The Final Events

The book of Revelation closes with a worldwide controversy between two sealings. On one side stand 144,000 redeemed from the earth, the Lamb’s name and His Father’s name written in their foreheads (Rev 14:1). On the other side stands a beast power whose forehead bears the name of blasphemy (Rev 13:1; 17:3), demanding that the inhabitants of the earth receive his mark, his name, or the number of his name in order to buy and sell (Rev 13:16–17). One side rests on the seventh day; the other side rests on the day Rome substituted. But the controversy goes deeper than the day. The day is the sign. Behind each day stands a God; behind each God stands a worship; behind each worship stands a destiny.

This article walks the closing scenes of earth’s history with that single controversy as its spine. It is the natural companion to The Hour of God’s Judgment (which traces the 2300 days and the heavenly sanctuary) and to Come Out of Babylon (which lays out the Babylonian identification in detail). Where those articles establish the prophetic and historical framework, this article walks the closing scenes themselves — from the worship issue at the centre, through the close of probation, the seven last plagues, the second coming, the thousand years, the executive judgment, and the new earth.

Part I — The Worship Issue

The battle is over worship

Revelation 14 announces the three angels of the closing message. The first angel calls every nation, kindred, tongue, and people to “Fear God, and give glory to him; for the hour of his judgment is come: and worship him that made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters” (Rev 14:7). The second angel announces the fall of Babylon. The third angel issues the most solemn warning in Scripture against worshipping the beast and his image. Three successive angels, one issue: worship.

The closing crisis is not, at its centre, an economic crisis. It is not, at its centre, a political crisis. It is a worship crisis. The economic instruments of Rev 13:17 — the inability to buy or sell — are the means by which the worship issue is enforced; they are not themselves the issue. The issue is whom you fall down before, whose name you bear, whose Spirit dwells in you, whose day you keep, and whose God you serve.

The seal of God is the Father’s name

And I saw another angel ascending from the east, having the seal of the living God: and he cried with a loud voice to the four angels, to whom it was given to hurt the earth and the sea, saying, Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees, till we have sealed the servants of our God in their foreheads.

The seal belongs to a specific Being. He is called “the living God.” Scripture identifies that Being plainly. Peter answered Christ in Matthew 16:16, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” The Living God of the Bible is the Father of Jesus Christ. The seal is therefore the Father’s seal, given to those who are His.

Six chapters later, Revelation tells the reader exactly what is written in the foreheads of the sealed:

And I looked, and, lo, a Lamb stood on the mount Sion, and with him an hundred forty and four thousand, having his Father’s name written in their foreheads.

The seal of the living God is the Father’s name written in the forehead. The forehead is the seat of the mind, the place of understanding and consent. To have the Father’s name written in the forehead is to know who the Father is, to confess Him as God in distinction from every counterfeit, and to receive from the Son — the only One in whom the Father’s name is fully written (Heb 1:4) — the Spirit by which the Father dwells in His people. The sealed are those of whom Jesus prayed, “I have manifested thy name unto the men which thou gavest me out of the world… and I have declared unto them thy name, and will declare it: that the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them” (John 17:6, 26).

This is the foundation. The seal is not a day. The seal is a Person — the Father — received in His Son by His Spirit. The day is the sign that points to the Person.

The Sabbath — sign, not destination

Where then does the seventh-day Sabbath stand in this picture? Exactly where the Lord placed it through the prophet Ezekiel:

Moreover also I gave them my sabbaths, to be a sign between me and them, that they might know that I am the LORD that sanctify them.

And hallow my sabbaths; and they shall be a sign between me and you, that ye may know that I am the LORD your God.

The Sabbath is a sign. It is the sign of a specific Being — the LORD (Hebrew YHWH, the Father’s covenant name) — doing a specific work — sanctifying His people. The Sabbath functions in the closing controversy the way a road sign functions on the highway. A sign that reads “to Wellington” is not Wellington. If a traveller stops at the sign, congratulates himself on his correct reading of it, and camps beside it, he has not arrived at the destination. He has only correctly identified the road.

Much of modern Adventism has stopped at the sign. The Sabbath has been transformed from a sign of the Father who sanctifies into a destination in its own right — a credential, a mark of denominational identity, a token believed sufficient to secure deliverance in the last day. But the sign was never intended to terminate on itself. It was always intended to point beyond itself to the Person whose seal it is. To have the right sign on the wrong God is not to be sealed. It is to bear the sign of a Person whose name your worship denies.

