Though Gentiles may trample saints underfoot, their efforts to destroy the church of God are ultimately futile. The Lord God preserves his treasured church in the face of heathen hatred. Even if Gentiles may come so close as the outer court, they cannot silence the prayers of the saints and their worship of their Saviour. In the course of history, the Lord has shown the reality of this promise time and again, from catacombs to concentration camps, as the worshippers of God continued in prayers coloured by the crushing boots of their oppressors. Always the gospel has a way of bouncing back.

The resurrection and ascension of the two witnesses illustrate graphically that the task of the church in this world, no matter how difficult and hated, always continues. Seasons of witnessing may be followed by seasons of silence and apparent death, but those seasons will in turn again be followed by periods of witnessing—all in God’s time. The testimony of Jesus Christ can ultimately not be cancelled.

Plagues alone do not work repentance. The first six trumpets resulted in devastating plagues upon the earth (Revelation 8:7 – 9:19), but the result was disappointing: The rest of mankind, who were not killed by these plagues, did not repent (Revelation 9:20). But now, when the survivors saw with their own eyes the truth of what the witnesses had said in their season of witnessing, there was a change. The instruction for the church is to continue testifying of the truth of the gospel in the confidence that the Lord is able to use their murder to break even the hardest hearts.

The plagues God sends in response to his people’s prayers have a formative role in preparing hearts to receive the gospel (as tearing up a field with a plough prepares the ground for seed). The plagues first engendered expressions of hatred against God’s witnesses (and hence against God), but that turmoil became ground for change.

As the Lord prepared John (and his readers) for the third woe, he first very pastorally gave much encouragement through this vision of the two witnesses. The Lord’s pastoral sensitivity to the fears of his people is an example preachers do well to follow.