Is the death of one-third of mankind in Revelation something likely to happen before the Antichrist?
A viewer asks whether the death of one-third of mankind in Revelation (chapters 8 and 9) is something likely to happen literally before the Antichrist.
Answer
No; those are symbolic numbers. When it says one-third of this and one-third of that, it is giving you a sense that this is a large number, not an exact count like 333 out of 999. The fraction one-third appears only in the Apocalypse among the New Testament, but it appears several times in the Old Testament in a similar way, most relevantly in Ezekiel 5 and in Zechariah 13:9, where the one-third is God's people brought through the fire, separated from the two-thirds of apostate Israel. By using this fraction, John symbolizes that the judgments are not designed to wipe out mankind totally, but to produce enough punishment that men should come to their senses and repent; anything more than a third would make the situation hopeless. John uses the word 'third' fourteen times in chapters 8 and 9, and fourteen being two sevens symbolizes the exactness and precision of the judgments, which transpire during the forty-two months and correlate with the two witnesses of chapter 11. So it is symbolic, not a literal prediction.