The little phrase, the calm before the storm, may find its origin in Revelation chapter
8 and verse 1, where we find the opening of the final seal on the scroll which the lamb
has taken in his hand.
One way to view these series of judgments in the book of Revelation is to see the trumpets
that we'll look at tonight and later the bowls of wrath poured out from God as all proceeding
from the seventh seal that is now to be opened.
In other words, the seventh seal that is opened leads to most of the rest of the book of the
Revelation.
Now some wag has stated that Revelation 8-1 is proof that there are no women in heaven
because there is silence there for half an hour.
I would never say that.
That is an insensitive remark and I would not say that but somebody did.
The half hour of silence is a time of building tension.
Can you imagine with all of the shouting and all of the singing and all of the movement
that has taken place in heaven in Revelation up to this point that now when the last seal
is opened everything stops and for a half an hour nothing is said.
There is just silence.
The tension builds toward the next action.
There is an expectancy mingled with foreboding in this half hour.
John says, �And I saw seven angels who stand before God and to them were given seven trumpets.�
The fact that they stand before God tells us that there are seven angels of special
service and perhaps even authority and to each of them is given a trumpet.
Trumpets were used in ancient Israel to call an assembly together.
They were used to begin the march of the various camps in the tribe of Israel.
The blowing of the trumpet gave an alarm in the time of war.
The trumpets were blown at the beginning of each of the feasts of the Lord.
So the trumpets were used for communication.
These trumpets that we look at here signal something.
They signal judgments that God is going to pour upon the earth.
Judgments which are different from the seven seals that we have seen open or the six seals
that we saw before this one was opened.
There seems to be some intensity in the judgment.
There is a different order in some of the things that take place.
There may be some recapitulation but for the most part what we see here is another series
of judgments poured out in chronological order after the opening of the seals.
It may be good to mention that these trumpets have nothing to do with the last trumpet which
shall sound which the Apostle Paul said would call the church upwards at the rapture.
These are seven trumpets of judgment.
Then another angel says having a golden censer came and stood at the altar and he was given
much incense that he should offer it with the prayers of all the saints upon the golden
altar which was before the throne.
Now here is the real tabernacle scene.
God which was on the earth was a picture of the heavenly, the true tabernacle.
John sees in heaven this altar which is there in the presence of God and the angel takes
a censer made of gold.
It is filled with incense and he brings it to the altar of God and there offers it with
the prayers of the saints.
The question is what are these prayers?
They may well be the prayers that we saw earlier under the fifth seal back in chapter six,
the prayers of God's martyrs, prayers that will now be answered more fully as vengeance
from God is poured out upon the earth.
They may also be the prayers of living tribulation saints who are crying out to God at that time
but I think in another sense we can look upon them as your prayers in mind.
As we have asked God as Jesus taught us to ask, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on
earth as it is in heaven.
God is going to bring his will to earth.
He is going to bring ultimately his kingdom to earth and what is about to happen is part
of the process leading up to that glorious day.
The events that are going to take place now as the trumpets are blown are best understood
literally.
There may be symbolic aspects or elements in them but it seems to me we have no reason
not to take them literally and we need to understand them as falling out in fairly rapid
succession.
There is not great time between these series of judgments but they come one right after
the other.
Well it says the smoke of the incense of the prayers went up before God and the angel took
his censer, filled it with fire from the altar and threw it to the earth.
Normally the censer was taken with the coals to the altar but here instead of being presented
before God this censer is thrown out upon the earth and the result of that is noises,
thunderings, lightnings and an earthquake.
Now where do those take place?
Well it is hard to imagine an earthquake in heaven.
He is talking about events that unfold upon the earth because of this censer being poured
out or thrown out actually upon the earth.
And so the seven angels who had the seven trumpets prepared themselves to sound.
The first angel sounded and then we have the first judgment.
It is a judgment of hail, fire and blood.
It says that hail and fire followed, mingled with blood and they were thrown to the earth
and a third of the trees were burned up and all grass, all green grass was burned up.
And so the trumpet that is sounded first affects the plant life.
That was the first to be created and now it is the first to be affected in this series
of judgments.
Of course the two great enemies of plant life, of vegetation are hail and fire.
And so now even the elements of nature itself bears the judgment of God for the sin of mankind.
And it says that these elements of hail and fire are mixed with blood in some sense.
Perhaps that is the result of their devastation.
Perhaps they actually fall out of heaven with blood substance on them because it is the
blood of the martyrs that has been shed that God is now taking vengeance for as he brings
this judgment.
