“And I saw thrones, and there were those who sat down on them, and power of judging was given them.

During the past thousands of years that Satan the Devil has been the “ruler of this world” there has been such an absence of justice or miscarriage of justice that it will be an excellent thing when the power of judging mankind is committed to these 144,000 associate judges of the Lord Jesus Christ. So when the apostle John saw those 144,000 thrones and those who sat down on them, he was seeing the beginning of the glorious judicial day that was spoken of to the Court of Areopagus, Athens, nineteen centuries ago, in these words:

⁹ “God . . . has fixed the day on which he will have the world judged, and justly judged, by a man of his choosing; of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”​—Acts 17:22-31, New English Bible, of 1970.

10, 11. What kind of “souls” were they that John saw, and for what work were they equipped?

¹⁰ The apostle John further identifies the occupants of the judicial thrones as being the 144,000 Kingdom joint heirs of the Lord Jesus Christ by going on to say: “Yes, I saw the souls of those executed with the ax for the witness they bore to Jesus and for speaking about God, and those who had worshiped neither the wild beast nor its image and who had not received the mark upon their forehead and upon their hand.”​—Revelation 20:4.

¹¹ The apostle John did not see headless “souls.” By using the descriptive word “souls” he was not talking like spiritistic mediums about “disembodied spirits.” He was using the word “souls” in the way that the inspired Holy Scriptures use the word, and he meant live, conscious beings in bodies, through which bodies they expressed their personalities. Only, in order to occupy judicial thrones in the invisible heavens, their bodies would have to be spirit bodies. In the discussion of the resurrection of the dead, we are told in 1 Corinthians 15:44: “It is sown [in death] a physical body, it is raised up a spiritual body.” Hence the apostle John saw live, conscious heavenly bodies, persons equipped with mental abilities for judgment work, and these John identified as being those “executed with the ax” for the witness of Jesus and God’s Word.