The Seven Seals - Revelation 6:1 - 8:1, the events leading up to the war.
Revelation begins the end times events in chapter 6 with the seven seals. Seals 1 through 4 are very general in nature, almost as merely heralds of a new time of calamity and warfare. Let us look at the first four seals individually.
Seal #1 - The enemy, Osama bin Laden in particular, is bent on conquest. He wants to embroil the US in multinational war in which the Muslim world rises up against the Christian west. The time of warfare is now beginning.
Seal #2 - This is the dividing of nations into the distinct sides for war. As President Bush stated, "Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists." Peace is taken from the earth and men will slay each other.
Seal #3 - There are going to be food shortages in parts of the world.
Seal #4 - One characteristic of this time of war will be "death" (or more appropriately "pestilence") which leads to "Hades" (or the grave). Considering the pestilence of chemical and biological weapons that Saddam Hussein has in his arsenal, this is a neat little fit.
Let us now look collectively at the first four seals.
Revelation's first four seals are horsemen whose riders initiate all the calamities of the end times in which the Muslim world would fight against the Christian world.
Our current events begin with four jetliners whose "riders" were armed with box cutters. Their goal was to precipitate a huge war of the Muslim world against the Christian world. The parallel here is remarkable.
Seal #5 - John saw "underneath the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God and because of the testimony which they maintained." Now, here it takes a little imagination. An Old Testament altar was a pile of rubble. It was forbidden to use carved rocks, so they used whatever boulders happened to be lying around. Yet, here we have what to John looked like an altar beneath which were the souls of many who had already been slain. I suspect very strongly that the "altar" which John saw was a representation of the six story-high World Trade Center ruins.
Courtesy
of Space Imaging
And it follows that the slain are underneath the altar; broken bodies by the thousands, ripped, burned and smashed beyond recognition. It is this group of dead souls that cry out for vengeance. "How long, O Lord, holy and true, wilt Thou refrain from judging and avenging our blood on those who dwell on the earth?"
It is amazing to me that it is in this setting that these dead people cry out for vengeance! Obviously there is a need for payback and these murdered souls ask for it. We Americans want revenge for their murders, and justly so. Just as George W. Bush has instructed us, though, we will not get satisfaction immediately. It will take time. These dead Americans are told they will have to wait. They must wait until the terrorists are destroyed and the war is over.
The dead had been killed because of the testimony that they had to God. This is not necessarily because of their individual beliefs, but rather because we, the citizens of the United States, are part of a Christian nation. We, a Christian nation, are the enemies of Islam. We, as a society, uphold the Christian faith. It is our Christian heritage that is the target of bin Laden's animosity.
They are then given a white robe (a white shroud/body bag?) and told they must wait until the number (perhaps numbering, i.e. gathering the remains, sorting and identifying?) of their "fellow-servants" (coworkers) and "brethren" (family members) who had died should be completed also.
(note: I recognize that the future tense of "who were to be killed even as they had been" has been changed to fit this scenario. I am not a foreign language scholar and perhaps someone could evaluate the appropriateness of my proposal so far as the tense of this statement.)
Seal #6 - It follows that the action that the US and allies takes to achieve that vengeance is recorded in verses 12 through 17. Here we see John describing, in words from the primitive ages of 2,000 years ago, technology of warfare conducted today. With the sixth seal, John records the campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The great earthquake is not a natural San Francisco style earthquake. It is the shaking of the ground from the massive explosions inflicted by our military. The ground shaking is accompanied by huge columns of smoke and the rising of dust (remember, for example, the dust from the World Trade Center towers collapsing.
The sun is obscured by the smoke and dust, and at night the dust causes the moon to glow red.
The stars falling from heaven are our missiles or bombs descending through the atmosphere as they streak toward their targets.
The massive barrage of missiles and bombs falling is described as figs falling to the ground in great abundance.
The sky splitting apart like a scroll is evident as the shock wave of massive detonations that whips across the ground from ground zero at the speed of sound.
