The passage: When the Lamb opened the seventh seal, heaven fell silent for about half an hour. John saw seven angels standing before God, and each was given a trumpet. Another angel came with a golden censer and much incense, which he offered along with the prayers of all the saints on the golden altar before the throne, and the smoke rose up before God. Then the angel filled the censer with fire from the altar and threw it onto the earth, producing voices, thunder, lightning, and an earthquake. The seven angels prepared to sound. At the first trumpet came hail and fire mixed with blood, cast on the earth, burning a third of the trees and all the green grass. At the second, a burning mountain was thrown into the sea, turning a third of it to blood, killing a third of the sea creatures, and destroying a third of the ships. At the third, a great burning star named Wormwood fell on a third of the rivers and springs, making them bitter, so that many died. At the fourth, a third of the sun, moon, and stars was darkened, and both day and night lost a third of their light. Then an angel flew through mid-heaven crying, “Woe, woe, woe to those who live on the earth, because of the trumpet blasts of the three angels still to sound.”
There was an earthquake when the last seal was broken. At that point self-willed power, having passed through its various stages and exhausted itself, was reaching its natural end. There would be a judgment. The cycle might close and a new one begin. But now a doom awaits not the world’s city, but God’s city — the city that had been set up as a witness to the world against its idolatries and for the rule of the righteous King. Its downfall seems minor in the eyes of the world’s rulers (though not entirely minor even to them), yet to the prophet it is nothing less than the end of an age or dispensation. It is the greatest catastrophe that has yet come upon the universe. Heaven falls silent as it contemplates it.
I. “And I saw the seven angels that stood before God, and to them were given seven trumpets.”
Nowhere in the Apocalypse are the references to the Old Testament as numerous as here. To understand these trumpets you must turn to the sixth chapter of Joshua: Jericho was shut up tight because of the Israelites, so that no one went in or out. The Lord told Joshua that He had given Jericho, its king, and its warriors into his hand. The men of war were to march around the city once a day for six days, with seven priests carrying seven rams’-horn trumpets before the ark. On the seventh day they were to march around seven times while the priests blew the trumpets; and when they made a long blast and the people heard it, all the people were to shout, and the walls of the city would collapse flat, and everyone would climb straight up into it.
The story preserved in that sacred book, telling how Canaan was conquered by the small band of former slaves who had come out of Egypt, must have taken a strong hold on the imagination of every Jewish child. A strange sense of an invisible, mysterious power capable of overcoming walls and armed men would have blended with a feeling that their forefathers were righteous men, Heaven’s favourites, punishing the wicked and accursed people of Canaan. Rabbinical schooling did little to separate what was right from what was wrong in these early impressions. It hardened the wonder at those ancient events into superstition, and the pride in the glories of the one nation into contempt for other nations. The Jew who broke away from that education — who talked and traded with foreigners, who found himself outwardly inferior to them and inwardly no better, who suspected the same was true of those Joshua led, who came to respect ordinary discipline, material strength, and the resources of an empire, and who learned that the heathen claimed even more miraculous interventions for their ancestors than he did for his — would be likely to distrust in his heart, if not openly scorn, the lessons he had inherited. Living either in that unbelief, or in a violent effort to suppress it and to crush anyone who showed signs of it, was probably the condition of most Jews in St. John’s day. But there were people, before and since, who became more truly like little children than these had ever been — precisely because they had put away the merely childish fancies and risen to the thought and reflection of grown men. In the account of Jericho’s fall they had found the witness of a God who was no more the God of their fathers than of themselves; a God who, by different methods suited to different periods, was always asserting that material power is subject to spiritual power; who was always dooming to destruction cities built on a false foundation, however strong they looked; who had chosen a poor Syrian tribe — not, as their own lawgiver and prophet kept insisting, for its righteousness, but as a witness of His righteousness — to put down races that defied His laws and defiled the earth with their crimes. And surely, if that were so, He would not treat that chosen tribe on any different principles from those He had applied to the tribes of Canaan.
