The end of the beginning or the beginning of the end or has it all already happened??

Who or what is the 144,000? Read Revelation 7:4-8 What’s unusual about this list? Let’s look at a map and see the differences?

Why is Judah first in the list? Jesus comes from the tribe of Judah. Also, Judah is really the only one left after the tribes were taken into slavery by Assyrians and Babylonians. The name Jews is derived from Judah.

Why is Joseph in one list and not the other? Joseph has two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim which are in the lists. Why is Dan not in the list of Revelation? Some stories say that the tribe turned to paganism and idol worship. The by product of being left out of the list, is that later writers began to speculate that the antichrist would come out of this tribe.

Why is the tribe of Levi not on the map but in the list? When the Israelites settled into Canaan, the tribe of Levi were not allowed to be landowners. They were made the priests and given religious duties. The other tribes paid a tithe to them.

Is the 144,000 in Chapter 7 the same as the 144,000 in Chapter 14? Read Revelation 14:1-4

With the exception of the futurist approach, all of the other approaches interpret the 144,000 symbolically, as representative of the church and the number 144,000 being symbolic of the totality—i.e., the complete number—of the church.

When taken at face value: “Then I heard the number of those who were sealed: 144,000 from all the tribes of Israel” nothing in the passage leads to interpreting the 144,000 as anything but a literal number of Jews So how do you handle this with the 144,000 referring to Jews?

In Revelation 7:4 we see that the 144,000 had been sealed. What kind of seal was it?

Read 2 Corinthians 1: These verses seem to indicate a figurative or symbolic seal rather than a physical seal. Some show being sealed with the Holy Spirit.

The preterist identifies the 144,000 as Jewish Christians who escaped from Judea when the Roman generals Vespasian and Titus withdrew to Rome after Emperor Nero's suicide. Christians would have been sealed with the Holy Spirit. So this would match up to Jews and sealed in Chapter 7 and first-fruits in Chapter 14.

Use your concordance to find which verses in Revelation refer to the Antichrist? Are you surprised to find the term is not in Revelation? The term or title antichrist, in Christian theology, is a leader who fulfills Biblical prophecies concerning an adversary of Christ while resembling him in a deceptive manner.

Read 1 John 2: Read 1 John 4:3 Read 2 John 1:7 Are you surprised that many antichrists have already appeared?

THE RETURN OF THE KING Jesus, God incarnate, first came as the suffering servant, no grand entrance from the clouds, but next time, God won’t come in disguise. It will be overwhelming either with love or with fear and at that point it will be too late to choose a different side.

People have waited over 2000 years for this return to happen? What are your feelings about this delay?

A king has been away fighting battles and is returning home. A herald goes ahead and blows a trumpet asking that the gates be open. The watchman wants to know who is outside the gates. The herald responds it is the king.

After the gates were opened, a greeting party went out to greet the King and escort him into the city. There would be a lot of pomp and circumstance and celebration. Read Mark 1: 1-11 This is the same imagery and used in the New testament to describe the second coming of Christ.

What is the parousia? Parousia is an ancient Greek word meaning presence, arrival, or official visit. The main use is the physical presence of a person, where that person is not already present refers to the prospect of the physical arrival of that person specially the visit of a royal or official personage. The main use in theology is to refer to the second coming of Christ.

Read 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 What do these verses mean to you?

The question is how is Paul using the term in 1 Thessalonians, presence or coming. Here parousia may refer to presence and what is envisioned here is an unveiling rather than a descent, it breaks the barrier between heaven and earth like the raising of a curtain. Or some argue that it speaks about Jesus coming down from heaven.

In Thessalonians, Paul is dealing with a problem where the Christians there are afraid that those who have already died will miss out when Christ returns. Paul is not talking about an escape plan for the living who will suffer during some future tribulation. Paul is reassuring the Thessalonians that there will be victory beyond death, a resurrection of the dead.

The Thessalonians would have recognized this royal entrance liturgy. The archangel is the herald blowing a trumpet loud enough to wake the dead. The greeting committee is made up of first the dead then those alive will rise into the air (not heaven) to meet Christ.

Dispensationalism is a nineteenth-century evangelical development based on a a series of chronologically successive “dispensations” or periods in history in which God relates to human beings in different ways under different covenants. A different interpretation called dispensationalism became very popular among conservative Protestants. Their concept of the rapture of the church before the final tribulation did not exist before 1820.