This one by the way compares to the seventh Egyptian plague back in the time of the Exodus
although it is a much greater intensity here and it is apparently a global effect, not
a local effect in one nation as was true then.
The second trumpet appears to be a falling meteor.
It says the second angel sounded and something like a great mountain burning with fire was
thrown into the sea and a third of the sea became blood and a third of the living creatures
in the sea died and a third of the ships were destroyed.
So John is describing a burning mass, a literal mass of some sort that comes out of the sky
and hits the seas of the world.
Could he be talking about some kind of explosion of a hydrogen bomb perhaps, something of that
sort?
Well, it may be that God is using that but it seems to me better to understand it as
something that comes out of the heavens, a falling meteor.
Did you happen to see in one of the news magazines some time ago the radar image of a meteor
that was still like two million miles from the earth?
They actually got a picture of it by radar.
It was five miles in length and I think it was three miles wide and they spoke in the
article, the devastation on the earth had this near miss as they called it in the terms
of space, had this near miss actually been a hit on the earth.
What we have here it seems is a huge meteor that God has prepared out there in space somewhere
and when it hits the atmosphere of the world it is going to burst into flames and come
and do tremendous devastation in the sea.
A third of it becomes blood.
A third of the sea creatures die as a result and a third of all the ships are destroyed.
Once again this might be compared to one of the Egyptian plagues, the first one when the
Nile River was turned to blood.
You can see that from the devastation that takes place in these first two of these judgments
there will be massive famine as a result.
With the damage that is done to the vegetation of the world and now the seas being affected
and the ships and the ability to transport things we see here also a major crippling
of the world commerce.
The third judgment begins in verse 10.
It says then the third angel sounded and a great star fell from heaven burning like a
torch.
It fell on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water.
The name of the star is wormwood and a third of the waters became wormwood and many men
died from the water because it was made bitter.
So we see again some kind of an object falling out of heaven.
It is called here a star but it may well be a meteor again and this time it is the fresh
water of the world that is impacted.
A third of it is made undrinkable.
Those who drink of it are poisoned by its bitterness.
It is called wormwood which is a common bitter herb in the Middle East.
It is a term that is used in the Old Testament in a number of different ways but mostly it
pictures woe and sorrow that accompany God's judgment and certainly here it is judgment
for sin that brings woe and sorrow to those upon the earth.
Then the fourth judgment concludes chapter 8.
It says the fourth angel sounded 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 were darkened.
A third of the day did not shine and likewise the night and I looked and I heard an angel
flying through the midst of heaven.
So we have the fourth trumpet.
This time it affects the sun, the moon, and the stars.
A third of them it says are darkened.
Man of course depends upon these for light, for warmth, for proper growth of crops, for
health, and perhaps increasingly for energy.
And so now God simply makes a one-third power reduction to the earth.
It may be that this is caused by some kind of an atmospheric interference.
God could use man's own devastation of the earth to create this.
Maybe it's pollution.
Perhaps it's going to be the result of nuclear war.
Perhaps God does something beyond anything that man does to create this one-third power
reduction but that's the case.
This of course is reminiscent of the ninth Egyptian plague which affected the light and
there was darkness in all of Egypt but here it is the earth as a whole.
And there is some suggestion here, some say that the day will actually be decreased instead
of 24 hours to 16 hours.
Now it seems to me that that would require some speed up of the earth's rotation which
would have a lot of other impact.
And so probably it's better to understand it merely as a third reduction in the amount
of light that is available.
Darkness is sometimes associated with the judgment of God.
In Isaiah 13 10, Joel 2 10, Matthew 24 29 it says that the day of the Lord which is
that period we're dealing with here, that the day of the Lord will be characterized
by darkness.
That is the darkness that accompanies the judgment of God.
We see darkness too at the time of Christ's crucifixion.
Matthew records for us that there were three hours when darkness fell upon Jerusalem, a
supernatural darkness that accompanied the judgment of God upon his son as he bore the
sin of the world.
And then John sees this angel or some manuscripts say an eagle, the two words are fairly close
in the Greek language and so there is a scribal difference here in the manuscripts that are
available.
The impact is really very small.
But John sees this being flying through the midst of heaven saying with a loud voice,
woe, woe, woe to the inhabitants of the earth.
Now the triple repetition here of woe merely underscores how terribly difficult and painful
this whole experience is going to be.
It is going to be woe or judgment or suffering unlike any that has been upon the earth before.
It is going to come with the remaining blasts of the trumpet of the three angels who are
about to sound.
And that brings us now to the fifth judgment which is the same as the first woe.
And you will notice that John gives more information about these following two judgments really
than he did about the first four.
