The Six Companies

I. One Night, Six Answers

There comes an hour when two corpses lie in the square of the great city, three and a half days, unburied — and the inhabitants of the earth send one another gifts. In those same days, under the same clock, a woman is carried on eagle's wings into a wilderness, to a place God has prepared for her, and there fed. And while below the storm breaks loose, above there already dwells a company under a tent. Three scenes out of one night — and they resemble one another in nothing, except in this: in all three God is at work bringing people through.

That is the question this part carries, and it is no small one: how does God bring a person alive through the night of the beast? Revelation gives that question no single answer. It gives six.

For four chapters this book followed two figures and the narrow seam between them — the wise and the hundred and forty-four thousand, a function and a body; the matter has been weighed, and at the close the crown lay in two pairs of hands at once. But those two did not stand alone in the night. Whoever takes in Revelation eleven to fourteen in a single glance sees not two or three but six human companies step forward there — and not one of the six lets itself be dissolved into another without something falling out of the text. Two witnesses who are killed in the street and rise again. A woman, crowned with the stars, who flees into the wilderness. A child snatched away to a throne. A wide circle that fights the dragon. A counted body with a seal on its forehead. And the company under the tent. Six figures — and the load-bearing thing is this: each of the six is carried through the tribulation by God in a different way. Not six arbitrary groups in the same chapters, but six modes — six answers to that one question.

And over the six ticks one clock. In these chapters there is one measure of time, under different names: forty-two months, a thousand two hundred and sixty days, a time and times and half a time.1 The same measure — half a week of years, the measure Daniel already knew; the days measure it most precisely, the months most broadly. Under that one clock the woman is fed in the wilderness, the two witnesses prophesy in mourning garments, and the beast is given authority to act.2 Keeping, witnessing, and authority do not run one after another; they run together: the woman and the witnesses in the same thousand two hundred and sixty days, the beast in its 42 months, which begin a little earlier. This is how this book reads the hands: set alike — the calmest setting, though the same span of time does not of itself prove the same period, and not every interpreter divides the half-week this way. The clock is one; the figures that move beneath it are many.

We like to read a prophecy as a railway timetable — first this, then that. But Revelation lays out no timeline here; it lays out a cross-section: one period, all the people at once — who witnesses and who is kept, who is persecuted and who is sealed, who has been snatched away and who already dwells under the tent. It is not six acts one after another. It is one storm, filmed from six sides at once.

Now walk the field — not in the order of the text, but in the order the field itself lays bare. Begin at the loudest side: with the figures who speak and bleed for it.

II. The Witnessing and the Persecuted

Set two men in mourning garments in the square of the great city, and you have the loudest, most vulnerable, most public figure in the whole field. "I will give power to my two witnesses, and they shall prophesy, a thousand two hundred and sixty days, clothed in sackcloth."3 They do not hide and are not snatched away; they stand in the middle of the street and speak. And the text draws them with the heaviest prophet-marks Scripture possesses: they are "the two olive trees and the two lampstands that stand before the Lord of the earth" — Zechariah's two anointed ones by the lampstand; fire goes out of their mouth that devours their enemies — Jeremiah, whose words were made fire in his mouth; they shut the heaven like Elijah, and turn the waters into blood and strike the earth with every plague like Moses.4 Elijah and Moses, law and prophets, compacted into two mouths.

And they are killed. That is what is proper to their mode, and the text does not flinch from it: "when they have finished their testimony, the beast that comes up out of the abyss will wage war with them, and overcome them and kill them."5 Their corpses lie in the street of the great city, three and a half days, unburied, before the eyes of all peoples and tribes and tongues and nations; and the inhabitants of the earth rejoice and send one another gifts, for these two prophets had tormented them.6 It is the only feast the earth-dwellers celebrate in the whole book, and it is a feast over two corpses. That is what witnessing costs: you stand in the light, you are hated, and at the summit of the hatred you lie dead on the pavement while your murderers send each other presents.

And then the text turns it around. "After the three and a half days a spirit of life from God entered into them, and they stood up on their feet, and great fear fell on those who saw them." And a loud voice from heaven said to them: "come up here" — and they ascended to heaven in the cloud, and their enemies looked on.7 Killed and raised, laid down in the street and called up to heaven: the full chain. And then happens what happens at no other judgment in the book: "and in that hour there came a great earthquake [...] and the rest were terrified and gave glory to the God of heaven."8 After the plagues of the ninth chapter it says expressly that the people did not repent; here, after the way of the two witnesses, "the rest" give God glory. What no disaster accomplished, a testimony that passed through death accomplishes.

