Revelation 8

Revelation 8:2-10

IX THE OF THE Revelation 8:2-10:1 We now take up that section of the book of Revelation that relates to the sounding of the seven trumpets, which commences at Revelation 8:2, and extends to the end of chapter II. But I shall not be able to expound the entire section in one chapter; I will try, however, to cover so much of it as extends to Revelation 10:8, leaving for the next study the most of Revelation 10 and the whole of II. You will observe that, as in the seals, here there are two groups, four and three. There was quite a distinction between the first group of seals and the three that followed; and so there will be quite a distinction between the group of four trumpets and the three that follow.

The general meaning of the sounding of the trumpets is the gospel as prayed from John’s time to the second coming of Christ. The seals, you will remember, were the gospel as preached from John’s time to the second advent. Every sounding of a trumpet comes as a response, not to a sermon, but to a prayer. We make a great mistake when we limit the power of the gospel to its preaching, for a very large part of its power is dependent upon its praying. The preaching is more conspicuous, and oftentimes a preacher takes credit to himself for the power of his sermons, when perhaps the power came from some obscure member of the church who prayed while he preached. Realizing this, I made it a habit of my pastoral life to engage a number of the most spiritually minded members of my church to enter into a covenant to pray for me every Sunday while I preached.

Even the apostle Paul felt his great dependence upon the prayers of his brethren and sisters, and earnestly solicited their prayers. Just so I would count the friends of the seminary who prayed for its endowment as upon the agents who worked for its endowment. It is an old saying that “Satan trembles when he sees the weakest saint upon his knees.”

The key passage of this section is as follows (Revelation 8:3-5) : “And another angel came and stood over the altar” – that means not the brazen altar of sacrifice, but the golden altar of incense “having a golden censer, and there was given unto him much incense that he should offer it with the prayers of all the saints upon the golden altar which was before the throne. And the smoke of the incense which came with the prayers of the saints ascended up before God out of the angel’s hand. And the angel taketh censer and he filled it with the fire of the altar and cast it upon the earth: and there followed thunders and voices and lightnings and an earthquake.”

A Bible student should understand the relative positions and distinctive purposes of the brazen altar and the golden altar. The first was in the outer court and for sacrifices. The other was in the holy place, and was for prayer based on the preceding sacrifice. Hence, the prayer “for Christ’s sake” – that is because he died for us. Prayer without expiation has no foundation.

It is evident from this key passage that what the trumpets will tell us about comes as a response to prayers offered to God, and when that censer is emptied upon the earth, then the trumpets begin to sound, each trumpet a response to prayers.

Let the reader note that this angel standing over the golden altar with the golden censer, which holds the incense, representing prayers on earth coming up before God in heaven, is the great high priest Jesus Christ himself, the angel of the covenant. Throughout the Old Testament the offering of incense before the mercy seat symbolizes prayers offered in the outer court. David says: “Let the lifting up of my hands be as the incense.” And when the high priest entered into the holy of holies he carried that golden censer filled with frankincense, and kindled it with a coal from the brazen altar, and as it kindled the smoke went up in a fragrant cloud; it represented the prayers ascending to God. You are to understand that the prayers are uttered on earth, but this is a picture of their presentation in heaven – the reception accorded these petitions and the responses given, and you must distinguish between the martyr cry of the last lesson and these prayers here. That martyr cry was for a single thing – it came from martyrs only. These are the prayers of all God’s people continually going up.

Now, seven angels stood, each with a trumpet, prepared to sound just as the high priest, having offered these prayers poured out on the earth coals of fire from the altar. The first angel sounded (Revelation 8:7): “And there followed hail and fire, mingled with blood, and they were cast upon the earth, and a third part of the earth was burned up, and a third part of the trees was burned up, and all the green grass was burned up.” In telling you what I conceive to be the meaning of these seven trumpets I speak with great diffidence – I will not be as dogmatic about it as I am about some of my interpretations. The wisest men and the greatest scholars on the earth may well differ in interpreting some of the imagery of this wonderful book. I am satisfied in my own mind, however, that I am giving you the true meaning.

In order, then, to get at the meaning of this first trumpet you are to ask: What, or who, was the great enemy in John’s time oppressing the church? It was pagan Rome – that fourth great world empire that Daniel saw, and that was terrible. At this particular time, Rome had commenced a worldwide persecution of the Christians; John himself was in exile on account of it, and not a church in the empire was safe from its cruel hands. Now, of course, the Christians prayed about that; they could not help it. And the first trumpet sounded. I understand that first trumpet to mean the judgment upon the Roman Empire – the pagan Roman Empire – that caused its decline.