He says the fifth angel sounded and I saw a star fallen from heaven to the earth.
And so it involves a star falling from heaven.
The star however is not a mass of material or some physical element that comes out of
the heavens.
But the language suggests here that this star is a person.
This star acts with intelligence and with authority.
And so it has a personal identity.
You say well how is a star, why is he a star in that sense?
Well certainly not in the same way but we use the word star today in referring to personalities.
We just observed the 57th or 58th birthday of the king of Elvis.
You remember Elvis?
A star.
Well here we have a star that is also a personality and personally I think the best understanding
is that this is likely Satan.
A picture of him fallen from heaven to the earth.
And it says to him was given the key to the bottomless pit.
Literally he says the key to the long shaft of the abyss.
The abyss is it seems a place in the earth that is a prison for demons.
Jesus was dealing with some demons in Luke chapter 8 and they said you're not going
to send us to the abyss prematurely are you?
Same word the abyss.
And so we understand the abyss to be a place of incarceration for some demonic spirits.
Probably not the same as Tartarus which is another name for a location given by Peter.
But nonetheless a real place in the earth and there is apparently a shaft like a well
shaft somewhere upon the earth that leads to that place of confinement for these demons.
And on this occasion this one who is cast to the earth is given a key to this prison.
The demons do not want to be cast into that place now because they are there confined
and cannot roam the earth.
They cannot do their evil.
They cannot afflict and cause suffering of human beings.
They do not want to go there.
But some are there however they will be released it seems.
Because this star opens the bottomless pit he opens up this shaft and smoke arose out
of the pit like the smoke of a great furnace.
And so you get this picture of the eruption like of a volcano.
The horrific pictures that were snapped of Mount St. Helens is what comes to my mind
when I see this.
The smoke and the dust that was blown into the atmosphere, the rolling of all of that.
And here we see this pit opened up and the smoke just boils out of it and the sun and
the air were darkened because of it.
And out of that smoke it says, locus came upon the earth.
To them was given power as the scorpions of the earth have power.
They were commanded not to harm the grass of the earth or any green thing or any tree.
Of course locus have through the centuries been a plague upon vegetation.
But these particular locus do not harm vegetation but only those men who do not have the seal
of God on their foreheads.
And they were not given authority to kill them but to torment them for five months.
And their torment was like the torment of a scorpion when it strikes a man.
In those days men will seek death and will not find it.
They will desire to die and death will flee from them.
And the shape of the locus was like horses prepared for battle.
And on their heads were crowns something like gold and their faces were like the faces of
men.
They had hair like women's hair and their teeth were like lion's teeth.
And they had breastplates like breastplates of iron and the sound of their wings was like
the sound of chariots with many horses running into battle.
They had tails like scorpions and there were stings in their tails and their power was
to hurt men for five months.
And they had as king over them the angel of the bottomless pit whose name in Hebrew is
Abaddon but in Greek he has the name Apollyon.
And so we see this plague of locus that comes upon the earth that will last for five months
which suggests to us that that is their life span.
They cause physical anguish but not death.
In fact it says here that God takes away the power of death during that time.
Men will be unable to die.
They will want to die.
They will seek to commit suicide.
But they will be unable to die because God will make them face this judgment.
You will notice that there is a king over these locus.
His name is Destruction or Destroyer.
He is the exterminator.
And it seems to me that again the best understanding is that this angel of the pit is Satan, probably
the same star that opened the pit with the key that was given to him by God.
These locus are unlike anything anyone has ever seen except John.
They are demonic in nature.
It may be that they are a particular type of demon that take this form.
Whatever they are, they are beyond the natural.
They have an element of supernatural about them and can inflict great suffering.
It is said that they have a stinger in their tail.
They look like a horse with armor on.
They are crowned with a gold color.
They have a face like the face of a man, hair like a woman's hair, and teeth as of lions.
They have breast plates that are like in scales.
And the sound of their movement is like an army of chariots.
Now the best way to understand this is just to take it the way John wrote it.
And we see here ugly, ferocious, and terrifying creatures.
However, there are those that take these in other ways.
And there has been one author at least who has suggested that what John is describing
here in the language that only he could use in the first century, that he is describing
helicopters.
You can see some interesting parallels to some of the modern warfare and the kinds of
sounds that they make and the instruments, the weapons located in the tails and the front
and so on.
But it seems to me there is something here beyond helicopters.
There is five months of torture by the result of these scorpion stings.
The sixth trumpet sounds in verse 13.
Well we skip verse 12.
It simply says one woe is past, two more are coming after these things.
The sixth trumpet is the second woe.
And it seems as though the seventh trumpet is the third woe.
