The four angels at the four corners of the earth, who held back the four winds and received the command not to cause any damage to the earth and the sea before the hundred and forty-four thousand were sealed,1 are not mentioned any more. The earth and the sea are about to be stricken, now that the servants from Israel are sealed and the ‘multitude that no one could count’ is safe with God. Whereas the judgments of the rider-horses – the ‘ghost-riders in the sky’- were limited to plagues striking mankind,2 with slaughters, hunger, diseases and death: the trumpets bring on different judgments—plagues that directly bring about catastrophes. Not just caused by man and his actions. What is now to take place looks like a detailed exposition of the sixth seal.3
It is pay-back time for those who are against God, like psalmist Asaph prayed: “May the groans of the prisoners come before you; with Your strong arm preserve those condemned to die. Pay back into the laps of our neighbours seven times the contempt they have hurled at you, Lord.”4
What is going to take place now is the reverse of what happened at Creation. Things went from chaos to cosmos then,5 but now they go from cosmos to chaos, to destruction, to desolation, under the trumpet judgments. The Lord is actually going to bring to completion the very things the people who rejected Him, who despised Him and His commandments have already been preparing for centuries: the desecration, dishonouring, defilement and destruction of the earth itself and of nature, of God’s Creation and, not least, of mankind itself. History will not endlessly continue repeating itself. There will come an end to it.
Things are suddenly no longer any more like they have always been. Man’s comfortable ‘dwelling place’, his ‘home’ which looked so safe: planet Earth, is being hewn down. God is tearing the roof off, knocking the walls down and pulling the foundations out from under the safe home that He had once made planet earth to be.
The inhabitants of the earth will observe with dread how vehemently and irresistibly the destruction of their earthly realm is. The Lord of host’s bulldozers are levelling the ground for a new world. Birth pangs precede the birth of the promised new Kingdom of Righteousness and Peace. All order, all structure, all beauty of the present world will disappear. Nature will be stricken and rendered hideous first; then judgment will reach the inhabitants of the earth themselves. Whereas the earlier seals contained trials and tribulations from which the Church, Israel and other groups of believers could come forth cleansed and purified, these trumpet judgments come upon the rebellious remnant of mankind who are hostile to God. These are the ones who are so typically called ‘the inhabitants of the earth’ in contrast to the people who are hidden with God and the Lamb,6 those who have their citizenship in Heaven, as Paul explains in Philippians 3:20 “But our citizenship is in Heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables Him to bring everything under His control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like His glorious body.” Although the possibility of conversion cannot be excluded at the revealing of the trumpet-judgments7 it is said that people will not repent and convert and glorify Him.8 The age of God’s grace and His wonderful patience seems now to have finally passed. Today we have not yet reached this stage, fortunately, and everyone who wishes to come to the Saviour to be saved for eternity may and can do so. You and I still can personally go to our knees and receive Him as Saviour and Lord, before the time of judgment comes.
• The seven angels do not all appear by name as such in the rest of the Bible. Jewish tradition does mention them in the apocryphal Book of Enoch, in which their names are given: Uriel, Raphael, Raguel, Michael, Sariel, Gabriel and Remiel, and Raphael is mentioned in Tobit 12;15 as saying ‘I am Raphael, one of the seven holy angels, who carry up and offer the prayers of the saints.’
• However,8 Timothy 2:5 says: ‘For there is one God and one Mediator between God and mankind, the Man Christ Jesus.’ He alone, as the Heavenly High Priest, brings the sanctified prayers of the people, cleansed by His blood into God’s presence. The angels are under His command.
Bible References:
1. Revelation 7:1–3 2.Revelation 6:1–11 3.Revelation 6:12–14 4.Psalm 79:11–12 5.Genesis 1:1–31 6.Revelation 6:10, 8:13, 11:10, 13:8 and 14, 14:6, 17:2 and 8 7.Revelation 11:13, 14:7 8.Revelation 9:21, 16:9 and 11
