The seven trumpets: prayers answered, a world warned and still unrepentant

The seventh seal (8:1) opens not onto a final catastrophe but onto silence, and then onto a new series of seven. The trumpets come from the same altar where the prayers of the saints were gathered. In Israel's life trumpets were sounded for several purposes: at Sinai, when God appeared (Exodus 19:16); in war, as at Jericho, where seven priests with seven trumpets circled the city for seven days (Joshua 6); at festivals; and as a warning of the day of the LORD (Joel 2:1; Zephaniah 1:14-16). Trumpets in Revelation combine warning and war.

The pattern of judgment draws on the plagues of Egypt, in which God's judgments on a proud empire freed a people who were oppressed. The first hearers were a minority under a power that regarded itself as eternal, and the plagues recalled that God has humbled such powers before. At the same time the trumpets strike only 'a third', a limit that marks them as warnings and not the final end, in contrast to the bowls that follow in chapter 16.

These chapters are the most vivid in the book and the easiest to misread by taking each image as a photograph. Two rules help.

• First, trace each image to its source: the plagues of Egypt, the trumpets of Joshua 6, the locusts of Joel 1 and 2, the blazing mountain and falling star of the prophets' language for judgment.
• Second, observe how the series is built.
• The first four trumpets form a group of their own, as did the first four seals, and each strikes a third of its object.
• The last three are called woes. The numbers, three and a half and a third, are symbolic and fractional and are never completed here.

The approaches divide as follows. Preterists, such as Kenneth Gentry, read the trumpets as judgments on first-century Israel and Rome in the years of the Jewish War, and the plagues as God's reply to the persecution of the church. Their strongest argument is the repeated Exodus pattern, in which judgment falls on those who persecute his people. Historicists, such as Edward Bishop Elliott and many Reformation writers, identified the first four trumpets with the barbarian invasions of the Roman Empire, the fifth with the rise of Islam and the sixth with the Ottoman Turks. Their strongest argument is that the Euphrates is the border from which invaders came and that the events match in order and scale. Idealists, such as William Hendriksen and G. K. Beale, read the trumpets as repeated warnings through the whole age, in which God sounds alarm against unrepentant humanity while protecting his people. Their strongest argument is that the seals, trumpets and bowls seem to describe the same conflict from successive angles, each series ending at the end. Futurists, such as John Walvoord and, with qualifications, George Eldon Ladd, read the trumpets as events in a future tribulation, some taking the locusts and the army literally and some taking them as demonic. Their strongest argument is that the judgments are described as catastrophic in a way no earlier period has seen. Some popular futurist writers have proposed modern military weapons for the locusts and the horses, a suggestion that careful scholars on all sides regard with caution.

A related question is whether the trumpets follow the seals (a strict sequence) or overlap them (recapitulation). Many futurists hold the first, and Beale and Hendriksen hold the second. The millennial views bear little on this passage, since the trumpets come before chapter 20, but they affect the larger scheme. Our understanding is that the passage itself identifies its purposes: it answers the prayers of the saints (8:3-5), it limits the harm to a third, it exempts those sealed with God's mark (9:4), and it exposes the world's refusal to repent (9:20-21). These points hold under every reading.

Chapter 8, verses 1 to 6. When the Lamb opens the seventh seal, there is 'silence in heaven for about half an hour'. Silence before the LORD's action is a prophetic sign (Habakkuk 2:20; Zephaniah 1:7). Seven angels receive seven trumpets. Another angel stands at the altar with a golden censer and 'much incense, along with the prayers of all the saints'. The prayers of 5:8 and the cry of 6:10 are before God, and the incense rises. Then the angel fills the censer with altar fire and throws it to earth, and thunder, lightning and earthquake follow. The answer to the prayers is judgment. The sequence tells the churches that their prayers move the events of history.

Verses 7 to 12.

• The first trumpet brings hail and fire mixed with blood, striking a third of earth, trees and grass; compare the seventh plague, hail and fire (Exodus 9:23-25).
• The second brings a burning mountain thrown into the sea, and a third of the sea turns to blood, sea creatures die and ships are destroyed; compare Exodus 7:20-21.
• The third brings a star named Wormwood on rivers and springs: a third of the waters turn bitter, and many die. Wormwood is a bitter plant used in Jeremiah 9:15 and 23:15 as a figure for God's judgment on a faithless people.
• The fourth strikes a third of sun, moon and stars with darkness, like the ninth plague (Exodus 10:21-23). Together the four undo parts of the ordered creation: land, sea, fresh water and the lights of the sky.

Chapter 8:13

An eagle (some manuscripts read 'angel') flies in mid-heaven and cries 'Woe! Woe! Woe to those who dwell on the earth'. The phrase 'those who dwell on the earth' is used in the book for the settled opposition to God.

