The ‘other angel’2 has done his job and brought the prayers of the hundred and forty-four thousand from Israel and of the multitude that no one could count and of the Church of all the ages into the presence of God. Many think that this Angel is the Lord Jesus Christ, as the Mediator between God and man and the great High Priest on behalf of Israel, who, as the Angel of the Lord, spoke with Abraham3 and wrestled with Jacob,4 spoke with Moses on the mountain,5 appeared to Joshua,6 and pleaded for Joshua, the High Priest,7 and ascended up to Heaven in a flame of sacrificial fire before the eyes of Manoah and his wife, the parents of Samson.8 Whatever the case may be, the seven angels are about to blow their trumpets and more details of the great tribulation are about to be revealed.
After the first four angels have blown their trumpets an interlude follows with an eagle flying in the midst of Heaven and calling out ‘woe’ three times. There was a similar difference between the first four seals and the following three. The trumpet judgments9 remind us of the plagues in Egypt,10 in the sense that the plagues were meant to move Pharaoh to let the people of Israel go. Pharaoh hardened his heart each time however, and in the end God hardened Pharaoh’s heart.11 The godless themselves bring this hardening about.12 The threefold ‘woe’ will not bring people to repent either, even though they will have experienced four trumpet judgments in the meantime already. That ‘woe to you’ sounds over Jerusalem13 and over Babylon.14 The trumpet-judgments are terrible. In the time in which John lived and saw these things, he was not yet acquainted with the horrors of our century as a result of the development of science and technology in the field of weaponry. Natural scientists have compared the trumpet judgments to the development of a worldwide nuclear war, in which all the modern weapons systems will be used in succession, in which one brings about the other, as it were, a chain reaction of violence. It is not clear whether that will be the case, or whether the disasters will have another cause, for example the result of a ‘bombardment’ of meteors, asteroids, comets (previously called ‘shooting stars’, because of their composition of a head and a tail containing poisonous gases) striking the earth.
Both possibilities appear to be feasible. In any event, they are real disasters; and a figurative, symbolic or allegorical explanation seems to be impossible here. People tried to deny the literacy of these passages because of the gravity of these events. Understandable, because it is terribly frightful. But the disasters are just as real as the plagues of Egypt were. The destruction of a third part is spoken of each time, which means that two thirds are spared. Whereas a fourth part of mankind has perished in the story through the four apocalyptic horsemen, under the four seals in Revelation 6, the destruction under the trumpets is increasing exponentially and intensifies towards the end. The curve of the statistics of casualties of wars, earthquakes and other ‘signs of the times’ are steeply on the rise. Even today already, the intensifying of the ‘signs of the times’ in every aspect is accelerating rapidly, and even more so as the return of Christ approaches. The disasters will not have the final word, however, but rather His Coming and the Kingdom that will follow!
• The things that take place on earth always appear to have Heavenly causes. In the Heavenly realms, angels are involved in the work of the Lord that affects the earth.
Bible References:
1.NIV 2.Revelation 8:3, 7:2 3.Genesis 18 4.Genesis 32:22-32, 35:9-10 5.Exodus 19, 20:1-21 comp. Hebrews 2:2 and Acts 7:38 6.Joshua 5:13 – 6:2 7.Zachariah 3 8.Judges 13:22 9.Revelation 9:20 10.Exodus 7-12 11.Exodus 7:3, 10:27, 11:10, 14:8 12.Mark 6:2, Acts 19:9, Romans 1:18-22, 2:5; 2 Corinthians 3:14, 2 Thessalonians 2:9-12; Hebrews 3:8,15 13.Ezekiel 16:23 14.Jeremiah 50:27