Mark, name, or number — three ways to belong to the beast

And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

If any man worship the beast and his image, and receive his mark in his forehead, or in his hand, the same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God… and the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night, who worship the beast and his image, and whosoever receiveth the mark of his name.

Revelation is precise. There are not one but three things by which a soul is identified with the beast: the mark, the name, or the number of his name. Possession of any one of the three places the bearer in the same condemned category. A reader of Revelation who has been taught to watch only for “the mark” will fail to recognise that the name and the number are equally disqualifying. He may pride himself on refusing Sunday and yet be carrying the name of the beast in his confession and the number of his name in his theology, without ever suspecting that he stands in the wider category Revelation condemns.

What then is the name? Revelation tells the reader in the same chapter.

The name of blasphemy

And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.

And I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns.

The name borne by the beast is blasphemy. Blasphemy, in the biblical and Christ-confessing sense, is fundamentally one thing: making God of that which is not God, or making not God of Him who is. The Jews accused Jesus of blasphemy precisely on this point: that, being a man, He claimed equality with God (John 10:33). The accusation was false in Christ’s case because He was, in truth, the only-begotten Son of God. But the structural definition of blasphemy that the accusers themselves used is the right one to carry into Revelation 13. To bear the name of blasphemy is to confess as God a being who is not the God of Scripture.

Which God, then, does the beast confess? Revelation does not leave the question hanging. The beast power is identified in the same prophetic line that Daniel had already drawn — the little horn, the man of sin, the woman seated on seven hills, the city that reigned over the kings of the earth in John’s day. The companion article on Come Out of Babylon walks the identification in detail. The system in view is the Roman papal communion. The God she confesses is named in her own official documents.

Rome’s Sunday is the sign of Rome’s God

It is the regular Adventist habit to quote the Roman communion on the Sunday change. It is far less common to quote her on the God whose authority that change is said to honour. But she speaks plainly on both.

Three things follow from this testimony, taken together.

First, the Roman communion does not regard Sunday as the foundation of her authority. She regards the Trinity as the foundation of her authority — the “central mystery,” the “source of all other mysteries.” Sunday is downstream of the Trinity. It is a day “dedicated by the apostles to the honor of the Most Holy Trinity.” Sunday is the sign; the Trinity is the Being to whose honour the sign is paid.

Second, this means the mark and the name are not two unrelated things. They form a single worship-system. The day signs the God. To accept the day is to honour the God; to accept the God is, sooner or later in the closing crisis, to accept the day. The two stand or fall together.

Third, the inverse also holds. If a worshipper accepts the Roman doctrine of God — the Trinity — while continuing to observe the seventh-day Sabbath, he carries Rome’s name while wearing the Father’s sign. Revelation 13:17 specifies that such a one stands in the same category as those who take the mark. He bears, in his confession of God, the name of blasphemy. The seventh-day Sabbath he keeps is being paid not to the Living God of Scripture but to the “three persons in one substance” of the fourth-century councils. The sign is intact; the destination is wrong.

The Jewish parallel — and the coming repeat

There is a Bible precedent for this exact tragedy. The Jewish nation in the first century kept the seventh-day Sabbath scrupulously. They prided themselves on it. They condemned Christ Himself for what they took to be its violation. And when the Roman armies surrounded Jerusalem in AD 70 they died confidently, telling one another that God would surely deliver them — they were, after all, Sabbath-keepers.

He did not deliver them. The city was levelled, the temple burned, more than a million Jews perished, and the nation that had borne the oracles of God for fifteen centuries was scattered to the four winds. Why? Not because they had abandoned the day. Because they had rejected the Son — and in rejecting the Son, they had rejected the Father:

He that honoureth not the Son honoureth not the Father which hath sent him.

If God were your Father, ye would love me: for I proceeded forth and came from God.

The Sabbath without the right Son did not save the Jews. They held the sign while denying the Person it signified. Their Sabbath-keeping became, in the end, a witness against them.

