The intermission scene (between sixth and seventh seals) --7: 1-17. Six seals have been opened, revealing the signs of impending events. The first four seals depict scenes of terror and tragedy never exceeded in the course of human history --the siege of Jerusalem by the Romans, the details of which fulfill these visions of the horrorifying inflictions, of its duration, and of the subsequent tribulations in its wake. It should not be even momentarily overlooked that all of these calamities were included in the narration of Mat 24:1-51, accompanied by the explicitly plain announcement by Jesus that the calamities would come upon that generation and fulfilled in it (Matthew . 23:36; Matthew 24:34). “ All these things shall come upon this generation.” After the disclosures of war, famine, pestilence and mortality in the pageantry of the four horses and riders, the fifth seal discloses the call of the martyrs for avenging judgment, followed by the answer of the sixth seal to their cry in the symbols of the descending wrath of the One on the throne and of the Lamb upon the persecutors and their accomplices. The immediate opening of the seventh seal would expectedly follow, but instead an interlude is projected into the vision as an enlargement of the martyr scene, expanded to include their “ fellowservants and brethren,” previously mentioned as “ partakers in the tribulation” yet on the earth. This recess between the sixth and seventh seal signifies a lapse between the announcements of judgment and the execution of them, and corresponds to the period of escape promised the disciples by Jesus, in Matthew 2.4:15-25 and Luke 21:18-19, in his descriptions of the siege of Jerusalem; and it was fulfilled in the withdrawal of the Roman armies, under the command of the Roman general, Titus, after the siege had commenced. It is described by Josephus, an eyewitness to the embattled scenes of the destruction of Jerusalem, with additional evidence from the Roman historian Pliny, to which further reference will be made in the following analysis of this interlude and its succeeding scenes.