Broad meadows

At the beginning of Revelation 7, we see an angel from the place of the rising sun give orders to four angels to not harm the land or the sea until the 144,000 are sealed. He then proceeds to do so. This all happens in what appears to be a short period of time. As I pointed out earlier, the angel from the place of the rising sun is the angel of the LORD, Michael. The other four angels I believe to be the four living creatures described earlier in Revelation.

I’ll talk more about them later, but some questions to be asked and hopefully answered are as follows: Why does angel become a man in the first place? Why from the accounts examined earlier, does he not know who he is? By the way we have followed his symbols through scripture, why does he appear to die more than once? What do each of those deaths mean?

Let’s start with the first question. Why does an angel become a man? I think the answer lies in why did God take human form in Jesus Christ? To offer forgiveness to mankind. If now an angel becomes a man, receives forgiveness as a believer, perhaps this forgiveness can now be extended to the angelic realm. This may be the case as an angel now has the key to the abyss as reported in Revelation 9.

Another thing that may be at play, answering both the above question and why does he not seem to know who he is until it is revealed to him? Those given authority must be shown for who they are and why they have that authority. In a similar fashion, Job was allowed to be tested to show what kind of man he was. Not perfect, but sincere. You can imagine a conversation happens between God and Satan where the accuser says to God, “The only reason Michael serves you so diligently is that you let him kill. Test him and you’ll see that he’s just a murderer.” His life on earth, with his past hidden, would be that test. His subsequent success, in God’s eyes, in overcoming the obstacles in this life reinstates him to his position of authority under Christ.

After Michael rises, he descends to earth and begins a second earthly mission as one of the two witnesses. As I wrote about earlier, after delivering his message to the world, his second death and subsequent resurrection is what then triggers the Rapture at the last trumpet. That accounts for two of the purposes described in the third seal. And from the law there are three positions for the goat: the young goat, the male goat for a sin offering (Numbers 7 at the consecration of the tabernacle) and the scapegoat on the day of atonement. There would appear to be a third. I’ll examine that question perhaps later, God permitting.

I want to switch gears now to briefly discuss the four angels of Revelation 7 as the four living creatures. In their way, the four living creatures offer evidence of the concept of merging that I use to derive prophecy from scripture. Merging is the concept that when reading an account from the scripture, the symbols in the story and the characters presented merge to form an overall spiritual/prophetic idea. Those symbols can then be followed horizontally across the Bible and you can know that you are dealing with the same person in each account. The four living creatures both provide an example of how that works. The creatures are symbols inside of symbols.

The living creatures appear in Isaiah 6, Ezekiel 1 and Revelation. In each one they are a little different and those differences have meaning as well. Let’s start with Revelation 4: 7 & 8.

“The first living creature was like a lion, the second was like an ox, the third had a face like a man, the fourth was like a flying eagle. Each of the four living creatures had six wings and was covered with eyes all around, even under its wings. Day and night they never stop saying:
“‘Holy, holy, holy
is the Lord God Almighty,’
who was, and is, and is to come.”

In Ezekiel 1, they are described this way:

“Their faces looked like this: Each of the four had the face of a human being, and on the right side each had the face of a lion, and on the left the face of an ox; each also had the face of an eagle. Such were their faces. They each had two wings spreading out upward, each wing touching that of the creature on either side; and each had two other wings covering its body.”

In this account they have four faces, but Revelation they each have one, they have merged together. In Isaiah, the faces are covered. So what do I think that this means? They are still the same creatures, but in each case there are differences. Let’s focus on what the faces seem to be implying. The human face I believe represents the idea that they too become human. The face of the lion may represent that they are of the same line or in accordance with the Lion of the tribe of Judah, Jesus Christ. The face of the ox may represent their angelic form. The face of the eagle may represent where they are from in their human form, that is the symbol of that country.

I think they may live in the time Michael does and during the time that a quarter of the earth’s population is killed by the means described in the seals, that they also die, with Michael being the last one in the sixth seal. It’s hard to tell from the context whether or not they know each other in their time on earth. These all seem to parallel the hierarchy that seems implicit in Daniel 9, where the goat has a large horn that is broken off, Michael, and four horns in that account are the four living creatures. They may also be the four angels bound at the river Euphrates, that is they are awaiting their death and subsequent orders from Michael to carry out the harm described in Revelation 9.