As Bill Kochman explains in such articles as "
The Woman in the Wilderness and the 144,000" and "
The Great Tribulation and the Rapture", his current understanding of the Scriptures is that the 144,000 represented literal flesh Jews in Israel, who accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior as a result of the preaching of the Two Sackcloth Witnesses during the great persecution of the Biblical Beast, referred to as the Great Tribulation, or Jacob's Trouble. These 144,000 only represented a small remnant of the population of Israel. Please read the aforementioned articles for more detail, as well as "
The Two Sackcloth Witnesses of Revelation 11".