We must learn to measure things by the divine standard, which is the canon of the Word of God. We are living in a time in which the Word of God – the Bible – is measured by human standards. What people are able to accept with their rationalistic mind is accepted. Whatever the Holy Scriptures say that goes against our feelings and opinions is declared to be ‘time- bound’ – bound to the times of 2000 or 3000 years or more ago – and probably a ‘myth’, a kind of ‘fairy tale’. German theologians like Rudolph Bultmann said that the Bible needs to be ‘ent-mythologisiert’, meaning to go through “de-mythologization”. The religious ‘nucleus’ could be kept, of course, but the rest is scientifically unacceptable and historically totally unreliable for modern man, they say. Someone said: ‘Today we know better than Moses and Paul.’ This is how rationalistic Higher Criticism of the Bible robs the Word of God of its power. However, the Bible is the Word of God; it speaks with absolute authority, not only about spiritual things concerning faith, our inner life, our soul and spirit, about eternal and everlasting life and about Heaven and hell, but also reliable when the Bible mentions facts of history and speaks about Creation, nature, the Universe, and other facts related to natural science and history of the future: prophecy / eschatology. The Word of God speaks with prophetic power. It speaks with absolute authority about the past, present and the future. We are living in the final days of this part of world history, in the end-times. A clear prophetic testimony should therefore be expected by all of those who firmly stand on the Word of God. The true Church should speak out clearly and give a true Biblical and prophetic testimony about all aspects of life in our world and in our societies.
The Lord will maintain the prophetic testimony by means of His two witnesses once the final days of the end-times have come. These two witnesses stand over and against the two beasts.2 Who are they? Who dares to stand up to the power of the anti-Christ and their followers? Is it the witness of two groups: the true believers among the Jews and those among the Gentiles? Or the combined testimonies of all true believers throughout all the centuries echoing in the latter days as well, being heard from books or disseminated by the electronic highways through the modern-day tools of mass-communication? Apparently not. “My witnesses,” says the Lord Jesus referring to two special witnesses for a special time. This special time is referred to as lasting 1,260 days, 42 months, a time plus two times plus half a time, three and a half year, during which ‘Jerusalem’ will be trampled underfoot. God keeps the prophetic testimony going through the ‘hundred and forty-four thousand’,3 through the ‘multitude no one can count’4 and through these two witnesses.
John’s own prophetic testimony continues to sound forth too,5 as well as the testimony of the other strong Angel who stands ‘on the sea and the earth’,6 and the testimony of the worshippers in the Temple.7 In short, the message of the Word of God cannot be quenched and will continue to resound, through all kinds of channels, right up to the very end. He will keep the message going, and He cannot be stopped.
But who are these two witnesses?
They are called the “two olive trees” (rendered in another translation as olive branches), the ‘two lampstands’. Almost every expositor points to Zechariah 4:1–14 in this respect, the fifth vision in a series of eight, in which the restoration of Israel, the Temple, the city of Jerusalem and God’s rule that will fill the earth. “Then I asked the angel, “What are these two olive trees on the right and the left of the lampstand?”
Again I asked him, “What are these two olive branches beside the two gold pipes that pour out golden oil?” He replied, “Do you not know what these are?” “No, my lord,” I said. So he said, “These are the two who are anointed to serve the Lord of all the earth.”8 In Zechariah’s time the two who were anointed with the oil of the Holy Spirit were Joshua, the High Priest, and Zerubbabel, the governor of Judah. Their whole ministry took place within the framework of the building of the Second Temple during the reign of Darius, after the Babylonian exile, and after the return of the remnant of Judah and others from Israel as well. Could they be the ‘model’ of the two witnesses of the ‘Church’ and ‘Israel’ in the final days of this age?
• Haggai is the prophet who urges the people of Israel to make haste with the building of the Temple, which was undergoing great difficulty9 under Ezra and Nehemiah.
• Rudolf Karl Bultmann (20 August 1884 – 30 July 1976) was a German Lutheran theologian and professor of New Testament at the University of Marburg. He was one of the major figures of early 20th century biblical studies and a prominent voice in liberal Christianity.
• Bultmann is known for his belief that the historical analysis of the New Testament is both futile and unnecessary, given that the earliest Christian literature showed little interest in specific locations of facts of history.
• Bultmann argued that all that matters is the “that-ness”, not the “what-ness” of Jesus and His times, i.e. only that Jesus existed, preached, and died by crucifixion matters, but not what happened throughout His life.
• Bultmann said that the grave was not empty, but Jesus lived on in the faith and the preaching/teaching of His followers who ‘believed’ in Him and in the myths that are told in the Bible.
• Bultmann relied on ‘demythologization’, an approach interpreting the ‘mythological’ elements in the New Testament ‘existentially’. Bultmann contended that only faith in the kerygma, or message , of the New Testament was necessary for Christian faith, not any particular facts regarding the historical Jesus. My comment: This is the beginning of the end of Christianity at large. In Europe we now have entered the post-Christian era.
Bible References:
1.NIV 2.Revelation 13:11–12 3.Revelation 7:1–8 4.Revelation 7:9–17 5.Revelation 10:11 6.Revelation 10:5–6 7.Revelation 11:1 8.Zechariah 4:14 9.Haggai 1
