The First Trumpets

Our secular age has tried to teach us again and again and again that things either happen by chance or that they are without moral significance or that they are the product of nothing more than accidental happenstance and shifting cultures. Help us Lord God, that we may see with the eyes of faith that you are the Sovereign Lord, the Lord God Almighty, that your wrath against sin is unstoppable. Therefore, we have no one else to whom to turn for refuge but you, who alone by the death of your Son can reconcile us to yourself.

Help us please Lord, that in consequence of these chapters of this book we may see afresh the cosmic dimensions of the struggle in which we are engaged and hate every vile thing, understanding afresh that we will bear either the mark of the Beast or the mark of the Lamb. We will suffer either from the Beast or from the Lamb. Grant,

8:1 “When he opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour. And I saw the seven angels who stand before God, and to them were given seven trumpets. Another angel, who had a golden censer, came and stood at the altar.
He was given much incense to offer, with the prayers of all the saints, on the golden altar before the throne. The smoke of the incense, together with the prayers of the saints, went up before God from the angel’s hand. Then the angel took the censer, filled it with fire from the altar, and hurled it on the earth; and there came peals of thunder, rumblings, flashes of lightning and an earthquake.”

The seven seals and now the seven trumpets and then the seven bowls, have some kind of relationship to one another, and the question is, what kind?

In Revelation we are at looking at the way God looks at the earth and at the way God looks at believers again and again with various kinds of judgments and patterns, and some of them you can nail down with great precision. Others, you can’t nail down beyond probability.

The different sevens look at things from slightly different perspectival angles, but they’re not just neatly tied up. We saw last week, all of the seven seals look at God’s judgments in terms of things that do take place on the earth. God’s judgments take place in terms of famine, in terms of death, in terms of civil disorder, in terms of war.

Now you come to the next seven. Look at the first four, at these trumpets, look at what they do. It is very difficult to line that stuff up with simple one-to-one descriptions of events that take place on the earth. What you are getting now is a kind of throne view, a God’s-eye view, God directly, miraculously interposing with his judgment.

Now we’re seeing God intervening with miraculous, however symbolically loaded, interventions of spectacular judgment.

The seventh seal

Chapter 8, verse 1: “When he opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about the space of half an hour.”

We have to remember that this is a drama. It’s as if you have a great drama unfolding, and after this sequence of judgments, then silence.

“My God, what’s next?”

The silence theme is found here and there in Scripture.

Now there is silence in heaven. It is as if God says, “Okay, now you’ve had a cycle of judgments. What comes next?” What comes next is more judgment, which may simultaneously suggest that God sometimes gives times of reprieve but that more judgment follows.

The half hour of silence is certainly meant to be dramatic, causing us to pause and reflect before we move on.

The Preparation

The seven angels stand before God. They’ve not been introduced before. Jewish apocalyptic often speaks of seven angels, and the non-biblical sources actually try and name them. Seven angels who stand before God means a perfect number for accomplishing his will.

To them were given seven trumpets. Trumpets likewise can function in quite a variety of ways in Scripture, this is an apocalyptic trumpet. You get this sort of thing in Zephaniah, and it crops up in the New Testament as well.
Zephaniah 1:14–16 describes the day of Jehovah as a day of wrath, a day of distress and anguish, a day of trumpet blast and battle cry. After all, those were the days when often people signaled the troops by trumpet calls.

Exactly the same imagery is taken in 1 Thessalonians, chapter 4, verses 13–18, concerning those who have fallen asleep already in Christ. It says those who have already died will rise first, for the trumpet of the Lord shall sound.

Then another angel, who had a golden censer (that is, something for holding either the ashes or what was to be offered on an incense altar), came and stood at the altar. He was given much incense to offer.

He was given incense to offer, which are, in fact, the prayers of all the saints, on the golden altar before the throne.

God’s purposes for redemption and blessing are going to be fulfilled, now the prayers of God’s saints can properly be fulfilled.

The only prayers of the saints we’ve heard of specifically since then have been the cries of chapter 5. “How long, O Lord? How long?” As they are offered up before the Lord, judgment falls on the people. That is remarkable?

