Take the book of Revelation
and remove it from its historical foundation
and give it to scholars with a fertile imagination
and let them consider their present situation
and they will surely make a new application
or see it as a biblical alegorization.
Revelation 8-11 shows us how the saints’ prayers are heard in heaven and answered with trumpets of judgments against those who are not God’s people until finally some of them look up and give glory to God.
There are judgments of pain and death when the trumpets of God are sounded! A third of just about everything and everyone is destroyed or killed in the process of the first four trumpet sounds alone. Of the seven earthquakes in the book of Revelation, three of them are here in these chapters. Apocryphal images of prophetic judgments from all quarters of the Old Testament prophets are drawn together and reproduced right here in these chapters. The sounding of the trumpets has a long history in the scriptures. There is a significance given to them that spans the history of Israel and even the church.
When our children were little they used to make up little songs. Almost all of them were about God or the church. When Jen and Tim were about five and three years old we video taped them as they sang, “Trumpets will sound and I will be floating up with my God!” Even then they knew that heaven’s trumpets were a good sound for God’s people. On the other hand the scripture reveals that heaven’s trumpets are a terrible sound for those who do not have the seal of God on them to mark them as God’s people.
Just listen as I read this section of the trumpets in its entirety. Try to imagine with the prophet all the amazing imagery and hear the wrath of God flowing out against those who are persecuting his people and dishonoring the name of the God that created them. Hear God’s enemies celebrate when they think God’s prophets have been silenced, then see their reaction to God’s prophets at their resurrection and vindication. Notice finally, when the kingdom of this world becomes the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ! This is a great blessing for the saints and a terrible woe against God’s enemies.
Ready? (Read 8-11)
Wow! Is all that actually in your Bible???
Instead of trying to dissect each mysterious and widely interpreted piece let us look at what is most clearly indicated by what we’ve just read and take a lesson from that.
Trumpets… this entire section is divided up by seven trumpet blasts, from seven angels directed by God’s will. But notice back at the beginning in chapter 8, what initiates these? The first six verses of chapter 8 tell us. Look at it again. This is a great lesson!
As soon as the Lamb opens the seventh seal, what happens?
Silence! There is silence in heaven for about a half an hour. What is this silence all about? Well, just look at what is happening during this silence and before the sounding of the first trumpet. See it there? What is going on? As seven angels stand with trumpets, another angel appears with something else. It is a censer. Much incense is given to him to add it to what? “The prayers of all the saints.” And verse 4 says that the smoke of the incense, with the prayers of the saints went up before God out of the angel’s hand.
It is as if, just as soon as the Lamb opens the seventh seal, God says to everyone, “Shhhhhhhhh! Quiet!” No more calling words of worship from the living creatures, no more shouts of “Worthy” from the 24 elders, no more angelic songs of praise and adoration from the angel choir. God calls for silence as he listens to the prayers of his people. Just think of it! Heaven is quiet so that your prayers may be heard! How important are our prayers to God? Prayers precede this entire trumpet section! Prayers of the saints make all the difference in heaven’s response to earth’s situation.
Over and over God’s word tells us to pray. If Revelation 8-11 teach us anything at all, it teaches us that we need to be a praying people, and that our prayers matter to God and impacts what happens in this world.
Listen to this article from Leadership Magazine:
The Tuesday night prayer meeting at Brooklyn Tabernacle felt like skydiving into a tornado, exhausting and exhilarating all at once. I’d read about the meeting in Jim Cymbala’s book Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire, but nothing prepared me for the event itself: 3,500 God-hungry people storming heaven for two hours.
Afterward, my friend and I went out to dinner with the Cymbalas. In the course of the meal, Jim turned to me and said, "Mark, do you know what the number one sin of the church in America is?" I wasn’t sure, and the question was rhetorical anyhow. "It’s not the plague of internet pornography that is consuming our men. It’s not that the divorce rate in the church is roughly the same as society at large."
