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Last month I wrote an article about the dispensations, and in it I discuss the fact that after each dispensation God only releases judgment on the part of mankind that failed to obey the ruling principle of a given dispensation and also extends an offer of grace in some manner. I mentioned that after the Age of Grace ends at the Rapture, God releases judgment on the world (an unsaved world that logically cannot include the saved Church) in the form of the Tribulation and its associated judgments (thus offering strong support for a pre-trib Rapture)
I also mentioned that He extends grace in the form of the 144,000 Jewish evangelists who take the gospel to the post-Rapture world and bring a huge number of people into the kingdom, both Jewish remnant believers and Gentile Tribulation saints. He also protects the Jewish remnant in the wilderness until the bloody end of the Great Tribulation so they can be ushered alive into the kingdom following the Second Coming.
A few days after I posted that article, I got an email from a nice gentleman whom I will refer to as G, and in it he politely expressed his opinion that perhaps the ministry of the Two Witnesses of Revelation 11Â should be included in that offer of grace coming on the heels of the Church Age, since they are also preaching and getting people saved. I blubbered something like:
“Yeah, you could be right. But hey, you got those 144,000…”
But the honest truth is that his comment completely blindsided me because I hadn’t even considered the Two Witnesses. For some odd reason the Two Witnesses of Revelation 11Â had never even crossed my mind the whole time I was writing that article.
But G’s email got me thinking, as readers’ questions and comments often do, and a couple of things quickly occurred to me: (a) I had never studied the Two Witnesses to any significant degree, and as a result (b) I didn’t know as much about them as I should. And I immediately recognized the Holy Spirit’s tried-and-true method of giving me a wake-up call.
Translation:Â Heads up, hoss…new assignment.
So here we areâthe Two Witnesses. In the course of this article, I want to discuss various aspects of these two enigmatic characters and in the process hopefully shed a little bit of light on questions such as who they are (and who they aren’t), what they do, and where, when, why, and how they do it. Not necessarily laid out in that order.
As we shall see, some of these points are interrelated and tend to shine light on each other, so I don’t feel compelled to do this laundry-list style. But what I will do is break this down into three major sections that speak broadly to all of the above points, and reduce this to three fundamental questions:
1. Who are they?
2. What is the nature of their ministry?
3. When do they minister?
Considering the extent to which students of the Bible argue over the some of the details surrounding the Two Witnesses, I suppose it’s a blessing that everything we are told about them comes in a single block of Scripture in Revelation 11:1â13…
