"When he opened the sixth seal, I looked, and behold, there was a great earthquake, and the sun became black as sackcloth, the full moon became like blood,"
(Revelation 6:12)
The scene jumps to the Day of Judgment. I’ve mentioned this before and I will reiterate this from time to time: Revelation is not chronologically precise. If you’ve got your chart out, and you’re going through the chapters of Revelation, and you’re charting everything, and you’re trying to put a date on it, then you are going to be squeezing some square pegs in round holes. John doesn’t operate like that. What he’s doing is helping us to look, to think about the context. He’s helping these struggling Christians. They’re struggling over persevering, over endurance, over pressing on, over being faithful, over living to the glory of Christ, instead of living for themselves and falling back into idolatry. And so he helps them by giving them occasional views of The End. John keeps The End in view without losing sight of the present, and he shows that present endurance will be vindicated in the end. So there’s this overlapping that takes place in Revelation. And so, here we get to the sixth seal, and John shows us The End. Now, he’s not going to stay there, but he wants us to see what happens in The End.
The first thing we notice is that the Day of Judgment is cataclysmic. The language that is used here is borrowed from the Old Testament, as well as the Olivet Discourse in Matthew 24 and Mark 13.
John said, “I looked, when he broke the sixth seal, and there was a great earthquake.” Now these people understood about earthquakes. The folks that lived in Sardis and Philadelphia and Laodicea had already seen their cities totally destroyed by earthquakes. They had heard of what had happened just a decade or so before in the area known as Pompey, when Mount Vesuvius blew its top, and that whole area was shaken by a gigantic volcano and earthquake. They knew about these things. He said, “There was a great earthquake.
He’s using pictures in order to give them some ideas about physical and natural occurrences of tragedy; but he’s showing them something of much greater proportion. John is not trying to give them literal descriptions of what’s taking place. Instead, he is stretching their imaginations and our imaginations. For instance, the stars falling to the earth: now, how big are stars? The sun is a star that’s a whole vastly larger than the earth. Now, we understand that, we know those kinds of things; so he’s not trying to be literal. He’s trying to help us understand that everything is being shaken, that the Day of Judgment is an unrepeatable event, and it is an incomparable event, and when it happens it’s going to affect everything.
(Dr. Phil A. Newton)
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