Who are the two witnesses in Revelation 11? Not Moses and Elijah back from heaven, and not two prophets preaching at the Western Wall after a rapture. They are the church in its witness to the world about Jesus from his ascension to his return.
Some characters in Revelation leap off the page. The two witnesses are among them.
Ask who they are and you'll get a cast list:
Two preachers at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, breathing fire on anyone who comes near (Left Behind novels).
Moses and Elijah returning to earth during a seven-year tribulation to preach and be killed by the Antichrist (evangelicals).[1]
Enoch and Elijah, since both left this world without dying (some ancient Jewish and Christian traditions).[2]
Elijah and Elisha, the Law and the Prophets, the Law and the Gospel, and even the Old and New Testaments.[3]
These readings look for two literal figures. Revelation 11 points somewhere else. I've explained how to read Revelation's symbols in an earlier post.
The two witnesses in Revelation 11 are the church: Christ’s people bearing witness to him in a hostile world between his first and second comings, persecuted yet preserved, killed yet raised.
Last article I argued that the 144,000 sealed in chapter 7 are the whole people of God. Chapter 11 shows us those same people from another angle. The sealed are who the church is. The witnesses are what the church does.
The Church's Witness
“The sealed are who the church is. The witnesses are what the church does.”
What Do the Two Olive Trees and Two Lampstands Mean?
The lampstands are churches (1:20), and the olive trees are Zechariah’s anointed king and priest (Zech. 4:14). Together they mark the two witnesses as the church: a kingdom of priests bearing prophetic witness.
The Lord says, I will grant authority to my two witnesses, and they will prophesy for 1,260 days, clothed in sackcloth (11:3). Jesus is the faithful witness (1:5), and his people bear witness to him (1:2, 9; 2:13). John’s own words tell us who these two are.
They are lampstands. These are the two olive trees and the two lampstands that stand before the Lord of the earth (11:4). We don’t have to guess what a lampstand is. Jesus already told John: the seven lampstands are the seven churches (1:20) among which the risen Christ walks.
They are two. Why? The law required two witnesses to establish a charge (Deut. 19:15), and Jesus sent his disciples out two by two (Luke 10:1). The number doesn't make them a fraction of the church. It makes their testimony valid.[4]
They are olive trees. John is drawing on Zechariah's vision of a golden lampstand fed by two olive trees, “the two anointed ones who stand by the Lord of the whole earth” (Zech. 4:14). Those two were Zerubbabel the king and Joshua the priest. These prophets, then, are kings and priests. So are we: the Lamb has made us a kingdom and priests to our God (5:10).[5]
They are prophets. In this vision they are prophesying, or preaching (11:3, 6, 10). This is what we’re to be known for! If anyone would harm them, fire pours from their mouth and consumes their foes (11:5). That's the language of Jeremiah, to whom the Lord said, “I am making my words in your mouth a fire” (Jer. 5:14). The fire is the word. It isn’t permission to call down judgment on our critics; when James and John wanted to do that to a Samaritan village, Jesus rebuked them (Luke 9:54–55).[6] But it does mean that the word God puts in his church’s mouth does what he sends it to do.
They wear sackcloth. Sackcloth is the garment of repentance (Jonah 3:5), and it’s the one clue John gives us to the content of their message.[7] They proclaim the one true God and his coming judgment, and they do it as a call to turn.
Are the Two Witnesses Moses and Elijah?
No. They’re modeled on Moses and Elijah, but they aren’t Moses and Elijah come back. They certainly look like them. Like Moses, they turn water into blood like in the plagues (11:6; Ex. 7:20). Like Elijah, they shut the sky so that no rain falls (11:6; 1 Kgs. 17:1), and fire consumes their enemies (11:5; 2 Kgs. 1:10–12). But they also look like Jeremiah since their words are fire (11:5; Jer. 5:14).
When you look closely, John doesn’t give one witness Moses’s powers and the other Elijah’s. Both witnesses have both. That one detail undoes the literal reading. Nor do Moses and Elijah stand for the Law and the Prophets here, since both men were prophets.[8] They’re precedents. Each confronted the idolatrous power of his day in obedience to God and at great cost to himself. The church in every age is called to the same witness.