Chapter 9, verses 1 to 12.

• The fifth trumpet shows a star that had fallen from heaven and was given the key to the pit of the Abyss. The 'star' is a personal being, most likely an angel, and some identify him with Satan, though the text calls him a star and says that the key was given to him, so he acts under permission. Christ alone holds the keys of death and Hades (1:18). From the pit rises smoke and a swarm of locusts, with the power of scorpions, who are told not to harm vegetation but only those who 'did not have the seal of God on their foreheads'. The sealed are exempt (7:3). They may torment for five months, about the span of the locust season, but not kill. The description draws on Joel 1 and 2, where a locust plague is a day-of-the-LORD army: horses prepared for battle, a noise of chariots (Joel 2:4-5). In Exodus 10 locusts were an Egyptian plague. The king of the locusts is 'the angel of the Abyss', named Abaddon in Hebrew (destruction; Job 26:6; Proverbs 15:11) and Apollyon in Greek (destroyer). Some propose a play on the name of Apollo, a god honoured by Roman emperors, though this is uncertain.
• The first woe is passed.

Verses 13 to 21. A voice from the four horns of the golden altar, the same altar as the prayers, commands the release of four angels bound at the Euphrates. The Euphrates was the boundary of the Roman Empire to the east, beyond which lay the Parthians, and in the prophets invaders came from beyond the river (Isaiah 8:7; Jeremiah 46). The angels are prepared for 'this hour and day and month and year', a precise time in God's plan. They lead an army of 'two hundred million' (literally twice ten thousand times ten thousand, a vast figure). The horses breathe fire, smoke and sulfur, the elements of Sodom's destruction (Genesis 19:24), and a third of mankind dies. The restraint of the earlier trumpets remains: it is a third.

The chapter ends with its point. The survivors 'did not repent of the works of their hands'. They go on worshipping demons and idols, 'which cannot see or hear or walk' (Psalm 115:4-7; Daniel 5:23), and do not repent of murder, sorcery, sexual immorality and theft. The trumpets are intended to bring people to repentance, and they do not.

All the main readings agree on what the trumpets teach about God. He hears the prayers of his people and answers them, even if the answer is judgment. Judgment on a rebellious world is real, and it comes in stages that carry a warning. It falls on the created order that human sin has distorted, as in the plagues of Egypt and the prophets' oracles. Its limits are set by God ('a third', 'five months', the sealed exempt). The powers of the Abyss act only as permitted. And the human response is stubborn: even after the judgments the survivors persist in idolatry and in the violence, sorcery, immorality and theft that follow from it. These statements hold for preterist, historicist, idealist and futurist readers alike.

The trumpets contribute to the biblical account of the end by showing that judgment comes with mercy as long as time remains. The prophets taught that God warns before he strikes (Amos 4:6-11), and Paul says that God's kindness is meant to lead to repentance (Romans 2:4). The long delay of the end is explained in the same way in 2 Peter 3:9. The same chapter that sets out the trumpets also shows that the end has not yet come: the seventh trumpet does not sound until 11:15. In the language of eschatology, the church lives between the first and the final trumpet, in a period of warning. The reality of hardened hearts does not cancel God's purposes. It underlines why a new creation and a final judgment are required.

The debated matters are the sequence of the series, the literal or symbolic force of the images, and the identification of the fifth and sixth trumpets. Historicists have found precise events, preterists have found them in the first century, futurists look to the future, and idealists see patterns. Each reading has to explain the same features of the text: the Exodus pattern, the limiting fractions, the protection of the sealed and the unrepentant survivors. Where those features are kept in view, the readings are closer in their message than in their maps.

Christ is not named in these chapters, but he is the Lamb who opened the seventh seal, and the trumpets issue from his act. The altar and the incense are the setting of his intercession: the prayers rise 'before God from the hand of the angel' (8:4), and Hebrews 7:25 and Romans 8:34 teach that Christ intercedes for his people. The limits on the powers of the Abyss are part of his authority, since he alone holds the keys of death and Hades (1:18), and the power of the star and the angel of the Abyss is borrowed. In the Gospels, Jesus cast out demons and silenced the Legion that asked not to be sent to the Abyss (Luke 8:31).

The Exodus background supports a Christological reading. The plagues of Egypt freed a people from slavery, and the New Testament sees the redemption of the Lamb as the greater Exodus (Luke 9:31; 1 Corinthians 5:7). The trumpets repeat the plagues on a world that, like Pharaoh, refuses to let God's people go and refuses to repent. The seal on the foreheads, the mark of the Lamb's ownership, is what protects from the locusts, as the blood marked Israel's doors. The church is again the people redeemed by his blood, and the same blood that marks it protects it.