Who Are the Two Witnesses of Revelation? Apocalypse in Context.

Apocalyptic literature is much abused by the religious world and thus much-maligned in the secular world. Christians have been taught, through the use of creative fiction and sensational literature, that the Book of Revelation is a predictive prophecy. As should always be the case when interpreting Scripture, we need to know whether or not the original audience would have read it this way.

The apocalypse was a form of literature during the Second Temple period devoted to creatively and symbolically speaking one overarching message to God’s people in times of turmoil and crisis:

Fear not. Your God wins, and you will be vindicated if you endure.

Even though it seems much more complicated than that, it isn’t. Think of Daniel and Revelation, both of which were written to audiences who were subject to tyrannical foreign powers. The apocalyptic genre details the trials, tribulations, and martyrdom of God’s people. It can sound scary when we don’t understand that it wasn’t written to scare people at all but to instill in them the hope that no matter what the kings of the nations and their “gods” cook up, God’s people will be avenged and vindicated. Shame will become honor, defeat will morph into triumph, and condemnation will be forgotten in light of a glorious vindication.

Let’s look at the mini-apocalypse in the midst of Revelation— the tale of the Two Witnesses in Revelation 11:1-13:

Then I was given a measuring rod like a staff, and I was told, “Rise and measure the temple of God and the altar and those who worship there, but do not measure the court outside the temple; leave that out, for it is given over to the nations, and they will trample the holy city for forty-two months. And I will grant authority to my two witnesses, and they will prophesy for 1,260 days, clothed in sackcloth.”

These are the two olive trees and the two lampstands that stand before the Lord of the earth. And if anyone would harm them, fire pours from their mouth and consumes their foes. If anyone would harm them, this is how he is doomed to be killed. They have the power to shut the sky, that no rain may fall during the days of their prophesying, and they have power over the waters to turn them into blood and to strike the earth with every kind of plague, as often as they desire. And when they have finished their testimony, the beast that rises from the bottomless pit will make war on them and conquer them and kill them, and their dead bodies will lie in the street of the great city that symbolically is called Sodom and Egypt, where their Lord was crucified. For three and a half days some from the peoples and tribes and languages and nations will gaze at their dead bodies and refuse to let them be placed in a tomb, and those who dwell on the earth will rejoice over them and make merry and exchange presents, because these two prophets had been a torment to those who dwell on the earth. But after the three and a half days a breath of life from God entered them, and they stood up on their feet, and great fear fell on those who saw them. Then they heard a loud voice from heaven saying to them, “Come up here!” And they went up to heaven in a cloud, and their enemies watched them. And at that hour there was a great earthquake, and a tenth of the city fell. Seven thousand people were killed in the earthquake, and the rest were terrified and gave glory to the God of heaven. (ESV)

I am not going to explain all of the language and numbers; there are scholarly books devoted to this subject, and I could never do it justice here. But this is what I call the mini-apocalypse at the mid-point of this larger apocalypse. We’re going to ignore the symbolism and look at the big picture. Because it is an apocalypse, we will see God’s faithful servants, their victories, their persecution and tribulation followed by their defeat, and eventually their vindication. This is the pattern of apocalypse. There is no darkness without light at the end of the tunnel in this kind of literature. It is meant to inspire God’s people to faithful endurance, not to frighten them. It was penned to comfort, not to alarm (unless you wavered in loyalty!). An apocalypse is an acknowledgment of our situation here on Earth juxtaposed with the promise of redemption at the end. We might lose for a while, but God wins in the end and the loyal will be rewarded for their trust in Him.

We can know that apocalypses were not written to frighten, because the people to whom apocalypses were written were generally already scared, oppressed, or at the very least uncertain of their future and without control over their own lives because of foreign rule. This sort of writing was supposed to be their remedy. Confusion can come when these writings are read by people who are not living within this larger reality of foreign oppression and uncertainty. When read by a people who are not living in daily fear of crucifixion, slavery, or oppression at the hands of fickle Emperors declared divine, it sounds ominous and scary and predictive of future cataclysms. When read by people who are already living in these realities, it provides a strong warning and a message of hope.

The word apocalypse means “a revealing; a revelation of something.” In this case, the text of Revelation begins in 1:1 with an explanation of exactly what is being revealed:

The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his servants the things that must soon take place. (ESV)

The revelation in question is specifically a revelation of our Messiah, and that is good news. What things must soon take place? Oftentimes we mistake these things for “the disasters,” but in the first-century Roman world, life was already a disaster for those people who had a new Savior and were not bowing down to the Imperial Cult. What they needed was a reminder to remain loyal and to receive the encouragement and promises reserved for those who maintain their allegiance to the Lamb. (As a side note, the Lamb is mentioned twenty-eight times while the Lion is only mentioned once.) Revelation is a reminder of the endgame and what will come to pass on behalf of God’s faithful (who were already at the time of its writing enduring uncertainly beyond our reckoning). Of course, Revelation also tells of what will happen to those whose loyalty fails.

And so we have this mini-apocalypse which has been turned by fiction writers into two specific people at the end of the age. Storytellers have told of two witnesses who will preach and work wonders— who will be slaughtered and then raised up to ascend to God bodily. And it sounds compelling, this story, but it doesn’t really line up with the Bible or with the genre of literature that the Book of Revelation falls into. What is the basic story of the Bible? The Bible tells of God’s quest to restore humanity. We were created as His perfect image-bearers, but we took on the image of the Beast (our beastly nature) in the Garden when we became deceptive like serpents (Gen 3). At Sinai, we became as obstinate and stiff-necked as cattle (Exodus 32), and when we worshipped stone images of false gods, we became as blind, deaf, lame, and dumb as they are (Psalm 115, see my Context for Kids Volume 4: Identity, Idolatry, and the New Creation). God has, since the beginning of our decline, sought and planned to restore us to our original status. He has been building an army of witnesses since the fall.

