Revelation 11:15 And the seventh angel sounded; and there followed great voices in heaven, and they said, The kingdom of the world is become the kingdom of our Lord, and of his Christ: and he shall reign for ever and ever. 16And the four and twenty elders, who sit before God on their thrones, fell upon their faces and worshipped God, 17 saying, We give thee thanks, O Lord God, the Almighty, who art and who was; because thou hast taken thy great power, and didst reign. 18And the nations were wroth, and thy wrath came, and the time of the dead to be judged, and the time to give their reward to thy servants the prophets, and to the saints, and to them that fear thy name, the small and the great; and to destroy them that destroy the earth.
19And there was opened the temple of God that is in heaven; and there was seen in his temple the ark of his covenant; and there followed lightnings, and voices, and thunders, and an earthquake, and great hail.

11:15–19 Can be an explanation of the consummation of history, since 10:7 has announced that when the seventh trumpet sounds “then will be completed” God’s accomplishment of his plan for history. The descriptions are not detailed because they have begun in 6:12–17, and John knows that more will come repeatedly later. Furthermore, the descriptions in 11:15–19 are no briefer than what we have in the first four trumpets, though it is briefer than the first two woes, that is, the fifth and sixth trumpets. Furthermore, a song can depict the content of a woe or trumpet as well as a vision can (e.g., 5:8–10 is a hymn narrating past events).

The emphasis of this section is not only on the kingdom but also on the woe of the final judgment (v18–19), which demonstrates that the consummated, eternal kingdom of God has finally appeared on earth. The coming of God’s kingdom is a woe on the enemies because it guarantees their demise in judgment.

You’re not just looking at judgments now; you’re looking at things from a Christian point of view, and the seventh angel sounds, but there’s no mention of woe.

Why is there no mention of woe?

You would expect more terror and judgment and fire.

You have the seventh but as a way of telling you that, after all, these things are part of the whole picture.

It’s not that you have this sequence and then it stops and now you talk about the people of God and then it stops. Chapter 11 is going on even while the woes are going on, all the way up to the very end, and at the end you have the witnesses raised again.

Now that the seventh trumpet is introduced, you still look at things from the point of view of the people of God before you expand into the whole tension between the people of God and the people of the Devil in chapters 12–14, but within that expansion there is terrible judgment that finally ends in hell.

At the end of chapter 11, you still look at things from the point of view of the people of God as they come to the very end. Then in chapters 12–14, it’s cast in terms of the Devil (chapter 12), the two beasts, the Antichrist and the False Prophet, a holy triumvirate against God, issuing into a division with the 144,000 with Christ on Mount Zion (top of chapter 14) and everybody else going to hell, the ultimate in suffering. We read, “And the smoke of their torment goes up forever.”

So the seventh trumpet, the seventh woe, does lead into the worst possible kind of thing, but now it’s in terms of a clear division of the two peoples, hinted at already by going back and forth from the woes of the six seals to the people of God and then the seventh woe. Then you have a whole new series of sevens, and you go back to the people of God.

This seventh one keeps up this look at the people of God while you’re looking on at what’s going on in the world, precisely because the author wants us to understand that both are going on at the same time and issue finally in the final judgment.

If we are looking at this correctly, then, the seventh trumpet is here and the woe side of it begins to be unpacked in the whole flow of the narrative from 12–14.

The Trumpet Sounds

Now, the seventh angel sounds his trumpet. “There were loud voices in heaven, which said, ‘The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he will reign for ever and ever.’

That could be understood in one of two ways. There is a sense in which Christ enters into his kingdom at his coming, death, resurrection, ascension, and exaltation to the right hand of the majesty on high.

He already said, “All authority is given to me in heaven and on earth.” Paul writes in 1 Corinthians, chapter 15, that all of God’s sovereignty is mediated through Christ. He shall reign, the text says, until he puts all of his enemies under his feet, and the last enemy he puts under his feet is death. Then he hands over the completed thing to his Father.

In that sense, Christ is already reigning. Christ is God’s mediatorial King. All of God’s sovereignty is mediated through Christ.

But, although Christ reigns, all of God’s sovereignty is mediated through Christ now, yet his reign is being contested. Under his sovereignty, the Devil still operates. Evil is still prevalent.

In the new heaven and the new earth, in the consummation, Christ reigns, but there’s no further contesting. It’s all over. Now which is meant here, or is it both?