Who Kills the Two Witnesses?
When they have finished their testimony, the beast that rises from the bottomless pit will make war on them and conquer them and kill them (11:7). In chapter 13 he is allowed to make war on the saints and to conquer (13:7). Same war, same enemy, same victims.[9]
Their dead bodies will lie in the street of the great city that symbolically is called Sodom and Egypt, where their Lord was crucified (11:8). Note the words their Lord. The witnesses die where and how their Lord died. To follow a slaughtered Messiah is to walk his road, and his conquering was his dying.[10] For three and a half days the nations stare at the bodies and refuse them a grave.
Is Revelation 11:12 the Rapture?
No. Revelation 11:12 vindicates a martyred church in front of the world; it doesn’t remove believers before a tribulation.
The church seems conquered, but it will be raised. After the three and a half days a breath of life from God entered them, and they stood up on their feet (11:11). Then they heard a loud voice from heaven saying to them, “Come up here!” And they went up to heaven in a cloud, and their enemies watched them (11:12). Some readers find a rapture here. But notice the audience. This is no secret disappearance. It happens in plain sight of their enemies, just as a cloud took Jesus out of his disciples’ sight (Acts 1:9).[11]
Anointed to Bear Witness
So, who are the two witnesses? Remember Zechariah’s olive trees. They poured oil into the lamp, and oil in Scripture is the anointing of the Spirit. We’re called Christians because we share in the anointing of the Christ, the Anointed One. The Heidelberg Catechism puts it this way:
But why are you called a Christian?
Because by faith I am a member of Christ
and so I share in his anointing.
I am anointed
to confess his name,
to present myself to him as a living sacrifice of thanks,
to strive with a free conscience against sin and the devil
in this life,
and afterward to reign with Christ
over all creation
for eternity. (Q&A 32)
Prophets, priests, and kings. That's what the two witnesses are, and that’s what you are. So, confess his name. Be a church known for one thing: testifying about Jesus.
Who are the two witnesses? If you belong to Jesus Christ, you are. Jesus wins.
Revelation: Jesus Wins
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Notes
[1] Kim Riddlebarger summarizes this dispensational reading, in which Enoch sometimes takes Moses’s place, and rejects it. “The Third Woe Is Coming Soon” (Revelation 11:1–19), Sermons on the Book of Revelation 17, Reformed Perspectives Magazine 11, no. 17 (April 26–May 2, 2009), https://reformedperspectives.org/articles/kim_riddlebarger/kim_riddlebarger.Rev.17.html.↩
[2] Richard Bauckham argues that the versions of this tradition closest to Revelation 11 were themselves shaped by Revelation 11. The Theology of the Book of Revelation (Cambridge University Press, 1993), 85n8, citing his “The Martyrdom of Enoch and Elijah: Jewish or Christian?,” Journal of Biblical Literature 95 (1976): 447–58.↩
[3] William Still lists all six and judges it idle to tie the witnesses to particular individuals. A Vision of Glory: An Exposition of the Book of Revelation (Nicholas Gray Publishing, 1987), 80.↩
[4] Bauckham, 85. Still, following Leon Morris, takes two as the number that makes testimony adequate (Deut. 17:6) and ties it to Luke 10:1 (80).↩
[5] Riddlebarger, “Third Woe,” citing Dennis E. Johnson, Triumph of the Lamb (P&R Publishing, 2001), 170. Still adds that the oil flowing from the olive trees is the Spirit ministering Christ to his church in perpetual supply (80).↩
[6] Still, 81.↩
[7] Bauckham, 86. Paul Spilsbury likewise calls the witnesses preachers of repentance. The Throne, the Lamb & the Dragon: A Reader’s Guide to the Book of Revelation (InterVarsity Press, 2002), 84. Still reads the sackcloth instead as mourning over the sins of both Christendom and the heathen world (80).↩
[8] Bauckham, 85; Spilsbury, 84–85. Spilsbury adds that Moses and Elijah model costly witness against the evil system of their day.↩
[9] Riddlebarger, “Third Woe.”↩
[10] Spilsbury, 85; Bauckham, 85.↩
[11] Still, 83.↩