There will always be witnesses. Why are two mentioned in the Book of Revelation? Because in the ancient world, when a king sent out a messenger, He always sent out two to make sure that one messenger wouldn’t be treacherous and deliver an evil report. This is also why Yeshua sent out His disciples in twos, first the twelve and then the seventy-two and then… This is the pattern of the ancient world and of Scripture. And if this is the pattern, then it still holds today— making these witnesses in Revelation 11 not two literal people but instead symbolic of all believers in all times.

We are the two witnesses. All of us. And the message of Revelation in this mini-apocalypse is that God’s witness in this earth can and will never be destroyed, no matter how terrible or tragic things look.

We can be killed. They can celebrate. But in the end, we win. We win because God wins, and He is true to those who are loyal to Him to the end. That’s just one of the hopeful messages of Revelation, a book that is treated by modern readers as a road map to the future but was never meant to be anything other than a message of warning and hope to God’s people in the midst of life in Imperial Rome. God will, once and for all, deal with the scourge of evil. That is another powerful message to those who might be tempted to curse God and die.

As far as being predictive prophecy, in a sense that is true. Roman persecution would not be triumphant, and the witness of Yeshua and the commandments would endure despite tribulation. In that way, it was predictive in the time that it was written. But God’s victory is always at the heart of predictive prophecy, so much so that to even mention that fact is redundant. It always happens, no matter how long it takes, and no matter how many of us might, like the “two witnesses,” be cut down and celebrated over. That the Kingdom endures and prevails— well, that is the foundational prediction of the entire Bible from front to back.

That victory isn’t merely a promise of words; it is a promise delivered in the lives of His people as He saves them from tyrannical oppression— over and over again throughout history.

We win. Because He wins.

The Bible isn’t telling us to survive. It is calling us to stand to the end wherever it is God has put us and doing whatever it is He has assigned us to do. We are witnesses, and the mini-apocalypse of the two witnesses tells us (without prettying it up) that witnesses die. It is even expected that we will die. And yet, like those two witnesses, we still stand boldly. We give our witness of the Gospel of the Kingdom. We tell of the fact that God infiltrated Earth and redeemed mankind through the ministry, death, and resurrection of Yeshua at the Cross. We tell all who will hear us that they are invited to come to Him in allegiance and to inherit the world to come. This is a message of hope, and it strips the power from regimes that threaten us with death. The sting of death is removed in this glorious message of the Kingdom. Therefore powers and principalities are of no eternal threat to us. This is reality for us as believers unless we do not truly believe in the world to come— unless we choose to fear death and to believe it is something to be avoided at all costs.

The message of the Bible is hope. All is not lost. In fact, all will be restored. Those who are loyal to Him are being restored, reset, to their creation settings. Everything is about loyalty, and we emulate the one(s) to whom we are loyal. Does our loyalty to Christ obligate us to love, sacrifice, and even die on behalf of those for whom He died? Or do we show preference to the Beast and His system, doing things the way the world does and preserving self above all? Do we conquer, fight, and strip peace from the world? Or are we meek and humble, bringing the spiritual sword of peace on behalf of men and the sword of war only against the powers and principalities? Do we gleefully flip tables without being willing to forgive and die for the people we are rebuking? May it never be! Do we insult without going silently to the Cross for them? How dare we! If we are going to follow Him, then we must follow Him all the way to the Cross. Otherwise, we might find ourselves following after the Beast in a Christ-ish way, a shadowy mockery of His example. If only the Mark of the Beast was something tangible that we could easily identify and avoid, something that could be taken accidentally or frivolously. But no, it doesn’t work that way. It would be nice if it did; then we wouldn’t have to work on our character or our faith. We wouldn’t have to place all of our hopes in Yeshua and His finished work. We wouldn’t have to acknowledge that He’d provided a way for us to once again become image-bearers of the Most High God instead of image-bearers of the Beast.

Making Revelation into predictive prophecy is entertaining, certainly, but it empties it of its core generational message. That message is simple. He is calling His people to be those “two” loyal witnesses, allied always and only with Him through His Messiah. This call does not sound in some future tribulation but in every tribulation. We must be willing to die. We must stand firm in our witness of loyalty to Him and not be distracted from it. We must know that we know that we know that no matter what they do to us, we will hear His voice, we will be bodily resurrected, and we will feast with Him at the Messianic banquet. The message, always, is hope.

Edit: (stars by my favorite author’s names)

People have asked me for my book list on reading Revelation through scholarly eyes so here goes! This list contains affiliate links.

Bauckham, Richard The Theology of The Book of Revelation

**Beale, G. K. John’s Use of The Old Testament in Revelation (The Library of New Testament Studies)

**Beale, G.K. Revelation: A Shorter Commentary

**Beale, GK Revelation, NIGTC

**Blackwell, et al Reading Revelation in Context: John’s Apocalypse and Second Temple Judaism

Boring, Eugene, Revelation: Interpretations Commentary (I love this entire series)

Boxall, Ian The Revelation of St John

Brown, Michael and **Keener, Craig Not Afraid of the AntiChrist: Why We Don’t Believe in Pre-Tribulation Rapture

Collins, John J. The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature

**DeSilva, David A. Unholy Allegiances: Heeding Revelation’s Warning