Revelation 7:1-8

Four angels were standing on the four corners of the earth holding the four winds. This shows that all the agencies of nature, all the instruments of judgment, are in God's hand. Not a wind can blow, not a storm can strike, not a judgment can fall, but by his permission. He says to the sea: "Hitherto shalt thou come and no farther; and here shall thy proud waves be stayed." And when Satan afflicted Job he could not go one iota farther than God permitted him. And as this storm of persecution falls upon the early church, and as this period of judgment falls on the persecutor, and as this period of danger and dissolution engulfs the lands where the churches are located, every lash is in God's hands and every life in his care. That is what the church needed to know in that hour when convulsions worse than earthquakes were about to shake the social and civil fabric to its center.

And so it was commanded: "Hurt not the earth nor the sea until we have sealed the servants of God in their foreheads." And 144,000 were sealed. It cannot be admitted that Jews alone constituted the servants of God. If the servants of God were to be sealed it must have embraced vastly more than the Jews. However at that particular time the Jews were the special objects of hatred, and the carnival of slaughter that ensued especially involved the Jews, and myriads of them were butchered without mercy. In these circumstances the danger to Jewish Christians was particularly great. This was true not only at Jerusalem but in all of those cities wliere the conflict raged. The Jewish converts would be subject to danger not only from those who hated the Jews, but from the persecution of the Jews themselves. So here we have this vision of a great multitude of Jews wlio have accepted Jesus Christ as Messiah and are sealed by God as his servants. That just 12,000 from each tribe are sealed shows that the number is not to be taken literally, but representatively. John the Baptist and Christ and his apostles all preached to the Jews up and down Judea and Galilee. And the command of Christ on the eve of his ascension was to "begin at Jerusalem." And when Paul went on his missionary journeys he went first into the synagogues and preached Christ. Here then are the results of the gospel among the Jews of that day.

The purpose of this seal or mark in their foreheads was that they might not be destroyed in the coming judgments that were to fall. A similar scene is recorded in Ezekiel 9:1-11, where men were marked in their foreheads and were not to be slain in the devastation of the city, according to the vision of Ezekiel. And when we come to the ninth chapter of Revelation and the plagues have fallen we will see that they were commanded to hurt only those who had not the mark of God in their foreheads. So that the evident purpose of this vision of sealing was to assure God's people of divine care. This was a vision. The mark was God's mark, not man's. It was not for the observation of human eyes, but was a revelation to God's people of his providential disposition of all their affairs.

It is further to be noticed in this connection that when Jerusalem was besieged by Roman armies, the Christians escaped the slaughter by a most remarkable providential circumstance. I take it that this vision of sealing referred to the affairs of the church on earth; but when we come to the second half of the chapter we have a scene staged in heaven.