The scroll with seven seals that Jesus was handed in chapter 5 is now open. The first four seals loosed the four horsemen of the apocalypse: war, violence, famine, and death. The fifth seal let the prayers of the saints loose upon the world. Who would have thought that the prayers of the saints - that’s us, folks, you and me and all those whom God has called to belong to him - would be part of the judgment of God, sandwiched in between death and destruction? Right after the prayers of the saints comes the opening of the sixth seal, featuring earthquakes, darkness at noon, falling stars, and terror on every side.
We’re tempted to look at John’s Revelation chronologically, to assume that all this is part of an as-yet-to-come set of end days which we can count and measure and predict. But I’m not convinced of that. Because the saints have been praying for justice and redemption since before the fall of Jerusalem. They’ve been praying for justice and redemption since they were captives in Egypt. Are we to take from this chapter that the prayers of the saints are not effective until the end times?
No, I think not.
Everything that happens in heaven is mirrored on earth in some way that we do not yet understand. But I suggest to you that all of these evils that were let loose by the first six seals have been part of life on earth since the fall, when Adam and Eve were booted out of the Garden and God let death loose in the land. Death is the fourth horseman. Has he not roamed abroad in the land before now? War is the first horseman. Has there ever been a time when war has been absent? As I said only a few weeks ago, war, famine, and disease are normal. They are ever-present ingredients in the human condition, and will be until the final redemption of the world.
What we are seeing in this throne room is the whole design of God’s plan from beginning to end, and the end was already known at the beginning. Our timing is not the same as God’s.
And so we come at last to the seventh seal. Of them all, this one is one we have most likely not yet seen worked out on earth. My literalist commentary points out that when the first angel blows his trumpet, “and there came hail and fire, mixed with blood, and they were hurled to the earth; and a third of the earth was burned up, and a third of the trees were burned up, and all green grass was burned up” [v. 7] these echo the plagues of Egypt at the time of the Exodus. And so it may be
either a reference to those days, which was a time when God meted out both justice and redemption, or those long-ago days may be a preview of a second visitation of hail and fire and blood.
The second angel tells of “something like a great mountain, burning with fire [being] thrown into the sea.” [v. 8] The most popular explanation for this event seems to be a huge asteroid collision. U.S. News and World Report reported in 1995 that asteroids “are a cosmic accident waiting to happen: ... the solar system is encircled by a 90-billion-mile-wide disk-like cloud of at least 200 million mountainous chunks of dirt and ice, some of which occasionally come hurtling through the solar system as starry-eyed comets.”
And then the third angel’s prediction sounds, say the literalists, remarkably like nuclear destruction: a great star fell from heaven, blazing like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water. The name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters became wormwood, and many died from the water, because it was made bitter.” [v. 10-11] The reference to “wormwood” hints at poison, and may refer to radiation poisoning.
The fourth angel speaks of the light of the sun being dimmed by a third. Some think this is a reference to a nuclear winter, others to the kind of weather changes that occur after a great volcanic eruption like Krakatoa. We've seen that kind of thing occur in recorded history, not to mention the climate change caused in prehistory by the meteorite strikes in Siberia and the Gulf of Mexico. But however
you interpret the details, everyone agrees that these aren’t the actual end of life as we know it. They only destroy part of the earth and its resources, and are intended to wake people up to the existence of God, the reality of his wrath, and their need for repentance.
But you know what? We don’t know exactly what is going to happen, or when. We don’t know if these predictions are of asteroids or nuclear bombs or global warming or God only knows what - and I don’t mean that lightly - as yet unimagined horrors. We won’t know until the end, and look back, and see the whole pattern whole. But what we do know is that these visions were given to us for a reason, and at least part of the reason is to help us to interpret what is going on in the world around us, and how to live faithfully in the midst of all the chaos and confusion.
So let’s back off the scary, confusing details and look at what is clear.
By referring back to the Exodus plagues, Revelation reminds us that God’s acts in the past are our firmest assurance for the future. Some of the things Revelation clearly foretells - like the fall of Rome and the survival of both the Christians and the Jews - were not even imagined by the people of John’s day. And yet they happened. We know they happened. And so if God has judged the oppressors of our spiritual ancestors, will he not also overthrow the powers that abuse and frustrate his people now?
The allusion to the plagues of Exodus is probably less a promise that they will happen again as to remind us that God is in charge of nature and has used it to issue wake-up calls and judgments throughout history. But even if it is intended to be taken as a literal future promise, the intended message is the same: God grabs our attention through what are nowadays called “natural disasters.” insurance policies still call these things: - hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, lightning strikes, floods, avalanches and so on - “acts of God”. We belittle their meaning when we call them “natural disasters.” They may be normal, they may occur in nature, but we cannot leave God out of the picture.
There’s a wonderful story about an atheist walking through the woods, admiring all the “accidents” of evolution. "What majestic trees! What powerful rivers! What beautiful animals!", he said to himself. As he was walking along he heard a rustling in the bushes behind him. Turning, he saw a 7-foot grizzly bear charging towards him. He turned and ran as fast as he could but the grizzly kept getting closer. He tried to run even faster, but made the mistake of turning to look and so tripped and fell. When he rolled over to pick himself up the bear was right on top of him, raising its paw to strike. At that instant the atheist cried, "Oh my God!"