There were such Israelites. St. John was one of them. And no one knew better than he how much his countrymen had become worshippers of material force and disbelievers in spiritual power. Though he lived away from the holy city, he knew it had become an accursed city, given over to strife and hatred, probably to as much fleshly wickedness as had brought judgment on the Canaanites, and certainly to a spiritual wickedness the Canaanites had never known. Yet he needed a special revelation to convince him that the same sentence carried out on Jericho was now to be carried out on Jerusalem — that the trumpets were sounding around her, and that they were blown not by mortal priests but by the angels who stand before God.
This, I take it, is the simple interpretation of the vision, and the one that connects it most naturally with what comes just before and just after. Holding that view, I cannot accept any of the more ingenious explanations that move the trumpets to a later period, or to a series of later periods — even if I thought they could be applied that way more directly to Christian purposes. But I do not think so. Let us hear what these trumpets said to the Israelites; then we shall be able to listen, with cleansed and open ears, to any trumpets that may be sounding warnings to us.
- “And another angel came and stood at the altar, having a golden censer; and there was given unto him much incense, that he should offer it with the prayers of all saints upon the golden altar which was before the throne. And the smoke of the incense which came with the prayers of the saints ascended up before God out of the angel’s hand. And the angel took the censer, and filled it with fire of the altar, and cast it on the earth; and there were voices, and thunderings and lightnings, and an earthquake.”
If the earlier words recalled the priests’ ministry at Jericho, these recall the priests’ ministry in the tabernacle. That ministry, later transferred to the temple, was ongoing. Jews did not just read about it in a book; they saw it with their own eyes. The altar, the sacrifice, the incense, and the daily prayers were bound up with the earliest thoughts of those who lived in Jerusalem, and were probably even more impressive to those who only visited at the great festivals. Like the historical record, these worship-acts must have affected the frequent or occasional onlooker in two ways. The acts of worship spoke of a communion between the visible and the unseen world: God was meeting men at the mercy-seat, and the priest was the continual witness of that communion. But it was the worship of Jews. God had spoken to their forefathers. They had been told what He is and how to approach Him. What an amazing gift! What nation ever received such a gift! The growing boy was formally taught what the child had learned by heart. For him the awe of the service turned into a kind of terror, and what he lacked in genuine sympathy was made up by appeals to his awakening pride: “The heathen know nothing of the right way of serving God; their priests are all wrong in the sacrifices they offer; their sacrifices will never be accepted.” Then, in countless cases, must have come the mature Israelite’s reaction against this indoctrination — or a cold inner indifference to it: “Why is one sacrifice better than another? Why shouldn’t their priests be as wise as ours? Why might not both be deceivers alike? How do we know any dealing with beings above us is even possible? How can we tell they are the least bit moved by our offerings? How can we tell such beings exist at all?” And here, too, there was a path leading through the struggles of adulthood back to a truly childlike faith: “My prayers are not only worthless; they are often impossible. I cannot pray. But I want to pray. An irresistible impulse drives me to try. And my sacrifices — what are they? Worse than worthless. They seem wicked. I have no right to offer them. My mind is wrong, and I am trying to bend God’s mind to it. And yet — ought I not to make sacrifices? Ought I not to be a sacrifice? What if God Himself is moving me to pray, not against His will, but so that His will may be done? What if He is stirring me to sacrifice, not so that I may gain something, but so that I may be freed from the greatest of all burdens — the burden of my own selfishness? What if sacrifice is a surrender? What if He, and not I, is finally the author of that surrender? What if this was the meaning of my nation’s worship? What if this is why He ordained the sacrifice, why He made the atonement, why we can only come with our dead offering, confessing our sins? What if the knowledge of this truth is the great blessing given to Abraham’s children, the blessing with which we are to bless all the families of the earth?”
