4 And I heard the number of the sealed, 144,000, sealed from every tribe of the sons of Israel:
5 12,000 from the tribe of Judah were sealed,
12,000 from the tribe of Reuben,
12,000 from the tribe of Gad,
6 12,000 from the tribe of Asher,
12,000 from the tribe of Naphtali,
12,000 from the tribe of Manasseh,
7 12,000 from the tribe of Simeon,
12,000 from the tribe of Levi,
12,000 from the tribe of Issachar,
8 12,000 from the tribe of Zebulun,
12,000 from the tribe of Joseph,
12,000 from the tribe of Benjamin were sealed.
A Great Multitude from Every Nation
9 After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, 10 and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!” 11 And all the angels were standing round the throne and round the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshipped God, 12 saying, “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honour and power and might be to our God for ever and ever! Amen.”
13 Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, “Who are these, clothed in white robes, and from where have they come?” 14 I said to him, “Sir, you know.” And he said to me, “These are the ones coming out of the great tribulation. They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.
15 “Therefore they are before the throne of God,
and serve him day and night in his temple;
and he who sits on the throne will shelter them with his presence.
16 They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more;
the sun shall not strike them,
nor any scorching heat.
17 For the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd,
and he will guide them to springs of living water,
and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”
We should not omit to relate this 'sealing' of God's people to what has already been said in general about the divine purposes in the world. In chapter 5 we pointed out that the book with the seals represented God's plans for mankind, and that these are put into operation through the death and resurrection of Christ. The implication is that all these woes and trials - the contents of the seals - are pressed by God into service in the work of calling men to Him self. The winds and the waves obey His will, even when the storms have been stirred up by anti-Christ himself. Thus, paradoxically - this is very wonderful - the fruits of Satan's wiles as he seeks to destroy Christ's kingdom on earth becomes, so to speak, the fruits of the Spirit, in that the very devices which are meant to corrupt and draw away men finally from God are made the means of winning them to Him and sealing them eternally for His glory. We heard only recently of a hard-bitten, irreligious man being constrained to think of spiritual things in spite of himself, because of the desperate world-situation that faces us in our time. This is something that the devil never really seems to have understood. Did he but know it, he gen erally goes too far, so that the extremity of his wiles so often becomes the means whereby his purposes are thwarted and defeated. There is in evil the seeds of its own destruction!