And thus judgment means the invasion of nations from the North; Scandinavia, Germany, and beyond the Danube even from the shores of the Baltic – out of their forests came the untamed Germans and Goths, and across the Danube came the Vandals and Huns. Gibbon, in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, shows how the invasion of these hordes from the German forests and across the Danube broke over all the boundaries of the Roman power, and carried their wasting influence with fire and sword into Italy itself. That is the meaning of the first trumpet.

Revelation 8:8 : “And the second angel sounded, and as it were, a great mountain burning with fire was cast into the sea, and the third part of the sea became blood, and there died a third part of the creatures that were in the sea, even them that had life, and a third part of the ships were destroyed.” Now, a mountain in Revelation means a city, and near to the city of Rome was that great volcano, Vesuvius, whose eruptions, when they poured into the sea have attracted the attention of the world. Pompeii and Herculaneum, two cities, were buried under one of these eruptions (A.D. 79). So this second trumpet signifies the downfall of the state of Rome itself. The first trumpet prepared for it; the second trumpet strikes at the Roman Empire in its heart and center. Dr. Lyman Beecher says it took Rome 300 years to die, and Gibbon, as he writes about the decline, writes also about the fall – the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

I shall not attempt here to give the number or order of the irruptions of Northern barbarians that first shattered and then completely wrecked imperial Rome. That empire, according to the prophecy of Daniel, divided into ten kingdoms. But, anyhow, this great civilization that built roads that are good today, and walls that stand today, and whose iron organization held the whole civilized world in its sway, went down at last because poor women and children and fathers, Christians, prayed.

The third angel sounded, “and there fell from heaven a great star, burning as a torch, and it fell upon a third part of the rivers and of the fountains of waters, and the name of the star is called Wormwood; a third part of the waters became wormwood and many men died of the waters because they were made bitter.” That word “torch” really means a lamp – “There fell from heaven a great star, burning as a lamp.” A lamp in this book stands for a church, and hence the meaning of this passage is that one of the luminaries that God intended for enlightening the world became apostate, this is the symbol of the paganized church, which succeeded pagan Rome, and hence after that it was called the “Holy Roman Empire.” In a later revelation we will find similar reference (Revelation 13:3) where, when the pagan head of the empire was wounded unto death, it was healed by an ecclesiastical head.

You will notice its effect upon the fountains and the rivers, that this apostasy poisoned the sources of life – the very sources of thought and reason and life among the people. The imagery of casting wormwood into water which all must drink is very striking. It reverses the miracle of Moses, who cast a tree into the bitter waters and made them sweet (Exodus 15:23-25). There was great glorification when Constantine, the Roman emperor, united the church and state, and gradually the state became subordinate to the church. And when the state perished, the church survived, claiming that it held both ecclesiastical and civil swords. The Pope today demands that nations send their ambassadors to him, because of his claim to be a civil as well as ecclesiastical ruler. For quite a while there were many papal states – that is, states under the Pope, who was as much their ruler as the English king is the ruler over England; Lombardy, Venice, Tuscany, and quite a number of others, and that civil power was exercised more or less until Garibaldi arose, and until Victor Emmanuel established a free church in a free state – that is, he separated the civil from the ecclesiastical power.

The fourth angel sounded, “and a third part of the sun was smitten, and a third part of the moon, and a third part of the stars, and that a third part of them should be darkened, and the day should not shine for a third part of it, and the night in like manner.” What does that mean? That following the establishment of the apostasy of the Romish church, the sources of light were eclipsed and the dark ages followed. Our book commences with luminaries – sun, stars, lamps, appointed to lighten the world. But apostate churches and preachers lose their shining power. Here he is not referring to the material sun, moon, and stars, they are symbols. The dark ages, so thoroughly known in history, followed the establishment of the papacy as a Holy Roman Empire.

There were hundreds and thousands of nominal churches and nominal preachers, but the preachers did not preach the gospel, and these socalled churches did not shine; the light that was in them was darkness. The virgin Mary supplanted Christ, and so the sun of chapter I was darkened. Ordinances were fearfully perverted and sacraments added. The saddest volumes of the annals of time that I read today are the volumes that tell about the dark ages following this assumption of power by the papacy.

