Studying Death, Dying and Future Hope in the SSnet.org series Lesson 9, may the Holy Spirit be the speaker to your heart.

The Topic today is: “Souls under the altar in the Book of Revelation for Morning Manna of the Sabbath School Lesson Death, Dying and Future Hope”.

Edition is on page 116 and for the laymen edition or Standard Edition, on page 77.

The SSnet.org site allows anyone, anywhere to read the lesson in their own language. Choose your own language to see God speaking also to your heart.

Why do you not click on this now?

--- https://absg.adventist.org/pdf.php?file=2022:4Q:SE:PDFs:EAQ422_09.pdf

---The purpose of the lesson this week is to deal with difficult verses.

---Revelation 6:9-11 speaks of souls of the dead martyrs under the altar.

---Which altar? Incense or burnt offering?

---A. Timm in our lesson sees it as the burnt offering altar because of ‘blood” not oil.

---The martyrs lives were like “blood” offered on the burnt offering for Christ.

---Non-Adventist G. E. Ladd in 1972 in his commentary also sees it like Timm as the burnt offering metaphor sacrifice of the martyrs lives and nothing to say about the state of the dead.

---Victorinus died in 311 AD but not before he wrote a commentary on Revelation.

---Coming to this part in Revelation he said that the righteous and wicked are in the Hades or Hell. They are separated from each other.

---Victorinus said they are sleeping saints in general and not just those at the Resurrection of Christ.

---He said that the martyrs are there crying for vengeance because they were killed.

---But, he said, they have to wait for the Second Coming and later for the wicked to burn in Hell. “because in the last time, moreover, the reward of the saints will be perpetual, and the condemnation of the wicked shall come, it was told them to wait.”

Source: Source. Translated by Robert Ernest Wallis. From Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 7. Edited by Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe. (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1886.) Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight. <http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0712.htm>.

https://www.newadvent.org/fath

---Not everything in Revelation is in heaven. Horses with many colors? No. Martyrs under an altar continuously crying? No. A sanctuary in heaven? Yes, because it is said also in other books of the New Testament especially the Book of Hebrews. (see also SDABC 7: 778).

---Victorinus puts the golden altar in the Holy of Holies following Hebrews 9:7-8 but Origen did not.

---For Tertullian beneath the altar is the Paradise or Garden of Eden.

---Rabbis holds that the souls are protected under the throne of God.

---Cyprian and Tertullian understood that the judgment is delay to the end of Time. That is why the martyrs are frustrated in their view.

---The church fathers said that the sun is Christ and the moon is the Church and that heresies and martyrdom darkened its face.

---Tertullian sees the stars as the seed of Abraham both Jews and Christians. ---With so many strange ideas the words of Ellen White are very wise: “"Not all minds are constituted alike, and we may thank God that the liberty to freely state his convictions and there is to be no lording it over the children of God. No man is to take another man's mind and mold it over to meet his mind and his ideas, for the molding might be for worse instead of for better." 18 MR 65