Those who had been led this far by an invisible teacher were ready for the mighty revelation of the sacrifice of the Lord of man and the Son of God — the revelation of Him saying, “Lo, I come,” not to change your will, but “to do thy will, O God.” But another revelation followed from this: the revelation of a Judge. The prayers and sacrifices in the Jerusalem temple had not been in vain. No incense that ever rose to heaven from a human heart had been in vain. The High Priest within the veil had presented every cry and groan to His Father. And what had those cries and groans asked for? That God would not judge the earth? That He would leave it to wallow on in crime and misery? Such prayers may have been offered by people kneeling at Jewish or heathen altars, but they were prayers for stones instead of bread — drink-offerings of blood, of bloody men, of which the High Priest says, “I will not offer them.” The prayers for right and justice did not stop the thunder, lightning, and earthquake; thunder and earthquake were now the answer to them.
When we read our Lord’s conversation with His disciples about the last days, we are often tempted to twist His words away from their plain meaning and say they could not refer to a judgment on that age and that city — even though He so solemnly says they did. Our inclination to trifle even with that divine language is not without excuse. If we suppose Jerusalem had no relation to the rest of humanity — neither to the nations it had been set apart from, nor to the nations that would be born after it had passed away — then we cannot see how words of such sweeping scope, pointing to distress and confusion everywhere, could be fulfilled by the fall of a capital that had lost all its ancient glory and was now merely the home of fierce rebel factions. But if that city had been the divine centre of the old world; if there stood the witness to the Name, the Kingdom, and the Will by which the world was governed; then there too must lie the key to the world’s destinies. The meaning of the earthquake, and its relation to past and future, remains incomprehensible until we grasp what it signified for the city where David reigned and the Son of David was crucified.
- “And the seven angels which had the seven trumpets prepared themselves to sound.”
Everything about this points to the greatness and importance of their task. It is not a Canaanite city that is to fall flat, but the very city that testified that the gods of the Canaanites were not the gods ruling the earth — the city that testified of a King of righteousness and peace.
- “The first angel sounded, and there followed hail and fire, mingled with blood, and they were cast upon the earth; and the third part of the trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up.”
The book of Joshua gave us hints about the purpose of the trumpets; the book of Leviticus explained the part of the vision dealing with the sacrifices and incense.
Here we are carried back to the plagues of Egypt, which we were reading about before Easter. This passage in Exodus comes at once to the mind of anyone reading the Apocalypse: the Lord told Moses to stretch out his hand toward heaven so there would be hail throughout all Egypt, on man and beast and every plant of the field; and there was hail, with fire mixed in it, over all the land, striking man and beast, every herb of the field, and breaking every tree.
This language, like what we considered earlier, had been put to a fatal use by Jewish self-importance. Pharaoh and the magicians, they told themselves, had been humbled for the sake of their forefathers. Their lawgiver could do rarer miracles than the so-called wise men of Egypt. The laws of nature had been suspended so that their race could be delivered. This passage fed that self-satisfaction: Egypt suffered from the hail and fire, but Goshen was spared. And so the great lesson these plagues carried to the world was entirely missed. It was not the I AM, the Eternal Lawgiver who had revealed Himself to His servant Moses, who was speaking and acting in them, but — as they took it — a capricious being, essentially no different from the gods the magicians honoured. Moses had not claimed the powers of nature that enslaved the Egyptians as the servants of a God mightier than the tyrant, a God who cared to deliver the outcast. He had not taught the Egyptians what such plagues, whenever they occurred, testified about their own government. The whole thing was reduced to a mere contest of strength between a Jewish prophet and the Egyptian magi, with both alike setting natural laws aside. Now the old record is restored to its true force. The angel’s trumpet proclaims that the plague of hail and fire is a message to Goshen even more than to Egypt. Jerusalem is to hear in that trumpet a sure declaration that the just Judge and Saviour is now judging Israel, so that the world may be saved.