Verse 15 says, “The kingdom of the world,” not the kingdoms, the kingdom, it is singular. That is very important, because the world, though it is divided into many different nations and people and languages is really one kingdom under one king. The god of this world, the prince of the power of the air, the ruler of darkness. God hacked up this kingdom at the tower of Babel to make it more difficult for Satan to accomplish his purposes, but Satan is still king over all the pieces of the once united kingdom.

In the end it is going to be reunited again under the power of Antichrist. The world is really one kingdom with one monarch, namely Satan himself. Jesus said, for example, in Matthew 12:26, they accused Him of casting out demons by Satan and He said if Satan cast out Satan, he is divided against himself, how then shall his kingdom stand?

V15 In the Greek language, “The kingdom of the world HAS become.”

That is a very important way to express something. It is what has been called proleptic aorist, sort of a technical term, But it means something in the future is so sure that it can be spoken of as if it has already happened.

We know the kingdom of the world is not yet Christ’s in chapter 11. It’s not going to happen till 20:5 and following when He sets up His kingdom. But when the trumpet blows, even though there is still some time, until the final kingdom is established, it’s as good as done. So when the trumpet blows, immediately heaven rejoices as if all that’s going to come out of that trumpet has already been completed. Although then we could say it doesn’t take place at this point, it is only initiated and anticipated, it is as good as done.

The point is, His kingdom stands because it is an undivided kingdom. We look at the world and we see it divided into all kinds of nations. It is politically, it is socially, it is linguistically, it is in terms of traditions and customs and geography, but it is one kingdom under one king being ruled by Satan and his demonic hosts.

John 12:31, it says, “Now judgment is upon this world, now the ruler of this world shall be cast out,” He’s talking about Satan.

So, heaven rejoices at the blowing of the seventh trumpet because the kingdom, the singular kingdom of the world that has been under the power of Satan has become the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ. Government though designed and ordered by God, according to Romans 13, for the well being of man is not submissive to God.

There have never been any Christian nations. The rulers, the kings, says Acts 4:26, take their stand against Christ. They always have and they always will. The long rebellion of the world’s kingdoms against God and against Christ will end here. And Genesis 6 will come to pass again wherein God said, “My Spirit will not always strive with man.”

In reality then, dominion over the world does not become Christ’s and God’s until after the final judgments, the blowing of the trumpet, the pouring out of the bowl judgments. Behind the diverse kingdoms that have existed in history is this single power of Satan pulling it all together.

The Devil is not going to relinquish these kingdoms without a struggle.

You’ve got the demons that have been bound in the pit all belched out of the pit and overrunning the earth and maiming everybody. You’ve got two hundred million demons that have been bound at the Euphrates River released and they’re moving across the earth killing everybody. You’ve got the people who are following the Antichrist, a whole world of them, and they’re all combining to assist Satan in keeping his world. It is not going to be easy. Only Christ, obviously, with His great sovereign power could conquer this formidable army under the control of Satan, but it’s going to happen and because it’s going to happen you see the praises of heaven there in verse 15.

This is a very important moment in redemptive history. This is the culmination of all the promise of God throughout Old and New Testaments. The Kingdom is finally Christ’s. This is the apex of redemptive history.

Luke 1 the angel comes to Mary and says in verse 31, “Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a Son and you’ll call His name Jesus. He’ll be great. He’ll be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give Him the throne of His father David and He will reign over the house of Jacob forever and His kingdom will have no end.”

verse 15 through 18 have very strong similarities to Psalm 2, the promise of the Messiah’s Kingdom. He says, “Thou art My Son, today I have begotten Thee, ask of Me and I’ll give Thee the nations as Thine inheritance and the very ends of the earth as Thy possession and Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron and shatter them like earthenware.”

So the time has come for everything to happen.

John 18, having all kinds of thoughts, when Jesus was being tried in the mock trial before Pilate. In verse 35 … 36, Jesus answers Pilate and said, “My kingdom is not of this world, if My kingdom were of this world then My servants would be fighting that I might not be delivered up to the Jews but as it is, My kingdom is not of this realm.” Well, the final kingdom is. The kingdom that He came to bring the first time was a spiritual kingdom, the final one will be a sovereign political social worldwide rulership.

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V15-17 This is probably the voice of the 24 elders or the angels in heaven or some group like this rather than of believers, because it’s not normally the way believers would refer to our Lord and of his Christ. In the New Testament, they speak of our Lord and the like.

