The opening words of this paragraph, “after this,” indicate that this vision of the 144,000 sealed occurs directly after the vision of the opening of the six seals of Revelation 6:1–17. We would expect that chapter 7 would relate the opening of the seventh seal. But chapter 6 had ended with the despairing cry from the mouths of every person on earth in the face of God’s judgmental wrath, “Who can stand?” Chapter 7 pauses the report of the opening of the seventh seal to provide a comforting answer to John’s readers to that question.
1 After this I saw four angels standing at the four corners of the earth, holding back the four winds of the earth, that no wind might blow on earth or sea or against any tree.