But as we will see when we get there, the seventh trumpet basically does what the seventh
seal did, and that is to open to another series of judgments.
Well let's look at the sixth trumpet.
It says the angel sounded and I heard a voice from the four horns of the golden altar which
is before God.
And so here is a voice.
It is undoubtedly the voice of God or of a powerful angel in the presence of God.
And it says to the sixth angel who had the trumpet, release the four angels who are bound
at the great river Euphrates.
The Euphrates is one of those ancient rivers, still flows today.
It is being used today in a number of hydrological projects.
Dams have been built.
It provides irrigation, electrical power, and so on.
But it has traditionally been the dividing line between east and west.
And when you look at the land that was given to Abraham and to his descendants, you find
that that territory extends as far as this river, the great river Euphrates.
Now the angel is told to release at this river four angels who are bound there.
Now the question of course comes to mind, who are these angels?
We have no other examples of elect or holy angels who are bound.
And so we would therefore conclude that these are demons, that these are fallen angels who
have been prior to this time, who perhaps even now are bound in the spirit realm there
at the great river Euphrates.
And it says that they are released and the four angels who had been prepared for this
hour and day and month and year were released to kill a third of mankind.
It's worth pointing out that these angels have been prepared and the question is by
whom?
The answer is by God.
God didn't create them as evil, but they having become evil have been assigned this
task by God which they now will fulfill.
And God has appointed this moment in the history of the world for their release.
And the purpose is dreadful.
They are going to bring about the killing of a third of all the people of the world.
Now if you back up and remember we had a seal which involved the death of one fourth of
all the people in the world.
And so already there has been devastation because of the great judgments of God.
Now another third of the population will be killed and depending upon how you calculate
that, it is either one half or more than one half of all the population of the world which
will die in what is probably the first half of the seven year tribulation period.
You think about that.
You think about the population of this metroplex being reduced.
That one out of every two people is gone over a period of a year, two years, whatever it
is.
And not just merely a peaceful death but terrible death, judgment from God.
Suffering, famine, war, disease.
And you see the kind of devastation that has come upon the earth and why this being is
flying in the heavens and saying woe to those who dwell upon the earth.
Verse 16 has been debated.
The number of the army of the horsemen was 200 million.
Most Bible commentators take this as symbolic.
They argue there has never been a force in the history of the world this size.
And there are generals, in fact I think it was William K. Harrison, a very fine general,
I believe a Christian, who said that it would be impossible for any nation of the world
or for any group of nations to field an army of 200 million people.
That the logistics of that are just beyond what can be accomplished.
And so it is said that these are not 200 million human soldiers but what we're dealing with
here are myriads and myriads of demons, demonic soldiers that are unleashed upon the earth
at this point.
And that is a possibility.
However, before we just say it's impossible for there to be an army of this size, it might
be well to remind ourselves that back in 1965 in Time magazine, China boasted then more
than 25 years ago that it could field an army of 200 million and they used that exact figure.
I don't think it was because they read Revelation chapter 9.
But they did choose that exact figure and they said they could put an army together
of that size.
W.A. Criswell has calculated that if the 200 million were a cavalry, as is suggested here
by this scene, that it would be a cavalry a mile wide, just one horse after another
for a mile, and 87 miles long.
Back in World War II, if you added together all of the armies of the allied and the Axis
powers, you would have a total of 70 million.
70.
So what we're dealing with here, if this in fact is an army of men, which I lean toward,
it is three times, nearly three times larger than any military force that the world has
ever known.
The reason that I think it is literal is because John says, and I heard the number of them.
In other words, this number is not something he added up on a calculator.
It's not a guess he took.
But he is saying that he heard this number.
Therefore, I think he's trying to underscore the fact that this is not some symbolic thing.
This is to be understood literally.
And thus he says, I saw the horses in the vision.
Those who sat on them had breastplates of fiery red, hyacinth blue, and sulfur yellow.
And the heads of the horses were like the heads of lions.
And out of their mouths came fire, smoke, and brimstone.
By these three plagues, a third of mankind was killed by the fire, the smoke, and the
brimstone which came out of their mouths.
For their power is in their mouth and in their tails, for their tails are like serpents
having heads.
And with them they do harm.
Well, you can see why some take this symbolic, because it's difficult to understand how this
could be literal horses and what kinds of creatures are these if they are not demonic.
There have been those who have conjectured that John is here using the language of the
first century to describe tanks armed with atomic weapons or mobile missile launchers
and that sort of thing.
And maybe that's the case.
But as a result of the movement of this massive force, a third of mankind is killed.