God does not want to see his people endlessly destroyed without judgment falling.

The prayers of the saints go up before the Lord from the angel’s hand. The angel then takes the censer, fills it with fire from the altar, and hurls it on the earth.

Now, the judgment is coming right from the very throne of God.

Now the trumpets

8:7 The first angel sounded his trumpet, and there came hail and fire mixed with blood, and it was hurled down upon the earth. A third of the earth was burned up, a third of the trees were burned up, and all the green grass was burned up.
V8 The second angel sounded his trumpet, and something like a huge mountain, all ablaze, was thrown into the sea.
A third of the sea turned into blood, a third of the living creatures in the sea died, and a third of the ships were destroyed.
V10 The third angel sounded his trumpet, and a great star, blazing like a torch, fell from the sky on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water—the name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters turned bitter, and many people died from the waters that became bitter.
V12 The fourth angel sounded his trumpet, and a third of the sun was struck, a third of the moon, and a third of the stars, so that a third of them turned dark. A third of the day was without light, and also a third of the night. As I watched, I heard an eagle that was flying in midair call out in a loud voice: ‘Woe! Woe! Woe to the inhabitants of the earth, because of the trumpet blasts about to be sounded by the other three angels!

What do we do with this?

These plagues neither recapitulate each of the seal judgments, nor do they follow the seals in a strictly chronological sense. They do cover the same period of final travail but from a different perspective. The sixth seal found people fleeing to the mountains and calling for sanctuary against the wrath of the Lamb (6:15–17).

The tribulation of this period is now portrayed in a more advanced fashion. While the first four seals depicted judgments that are the inevitable consequences of human sinfulness, the trumpets reveal the active involvement of God in bringing punishment upon a wicked world.

The trumpet-plagues are directed against a world adamant in its hostility toward God. As the intensity of the judgments increases, so also does the vehemence with which people refuse to repent (9:20–21; 16:9, 11, 21). But the trumpet judgments are not final. They affect a significant proportion but not all of the earth (one-third occurs twelve times in vv. 7–12). Their purpose is not so much retribution as it is to lead people to repentance. Like the watchman and his trumpet in Ezekiel 33, they warn the people of impending danger.

In the trumpet sequence there is an increase in severity over the seals. The trumpets go beyond the seals in their more detailed portrayal of the judgment of God on evil.

It is important to see that there’s no easy alignment of these trumpets with the seals.

The whole pattern is of judgment still not bringing people to repentance. That also means these judgments are not the final ones. They still don’t repent, but you still don’t have the final judgments.

The first four, have a function of warning of worse judgments to come. Otherwise, it’s very difficult to make sense of verse 13. It’s as if God sometimes says, “If you think these are bad, you haven’t seen anything yet

It is hard to interpret these things literally, we must remember, we are dealing with apocalyptic material. You try to press apocalyptic language to a literalistic extreme and you get nonsense.

It doesn’t mean this is unreal or unimportant. It means it is symbolic language of judgment that is terrifying. It is horrendous language referring to horrendous judgment. The blood and hail and fire and so on, these are like those in Joel 2:31.

That passage is actually picked up by Peter on the day of Pentecost with respect to what happened in his day. when Jesus dies on the cross there is an unexplained darkness at midday for three hours. How that happened no one knows.

Where the focus of the first four seal woes is primarily on the trials which test the faith of God’s people, the focus of the trumpet woes is primarily on the trials which punish the unbelieving persecutors during the same period of the entire church age when the faith of believers is tested.

This is suggested by the model of the Exodus plagues, where the same elements which struck the Egyptians were transformed to protect the Israelites.

The first set are judgments affecting the sources of human life, while the final three directly strike humans themselves.

While the trumpet plagues bring warning and may cause repentance in some (as indicated by the limitation of the judgments in 8:7–9:21, which implies that God is restraining His wrath to allow for repentance), their primary purpose is the judgment of unbelievers.

These plagues also function to demonstrate their hardness of heart and the fact that they are being punished because of such hardness, which is expressed by their persistence in idolatry

( 9:20–21) and their persecution of the saints (cf. 6:9–11).