That chain has run through this whole book. Prophesying; falling by the hand of the beast; rising; being glorified; bringing many to the acknowledgment of God — that is, down to the very order, the way of the wise from Daniel: they make the many understand, some of them stumble by sword and flame to be refined, at the end they shine, and the many are justified.9 The two witnesses carry that chain most fully of all the figures in this field. They are not simply the wise. Counted they are, indeed — as two: two witnesses, two olive trees, two lampstands — but a register that is not, and the name appears nowhere.10 Their mode is the maskilim-mode: to teach openly, to die for it, to rise through it, and to bring others to God. Here the function that this book follows stands closest to the light.

Beside them stands a broader figure, less sharply outlined but far more numerous. When the dragon lost his war against the woman, "he became enraged at the woman, and went off to wage war against the rest of her seed, who keep the commandments of God and hold the testimony of Jesus."11 No pair and no counted body, but an open circle — the persecuted, witnessing end-time Israel in its full breadth, marked not by a number but by what it holds fast: the commandments, and the testimony. One chapter further, that same circle receives its oldest name. When the beast out of the sea receives its authority, it says: "it was given to him to wage war with the saints and to overcome them."12 That is, word for word, Daniel's own sentence about the horn. Where the book names Daniel's persecuted group, it chooses neither "the wise" nor "the hundred and forty-four thousand," but its broadest word: the saints. And when the pressure is at its highest, there follows the caption that hangs over this whole period: "here is the endurance of the saints; here are those who keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus."13

The rest of her seed and the saints are thus one and the same circle, named twice — once as the children of the woman, once with the name that Daniel gave. And in that circle the function of the wise belongs at home: not as a third group beside it, but as the teaching, witnessing vanguard within it. The two witnesses are its sharpest, most public point; the saints are its full circumference. This is the loud, suffering, speaking side of the field — the side where it costs you something.

III. The Kept and the Snatched Away

Now cross the field, to the quiet side — to the figures who do not die in the street, but are sheltered, hidden, or already taken away. Here the mode is not witnessing but keeping.

The first you see not on the ground but in the sky: a great sign. "A woman, clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars."14 Sun, moon, twelve stars: the dream of Joseph — Jacob and his house, the tribes. The woman is Israel, crowned with her own twelve tribes. And she is no image of repose: she cries out in her birth pangs, a mother in the hour when the body tears.15 But when the dragon cannot devour her child, her mode comes into view: "the woman fled to the wilderness, where she has a place prepared by God, to be fed there a thousand two hundred and sixty days." And again: "to the woman were given the two wings of the great eagle, to fly to the wilderness, to her place, where she is fed, a time and times and half a time, out of the sight of the serpent."16 Kept — that is her word. Not taken away from the earth and not killed in the street, but hidden on the earth and fed, throughout the whole period, on wings that have belonged to Israel since the exodus: "I have carried you on eagle's wings."17

And here falls the discovery that holds this field together. In Daniel one magnitude stood under the clock: "the holy people," whose power is shattered. Revelation splits that one magnitude in two, within the same span of time: the woman is kept that period; the rest of her seed are persecuted that period. One people, one time, two destinies: the mother in the wilderness, sheltered and fed; her other children on the battlefield, fought and overcome.18 That is no contradiction but a division: God keeps the one through the storm and carries the other in the storm, and it is the same God and the same storm.

Out of that woman a child is born, and the child has the shortest and most violent mode of all: it is snatched away. "She bore a son, a male child, who shall shepherd all the nations with an iron rod; and her child was snatched away to God and to his throne."19 The son with the iron rod is the anointed king of the second psalm; his whole career is compressed here into two hinges: born, and snatched away. And the verb is sharp and rare. Ἡρπάσθη — precisely the verb that stands elsewhere where the living are seized away: "we shall be snatched away, to meet the Lord, in the clouds."20 The word of the taking-away. Where the woman is kept and the saints are fought, the child is taken up — upward, out of the reach of the dragon, to the throne. Three figures from one mother, three modes: kept, snatched away, persecuted.

And then there is a company that, while all this happens below, already dwells somewhere else. When the dragon is cast out of heaven, a twofold cry sounds: "Rejoice, O heavens, and you who dwell in them; woe to the inhabitants of the earth and the sea."21 Two addresses at the moment the storm breaks loose: those who dwell in heaven and those who dwell on the earth — the one called to rejoicing, over the other a woe. And the verb of the heaven-dwellers is no ordinary dwelling-verb. It is σκηνόω — to tabernacle, to dwell in a tent — and it is the key to who this sixth figure is.

