Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of the End Times from Revelation 8–10
We’ll begin with Revelation, chapter 8, a few comments on this passage we just did not have time to look at. We’re not going to have time to do all of chapters 8–11 today, but I would like to get through chapter 8 rather quickly, chapters 9–10 a little more slowly, and start chapter 11, and then we’ll catch up, I think, next week. Let’s bow in prayer.
Lord God, we frankly confess that there are large swaths of this book that are frightening and distasteful to us, emphasizing themes we really don’t like: bizarre judgments, a third of humanity wiped out, talk of torment and suffering, flame, hate, sin, and malice. Yet in our more sober moments, Lord God, we recognize that you do not see the world the way we see the world.
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. Grant, 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 implacable. 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.
Grant 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 opprobrium either from the Beast or from the Lamb. Grant, Lord God, that all gathered here may be found with the followers of the Lamb. In whose name we pray, amen.
We ended last day at the end of chapter 7. I would like to read the first verses of chapter 8 before we press on. What we saw, if you recall, in chapters 6–7, was the seals numbers one through six and then a kind of interlude or excursus, and the interlude or excursus turns from a focus on the judgments that fall to the redeemed. I suggested to you that both of the pictures in chapter 7 (although it is disputed, I acknowledge), both the 144,000 cast as the true Israel and the great multitude in white robes, are different ways of referring to the people of God.
Then just as the seventh seal sounds, there’s an entirely different picture, and it’s really quite startling. Let me read the first few verses of chapter 8. “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.”
Now what are we to make of this passage? There are two or three things that need to be said. The first is the first introduction to structural problems in the book that we need to come to terms with. By now you’re well aware of the fact that the three central sevens … 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?
One could imagine a purely serial relationship. In that kind of relationship, everything represented by the seals takes place, then everything represented by the trumpets takes place, and then everything represented by the bowls takes place. So you have in this structuring of the book serial developments. In that case, of course, all of the judgments in the seals have to be complete before you get any of the judgments in the trumpets, and so on.
Another alternative would be you might imagine (some have argued for this; I will give you the details of it in a couple of weeks).… Now they are running as parallels. That is to say, what the seals represent is exactly the same thing as what the trumpets represent. What the trumpets represent is exactly the same thing as what the bowls represent. They’re covering the same turf. Therefore, what the book does is review the same pattern again and again and again.
We’ll see later when we consider the structure of the book as a whole that some people have argued, for example, that the book of Revelation runs from the coming of Jesus to his second coming seven times over. That is to say, the same material is recycled, recycled, and recycled several times over in order to establish the pattern of what takes place from several different perspectives.
There’s another alternative. From this perspective, the seventh seal sort of dumps into the seven trumpets. The seven trumpets sort of get subsumed under the seventh, and the seven bowls get subsumed under the seventh trumpet, so that far from being three separate series that are in serial or exact parallels, the last series of seven gets dumped under the seventh of the second series, and that whole series gets dumped under the seventh of the first series.
So what you get in this kind of structuring of the book is a kind of rushing, hasting toward judgment. The speed doubles and doubles. You’re moving faster and faster toward condemnation and judgment. That’s another possibility. Now I have to tell you that although all of these have their attractions and, in due course, I’ll weigh some of these sorts of structures against other factors when we come to the structure of the book as a whole, I have to confess I’m not convinced by any of them.
They strike me in every case as just too neat. They don’t work quite. You have to start forcing some things to get them to work. Part of the problem is we are demanding a primarily chronological sequence when maybe the book doesn’t offer us one. Obviously in large terms it does. It’s clear that there are some things that take place only at the end. The position I will take here and develop in times to come is that, yes, the book does go back in various sections to the first coming of Christ.
It goes back to his death and then goes to the end, and it does look at the sufferings from a variety of perspectives so that you get some repeating, some coming back. Yes, that’s true, but there is no simple neat pattern in which you say they’re all perfectly aligned. You know, the first seal equals the first bowl equals the first trumpet; the second seal equals the second bowl equals the second trumpet.
Nor do you have everything collapsing from one into the other. None of the patterns fit except by a great deal of forced work. What you are doing is looking at the way God looks at the earth and at the way God looks at believers again and again and again with various kinds of judgments and patterns, and some of them you can nail down with great precision. Others, in my view, 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. For example, in the first case, as 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. Isn’t that we saw in the first one?