That history is given for a reason. The Lord, by His servant, warned plainly that the same trap stands open in the closing controversy:

Satan is working that the history of the Jewish nation may be repeated in the experience of those who claim to believe present truth. The Jews had the Old Testament Scriptures, and supposed that they were conversant with them; but they made a woful mistake… Satan is working today to repeat the same scenario.

Those who “claim to believe present truth” are professed Sabbath-keepers, the heirs of the Advent movement of 1844. The trap is the same: hold the sign tightly enough to believe yourself sealed, while quietly substituting another God in the place where the Father was once known. That substitution is precisely what happened, formally and on the record, in the Seventh-day Adventist denominational shift toward Trinitarianism from the early twentieth century onward.

Mrs. Hastings — sealed without the Trinity

The objection will be raised that none of this can be sustained without something more than inference — that for the case to stand, there must be direct testimony that someone was sealed in the days when the church was non-Trinitarian. That direct testimony exists.

In 1850 a letter went out from the hand of Ellen G. White to Bro. Leonard Hastings, whose wife had just died. The Hastings family had been among the earliest believers in the Advent message. Mrs. Hastings had been a faithful Sabbath-keeper and a committed member of the small Adventist body in its first decade. The letter speaks of her in these terms:

I saw that she was sealed and would come up at the voice of God and stand upon the earth, and would be with the 144,000. I saw we need not mourn for her; she would rest in the time of trouble.

The Adventist body of 1850 was uniformly non-Trinitarian. James White, Joseph Bates, Uriah Smith, J. N. Andrews, J. N. Loughborough — the founders — rejected the Trinitarian formula on biblical grounds and confessed instead the Father as the one God and Jesus Christ as the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father from eternity, fully divine by inheritance. That this was the universal confession of the early Advent body is conceded today even by Trinitarian Adventist historians.

Mrs. Hastings worshipped that God. She did not confess the Trinity. And Ellen White, by the testimony of Jesus given to her, declared that she was already sealed — sealed under the worship of the Father and the Son, without any confession of a co-equal third Person. She will come up at the voice of God. She will stand with the 144,000.

The implication is unavoidable. Either the seal of God can be received without the Trinity — in which case the Trinitarian confession is not a requirement of the seal at all — or Mrs. Hastings was not sealed, and the testimony of Jesus given to Ellen White was in error. The second option is not open to anyone who accepts that gift. The first stands.

The historic Adventist body, confessing the Father and the Son in pioneer terms, possessed the seal of God. The modern body, having quietly substituted Rome’s “central mystery” in the place of that confession, holds the sign without the Person. The Sabbath remains; the God whose seal it is, has been changed. This is the crisis the Lord, by His servant, warned of in advance:

The light we have received upon the third angel’s message is the true light. The mark of the beast is exactly what it has been proclaimed to be. Not all in regard to this matter is yet understood, nor will it be understood until the unrolling of the scroll.

Not all is yet understood. What modern Adventism has long confined to the question of the day, the unrolling of the scroll has now made plain extends to the question of the God.

The two seals at a glance

Read horizontally, the contrast is total. There is no intermediate category. The closing controversy is between two worship-systems, named, sealed, and divided down the middle. The remnant is identified by two marks of its own:

And the dragon was wroth with the woman, and went to make war with the remnant of her seed, which keep the commandments of God, and have the testimony of Jesus Christ.

Here is the patience of the saints: here are they that keep the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus.

Two marks: the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus. Not the faith about Jesus as the second Person of a co-equal Trinity. The faith of Jesus — the confession Jesus Himself held and taught: that the Father is the only true God (John 17:3) and that He, the Son, is sent from the Father, lives by the Father, and does always the Father’s will. The remnant of Rev 14:12 hold the commandments of the Father and the faith of the Son. That is the seal.

Part II — The Closing Crisis

With the worship issue established, the closing scenes of earth’s history fall into place. They are the working out, in space and time, of the great controversy between the two seals. The Spirit of God moves on one side; the spirits of devils move on the other. The honest in heart are gathered out of every communion; the impenitent are gathered in to the worship of the beast. The decision is forced, the door of probation closes, and the seven last plagues fall.

Signs of the end

Daniel was told that “at the time of the end… many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased” (Dan 12:4). Christ told His disciples that the closing generation would witness wars and rumours of wars, famines, pestilences, and earthquakes — “the beginning of sorrows” (Matt 24:6–8). Paul foretold a moral collapse so extensive that the closing era could be recognised by the character of its inhabitants:

This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good… having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof.