That tent-word has by then already fallen once in the book, and not about angels. In the seventh chapter, after the counted body, there stands a second company: "a great multitude, which no one could number, out of every nation and all tribes and peoples and tongues," come "out of the great tribulation," standing before the throne — and of them it is said: "He who sits on the throne will spread his tent over them."22 The innumerable counterpart of the counted body, already under the tent. She stands before the throne and not in chapters eleven to fourteen; therefore this field does not count her as a seventh figure. But whoever hears "those who tabernacle in heaven" in the twelfth chapter has already met her — and must not lose her.

Three modes on this side of the field, over against the two on the loud side: kept, snatched away, tabernacling. Not all are called to witness and to die; some are carried by shelter, some by taking-away. And it is the same hand that hides the one and takes the other away.

IV. The Sealed Body, and the Mirror Facing the Field

There remains one company that is already known — the body that the whole of Part III was about: the hundred and forty-four thousand. Here it needs only to be set back in its place in the field. Their mode is sealed — and that word is theirs alone. Before the four winds were allowed to blow, they were sealed on their foreheads: "until we have sealed the servants of our God on their foreheads."24 Counted, tribe by tribe, twelve times twelve thousand; marked with a seal; and at the end complete on Mount Zion, not a name fallen from the register. They are not snatched away like the child and not hidden like the woman; they are secured on the spot — kept on the earth, in the midst of the judgment, by the seal.25 Of all the figures in this field, they are the counted body: not the broad persecuted circle and not the speaking vanguard, but the narrow, mustered, sealed inner body — the tribal seed of the woman, that follows the Lamb wherever he goes.

With that the field is full: six figures, each with a face, each with its own verb. Lay it out flat once, as a dossier.

Below the line of that dossier stands no footnote but a second stage. Over against the field, Revelation builds the counterfeit.

It begins with a class that is the negative of the whole field: the earth-dwellers, "those who dwell on the earth" — not those who tabernacle but those who settle, with their name not in the book of life. They are tempted, deceived, made drunk; they worship the beast; their only feast is the death of the two witnesses.26 Where the field of God knows six ways of being carried, they know only one: to stay settled, and to fall with the earth. They are the sounding-board of the deception — the crowd to whom the counterfeit stage speaks.

And on that stage stand three leading players, and each has stolen his role from the field of God. The dragon gives the beast "his power and his throne and great authority" — he does what a father does, he transfers power: the counterfeit of the Father who gives his Son the throne.27 The beast out of the sea bears a wound "as though slain to death" that healed, and the whole earth marvels — the counterfeit of the Lamb that was slain and stands; the beast has its own false resurrection.28 And the second beast, out of the earth, "had two horns like a lamb, and it spoke like a dragon" — lamb's shape, dragon's voice: the false prophet, the anti-wise one.29 Where the wise make the many understand, he makes the earth-dwellers stray. He is the teacher of the wrong worship, the counterfeit of the teaching vanguard.

And the mirror reaches deeper than the roles: the sharpest pair in the field has a double — the two witnesses over against the beast-pair. The same half-week: the witnesses prophesy a thousand two hundred and sixty days, the beast acts forty-two months. The same fire: out of the mouth of the witnesses goes fire that devours their enemies — word-fire; the second beast makes fire come down from heaven "before the eyes of men" — theater-fire, a sign for the audience. The same death and revival: the witnesses are killed and rise after three and a half days; the beast bears a head "as slain to death," and the deadly wound was healed — a parody resurrection, and it is precisely that healed wound the earth goes to worship. And the same worldwide audience: at the corpses of the witnesses the peoples and tribes and tongues and nations stand watching; behind the beast "the whole earth" goes marveling. Two witnesses over against two beasts — the beast out of the sea and the beast out of the earth: the true pair and the false, mirrored across the axis of the twelfth chapter.30

Even the woman has her mirror image, further on in the book. The word "wilderness" falls in the whole of Revelation only with two women: twice with the woman, who flees there and is fed there, and once with another woman — the harlot, who is seen in the wilderness, enthroned on the beast. The woman is kept in the wilderness; the harlot becomes wilderness — at the end she is "made desolate," with a word of the same root. The woman is carried on wings that God gave her; the harlot is carried by the beast, which at the end hates her and eats her up. And on her forehead stands, as with the hundred and forty-four thousand, a name written — "Mystery, Babylon the great": the mirror of the Name of the Father on the mountain.31 More than the mirror is not needed here; the history of the woman herself is worth a book of its own.