Time stopped. The bear froze. The forest was silent. Even the river stopped moving. As a bright light shone upon the man, a voice came out of the sky saying, "You have denied my existence all these years, taught others that I didn't exist and even credited creation to a cosmic accident. But now you call upon me in your hour of need. Do you expect me to help you out of this predicament? Am I finally to count you as a believer?" Quaking, the atheist looked directly into the light and said, "It would be hypocritical of me to ask to be a Christian after all these years, but perhaps you could make the bear a Christian?" "Very well," said the voice. The light went out. The river ran. The sounds of the forest resumed.
...and then the bear put both paws together, bowed its head and spoke: "Lord, for this food which I am about to receive, I am truly thankful."
As I said, it’s not a good idea to leave God out of the picture. Because some day the whole world will be silenced before God. We see that silence at the beginning of this chapter. The arrogance of the secular political, academic and other elites who ridicule or ignore God - or blame him for the suffering and injustice in the world - will be silenced.
God is sovereign, but he has chosen to make the prayers of the people part of the exercise of his will. Author Eugene Peterson says, “While conflicts raged between good and evil, prayers went up from devout bands of first century Christians all over the Roman empire. Massive engines of persecution and scorn were ranged against them. They had neither weapons nor votes. They had little money and no prestige.” [Reversed Thunder] But they did have prayer. And that prayer helped shape the course of history. Or we can look back with scholar Craig Keenan to Daniel, “whose prayer becomes the battleground for angelic powers greater than the earthly rulers affected by them while the leaders of empires rise and fall as little more than pawns in the hands of a sovereign
God.” [Dan 10:13, 10:20-12:3]
We often fail to see the effects of our seemingly insignificant lives; who would have thought that the future of Israel lay in the desperate prayers of Samuel’s mother Hannah, who thought herself a failure because she couldn’t give her husband a son. I don’t know exactly how it works, no one does, but somehow the wheels of God’s grand design are greased by the prayers of the saints. Throughout the world there are bands of committed Christians who come together on Fridays, the Islamic holy day of prayer, to pray for the gospel to penetrate the Islamic world. Reports abound of Muslims being converted through dreams and visions even in “closed” Islamic countries. A small handful of saints prayed here last Thursday evening, for this country and the world, for justice and
healing and peace. They will all come, in God’s time, and we are part of it.
\But the peace and healing that we pray for cannot come apart from justice. Peace comes after judgment. The judgments that John so vividly describes come in response to our prayers. And though we may not welcome it, since by and large we are pretty comfortable, genuinely persecuted Christians see judgment on their persecutors as a sign of hope. There is a story of Polish slave laborers working in munitions factories for Germany toward the end of WWII being bombed by allied planes. Some were killed, more were wounded. And yet they prayed for the planes to return, again and again, as often as necessary, until the Nazis were defeated. God will end history on one great final day, but he
is Lord of history even now. God is just. There is a difference between good and evil, where one side is in the right and one side is in the wrong. It is not always so clear, but when it is, God provides those who have eyes to see and ears to hear with sufficient moral clarity to take sides in such conflicts. Richard Niebuhr rightly challenged the liberal social gospel movement of watering down the offense of the cross with the scathing words, “a God without wrath brought me without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of Christ without the cross.” The silence of contemporary evangelicals about impending judgment against sinful nations is just as serious a form of ignoring God’s just wrath. As William Eisenhower puts it in his powerful “Sleepers in the Hands of an Angry God”, “once we have given up wrath, can sin, judgment or the cross be far behind?” [Christianity Today, March 1987]
Natural disasters are not just random events, and our ability to predict them is not at all the same as the ability control them. On the contrary, it is God who controls the events of nature, and the notion that he does not use them as judgments is contrary both to reason and to Scripture. Everybody points to the disasters that happen in other parts of the world. Americans gasp at the floods in Bangladesh, and wars in Africa, mid-westerners fear California earthquakes, Alaskans point to Arkansas tornadoes, rural people comfort themselves with the certainty that missiles or terrorists are more likely to target cities.
But all we are doing is pacifying our anxieties with dubious assurances. Our current prosperity means nothing. Babylon and Egypt and Rome had far more power than Judah ever had, and yet those empires have been ruins for over two millennia.
Natural disasters are normal. But they are not random. They are acts of God, acts of a just and sovereign God who gives us more warnings than anyone could possibly have a right to expect. And every act of God that we see is sent by our merciful and loving God as a reminder of who is in charge, and of whose justice will prevail. One of my favorite OT scholars, Walter Kaiser, president of Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, said a few years ago, “North American society is headed for destruction and judgment. And we had better believe it’s coming, because there is no sign that repentance is near. It is coming, or else God is a liar and his word is not true. The prophet’s message must be preached again
today.” [The Old Testament in Contemporary Preaching] And so when we hear the words of main-line Protestant spokesmen saying "Peace, peace," when there is
no peace,” [Jer 6:14] let us look again at the acts of God in the world around us and remember that God is still just. He has not changed. So we must.