I read Revelation 8:13 : “And I saw and heard an eagle” – or as some versions, and better ones, have it, an “angel” – flying in mid-heaven, saying with a great voice: Woe, Woe, Woe" – that is, three woes – “for them that dwell on the earth by reason of the voice of the trumpet of the three angels that are yet to sound.” This is a prelude to the second group – a group of three, – distinguished by a “woe” for each trumpet. It means that when a perverted ecclesiasticism, such as the papacy was, dominates the world, woes of incalculable horror are sure to follow. So we note the next (Revelation 9:1): “And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star from heaven fallen unto earth”, now, don’t read that: “I saw a star falling unto the earth,” that is not what it says; that star used to belong to heaven, but it was already fallen when seen here. Satan was once called Lucifer – that means brightness of the morning, and he is so styled in the Old Testament before his downfall. He is the fallen star here, and as the church lights are eclipsed through apostasy, so this apostate angel. He will get in a subtle, malicious piece of work here, as we will see, “And there was given to him the key of the pit of the abyss” – you might say the key to hell itself – “and he opened the pit of the abyss, and there went up smoke out of the pit as the smoke of a great furnace, and the sun was darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.

And out of the smoke of the pit came forth locusts upon the earth, and power was given them as scorpions of the earth have power, and it was said unto them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree, but only [notice whom they are to hurt] but only such men as have not the seal of God on their foreheads; and it was given them that they should not kill them, but that they should be tormented five months.” Any one who has studied the history of the locusts knows that the locust period is five months. But if we follow the numbers of Revelation we will find that every day represents a year. The five months, therefore, would represent about 150 years, though the five months are put in here because they correspond to the locust period. “And their torment was as the torment of scorpions when it striketh a man. And in these days men would seek death but should in no wise find it, and they shall desire to die and death fleeth from them. And the shapes of the locusts were like unto a horse prepared for war, and upon their heads crowns like unto gold; their faces were as man’s face; they had hair as the hair of a woman; their teeth were as the teeth of lions; and they had breastplates, as it were, of iron, and the sound of their wings was as of the sound of chariots of many horses rushing to war, and they had tails like unto the scorpion and stung, and in their tails was their power to hurt men five months. They had over them as a king the angel of the abyss; his name in Hebrew is Abaddon, and in the Greek Apollyon, which means destroyer” – which also means the devil.

The special points to note here are:

1. This hell smoke darkened the sun and the air. That is, by darkening the atmosphere, the medium through which sunlight shines on the earth, the sun could not be seen. See account in Genesis I, where the heavenly luminaries, though existing, do not appear until the atmosphere is created. As in this book, the spiritual lights are Christ, the churches, and the pastors. Any smoke the devil may send will prevent the earth from being illumined by them.

2. That the haze of this smoke generates tormentors, compared to locusts.

3. That those tormented are not the children of light, but the children of darkness. They hurt not Christians, but torment infidels and atheists.

4. The connection between a corrupt ecclesiasticism and atheism. The latter follows the former as a natural result.

5. The meaning of the locusts. When we were in the Old Testament, in the prophecy of Joel, under the imagery of locusts a great evil was symbolically presented. And in this symbolic language you should not look for real locusts, but what they symbolize. The devil is their king; they come out of hell itself. It is not their purpose to kill men, but to torment them. They are not allowed to torment a Christian, for he has light; but only those who by the smoke are hindered from seeing the light; those that have not the seal of God on their foreheads. Whatever these tormentors are, they trouble only infidels and atheists.

Some interpreters very foolishly construed these locusts to represent the Saracens or Mohammedans, but when the Saracens struck they killed and the chief objects of their vengeance were the Christian nations. They did not seek so much to torment as to kill, and so that interpretation fails to fit the case. What, then, is the thought symbolically presented in this cloud of locusts that torment men who were not Christians? My answer is, a corrupt ecclesiasticism, especially when united with the state, breeds atheism and theism breeds restlessness and torment. It looses the tiger. The Jews have a proverb: When the tale of brick is doubled then comes Moses.

It is also a proverb: Given the ecclesiastical corruption in France – then comes Voltaire. Given Voltaire and then the tiger is loosed. The testimony is abundant that the Romanist hierarchy became corrupt from Pope to priest. Monasteries and nunneries were as cages of unclean birds. In the interest of morality nations suppressed them. See the history of them in England.

The priests had no gospel. The churches and cathedrals were full of idolatry. When men go to church to find Christ and see only the virgin Mary; when preachers are substituted by priests; the gospel exchanged for ritualism; there comes in a revulsion of public sentiment from the Christian religion, embodied in the only form they see it. Infidelity in France, voiced by Voltaire; rationalism in Germany, or in England led by Bolingbroke, Hume, and Taylor, in America by Paine and Ingersoll – all of it is a rebound from corrupt ecclesiasticism. All sacred things become profane; they are without God and hope in the world.