Every clause has a contemporary referent. The unprecedented explosion of knowledge in the past two centuries, the chronic condition of regional and global war, the proliferation of weapons capable of rendering large stretches of the earth uninhabitable, the moral inversion by which Paul’s list of vices is no longer hidden but openly celebrated — none of this is hidden. None of this is in dispute. The closing signs are not a future prediction. They are a present reality that confirms the prophetic framework.

And alongside them, one further sign of the end: the everlasting gospel, predicted by Revelation 14:6 to go “to every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people” before the end comes, is now reaching corners of the earth no previous generation could have reached. The same instruments which Rome uses to consolidate her false worship serve also to carry the call to come out of her.

The latter rain on the remnant

The closing work of the gospel does not advance in human power. It advances in the outpoured Spirit of God — the latter rain promised in Joel and prefigured in the Pentecostal early rain of Acts 2.

Be glad then, ye children of Zion, and rejoice in the LORD your God: for he hath given you the former rain moderately, and he will cause to come down for you the rain, the former rain, and the latter rain… And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.

The Spirit poured out in the latter rain is the Spirit of God the Father, conveyed through Jesus Christ the Son. He is the same Spirit who hovered over the waters in creation, who came upon the prophets, who descended on Christ at His baptism, and whom Christ promised His disciples in His own words: “I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever” (John 14:16); and “I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you” (John 14:18). The Comforter is the personal presence of Christ Himself, by the Spirit, dwelling in the believer. Paul names Him so explicitly: “Now the Lord is that Spirit” (2 Cor 3:17); and again, “God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father” (Gal 4:6).

Under the latter rain, the remnant church is illumined with boldness, clarity, and power. Ministers and laymen alike are moved to plead with souls in every communion. Old prejudices fall away. Honest hearts who have walked for years in confused Babylon hear the call distinctly and come out. The loud cry of Revelation 18 sounds — the earth illumined with the glory of the descending angel — and the great gathering home of the honest in heart is accomplished before the door closes.

And after these things I saw another angel come down from heaven, having great power; and the earth was lightened with his glory. And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen… And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.

The counterfeit revival

Every genuine work of the Spirit of God in earth’s history has been met, sooner or later, by a counterfeit. The latter rain will be no exception. As the genuine outpouring advances, an enormous counterfeit revival arises in the religious world. Miracles are wrought; the sick appear to be healed; dreams, visions, and supernatural manifestations multiply. Spirits impersonating the dead appear to grieving relatives, speaking words of peace and consolation while quietly endorsing doctrinal positions hostile to the plain word of God. The warning of Paul is precise:

Even him, whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders, and with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved.

And I saw three unclean spirits like frogs come out of the mouth of the dragon, and out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet. For they are the spirits of devils, working miracles, which go forth unto the kings of the earth and of the whole world, to gather them to the battle of that great day of God Almighty.

Three unclean spirits, three sources, one objective: to gather the inhabitants of the earth into a unified false worship under the dragon, in opposition to the remnant of God. The dragon is Satan; the beast is the papal communion; the false prophet is the apostate Protestant world acting in concert with her. The miracles are real; the doctrine they endorse is the substitution of the worship of God’s rival in the place of the worship of God.

Satan’s masterpiece — the false Christ

At the climax of the counterfeit revival, Scripture foretells the most dangerous deception the human race will ever face. Satan himself, in person, appears upon the earth as Christ.

And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.

Then if any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is Christ, or there; believe it not. For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect.

The deception will be staged with consummate skill. A radiant figure of majesty and beauty appears in a place agreeable to the expectations of the world — very likely in the region of the Middle East, where the messianic hopes of three of the world’s largest religions converge. He performs miracles in plain view. The sick are seemingly healed; the dead appear to be raised. Global media carry the event to every corner of the earth simultaneously, and millions of viewers, watching the same broadcast, conclude that the scripture saying “every eye shall see him” (Rev 1:7) has been fulfilled. The figure speaks words of love, peace, unity, and reform. He calls the religions of the world together. He endorses Sunday worship as the consummate sign of the world’s unity under his benevolent reign. He commands the persecution of the small body of recalcitrant Sabbath-keepers who refuse to acknowledge him.

