“If you see the ‘door’ of opportunity for sacrifice and service open before you, enter in. But enter quickly; for the night of darkness and of intense opposition to the truth will ere long be upon us and will hinder you from engaging in the service. ‘The morning cometh, and also the night.’ ‘The night cometh in which no man can work.’ When that is true, you may know that ‘the door is shut.’ that all the wise virgins have entered in, that all have been proved, and that all vacancies have been acceptably filled. All the special ‘servants of God’ having by that time been ‘sealed in their foreheads’ (given an intellectual appreciation of God’s Plan), the four winds will be loosed and will produce the great ‘whirlwind’ of trouble in the midst of which the remnant of the Elijah class will be ‘changed,’ and exalted to Kingdom glory.”—C. 225.
7:4. And I heard the number of them which were sealed.—“We have every reason to believe that the definite, fixed number of the Elect is that several times stated in Revelation, namely, 144,000 ‘redeemed from amongst men.’ ” (F. 179; Rev. 14:1.) This is the equivalent of one saint fully developed for each five days of the Age.
And there were sealed 144,000.—On this point one of Pastor Russell’s coworkers has well said: “That this is not a symbolical, but an exact number, seems certain from the fact that, in the same chapter reference is made to another company, also spirit‐begotten. In the 9th verse we read: ‘I beheld, and lo, a great multitude which no man could number.’ It is not probable that this multitude is so great that no one could actually count them, but rather that none can state their number, God having left it indefinite.”
Of all the tribes of the children of Israel.—“As a name, Israel signified ‘The people blessed of the Lord,’ ‘The people of God,’ ‘The Lord’s people.’—2 Chron. 7:14.” (D. 654; Gal. 6:16; Rom. 9:6‐8.) Each of the saints is reckoned as belonging to one of the twelve tribes of “Israelites indeed,” which tribes bear the names of the twelve patriarchs of natural Israel. In every family each child is beloved for some characteristic peculiarly its own; and in the meaning of the names of the children of Israel we may recognize certain of the qualities which make each overcomer precious in the Father’s sight.