Now we are coming to the locusts. Take God away from man – power away from prayer, no church to visit, no sermons to hear, turned away from all supernaturalism, the ship of life hails from no port and is bound to none, drifts on uncharted seas without helm or compass, at the mercy of winds and tides and sunken reefs; when all standards of authority are lost, when no solution of life’s problems can be found in the conflicting vagaries of philosophy – the mind preys on itself. Restlessness and discontent pervade the masses. Then swarm those tormenting locusts of atheism. There were certainly in dark ages, and even later, periods of awful horror. Maniacs filled the forests.

All law was gone. Freebooters, banditti, free companies, roved at their own will and nowhere were peace and safety. It was a time of torment. The devil delighted to torment the very people he had beguiled. He agreed with them that their church was bad, and suggested that they follow him. Such was the first woe.

The author adds: “Behold, there come yet two woes hereafter,” but it gives only one of them, as the woe of the seventh trumpet is reserved for the latter part of the book. Revelation 9:13 : “And the sixth angel sounded, and I heard a voice from the horns of the golden altar which is before God, and one saying to the sixth angel that had the trumpet: Loose the four angels that are bound at the great river Euphrates. And the four angels were loosed, that had been prepared for the hour, the day, the month and the year, that they should kill the third part of men. And the number of the armies of the horsemen was twice ten thousand times ten thousand: I heard the number of them [that means two hundred million]. And thus I saw the horses in the vision, and they that sat on them, having breastplates of fire and hyacinth and of brimstone: and the heads of the horses are as the heads of lions, and out of their mouths proceeded fire and smoke and brimstone. By these three plagues was the third part of man killed, by the fire, and the smoke and the brimstone, which proceeded out of their mouths.

For the power of the horses was in their mouths, and in their tails, for their tails are like unto serpents and have heads, and with them they hurt. And the rest of mankind, who were not killed by these plagues, repented not of the works of their hands, that they should not worship demons and idols of gold and of silver and of brass and of stone and of wood, which can neither see nor hear nor walk; and they repented not of their murders and their sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts.”

Now, I have twice in my life changed my own mind as to what is symbolized by that great army of horsemen, coming from the Euphrates, from over the east. I once thought that it symbolized the European wars commencing with Napoleon Bonaparte and lasting to the present time. But I do not now think that is right. There was a power in history that did come from the East, and it was an army of cavalry of uncounted numbers, and they did sweep over the fairest part of the earth, and particularly did they strike hard against apostate churches, both the Roman and the Greek Catholics. They were the Saracens. Mohammed, who was the founder of their religion, arose in the sixth century.

As it grew in power it swept over all Asia from the Euphrates to Constantinople, captured the Holy Land, all Asia Minor, including the territory of these seven churches, crossed the Bosphorus and the Balkan mountains to thunder at the gate of Vienna. They captured Greece and the eastern Mediterranean islands, captured North Africa, crossed the Straits of Gibraltar, and founded a kingdom in Spain, entered France and would have swept all Europe but for the disastrous defeat at Tours by Charles Martel. Against their strongholds in the Holy Land the Crusades of confederated Europe were broken. It is yet a great power, kindling today its fires of war in the Balkans. God used the Mohammedans to strike the apostate Greek Catholic and Roman Catholic churches. These, as I think, were the horses of the sixth trumpet, the second great woe.

1. What is the general meaning of the trumpets? And what is the key passage disclosing this meaning?

2. Where in tabernacle and Temple was the golden altar and what its relation to the brazen altar of sacrifice, and what did incense symbolize?

3. Who was the angel with the censer?

4. What great enemy at this time, by cruel and worldwide persecution, was driving Christians to prayer?

5. What, then, probably, the meaning of the first trumpet?

6. In this book what does a mountain symbolize?

7. What natural prodigy in Italy probably suggested the imagery of a volcano overturned in the sea?

8. What is, probably, the meaning of the second trumpet?

9. What is the meaning of a torch in Revelation 8:10?

10. When, a fallen luminary like a burning lamp, poisons the fountains and rivers, sources of life, making the waters bitter, and causing the death of many – what probably is meant by the third trumpet?

11. What miracle of Moses reversed the thought here?

12. What probably is the meaning of the fourth trumpet?

13. What is the meaning of the prelude to the second group of trumpets (Revelation 8:13)?

14. Who is the fallen star of Rev 9:1? Cite his Old Testament name and two names here.

15. What effect on the luminaries by this hell smoke? And how brought about?

16. What then, probably, the locusts?

17. What is probably the meaning of the sixth trumpet and second woe?