The honest student of Scripture is not deceived, because Scripture forbids exactly this scenario in advance. The true Christ does not come to the earth in the closing moments of probation. The true Christ comes at the end of the seven last plagues, with all the holy angels, in the clouds of heaven, with the trump of God, and every eye sees Him at once — without television, satellite, or staging. The reader of 1 Thess 4:16 and Matt 24:27knows that a Christ who walks on the earth before that day, performing miracles and calling for the persecution of God’s commandment-keepers, is no Christ at all. He is Satan in his masterpiece.

The two camps decided

Under the pressure of the counterfeit, the world is rapidly polarised. The two camps of Rev 14 become visible. On one hand stand those who, by the latter rain of the Spirit and by the plain testimony of Scripture, know the false Christ for what he is and refuse him. They worship the Father in spirit and in truth (John 4:23–24); they confess the Son sent from the Father; they keep the commandments of God, the seventh-day Sabbath included; they have the faith of Jesus, not the faith of fourth-century councils. On the other hand stand those who, however sincerely, have accepted the false Christ and his false day, and have unwittingly received the name of his god into their forehead and the mark of his day into their practice.

Between the two camps there is no longer any middle ground. The question forced by the false Christ is, in essence, the question Joshua put to Israel at the end of his life: “Choose you this day whom ye will serve… but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD” (Josh 24:15). It is not possible in the closing controversy to serve both. The two services are mutually exclusive; the two Gods are not the same God; the two days are not interchangeable. Every soul on earth is brought to the decision.

The death decree

With the world polarised and the plagues of the natural order beginning to fall, the inhabitants of the earth conclude that the cause of the disasters is the small body of Sabbath-keeping commandment-keepers who refuse to unite in the world’s new worship. The Sunday-worship laws — first commended as humanitarian, then progressively enforced — culminate in a universal decree against those who refuse them.

And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.

The history of Daniel 3 is the type. Three Hebrews stood before the image on the plain of Dura, refused the worship demanded, and were cast into the burning fiery furnace. The history of Daniel 6 is the type. Daniel knelt at his open window in defiance of a worship-law, and was cast into the lions’ den. The antitype in the closing controversy is global. The remnant scattered across the earth, isolated in cottages and farms and forest places, hear the same decree under their own sky.

They do not retaliate. They do not organise resistance. They keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus, and they commit their souls to Him in well-doing as unto a faithful Creator (1 Pet 4:19).

The close of probation

He that is unjust, let him be unjust still: and he which is filthy, let him be filthy still: and he that is righteous, let him be righteous still: and he that is holy, let him be holy still. And, behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me, to give every man according as his work shall be.

Probation closes silently. The world goes on with its commerce and its quarrels, unaware that the door of mercy has shut. In the heavenly sanctuary Christ has ceased His mediatorial work — not because there are more sinners He would gladly save, but because every case has been decided. The character of every soul on earth is fixed. The unjust will be unjust still; the righteous will be righteous still. The Spirit of God is withdrawn from the impenitent; the angels who restrained the winds of strife loose their hold; the four winds of the earth are let go (Rev 7:1–3).

Christ then removes His priestly garments and takes the robe and crown of the King, and the seven angels are commanded to pour out the vials of the wrath of God upon the earth (Rev 15:5–8; 16:1).

Part III — Deliverance and the Kingdom

The seven last plagues

Revelation 16 sets out the seven last plagues in sequence. They fall on those who have received the mark of the beast and worship his image; they do not fall on the sealed of God, who are shielded as Israel was shielded in Goshen when the plagues fell on Egypt (Ex 8:22; 9:26; 10:23).

And the first went, and poured out his vial upon the earth; and there fell a noisome and grievous sore upon the men which had the mark of the beast, and upon them which worshipped his image.

A grievous sore upon those who bear the mark. The sea becomes as the blood of a dead man, and every living soul dies in it. The rivers and fountains of waters become blood. The sun scorches men with intense heat. Darkness falls upon the seat of the beast, and his kingdom is full of pain and blasphemy. The great river Euphrates is dried up — as the literal Euphrates was dried up before Cyrus took Babylon — preparing the way for the kings of the east. The seventh angel pours out his vial into the air, and a great voice comes out of the temple of heaven, from the throne, saying, “It is done” (Rev 16:17).

