It is about to begin! The Lamb, whose worthiness took centre stage in chapter 5, has taken the scroll from the hand of God and is going to break the seals. This precedes the opening of the scroll upon which is written the events that will take place before this part of world history has come to an end. It could be said the book itself contains two main streams: on the one hand the establishment and development of the Kingdom of God and the gathering of the saints in that Kingdom, and on the other hand God’s trials, tribulations and judgments for the rebellious people and nations on planet earth and upon the ‘powers of darkness’ that have oppressed God’s people. It shows the hatred of the ‘demonic powers’, the great enmity they have against God and His people and the suffering that the people of God therefore have to endure before the end comes.
Yet: Jesus is the Victor! God will pass judgment on these satanic powers and the rebellious ungodly nations and He will finally overcome them. But before the ‘Final Judgment’ begins, the Lord pours out a series of plagues upon those who are willing instruments in perpetuating the darkness. Because Satan and his dark forces always use people to do their evil things. The Nazi-atrocities, political violence, ‘satanic’ wars against many European and Middle East nations and many murders, tortures, gas-chambers and killings and Jews and Bible-believing Christians and other forms of genocide were clearly demonically inspired, but executed by human beings. Now the time of reckoning has come. The scores will be settled. God’s wrath and revenge (Romans 12:19) sets in. These ‘judgments’ contain His wrath upon those oppressors and persecutors, but they also serve a merciful goal. These are the ultimate attempts of God to bring hardened sinners to their knees, so they can be converted, before the Last Judgment definitely arrives and it therefore becomes too late for them to be converted.
Now that the seals are about to be broken, it is perhaps good to look at the structure and the sequence of what is to follow afterwards. Some see the seals, trumpets and vials following on from each other in this way, followed by the return of Christ:
A second possibility is that the seals, trumpets and vials partially overlap each other, so that what takes place becomes more intense as the return of Christ approaches. This view sees them as follows, followed by Christ’s return:
The Semitic style of the Book of Revelation could point to that second kind of structure—a story-telling of events that succeed each other, but whereby the previous one is referred to again in each case, so that more details can be added. They ‘zoom in’ from a general approach to a closer look, so that more details are revealed. This sometimes results in chronological tension! The jumping ‘back and forth’ in time in the succession of events – starting all over again in order to have a ‘deeper look’ at things may confuse our orderly Western brains sometimes! But one could also compare it to flash-backs in a movie. Every time more details are added, the process intensifies towards a climax, leading ultimately towards the revealing of the ‘Coming of Christ’. Just as birth pangs become more and more frequent and increasingly painful as the birth of a child approaches, events will accelerate in intensity the nearer we are to Christ’s Coming..
Whatever the case may be, each attempt to draw up a scheme, a schedule of events, a road map of end time events, or a prophetic chart has its inherent problems. Let us therefore just follow the text step by step, praying for enlightenment by the Holy Spirit! He is the Author of the Word, so we need His Enlightenment!
It is clear, that the breaking of the first five seals is not yet ‘the great tribulation’ itself, but the introduction to it. They precede the final outburst of violence and spiritual darkness. When we arrive at the sixth seal we are standing at the threshold of the final phase. And the book/scroll is only really fully opened when the seventh seal has been broken.
The repeated ‘I saw’ … ‘and I saw’ … ‘and there came’ … ‘and I saw and heard’ … ‘and I saw’ … refers to the chronological order in which things are seen. Not necessarily a chronological order of end-time events, not necessarily a time chart of the events that are described. “After this I saw, and after that I saw”, John says. It is the order of seeing by John, one ‘prophetic slide’ after another. But the ‘prophetic pictures’ are not necessarily presented in the right chronological order.
There are many end-time diagrams, eschatological orders of events, and they all make me equally hesitant, although I learned a lot of them. I studied many of those books. Of the over 100 meters of theological books I have on my bookshelves, over 15 meters of books deal with prophecy and eschatology. Stemming from many and different theological traditions, churches and denominations. So I learned a lot from them. But in the end I thought: if the Lord wanted us to have such a prophetic timetable, a chronological order of end-time events, He would have revealed that in Scripture. But He didn’t. If this were the correct plan in this book written by this respected Christian author, why did God not reveal it in this way in the Bible? Why do I have to rummage around in texts to put it together in a logical sequence and glue Bible-verses together like in a jig-saw puzzle? The Bible does not give diagrams, schedules of end-time events. The Bible gives revealed prophetic truth, in very reliable prophetic pictures with a lot of details that one day will become ‘actual’! So we should read our Bibles with their ‘prophetic slides’ together with our daily newspapers! And we may try cautiously—in faith—to interpret the current affairs that are happening in the world with these prophecies of the Bible. Praying for enlightenment by the Holy Spirit. The only ‘logical’ order of end-time events in the Bible that I know of is Matthew 24 (+ Mark 13, Luke 17 and 21), where Jesus tells His disciples to sit down on the Mount of Olives and then answers their question: how do we know the signs of the times that will make it clear to us that You are now soon coming in Glory? What are the signs of Your Coming? What follows is Jesus’ answer to this question. There He mentions a lot of ‘signs of the times’, in a kind of chronological order. The Book of Revelation follows this same order, by the way!
