Reviving The Two Witnesses - Raised Again!

 The public press joined the clergy in villifying God's people, one paper saying:  "The finis of the Finished Mystery has been given."  Nothing, though, could been further from the truth!   The two witnesses did not stay dead.  We read:  "And after three and a half days spirit of life from God entered  into them, and they stood upon their feet, and great fear fell upon those beholding them. And they  heard a loud voice out of heaven say to them: 'Come on up here.'  And they went into heaven in the cloud, and their enemies beheld them." (Revelation 11:11,12)   Thus, they had an experience similar to that of the dry bones in the valley that Ezekiel visited in vision.  Jehovah breathed upon those dry bones, and they came to life, providing a picture of rebirth of the nation of Israel after 70 years of captivity in Babylon.  (Ezekiel 37:1-14) These two prophecies, in Ezekiel  and in Revelation, had their striking modern-day fulfillment in 1919, when Jehovah restored his "deceased" witnesses  to vibrant life.

What  a shock for those persecutors!  The corpses of the two witnesses were suddenly alive and active again.  It was a bitter pill for those clergymen  to swallow, the more so since the Christian ministers whom they schemed to put in prison were free again, later to be fully exonerated.  The shock must have been even greater when, in September 1919, the Bibler Students held a covention in Cedar Point, Ohio, U.S.A.  Here J.F. Rutherford recently released  from prison, stirred conventioners with his talk "Announcing the Kingdom," based on  Revelation 15:2 and Isaiah 52:7.  Those of the John class once again  to "prophesy," or  preach publicly.  They advanced from strength to strength, fearlessly exposing Christendom's hypocrisy.

Christendom tried again and again to repeat her of  1918.  She rejected to mob action, legal maneuvering, imprisonment, even executions-all to no avail!  After 1919 the spiritual domain of the two witnesses was out of her reach.  In that year Jehovah had said to them:  "Come on up here."   And they had ascended to an elevated spiritual state where their ememies could see them but not touch them.  John describes the shocking effecgt  their restoration on the great city:  "And  in that hour a great earthquake occurred, and a tenth of the city fell; and seven thousand persons were killed by the earthquake, and the rest  became frightened and gave glory to the God of heaven." (Revelation 11:13)  There were truly great convulsions in the realm of religion.  The ground seemed to move under the leaders of the established churches as this body of revivified Christians got to work.  One tenth of their city, figuratively 7,000 persons, were so profoundly affected that they are spoken of as being killed. 

The expression "a tenth of the city" reminds us  that Isaiah prophesied regarding an ancient Jerusalem that a tenth would survive  the destruction of the city as a holy seed.  (Isaiah 6:13)  Similarly,  the number 7,000 remids us that when Elijah felt tha the alone remained faithful in Israel, Jehovah told him that there were, in fact, still 7,000 who has not been to Baal.  (1 Kings 19:14, 18)  In the first century, the apostle Paul said that these  7,000 pictured the remnant of the Jews who had responded  to the good news about the Christ.  (Romans 11:1-5)  These scriptures help us to understand  that the "seven thousand" and the "tenth of the city" in Revelation 11:13 are those  who respond to the restored two witnesses  and abandon the sinful great city.  They die, as it were, to Christendom.  Their names are taken off her membership rolls.  They no longer exisrt as far as she was concerned .

Next time: Reviving the Two Witnesses - Conclusion of Raised Again! 

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