The time of Jacob’s trouble

Between the close of probation and the visible coming of Christ lies an interval the prophet Jeremiah calls “the time of Jacob’s trouble” (Jer 30:7). The sealed of God, under the shadow of the death decree and surrounded by the falling plagues, pass through a final searching of soul. They are sinless, having put away every known sin under the convicting work of the Spirit before probation closed; but in the absence of the Mediator’s sheltering ministry they feel the full weight of conscious unworthiness, and they wrestle as Jacob wrestled at the Jabbok — not against angels of darkness but for the assurance of God’s remembering love.

And he said, Let me go, for the day breaketh. And he said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.

The promise to them is sure: “Alas! for that day is great, so that none is like it: it is even the time of Jacob’s trouble; but he shall be saved out of it” (Jer 30:7). They shall be saved out of it. Not one of them shall be lost.

The voice of God — deliverance

At midnight — the figurative darkest hour, the moment when the death decree is set to take effect — God speaks. The heavens open. The voice of God is heard rolling from heaven to heaven, declaring the day and hour of Christ’s coming and announcing the everlasting covenant. The Sabbath is honoured before the universe. The graves of the righteous dead are opened at His word. The sealed of God, scattered across the earth, are gathered into companies, illumined with His glory, and the oppressors fall back in dismay.

And it shall be said in that day, Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, and he will save us: this is the LORD; we have waited for him, we will be glad and rejoice in his salvation.

At His voice the great hail of Rev 16:21 falls — every stone about the weight of a talent — on the camps of the oppressors. The earth reels under the most violent earthquake in its history. Islands flee away; mountains are moved out of their places; every wall in the world falls.

The Second Coming

For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be… And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.

For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.

The second coming of Christ is literal. It is visible. It is audible. It is universal — every eye sees Him at the same moment, without screens or staging. It is not the secret rapture of popular fiction; it is the open, glorious return of the King of kings with all the holy angels. The heavens are rolled together as a scroll (Rev 6:14). The sign of the Son of man appears in the sky. The wicked, who have refused the latter rain, refused the call to come out, and embraced the false Christ, see now in the brightness of His coming the One they have rejected, and they cry to the rocks and to the mountains, “Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb: for the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?” (Rev 6:16–17).

The resurrection and the translation

At the trump of God the graves of the righteous dead of every age burst open. From every continent and every century the sleeping saints awake in glorified, immortal, incorruptible bodies (1 Cor 15:51–54). Parents are reunited with the children they buried in infancy; husbands and wives long parted by death see each other’s faces for the first time in a hundred years. Then the righteous who are alive on earth are changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, and the two great companies — the raised and the translated — rise together to meet the Lord in the air.

The wicked, in the same hour, are slain by the brightness of His coming (2 Thess 2:8). Their bodies lie unburied across the face of the desolate earth, from one end of it to the other (Jer 25:33). Not one of the wicked is left alive.

The earth desolate; Satan bound

And I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand. And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years, and cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled.

With the wicked dead and the righteous taken to heaven, the earth is left without inhabitant. It is desolate, broken, and empty — the “bottomless pit” or abussos, the same word the Septuagint uses of the formless deep of Genesis 1:2 before the creation week began. Jeremiah describes the scene in language that deliberately echoes that pre-creation desolation:

I beheld the earth, and, lo, it was without form, and void; and the heavens, and they had no light. I beheld the mountains, and, lo, they trembled, and all the hills moved lightly. I beheld, and, lo, there was no man, and all the birds of the heavens were fled. I beheld, and, lo, the fruitful place was a wilderness, and all the cities thereof were broken down at the presence of the LORD, and by his fierce anger.

To this ruined earth Satan and his angels are confined. He has no one to tempt and no one to deceive. He paces his desolate prison for a thousand years, surrounded by the wreckage of his rebellion. The chain that binds him is a chain of circumstances: with no human race to influence and no created being to oppose him, he is bound as effectively as if he had been chained in iron.

The thousand years in heaven

Meanwhile the redeemed are with Christ in the Father’s house. The mansions Christ promised in John 14:2–3are real and prepared. They sit at the marriage supper of the Lamb (Rev 19:9). They reunite with friends and relatives long parted by death. They meet face to face the men and women of every age whose names they know from Scripture — Abraham, Moses, David, Daniel, Peter, John, Paul.