Now you come to the next seven. Look at the first four. Look at these trumpets. Look at what they do. Fire and hail mixed with blood is hurled down on the earth. A third of the earth is burned up. That’s the first. Second, something like a huge mountain is thrown down. Third, a great star blazing. The name of the star is Wormwood.
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 you’re not seeing the same judgments from the perspective of working out in the framework of history … bloodshed, famine, judgments in those terms.
Now you’re seeing something, in some ways, more terrifying yet: God intervening with miraculous, however symbolically loaded, interventions of spectacular judgment. That’s the way it looks. In the second series I think there are some things you can identify with great likelihood, especially when you get to the three woes, which are the same as the last three trumpets, but the perspective is a little different even as you look at the theme of judgments again.
In other words, there is some progression, but not without considerable restatement and development of detail. Yes, as one moves closer to the end of the book there is greater enlargement and greater emphasis toward the consummation. That’s all true, but I’m not sure it is possible to press everything in the book of Revelation into well-defined patterns that leave no loose end.
So now you get 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.” You have to remember that this is a drama. This is not just history. It’s not like a chronology. You know, somebody is sitting there with a stopwatch. “Thirty minutes.” That’s not what’s going on. It’s as if you have a great drama unfolding, and after this sequence of judgments, then silence.
Supposing you were watching a play, and the play moved up in intensity with clanging cymbals and a crashing chorus as you moved into more and more tension and drama and judgment. Then you come to a big climax, and then … silence. There’s something awe-inspiring about that. It leaves you with a kind of breathless anticipation. “My God, what’s next?” What’s next is the seven trumpets.
The silence theme is found here and there in Scripture. “The Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him.” (Habakkuk 2:20) Does that fit here? I’m not sure. The point in Habakkuk 2:20 and similar passages (Zephaniah 1, Zechariah 2) about being silent before the Lord is that God is so transcendent we shouldn’t be quick to speak and spout before him; we are to bow before him in reverence.
That’s not quite the idea here. It’s not as if the whole earth is to be silent before him. 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.
There’s another element here as well. If those commentators are right who think the slitting of the seals is not by itself the opening of the scroll but the kind of preliminary judgments before the scroll is opened, then you have a kind of slitting of the seal, and then there’s a solemn silence, and then you’re to understand that at the end of that silence the scroll opens, and now you get the trumpet angels sounding their judgments. “If you think the earlier stuff was serious, wait till you see this.”
I’m not sure that’s right. I’m not sure, as I indicated last week, if that’s just too picky a view of the slitting of the seals, but if it’s not, then the slitting of the seals is sort of prolegomenon judgment to the more serious stuff that now unfolds. In either case, the half hour of silence is certainly meant to be dramatic, causing us to pause and reflect before we move on.
Now verses 2–5 are a sort of setup, a preparation, for the trumpets themselves, which again come in a certain pattern. Like the seals, you get four trumpets very quickly, one, two, three, and four. Then, like the seals, you get five and six each extended at greater length, and then you have an interlude or an excursus before you get the seventh, and that interlude or excursus brings you in again to reflection on who the people of God are, what they’re doing at this point, just like the interlude or the excursus between the sixth and the seventh seal sequence. You have a whole pattern of things here.
So first of all, the preparations. 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. Well, there’s nothing like that here. Seven angels who stand before God means a perfect number for accomplishing his will. They’re in his presence ready to go. They stand before God ready to be sent to do whatever he wants them to do. They’re standing before him.
To them were given seven trumpets. Trumpets likewise can function in quite a variety of ways in Scripture, but perhaps in this case we’re not to think of trumpets as the trumpets around the walls of Jericho signaling the fall of the wall or something. No, this is an apocalyptic trumpet. You get this sort of thing already 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. We did that in our armies until fairly recently when we had radios and that sort of thing to signal around amongst the commanders.
Everybody goes around with little earphones on their heads, and there’s somebody standing way back with television monitors and radio signals, but until then, how did you signal your troops? Well, you had a bugler, and his job was to signal various calls. Does this call mean come and eat or does it mean charge or does it mean retreat? Everybody was supposed to know what the bugle sounds meant.
The bugles, then, could be associated in the public mind with war, with struggle, with death, with attack. That’s what’s going on in Zephaniah 1:14. A day of distress and anguish, a day of trumpet blast and battle cry. That’s what the day of the Lord will be like, not a nice sweet day when everything turns up roses. It’ll be a time of judgment.
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. The same language is picked up in the eschatological discourse. It’s the return of the Lord. It’s an apocalyptic trumpet that is given.
