The Two-Hundred-Forty-Second (The Lessons)

You may have picked up on the statement last week about my view on Revelation and its fulfillment, and you may have your own thoughts on that.  Of course, as I’ve stated multiple times before, I have no desire for you to blindly accept my views, or anyone else’s, but this week we’re going to ask and answer a fundamental question about this particular view.  It’s a question that might need to be answered before a believer is open to considering whether or not the view is accurate.

First, let’s set the background and be a little more specific about some key aspects of this view.  There are a couple of harvests prophesied in Revelation, and it’s obvious in their context that they are harvests of individuals (Revelation 14:14-20).  The first is conducted by what is presumed to be Yeshua Himself, as He is called “Son of Man,” and has a golden crown on His head.  The second is conducted by a nameless heavenly messenger.  They both perform their harvests using a sharp sickle.  

While it is obvious, again through context, that the first is a harvest of believers and the second is a harvest of non-believers, there is something interesting found in the Hebrew version of Revelation about the sickles used.  The first, held by Yeshua, uses the word charmesh, and the second, held by the messenger, uses the word magal.  The significance of that difference is when you look at other uses of these words in scripture, you find that every time charmesh is used it is in context to Israel, YHWH’s chosen people (Deuteronomy 16:9, 23:25), and every time magal is used it is in context to Gentiles (Jeremiah 50:16, Joel 3:13).  This realization just serves to support the interpretation that the first harvest, by Yeshua, relates to believers, and the second relates to non-believers.

Getting back to the background on this view of Revelation, I believe that these harvests represented events that occurred around the time of 70AD and the siege and destruction of Jerusalem and the temple.  If you read the historical accounts, you find that there were multiple instances, leading up to and during the siege of the city, in which any believers that continued to reside in the city were able to escape.  This corresponds to the gospel accounts of Yeshua’s prophecy of the destruction of the city and temple and His warning to flee the city once they saw Jerusalem surrounded by armies (Matthew 24:15-18, Mark 13:14-16, Luke 21:20-22).  In fact, He was insistent in the warning that this action needed to be done quickly, and without delay, not even to grab anything from their homes before fleeing.

To me, Yeshua’s harvest of Revelation 14 was fulfilled when believers fled the city of Jerusalem, and the messenger’s harvest was fulfilled when the city, filled with all the remaining, unbelieving Jews, came under siege and went through the most horrific events you could ever think a person going through.  These events were the winepress of YHWH and, I believe, were the fulfillment of the seven bowls of YHWH’s wrath (Revelation 15:7-16:21).  Additionally, given that the characteristics of the beasts of Revelation line up perfectly with the Roman Empire around the time of 70AD, and the fact that the Roman Empire has since crumbled and fallen, I believe all the events of Revelation, up to and including chapter 19, have been fulfilled.  There is no more Roman Empire beast, and according to chapter 19, the empire’s fall was the fulfillment of the beast being thrown into the lake of fire (Revelation 19:20).

So, as a summary to this…summarized…background, I believe the majority of the book of Revelation was prophecy for the believer living around the time of 70AD.  And here is where the fundamental question comes in: what does that mean for us today?

For many, many decades, maybe even centuries or millennia, believers have seen Revelation as future events.  It has resulted in much motivation, both negatively and positively, in the body of believers.  On the one hand, you’ve got the motivation of doomsday preparation and sequestration from society in anticipation of a one-world beast government.  On the other hand, you have the motivation of preaching the gospel to the whole world in an attempt to help bring about the end (Matthew 24:14).    

As a side note, as far as that last, positive motivation goes, did you know there’s scripture saying this has already been fulfilled?  According to Paul, the gospel had already been preached to the whole of creation when he wrote the letter to the believers in Colossae (Colossians 1:6, 23).  He didn’t use the same Greek word as is recorded in Matthew’s gospel, but when you look at the statement by Yeshua and the words of Paul, if anything, Paul’s statement is the more restrictive one.  In other words, it requires a substantially greater amount of effort for Paul’s words to be true than it does for Yeshua’s.  Yeshua used a Greek word that is translated to either land, referring to the region of Israel, or world, meaning the known inhabited world, which at that time was the Roman Empire.  Paul, on the other hand, used Greek words that mean all of creation, which is a significant accomplishment to have occurred by the time Paul wrote those words.

Moving on, it’s worth noting that I’ve found, even for me personally, that many times a person rejects a different interpretation of scripture, even if it is clearly true, because of a couple reasons.  First, they subconsciously cannot accept the fact that something they’ve believed for the majority of their life (or perhaps their life in Yeshua) is false.  There’s almost a loyalty, of sorts, to the belief, as though it’s a person and that by believing something else, or even just accepting their belief as false, they are somehow betraying that belief.  Second, they don’t know what it would mean for them if they were to believe this new interpretation.  They were comfortable in their original belief.  They knew what it meant about their place in the world, what the future holds, and how they should react to that future.

This week, we’re trying to help with that second reason in an attempt to help someone at least consider this view of Revelation fulfillment, but first I’ll submit to you the possibility that the currently held belief by the majority of Christians, namely that most of Revelation predicts events future to us today, is equivalent to the “duck and cover” campaign of the Cold War.  I didn’t personally live through those times, but I have seen enough documentaries and heard my parents’ accounts of their experience to know what it was.  You are welcome to look it up yourself, but the short story is that during the Cold War, with the threat of a nuclear attack looming, people were trained to duck and cover under desks if they saw the flash of a nuclear bomb going off.  They even had drills in schools to help ingrain this response in children’s minds.      