Jim named two or three other candidates for the worst sin, all of which he dismissed. "The number one sin of the church in America," he said, "is that its [ministers] and leaders are not on their knees crying out to God, ’Bring us the drug-addicted, bring us the prostitutes, bring us the destitute, bring us the gang leaders, bring us those with AIDS, bring us the people nobody else wants, whom only you can heal, and let us love them in your name until they are whole.’"
I had no response. I was undone. He had laid me bare, found me out, and exposed my fraudulence. I was the chief of sinners. I had never prayed, not once, for God to bring such people to my church. So I went home and repented. I stopped sinning. I began to cry out for "those nobody wanted."
And darned if God didn’t bring them. But then I found out why nobody wants them: they’re messy and costly and dirty. They swear at you, lie to you, steal from you. Worse, they make you love them, and then often break your heart.
But when God brings messy people, it does two things: first, it makes you real, and then it makes you desperate. It makes you real, because you’re dealing with a magnitude of sin that bromides and platitudes are powerless against. You have to name sin in all its ugliness and minister the cure undiluted. A crack cocaine addict recently agreed to go through a year of intense rehab because I knew he was bluffing me and I called him on it. I leaned into his face and told him that unless he stopped BS-ing me, and right now, I was walking. He was in rehab in three days, and has now been there for three months with nine still to go. Anything less than hard reality at that moment would have fallen short.
Messy people also make you desperate. Until I began to cry out, most of the people I counseled were struggling with sins that, for the most part, had minimal social consequences. They became angry too quickly, or gossiped too often, or ran up their credit card too high. Problems, yes. Sins, indeed. But any of it, all of it, they could more or less manage on their own.
Ministry under those circumstances is like being in a boat when the wind kicks up. You strain against the wind and it’s comforting to know Jesus is somewhere nearby, but you can tough it out alone. You can fall back on your basic nautical skills to get through it.
But that doesn’t work with sex-trade workers and crack addicts. With them, ministry is like being called out of the boat to walk on the water: you’ve never been here before, there’s no three-step technique, and unless Jesus is with you, ready to catch you when you fall, you are going to sink all the way down.
Some days I wish things were tidy again. But if ministry and mess are inseparable, I’ll take them both.
(Mark Buchanan is pastor of New Life Community church in Duncan, British Columbia, and a contributing editor of Leadership).
Are we willing to pray prayers like that for this church? The church at Ephesus probably would not, but it looks like the churches at Pergamum and Thyatira may have!
Another thing this section of Revelation (8-11) most certainly teaches is that even the limited wrath of God is horribly terrifying! These trumpets of judgment are not yet the full burning wrath of the Almighty against sin and evil. In fact, there is room afforded for repentance at this point, but sadly we still see those here refusing to repent. Even after an army of 200 million kill a third of mankind, verses 20-21 tell us:
The rest of mankind that were not killed by these plagues still did not repent of the work of their hands, they did not stop worshipping demons, and idols of gold, silver, bronze, stone and wood – idols that cannot see or hear or walk. Nor did they repent of their murders, their magic arts, their sexual immorality or their thefts.
So… the plagues and punishments couldn’t turn their hearts to God. Then, what, pray tell could??? If there is any hope at all it must come from the preaching of the word of God.
Right after it says that these refused to repent, John is given a little scroll to eat and a commission to prophecy again to many nations, peoples, tribes, and tongues! Next as John is measuring the temple, two witnesses arise and are empowered by God to preach and punish the earth with plagues. They go to work! But then they are attacked and killed by a beast from the Abyss. As their bodies lie unburied for three and a half days the people who hate them celebrate and gloat over them and give gifts to one another. But then God vindicates them and their words as he raises these witnesses from the dead and calls them into heaven while their enemies look on. Finally, an earthquake that destroys a tenth of the city and kills 7000 of them hits. At this point the survivors give God glory.
Then… the final trumpet sounds. And the kingdom of this world becomes the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever! And the curtain of this section of Revelation and the trumpets closes with God’s temple in heaven opening and with flashes of lightning, rumblings, peals of thunder and earthquake and a great hailstorm!
Amen!