While these photos are of nuclear explosions and the events in Afghanistan are just conventional weaponry, the shockwave is clearly visible forming as a white ring around the base of the mushrooming cloud. This ring expands outward at the speed of sound. This same circular wave is also found with conventional weaponry, though smaller in size.
Here is a really obvious clue that sounds custom fit for the rugged terrain of Afghanistan. We know that Osama bin Laden was hiding in the caves of this mountainous country. Verses 15 and 16 says that everyone (of the enemy) hides themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains and they are terrified of the bombardment.
Chapter 7 then shows the formation of a unique group drawn from the nations of the good guys. We have been taught that the 144,000 are missionaries, evangelists or post rapture Jews converted to Christianity.. They are not. They are soldiers. And they are our soldiers. Every instance we find them in Revelation is in the context of a military setting. Much later, we will find them commanded by a returned Jesus immediately following their military rescue of Jerusalem. This is a special army drawn from the remnants of all twelve tribes of Israel.
So why are the 144,000 soldiers associated with the United States? In Through the Prophet's Eye, I discuss in great detail the historical movement and identity of the lost ten tribes of Israel. The Cliff Notes version of this topic would show that the ten tribes of the Northern Kingdom of Israel can be traced through ancient records and surviving artwork, and are firmly identified as the Cimmerians who were the primary settlers of an essentially uninhabited Northern Europe in the B.C. days. The Cimmerians are well known to have arrived on the historic scene at the same time and place as the disappearance of the ten-tribed House of Israel. The descendants of the Cimmerians have received name changes multiple times as the different tribal groups migrated and split apart. Millions of descendants of the original Cimmerians have migrated to the USA over the past four centuries, and while the US has become a hodgepodge mix of many peoples, by far the largest percentage of our population descends from the Cimmerian people.
The soldiers have the "seal of God" upon their brows. It is an insignia upon their headgear. It distinguishes them from enemy soldiers who have the insignia of the enemy soldiers, known to us as the "mark of the beast", upon their headgear. For example, the Nebuchadnezzar Division insignia is shown below.
Iraqi Republican Guard troops run during endurance training earlier this month southeast of Baghdad. Photo from MSNBC
Considering that the Iraqi military has procured many US uniforms in which they hope to deceive our troops, it would not be surprising at all to see a new unique identifier placed on the helmets of our soldiers to make for quick friend-or-foe identification. Such a insignia would not be necessary with sailors or aviators. It would be necessary only for ground pounders that would be expected to come into contact with Iraqi soldiers.
While there are more than 144,000 troops in theater, those troops on the ground that would need a friend or foe identifier may only be those who reasonably could be expected to encounter enemy troops.
Much ado has been said about the Great Tribulation. Most people don't realize that this word "tribulation" is used only one time in Revelation - and all it says is here we have this large group of soldiers that have come through a very difficult time. What that difficult time is, we do not know. It is very possible that these are soldiers that have come from the nation that has suffered through the tribulation of the loss of the twin towers and the wing of the Pentagon.
Seal #7 - I am not certain what the silence in heaven for half an hour means, but I'm sure we'll find out. The word for "heaven" means the spiritual realm, space, or simply the atmosphere. I suspect it might be an electromagnetic pulse bomb that fries the enemy electronics and sensors, thus depriving the enemy of radar tracking capabilities and many other computer usages designed for warfare. It may also be an electromagnetic weapon that disrupts the electronic charges occurring in the atmosphere. It is well known that a nuclear burst has this same affect on the atmosphere, and I understand that this may last an hour or so. That would cause an electronic silence "in heaven". The Electromagnetic Bomb
The benefit for this occurring at this point in Revelation is that it would effectively blind the enemy communications and possibly radar at a critical initiation of hostilities against Iraq. Thus blinded, Iraq would be unable to defend its most threatening sites from our air strikes.
In summary, the seven seals are the main events that lead up to our war against Saddam Hussein.