‘Clothed in sackcloth.’ Predominantly, the gospel is warning. It tries to do so as winsomely as possible – we are appealing to people, we’re persuading people – but at the same time we are warning people. When you see what some of the churches are doing nowadays where they have people in pulpits who are not so much preachers warning the community, but comedians. Joke after joke, entertainment, light-hearted lightness, superficiality and wisecracks. No, ‘clothed in sackcloth’, warning the people. We are happy people, but we are also serious people, and we are very sincere about these things. This is a gigantic matter, a matter of eternity, a matter of heaven and hell.
The question has to be asked, why does the Book of Revelation express the same symbolic period of time in these different ways? Why is it first in years, then in months, then in days? One answer which is very simple is this: three and a half years suggests a long time; this is not something which is soon over. You measure something in months to draw attention to the fact that it is passing much more quickly: the time is now spoken of in shorter terms. You measure it in days and you’re saying that this period of time is composed of lots of small acts. We may think grandly, we want revival. Well of course we do. We want God to do great things, but to hear it expressed in days tells us that the gospel age is full of small acts, small good works, small acts of witness, many thousands of individual prayers. The gospel age is a long time, warns the Scripture, but at the same time, it goes by very quickly and there is no time to lose. Never despise all the small prayers and the small witnesses, and the things that take so long to achieve: teaching the children in the Sunday School week by week. You carry on doing it step-by-step. The age is composed of different things that are measured, in a sense, in different ways
Some identify these two witnesses on the basis that they are two real persons. Some suggest Moses and Elijah. This is because the passage goes on to say that they have power to shut heaven so that it does not rain, and power to strike the earth with plagues, two miraculous signs attributed to Elijah and Moses in Scripture. In Elijah’s case this is said to be further supported by the prophecy that Elijah will come ‘before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord’ (Malachi 4:5), which Dispensationalists teach has been only partially fulfilled by John the Baptist (Matthew 17:10-13). But Christ does not say that John only partially fulfilled Malachi’s prophecy, but that ‘Elijah has already come’. Others suggest Enoch and Elijah, because they are the two men recorded in the Bible as never having died but as having been translated directly to heaven. This is said to violate the rule of Hebrews 9:27, ‘that it is appointed unto men once to die’. This violation is remedied, in their minds, by the subsequent death of these same two at the end of the world. But Scripture never intends this to be a cast-iron rule without exception, or else as Walvoord says, there would be no rapture. There is no need to worry about who these witnesses are. We should not focus on the one issue which we do not need to know and which the passage does not tell us.