And what is the result of all of this?
You might think that with all of the death and the devastation, the disease, the famine,
the supernatural sights and sounds that are taking place, that surely men would be ready
to repent.
As it says in verse 20, the rest of mankind who were not killed by these plagues did not
repent of the works of their hands.
Of course, we're not dealing with those that were sealed, the elect, in chapter 7, nor
with that massive group of people who are saved out of the tribulation.
There will be many saved.
But John is dealing here now with the remainder of mankind.
And he says that instead of softening them up for the message of repentance, that in
fact it even hardens their hearts.
He says they did not repent of the work of their hands, that they should not worship
demons and idols of gold and silver, brass, stone and wood, which can neither see nor
hear nor walk.
And they did not repent of their murders, of their sorceries, of their sexual immorality,
or their thefts.
You get the picture here of a violent society.
And if we are not living in a society headed in this direction today, I don't know where
we are.
The people of that day will be apparently involved in raw paganism.
Isn't that the direction of man's religion?
A return to just the raw elements of worshiping the elements of the earth in witchcraft and
Satanism?
There is much more of that than you and I could dream about in our world today.
And I'm talking about in the United States of America.
And that's going to increase.
As men turn from God in the knowledge of the truth, they are turned to that which is false.
They are turned to the lie.
And by the time that these events take place, this will be very common.
The worship of demons.
You say, whoever would worship demons?
We have people doing that all over the place in the United States of America today.
In the New Age movement, this is exactly what the New Age movement is about.
It's not overt demonism necessarily, but they are touching powers of the occult.
And they are finding there a certain thrill, a certain sense of excitement that is causing
many to be sucked into the occult, even unawares.
But they are really worshiping demons, as are those who worship idols.
They did not repent of their murders.
Were you as sickened as I was by what happened in Palatine this weekend?
They did not repent of their sorceries.
The word here, as you probably know, is pharmakeia, where we get our word pharmacy.
It's talking about witchcraft, but tied together with witchcraft in that day was the use of
drugs.
And it is exactly true today.
Drugs lead to witchcraft.
The two go hand in hand.
Drugs open the door to demons.
They cause a passivity in the human being that is just an open door to demonic invasion.
They did not repent of their sexual immorality.
I need say nothing about that, nor of their thefts.
And so we see that in a sense, this day is little different than ours.
It's more intense.
It's worse than ours in terms of the evil, but we see our culture heading in this direction,
described here.
And when I say it's no different than ours, I mean that even today, warnings of the coming
judgment of God do not cause men to repent.
And then the falling out of these judgments will not cause men to repent.
What is it that causes men to repent?
The kindness and the goodness of God alone.
Else the sinful human heart will not turn from its evil, and the judgments from God will
indeed only harden the heart.
Only the goodness of God leads man to repentance, Romans 2, 4.
Man is not changed by punishment.
Man is changed rather by the new birth, by which he then believes and is saved.
And so we come to the end of the six trumpets and their judgments.
A fierce series of judgments.
God willing, next week we'll take up chapter 10.
But I want to close tonight with this reassuring thought that God is sovereign and God is control
of all of this.
The one to whom we bow our knees and to whom we lift our voices and we say, our Father
who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.
That is the God that we see acting here.
It is the God that we know, the God that we trust, the God who is faithful.
We need not be fearful in light of these things, but we ought to be stimulated to be faithful
ourselves in representing him and proclaiming the gospel of Christ to a world.
It is not our business whether people respond to that message.
We want that.
We pray for that.
We seek to persuade them.
The results are God's work.
But our job is to be faithful in the proclamation and in representing Jesus Christ.
And so may we be that.
May we be God's people in these days.
Would you bow with me please as we pray?
And now Father, as we have studied your word tonight and we see the fierce and horrifying
judgments that will come upon the earth in the tribulation period.
How glad we are and how grateful we are for your saving grace in our lives.
For surely were it not for that grace and that goodness leading us to repentance, we
would be a part of a crowd like that.
We would still be in our sins and hostile toward you and haters of God, wicked in our
evil works.
But you and your grace and kindness reached down and you caused us to be born again by
your Spirit.
And you brought us into your family.
You have forgiven us and you have given us a place in Christ.
And there we are kept and preserved.
And we say to you, praise the Lord.
And we also petition you that you would strengthen us by that same Spirit who caused us to become
alive.
You would strengthen us to be your people in this day.
That we might be faithful proclaimers of the word of God.
And faithful livers out of the love of God that you might use us to call others into
the kingdom.
We also pray as you taught us to pray, Lord, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth
as it is in heaven.
For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.
Amen.
Good night.