And even the seal is imitated. In the place where the hundred and forty-four thousand bear the Name of the Father, the second beast sets its mark: "it makes all, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, receive a mark on their right hand or on their forehead, and that no one can buy or sell except whoever has the mark, the name of the beast or the number of his name."32 The same place — the forehead; the same grip — a mark that grants access. But the seal is a given Name, heard and written; the mark a calculated number of a man. The seal keeps against God's judgment; the mark protects against the ban of the market that the beast itself has thrown up. A counter-sealing: the same offer — survival — with the threat shifted and the heart reversed.

So over against almost everything stands a double: over against the Father the dragon, over against the Lamb the beast, over against the wise the false prophet, over against the two witnesses the beast-pair, over against the woman the harlot, over against the seal the mark, over against those who tabernacle the earth-dwellers. Almost — for two figures have no double: the child has in the whole book no counterfeit, and the great multitude no antitype. The mirror is a dominant pattern, not a closed system; whoever would let it serve as proof must weigh in those two open places. But that the counterfeit imitates so much of the field is itself a sign that the field is a composition — worth the imitating.

V. Six Modes, One Storm

Set the field before you once more.

Six companies, six modes — witnessing, kept, snatched away, persecuted, sealed, tabernacling — and over all six one clock: the same half-week that Daniel knew, counted in days for the woman and the witnesses and in the broader months for the beast's authority, one storm over the whole field. They are not six times one after another; they are six answers of God to one time of tribulation. Persecution too is an answer — the saints are not abandoned to the dragon but given into his hand, bounded, for a measured time. Six ways in which the same hand carries the same people through the same night.

And where, in this field, do the two figures stand that this book set out for? The wise — the function, the teaching, witnessing vanguard — stand on the loud side: with the two witnesses, whose chain they carry most fully, and in the midst of the persecuted circle of the saints, where their work is done and exacts its price. No separate seventh company, but a service that runs crosswise through the speaking, suffering figures. And the hundred and forty-four thousand are the sealed body, the counted tribal seed — out of which and over which the vanguard works, in the calmest reading of the lawsuit; how the lists run exactly remained there an open verdict, and this field does not now render it. The one makes understand; the other learned the song. The one falls in the track of the Servant; the other follows the Lamb wherever he goes. And both, each along its own mode, are what this book calls them: confidants of the Lamb. They do not stand at the edge of the field; they stand at its heart, on the side where the sound and the blood are.

So the field lies there, at the beginning of this part. Six companies, six modes, one clock, one storm — and one counterfeit that tries to imitate the whole. But the field is not the end. Every mode issues somewhere: the witnesses are called up to heaven; the child is already at the throne; the woman comes out of the wilderness; the saints inherit, after the time of their surrender, the kingdom; the sealed body stands complete on the mountain; those who tabernacle move along with the Tent until God dwells with men. Six ways through the night — and they come out at one place. But this field has only counted the six figures and not named the power that carries them. Which power brings a person alive through this night? That is what comes next — and only after that, where the ways come out, the crown.

For whoever reads this in those days.

Look once more at the field. Perhaps you are standing in the street, in the mourning garments of the witnesses — you have spoken, it has cost you everything, and it seems as though your murderers are already sending one another presents. Perhaps you are one of the saints, simply one of the many, without a visible seal and without a name of your own on a list, and the war comes straight at you. And perhaps you are sitting hidden — fed in a place you did not choose yourself — and you wonder whether being hidden is brave enough; whether God does not really mean the people in the square, and you are dodging the field. Then hear what the field says six times, at each figure anew: no one here chose his mode. The witnesses did not volunteer; to them power was given. The woman did not choose her wilderness; to her the wings were given, and the place was prepared before she fled. The child did not leap; it was snatched away. The seal was no application but an act from above, set while the four winds were being held back. To be kept you do not choose yourself — and witnessing is not asked of everyone, and being snatched away happens to you. The mode is no achievement and no report-card grade; it is an assignment, and the hand that assigns is the same for all six. So do not be ashamed of the shelter, as though only the square counts: the wilderness-place is no flight winked at, but a place God has prepared — with your food along with it, throughout the whole period; the woman is fed with the same care with which the witnesses are raised. And in whatever mode that hand carries you: it is the same storm and the same night as that of all the others, and no one is carried by a different hand. What is the same for all is the clock: the time is measured out, counted down to the day — a thousand two hundred and sixty days, counted and written; and He who counts, counts the days too, and loses no one. The dragon has one clock, and it is short, and it is not his. So inhabit the place assigned to you, as long as the clock runs — the square or the wilderness, the vanguard or the shelter. For all six of the ways come out at one mountain, and on that mountain stands the Lamb, and he is already standing there.