Commentary on Revelation 7:9-17

• 7/27/2025: Revelation 1:4-8; accompanying text: John 8:13-20
• 8/3/2025: Revelation 4:1-11; accompanying text: John 17:1-5
• 8/10/2025: Revelation 5:1-13; accompanying text: John 1:29-31
• 8/17/2025: Revelation 7:9-17; accompanying text: John 14:1-4
• 8/24/2025: Revelation 13:1-18; accompanying text John 12:30-32
• 8/31/2025: Revelation 21:1-6; 22:1–5; accompanying texts: John 4:1-14; 16:20-22

Week 4 (8/17/2025): The Multitude from Every Nation

Revelation 7:9–17

Accompanying text: John 14:1-4

Readers of Revelation tend to get preoccupied with the number and identity of the saved. This is a good week to tackle that quandary.

Directly preceding this reading in chapter 7, we get the notorious number 144,000. This is not a statistic but a symbol: 12 (tribes of Israel) x 12 (apostles) x 10 (everything) x 10 (everything) x 10 (everything). Far from limiting, this is symbolically as big a number as you could get.

Then, right at the outset of today’s reading, John beholds “a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages.” Here God’s election is not stingy but sweeping, already anticipating the successful outcome of the gospel mission.

Yet this is no carte blanche to assert universal salvation, either. The vision equally anticipates the hostility and hatred that the gospel mission will elicit. Revelation stridently refuses to give pat answers about the number and identity of the saved or the damned. It’s not our business or competence.

What the vision cares about is strengthening our fidelity to the Lamb, which is costly, because it makes us the target of the hostile powers that despise God. Comfort and hope are offered to the persecuted. But revenge fantasies, which can fester in the persecuted, are blocked.

Revelation continually returns its focus to the worship of the victorious Lamb. This book won’t—and so you shouldn’t—provide answers about any given person’s eternal destiny. Proclaim instead the trustworthiness of the merciful, righteous, and victorious Lamb who was slain.