And they receive answers. Every soul that has wondered why a loved one died, why a prayer was not answered, why a hope was deferred, finds the answer at last in the perfect knowledge of God’s working. The veil between heaven and earth is finally lifted. The redeemed see the invisible spiritual battles that were waged for each of them; they see how the prayers of others kept them in the way; they see the unseen angelic ministries that protected and guided them. Nothing is hidden.

The executive judgment

And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them… and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years.

Do ye not know that the saints shall judge the world?… Know ye not that we shall judge angels?

During the thousand years the redeemed participate in the executive judgment of the lost. The investigative judgment in the heavenly sanctuary (Daniel 7–8 and Hebrews 9) decided every case before probation closed. The executive judgment of the millennium does not re-open those decisions; it opens them to the redeemed.

Why? Because the great controversy was waged in the sight of the watching universe, and the watching universe must see the records on which God’s decisions rested. The redeemed themselves must see them. Each of us will at some point look for a friend, a parent, a brother or sister whom we expected to meet in the kingdom and not find them there. We will be shown the record. We will see, not the censored summary, but the whole case — every prayer offered for that soul, every appeal of the Spirit refused, every moment when the truth was seen and turned from. We will rise from the open records and say with the voice of every loyal heart in the universe, “Just and true are thy ways, thou King of saints” (Rev 15:3).

The proportion of punishment is also determined in this executive judgment. The plain testimony of Scripture is that the wicked are punished “according to their works” (Rev 20:12–13) — not all alike, not all forever, but each according to a measure proportioned to the light he received and the wrong he did. The redeemed assist in determining that measure. They are content with the verdict they help to render. The universe is content.

Christ returns with the New Jerusalem

At the end of the thousand years the second phase of the great homecoming begins. The new Jerusalem, the city of God prepared as a bride adorned for her husband (Rev 21:2), descends from heaven to the earth, accompanied by Christ and the redeemed of all ages.

And his feet shall stand in that day upon the mount of Olives, which is before Jerusalem on the east, and the mount of Olives shall cleave in the midst thereof toward the east and toward the west, and there shall be a very great valley.

The mount cleaves; the valley spreads; the foundations of the holy city come to rest upon the prepared plain. Within its walls live the redeemed. Outside its walls lies the still broken earth, and on the broken earth a dreadful summons is given.

The final resurrection and the last assault

But the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished… And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, and shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea. And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city.

At the voice of Christ the wicked dead of every age are raised — the second resurrection. The numbers exceed comprehension. From the antediluvians who perished in the flood to the impenitent of the closing generation, the unsaved of history come up in the bodies they bore in earth’s last moments. They are not changed. They are not glorified. They are mortal still, and as full of unrepented hatred as the day they died.

Satan is loosed from his desolate prison and goes out to deceive them one final time. Every general, every conqueror, every military genius of human history is there — Pharaoh, Sennacherib, Nebuchadnezzar, Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler — and to them is added the impenitent mass of every generation. Satan rallies them with the lie that the city of God may be taken by force. They believe him. The armies of the lost, more numerous than the sand of the sea, encircle the New Jerusalem.

And then, above the city, Christ appears upon the great white throne (Rev 20:11). The records of every life are opened. The lost see, as in a vision, the entire history of their lives — every sin, every appeal of the Spirit refused, every prayer of a praying mother ignored, every moment when the truth was within reach and turned from. They see, in the same vision, the life and death of Christ — the cost of the salvation they refused. And they see that the verdict against them is just.

Just and true are thy ways, thou King of saints. Who shall not fear thee, O Lord, and glorify thy name?

Every knee bows; every tongue confesses (Phil 2:10–11). The condemnation of the wicked is ratified, in their own mouths, before it is executed.

Fire from God — the final destruction

And fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them. And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever… And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death.

Fire comes down from God out of heaven. The earth is broken up; the fountains of the great deep open from beneath; the molten substance of the planet’s interior bursts upward. The entire surface of the earth becomes a lake of fire. Within it every wicked being is destroyed — not in a never-ending torment of conscious suffering, but in the proportionate judgment of God, ending in the second death (Rev 20:14; Mal 4:1, 3). The wicked become ashes under the soles of the feet of the righteous. Satan himself, the originator of the rebellion, is the last to be consumed. He is destroyed by the fire that issues from within him — an outward sign of the moral corruption that has eaten through every fibre of his being for thousands of years.