Then another angel (some have tried to identify him with Christ, but I don’t think Christ is ever identified as an angel in the book of Revelation), 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. I think this is still an incense altar, nothing more, because the next line says, “He was given much incense to offer.”
The next line of Greek could be read either, “He was given incense to offer along with the prayers of all the saints” or “He was given incense to offer, which are, in fact, the prayers of all the saints, on the golden altar before the throne.” In my view, although the Greek can be read perfectly well either way, it is this latter that makes more sense in the light of the book.
Do you remember what we read in chapter 5? Once the Lamb begins to open the scrolls, once it’s announced he’s going to do so, some angels offer to God incense, which are, it says, the prayers of the saints. What is meant by that? Well, now that God’s purposes for redemption and blessing are going to be fulfilled, now the prayers of God’s saints can properly be fulfilled. Otherwise they’re just bouncing off the heavens. We saw that already in chapter 5.
Perhaps that is a small indication that this is now the opening of the scroll. Going back to the structure in chapter 5, as the scroll is opened, now the prayers of the saints are being brought before the Lord. But what prayers of the saints? 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. Isn’t that remarkable?
In other words, there is a sense in which when the church is persecuted, when the church is oppressed, when there are martyrs, when there’s a denial of truth, and Christians turn to the Lord in prayer and ask, “How long must this go on? Will you not send us revival? Will you not limit such wickedness? Will you not stay the hand?” sometimes the answer, as in chapter 6, is, “Not yet; the number of the martyrs must be filled up,” but sometimes, as these prayers are wafted in the presence of God, God responds with judgment.
God does not want to see his people endlessly destroyed without judgment falling. Later on, as we’ll see, the answer is a little bit different yet again. The angel stands with one foot on the land and the sea and says, in the King James Version, “Time will be no more.” What he’s saying there is, “There will be no more delay. Now judgment really comes afoot.”
So that is what is going on here. That’s part of the preparation. 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. In other words, the judgment is coming right from the very throne of God. That’s the picture.
There come peals of thunder (thunder is often connected with judgment in one fashion or another in apocalyptic literature), flashes of lightning, and an earthquake, all terrible images of judgment falling on the people of God. Thus, for example, in Ezekiel’s vision of Ezekiel, chapter 10, verses 1–7 you get similar judgments, thunders and so forth.
Now the trumpets. “Then the seven angels who had the seven trumpets prepared to sound them. 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. 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. 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.
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!’ ” Then you get the three woes.
What do we do with this? First, it is important to see right away that there’s no easy alignment of these trumpets with the seals. There’s no simple recapitulation. You’re dealing with a slightly different kind of description. Second, the trumpet plagues all through here are directed increasingly toward a world in profound hostility against God. Look on, for example, in chapter 9, verses 20 and following. “The rest of mankind that were not killed by these plagues still did not repent of the work of their hands.”
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. Moreover, the repeated “One third, one third, one third,” which actually occurs 12 times in verses 7–12, suggests that the judgments afflict many people, but not everybody. They’re directed against humankind in rebellion against God, and they destroy large numbers of people, but not everybody.
Moreover, the first four, in the fourth place, have amongst other functions the warning of worse judgments to come. Otherwise, it’s very difficult to make sense of verse 13. It’s almost as if God sometimes says, “If you think these are bad, you haven’t seen anything yet.” Now where does the imagery come from before we try to identify them a little bit more? The first angel sounds the trumpet, and there’s hail and fire mingled with blood.
If you think all of these are to be interpreted literalistically, all I have to say is I don’t think you’re being fair with apocalyptic. How do you get, in any case, one third of the sun dying and one third of the moon? And if you did have one third of the sun dying, would that mean one third of the day died? No, it would mean that the whole day was a lot colder. You try to press apocalyptic language to a literalistic extreme and you get nonsense.
That doesn’t mean this then becomes 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.… You find such descriptions in, for example, Joel, chapter 2, verse 31. In that passage we are told that on the last day the moon turns to blood and the sun to darkness.
That passage is actually picked up by Peter on the day of Pentecost with respect to what happened in his day. What’s going on there? Many people have pointed out that when Jesus dies on the cross there is an unexplained darkness at midday for three hours. How that happened no one knows. It could have been a miraculous thing. It could have been an unimaginably thick black cloud. When I was growing up, you could see storms that would give you dusk, almost blackness, in center day. Yes, it could be.