V. “And the second angel sounded, and as it were a great mountain burning with fire was cast into the sea: and the third part of the sea became blood; and the third part of the creatures which were in the sea, and had life, died, and the third part of the ships were destroyed.”
The first trumpet, taking the symbols in their simplest sense, indicated a withering of the earth’s produce, a decay of vegetation such as some sudden calamity might cause — the result and punishment of neglect and hard-heartedness. The passage I have just read, whatever weight we give to particular phrases in it, points just as clearly to disasters affecting the sea and the commerce of nations. A third of the ships were destroyed. That particular kind of suffering could impoverish great trading centres like Alexandria or Ephesus, and would only reach first-century Palestine in its secondary effects. But the angels’ trumpets, like our Lord’s words, teach the Israelite to link the doom of his own country with the common sufferings of humanity. That city was set on a hill to witness to the world of a God who rules land and sea, who has appointed men to subdue the earth and cross the sea, and who cares more for those made in His image than for all the treasures they dig from the ground or trade in commerce. That message had not been delivered; the Jew had worshipped these treasures as much, cared for man as little, and believed in a just God as little, as the heathen around him. Therefore earth and sea raised their voices against him more than against any others, saying to him — not to Pharaoh or Belshazzar — “Your kingdom has been taken from you; you have been weighed in the balance and found wanting.”
- “And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters. And the name of the star is called Wormwood, and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters because they were made bitter.”
Most, I think, will agree that here we have the hint of some visitation affecting the internal life and health of nations, just as the previous one affected their dealings with each other. I do not know that we would gain much by trying to interpret the specific details more precisely. Wormwood that makes waters bitter and destroys life would be a fitting and by no means exaggerated symbol for miseries that have fallen on countries in East and West at various times; and even without direct evidence, we may well believe such things were among the woes afflicting the world in the disastrous years before Jerusalem’s fall. What matters to us is that the calamity was a message to the Jew. It told him that he was the Jonah in the ship. It was another trumpet blast declaring that the walls of his city were to collapse flat.
- “And the fourth angel sounded, and the third part of the sun was smitten, and the third part of the moon, and the third part of the stars; so as the third part of them was darkened, and the day shone not for a third part of it, and the night likewise.”
It would be easy to read this as describing a moral darkness rather than a physical one. But I believe that adopting that interpretation would depart from the general purpose of these revelations and break their consistency.
The sounds of these first four trumpets all seem to me to point to the connection between physical life and physical decay on the one hand and moral life and moral decay on the other; to the way physical agents become instruments for punishing moral transgression; to the truth that earth, sea, rivers, sun, moon, and stars obey eternal laws — but laws given them by the One who created voluntary beings and whose highest kingdom is over those beings. These were the truths the Jewish nation had been called out of all nations to declare, by its words, its services, and its continual life. And these are the truths it was now to declare by its ruin and death.
But in saying this, I do not doubt that there are evils far more terrible than any that earth, sea, air, or sun and moon can inflict — or that these worse evils were at work when Jerusalem fell, and were causing her fall. Such darker evils, I believe, are pointed at in the words that follow.
- “And I beheld and heard an angel flying through the midst of heaven, saying with a loud voice, Woe, woe, woe, to the inhabiters of the earth, by reason of the other voices of the trumpets which are yet to sound.”
That these trumpets point to moral sins, to spiritual wickedness, and to their political consequences, I cannot doubt. Those who live on the earth needed to know that such woes are the greatest woes of all. The heathen needed to know it as much as those to whom belonged the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law and the promises, and from whom, as concerning the flesh, Christ came, who is over all, God blessed for ever. And if anyone needs it even more than they, it is those who have inherited a better Covenant, a fulfilled law, a higher promise — the members of Christ’s body, the heirs of the Kingdom of Heaven. May He who made the deaf hear enable His Church to receive His message! May He who made the dumb speak enable His ministers to deliver it!