Sealed with the Name

The 144,000 from the 12 tribes are sealed in Revelation 7, but we don’t learn the contents of the seal until they reappear in 14:1. There we’re told that they are sealed with “His Name” and the “Name of His Father.”

In the Great Commission (Matthew 28), the singular “Name” into which one is baptized is Father, Son, and Spirit. By contrast, the 144,000 are sealed with a double name – the Name of the Lamb and the Name of the Father. God has a singular name; God’s Names are plural – Lamb and Father at least. The Name of God, like God Himself, is One and Many.

The fact that the Names of the Lamb and of the Father are sealed on the 144,000 reinforces the import of the seal as such. To seal something is to claim it as ownership; to seal it with a name is to identify the property with the owner. As a wife takes the name of her husband, so the 144,000 take the name of the Father and Son. The Father’s and Son’s names and reputations are now bound up with those who are sealed with their Names. If the 144,000 are lost, then the name of Father and Son is diminished.

The name of the Lamb is the easier to identify. That Name is, most immediately, the Lamb, but also the name of Jesus who is the one who is being unveiled in the book of unveiling. More expansively, we can say that the Name of Jesus as given in Revelation is the full title that is given in 1:5-6: “faithful witness, firstborn from the dead, ruler of the kings of the earth,” the one who loves, releases, and makes His people to be a kingdom and priests to God. 

That expanded name is relevant here in chapter 14, because that Name identifies the 144,000 with the Lamb who is the model for the 144,000 – as faithful witness. And the Name of the Lamb also sets a trajectory for the 144,000: If they live up to the name they wear – faithful witness – they will also share in the Lamb’s conquest of death and rule over the kings of the earth. They will prove to be the kingdom and priests to God. The name that they wear implies a life-and-death-story, and an aftermath of resurrection and exaltation.

They also are sealed with the Name of the Father. Other than “Father,” we do not seem to have a specific Name for the Father. “Father” is itself a significant name for the 144,000. The Father is the One who cares for His world, who does not let a swallow fall from heaven without His knowledge, who feeds the birds and clothes the grass of the field in glory. That Father has sealed His name on the saints.

If we go back to the beginning of Revelation, though, we have an additional way to unpack the Name of the Father that seals the 144,000. In John’s blessing, the Father is designated as “He who is and who was and who comes” (1:4). The Father is the God who is always present, has always been present, and is always coming to bring a new and bright future. The Father is the One who encloses all times: Before Him there was nothing, since He is the beginning of all beginnings; He is the One who will in the end be all in all. All along the way in between, He remains the God who is. 

And then we can re-connect this name-seal with the Great Commission, for the seal on the 144,000 is a specification of baptism into the Name. The import is the same: Not only the 144,000 but the entire church is baptized into the Name of the Lamb – called to follow the faithful Witness through death to resurrection and rule; the entire church is baptized into the Name of the Father, who is, was, and comes. Sealed with the Name of the Father, all the baptized are assured, along with the 144,000, that “my times are in Your hands.”