To this day, you can sometimes get descriptions of dust storms in the Middle East that make things extremely dark. How it happened I don’t know, but there’s no doubt that Peter sees the sun turning to darkness as already having been fulfilled, at one level at least, in the darkness surrounding the death on the cross. It doesn’t mean that the sun sort of shut down or turned off or that one third of it sort of switched off, but it did have a devastating effect, nevertheless, in the time of Jesus, and was seen in the time of Jesus as a sign of judgment.
Peter also quotes the bit about the moon turning to blood. The gospel narratives don’t record that. On the other hand, it is not at all impossible if there was dust or cloud or the like involved that the moon did turn to blood in terms of its appearance to us. That is, it turned to blood red. So it’s possible that you’re dealing, in part, with those sorts of signs of things, but as I’ve indicated before, so much of Hebrew poetry does also see a kind of nature component.
When God lays bare his arms, on the one hand the hills clap their hands and the trees dance for joy, and on the other hand the stars fall from the skies. Whatever it is that happens here, however, this is a hurling down of incense from heaven (verse 5) or now hail and fire mixed with blood hurled down to the earth. It comes from God, and the effect is to destroy a great deal of the earth: a third of the earth, a third of the trees, and all the grass.
Now as we work through these judgments, I find these four here amongst the hardest in the book of Revelation to come to terms with in terms of what is taking place in the reality to which these things point. I’m not sure, but let me make some suggestions. See, I don’t think the point here is quite so much to identify them exactly as to point out that they come from God, in any case, but let me make some suggestions.
I will come back to this suggestion for one of the woes. The first woe, for example, is bound up with plagues, we’ll see in a few moments. I don’t know what you’ve read of medieval literature, but the smallest estimates of the numbers of people in Europe who died under the black plague was one third of the population, and that happened twice.
Yes, the population has advanced, but until the rise of twentieth-century medicine, many families had four, five, six, seven, or eight children, earlier generations even more, and then lost many of them to disease, to illness, to ravaging. You can’t read the Puritans without finding that almost without exception their families lost children. They would have eight, nine, or ten children, and five would survive, seven would survive, three would survive.
We think now, because we have come to a relatively secure place in medical science, that people don’t die in large numbers. “That’s not right. It doesn’t happen, especially not to nice people like us. Maybe they do in ravaged parts of the world, but it doesn’t happen to us.” Then I pick up my latest copy or two of Scientific American.
There was a very interesting article in which epidemiologists and other experts are now saying that there is so much resistance from so many diseases to so many of our forms of prophylaxis that, at the end of the day, we could be in for plagues the like of which you haven’t seen. That’s what the experts are saying.
So just at the time where you have a half-hour reprieve, as it were, God reminds us again who’s boss. Hasn’t AIDS hit some people that way? I wrote a long essay on AIDS five or six years ago, and I tried to get the best figures I could. Now a few years later, when I follow the statistics of the World Health Organization, all of my figures are vastly out of date.
According to the World Health Organization, even if they find a powerful inoculation today and start using it, or a powerful drug that would inevitably, to begin with, at least be expensive.… No matter what they do now, not fewer than 40 million people worldwide are going to die. That’s WHO, the World Health Organization.
That, I think, is bound up with one of the later woes: plagues. Verse 20 of chapter 9: “The rest of mankind that were not killed by these plagues still did not repent of the work of their hands.” In verse 7, it sounds more like judgment upon the natural order. Have you not read of the terrible drought and plague in the Sahel, as the mighty Saharan Sahel encroaches further and further south? Is God not in charge there either?
What happens in the Great Plains when the Ogallala Aquifer dries up? And it’s drying up. I don’t know. I’m not trying to be a scaremonger. All I’m saying is that these phenomena, which we accept so readily in the natural plane, from a biblical point of view have a sovereign God behind them, and sometimes he speaks in sternest judgments … judgments that can destroy food sources, judgments that bring terrible destruction.
You read the story of the Titanic. At one level, it’s a horrendous disaster. No matter how you cut it, that was a horrendous disaster, and you think how it could have been averted. They should have had more lifeboats, and they should have taken heed to an earlier warning about icebergs in the area, and so on. Yes, hindsight is wonderful.
As a Christian, can’t you hear the voice of God’s judgment there somewhere? The mighty British Empire is saying, “This is a boat that cannot be sunk. We have now triumphed over the seas. Britain is at the heyday of her power. The sun never sets on the British Empire.” And on her maiden voyage she goes down.