As you might expect, with a few exceptions limited to very unique circumstances the act of ducking under one’s desk is unlikely to prevent someone from being injured or killed in the event of a nuclear detonation.  And when you consider that, you can see that this campaign was one of false hope.  Not only did it make people think they knew what to expect and how to react, it made them think there was a possibility of their survival if they saw the bright flash.  Even more, the regular drills encouraged children to live in a state of fear, not knowing if or when they might see a nuclear bomb go off.  

In the same way, a belief that there will be some future one-world government that subjugates everyone and strips their rights away, forcing them to take some mark in order to feed themselves and their family, encourages believers to live in a state of fear.  We saw this in action during COVID, where believers were calling vaccines the mark of the beast, and you can see the same theme in recent history.  They’ve even called UPC barcodes the mark of the beast.  Even if believers aren’t living in fear of these things, at the very least, trying to look around every corner for the next mark or one-world government is a distraction from what we are called to do as believers.

So, if we don’t have Genesis through Revelation 19 in order to keep us on the lookout for a beast government, what do we have it for and, more importantly, what are we called to do as believers?  Many Christians, while having a fondness for Israel the country and Jews all over the world, like to keep their distance from the Israelites of scripture, and more specifically, the Jews.  They like to think of themselves, and Christianity in general, as being in some bubble compared to what they read in scripture, failing to recognize that no such bubble exists.

Not only did believers, our faith, originate from Israel, we are subject to the same exact pitfalls Israel and the Jews experienced when it comes to faith and serving YHWH.  We are not immune or somehow protected from them.  That’s exactly what scripture is for.  From Genesis to Revelation 19, we should be looking for all the mistakes made by Israel and the Jews, including all the ones Paul wrote to the various churches about, and making sure we don’t fall into the same traps.  

Yes, we have something that everyone before the fulfillment of Pentecost lacked: the Holy Spirit.  However, when you look at where mainstream Christianity is today and where it’s going, it’s almost as if believing or knowing we have the Holy Spirit gives believers the false sense of security that we can do no wrong when it comes to worshipping, serving YHWH.  Not only are we making the same grave errors as the churches Paul was writing to, we’re making the same ones Israel did.  

Israel developed a whole law structure, as well as specific requirements on how to conduct feast days, that were based on the traditions and interpretations of men.  This was the oral tradition Yeshua spoke against during His ministry (Matthew 15:1-9, Mark 7:1-8).  Today, Christians have created their own holidays based on the traditions of men, one of which will be celebrated this weekend, using pagan influences and times just because some leader of faith thousands of years ago decided it.  What was wrong with the original Feasts of YHWH?  The ones that Yeshua perfectly fulfilled?  Why did we have to change what YHWH decreed, and therefore what our Savior Yeshua not only observed throughout His life, but made perfect?  That’s what we should be celebrating, not something divorced from where it originated.

Israel also failed to trust in YHWH, multiple times, and focused on what their natural mind was telling them rather than what YHWH was telling them.  As one example, they were made to walk the desert for forty more years, a whole generation not being able to see the promised land, because they did not trust that YHWH would deliver the inhabitants of that land into their hand as promised (Numbers 14).  In the same way, Christians as a whole kneel to modern medicine and the mind of man, volunteering themselves up for experimental drugs and vaccines, and shutting up the doors of worship when ordered vice being a beacon of hope and light in the darkness.  Where is the trust in Yeshua’s words that whoever believes in Him will do even greater things than Him (John 14:12)?  He healed diseases with a touch and a word, casting out demons with the same.  Who among believers is answering His call, His promise, to do greater things?!

One of the reasons I firmly believe Yeshua is coming back physically, unlike some believers that hold a similar view of Revelation, is because history has shown that man, even with the Holy Spirit, is incapable on his own of consistently coming to the right answer.  Over thousands of years, it stands to reason that if we were capable of that, every one of the believers today, or at least a vast majority, would be fully in obedience to YHWH and how He desires us to worship Him.  Not only that, but we’d be in complete trust of Him, and I dare say we would have already dominated the world.  I mean, who wouldn’t want to join a faith that can cure disease and sickness, including what they call mental illness today, with a touch?!  The world would be flocking to the Christian faith!  It’s clear to me that unless we have Yeshua physically leading us here on earth, we will never achieve the fulfillment of the last two chapters of Revelation.

We have a whole book of lessons we can learn from Israel and the early church, but we have to first acknowledge that we can, and have, made the same mistakes they did, and then we have to apply those lessons to our lives.  We need to stop looking at ourselves as being different from where we came from.  The Israelites were YHWH’s chosen people, just like believers today are His chosen people.  The Israelites made so many mistakes their capital and their temple were destroyed multiple times in judgment and their land was devastated because of it.  While we don’t have a Christian capital or temple, other than the temple of our bodies, we still have the capability of making the same mistakes Israel did.  And we will never be able to bring into fruition the greater things Yeshua talked about us doing if we make those mistakes.

In closing, just to be clear, I have not yet done the “greater things” either, but I pray that one day I get there.  I regularly ask Him to show me how to get there.  What I do know is that He said that we would be able to, and because of that I know it’s true and we are all capable of it!

Shabbat shalom and YHWH bless you!

-Rob and Sara Gene