“The twenty-four elders, who were seated on their thrones before God, fell on their faces and worshiped God, saying: ‘We give thanks to you, Lord God Almighty, the One who is and who was, because you have taken your great power and have begun to reign.

The nations were angry; and your wrath has come. The time has come for judging the dead, and for rewarding your servants the prophets and your saints and those who reverence your name, both small and great, and for destroying those who destroy the earth.’ Then God’s temple in heaven was opened, and within his temple was seen the ark of his covenant.”

What you have here is a picture of the ultimate bliss just beginning. You get peeps of it again and again in the book of Revelation, and then it’s all unpacked gloriously in the last two chapters. The time has come for God to take up his reign in the sense that it is now the uncontested reign. It is the time when the dead are judged, verse 18, for rewarding the saints, for destroying those who destroy the earth.

Then heaven is opened. The temple is seen in the ark of the covenant. it sounds like final vindication, but at the same time, the language may be as ambiguous as it is because there is a sense in which some of the destructions that come on the earth come already. We seen that already in chapters 7–9? The destruction has already begun to come on the earth.

First John, chapter 2: “Yes, the Antichrist is coming, but as you have heard that Antichrist is coming, so now also there are many antichrists.” The judgment of the end has already come back, just as the salvation of the end has already come back. Everything is stepped up in terms of urgency, nearness. The drama is being played out. There is something decisive that has happened with the first coming of Christ, and we’re unraveling quickly toward the end.

The language here is ambiguous on purpose. I think, on the one hand, there are hints here of the final vindication of the people of God, but some of the eschatological judgments are already falling. The people of God are, in some ways, already being preserved, already being vindicated. They die, and they are vindicated before God.

19 Another note of the final judgment is struck. The closing “lightnings, sounds, thunders, earthquake, and great hail” has already been a repeated indicator of the last act of judgment (so 4:5; 8:5; 16:18; see on 8:5b). In the OT such series of cosmic phenomena indicate theophanies.410 Here the series comes from the innermost part of God’s heavenly temple. With the seventh trumpet, as with the seventh seal, the very end of history has been reached. The combination of the phenomena here emphasizes that God is appearing to execute the final judgment.

Therefore, Rev. 11:15–19 notes the end of the evil world kingdoms and the church’s reward in escalated typological fulfillment of the Exodus-wilderness-Jericho pattern. The sevenfold trumpet pattern of the Jericho episode is another connection. Trumpets were blown on six successive days, and then on the seventh day the trumpet blasts brought the wall down (on this background see further the introductory comments on ch. 8). In that episode the ark followed the trumpet blowers. This suggests further that 11:15–19 forms the content of the seventh trumpet. There are no more half-weeks (cf. 11:2–3, 10–11); the full week of consummation has been reached.

Yet the appearance of the ark signals not only judgment but also God’s gracious presence with his redeemed community and his provision of grace by atonement. On the OT Day of Atonement the sacrificial blood was sprinkled on the mercy seat of the ark as a covering for the nation’s sins. This ensured God’s continued presence with his people. This was the significance of the ark residing in Israel’s tabernacle and temple. Though the ark disappeared during the Babylonian captivity, some Jews expected its return at the end of time, when God would graciously restore Israel, dwell in the midst of its people (2 Macc. 2:4–8; 2 Bar. 6; cf. Josephus, Ant. 18.4.1), and resurrect them (Lives of the Prophets 2:11–19). The OT did not expect a literal reappearance of the ark at this time. Interestingly, except in 2 Maccabees 2 and 2 Bar. 6, Jewish writings do not expect a literal reappearance of the ark but affirmed that it had been buried.411 Rather, the OT looked forward to a reappearance of God’s presence in Israel, which was what the ark had represented (as clarified by Jer. 3:16–17).

This presence of God without a literal reappearance of the ark is the idea in Rev. 11:19, which is expanded in 21:3, 22, where the establishment of the end-time temple is interpreted as God’s presence in the midst of his people.

At the consummation God dwells with his people in a more complete and intense manner than previously, as indicated by the observation that the curtain that has separated the ark from the rest of the temple and from the people is now gone.412 All believers, “small and great,” enjoy God’s presence in a greater manner than was possible in the OT. Therefore, the ark in 11:19 is a suitable symbol for both the judgment and the reward of the last day. Therefore, the full answer to the saints’ petition for vindication in 6:9–11 is revealed in 11:15–19.