Therefore will I bring forth a fire from the midst of thee, it shall devour thee, and I will bring thee to ashes upon the earth in the sight of all them that behold thee.

Death and the grave are themselves cast into the lake of fire. The last enemy is destroyed. Sin, sinners, Satan, and death itself are removed from the universe. The atonement is complete.

The new heavens and the new earth

Nevertheless we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.

And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea. And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.

Upon the cleansed and purified earth the Lord re-creates. The Edenic beauty long lost is restored, surpassed, and made eternal. The seas no longer divide the lands; the curse is lifted; the tree of life stands on either side of the river of the water of life (Rev 22:1–2); the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. The redeemed inherit the earth made new (Matt 5:5). The New Jerusalem is the capital. From it the saved go forth to fill the earth and, in the fulness of eternity, to explore all that God has made beyond it — the worlds the Father has kindled in His unfailing creative joy, of which Scripture speaks in Hebrews 1:2 and Hebrews 11:3 and from which the unfallen sons of God came to present themselves before Him in Job 1:6.

Death is no more. Sorrow is no more. Crying is no more. Pain is no more. The Sabbath of the Lord, which signed the worship of the Father throughout the great controversy, is kept now in unbroken sequence by every redeemed soul (Isa 66:23). The Father and the Son are dwelling with their people. The controversy is finished. Sin will not rise a second time; the universe has seen its first and final fruit, and the loyal of every world have settled for eternity into the love of God.

The question before every reader

The closing scenes are not given in Scripture to satisfy curiosity. They are given so that every reader, knowing what comes, may prepare. The worship issue at the centre is not an academic distinction. It is the decision on which every soul will stand or fall in the closing crisis.

The honest question is not, “Do I keep the Sabbath?” It is the deeper question to which the Sabbath was always meant to point: Do I worship the Father, in spirit and in truth, through His only-begotten Son, in the Spirit which He has sent forth into my heart? Is the Person to whom my keeping of the day is paid the Living God of Scripture — the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ — or is it a substitute named in the fourth century by men whose unity was imperial rather than biblical? The answer to that question will determine whether the Sabbath I keep is a seal or a snare.

If the latter rain has begun to fall — and the signs of the age leave little doubt that it has — then the call of the fourth angel of Rev 18:1–4 is sounding now. The voice from heaven says, “Come out of her, my people.” The honest in heart in every communion — including in the modern Adventist body that has quietly substituted the Roman confession in the place of the pioneer faith — are called to step out, to recover the Father and the Son as Scripture names them, and to wait for the Lord with their lamps trimmed and burning.

The witness of Scripture

The closing sequence at a glance

Further Reading

• Nader Mansour. The SDA Mark of the Beast. Public address. The exposition this article’s Part I is built upon — the seal as the Father’s name, the mark as more than Sunday, the name of blasphemy identified as the Trinitarian confession of Rome, the Mrs. Hastings letter as direct EGW testimony that the seal was given to the pioneer non-Trinitarian church.
• Doug Batchelor / Amazing Facts. The Final Events of Bible Prophecy and Armageddon and the Final Events. Public broadcasts. The eschatological sequence presented in Parts II and III draws on these expositions for its narrative spine. The worship-issue framing has been substantially reworked from the Trinitarian framing of those broadcasts to the historic pioneer Adventist confession.
• Ellen G. White. The Great Controversy, chapters 36–42. The classical Adventist exposition of the closing scenes — the impending conflict, the final warning, the time of trouble, the deliverance of God’s people, the desolation of the earth, the controversy ended.
• Ellen G. White. Early Writings, pp. 32–35. The Mrs. Hastings letter and the early visions of the sealing.
• Catechism of the Catholic Church, §234 (on the Trinity as the central mystery), §2174–2188 (on Sunday as the day of the Lord). The Roman communion’s own confession of both the doctrine and the day.
• Companion article: The Hour of God’s Judgment — the 2300 days, the heavenly sanctuary, and the judgment-hour ministry that began in 1844.
• Companion article: Come Out of Babylon — the detailed exposition of the Babylonian identification and the second angel’s message.