later when the Virgin Mary would conceive a child by the Holy Ghost and give birth to Jesus. We see that much of the detail was contemporary to the day of Isaiah, but it also points to a greater deliverance and fulfillment than the temporary one under Ahaz.