article15

§9 Angelic Trumpets Sound Six Judgments of God (Rev. 8:6–9:21)

8:6 / The significance of the seven trumpets has been variously appraised (Beasley-Murray, Revelation, pp. 152–56). According to John’s Bible (OT), Israel’s liturgical trumpets were sounded for a variety of reasons. They were used to convene the worshiping community (Num. 10:3), to begin pilgrimages (Num. 10:5), to call warriors for war (Num. 10:9), to celebrate the sacred feasts (Num. 10:10), to install new kings (1 Kings 1:34), and to summon Israel to repentance and renewal (Jer. 4:5). Seven trumpets were also used to destroy Jericho (Josh. 6:4, 6, 8) and to establish Israel in God’s promised land. In fact, Caird thinks John has this story in mind when writing down this vision because the ark appears upon the blowing of the seventh trumpet (Rev. 11:19; cf. Josh. 6:4; Caird, Revelation, pp. 109–11). While John may well have thought of one or all these OT references to trumpets, primary significance should be given to the number of trumpets, seven, indicating that the trumpets are put to an eschatological use: they sound the fulfillment of God’s promises of shalom for a restored Israel and of great wrath for God’s enemies.

This interpretation is in keeping with the immediate context. Since John finds the seven angels in the vision of the seventh seal, the interpreter should view the vision of trumpet judgments as continuing the vision of seal judgments. This continuity is not chronological but theological; and the liturgical pause of the seventh seal makes the very theological point contained in the vision of trumpet plagues: the exaltation of the slain Lamb announces God’s triumph over evil and vindicates God’s lordship over all things. It is this conviction that the scroll’s writing asserts; and now, with the breaking of its final seal, God’s scroll is laid fully open and the validity of the church’s conviction about God’s reign becomes even clearer with every fanfare of the angels’ trumpets.

8:7–12 / The natural disasters signaled by the first four trumpets are restricted to a third of the earth … sea … springs of water … and sky—a significant part of the earth but not even most of it. Military strategists would call this a “survivable” result; the plagues may cause global chaos but not destruction. God’s exaltation of Christ does not issue in a devastating, final judgment of evil powers and human sin; that awaits Christ’s return. Rather, when God says “No!” to sin on Christ’s cross, God intends also to say “Yes!” to all humanity, and to bid all, especially the disobedient church, to repent (cf. Rev. 22:11). God’s first and last word is “Yes,” and that stands at the center of John’s Gospel.

Several commentators have noted that this part of John’s vision alludes to the plagues of the Exodus tradition. The imagery of hail and fire mixed with blood, which resulted when the first angel sounded his trumpet, echoes the seventh plague on Egypt (cf. Exod. 9:13–35). With the second trumpet the sea turns to blood, reminding the reader of the plague of blood (cf. Exod. 7:20–21). The vision moves from salt seawater to the springs of fresh water. The star Wormwood (cf. Jer. 9:15) fell from the sky to poison drinking water, perhaps echoing the grumbling Israel at Marah (cf. Exod. 15:23). This may convey a more pointed rebuke to the disobedient church (cf. Caird, Revelation, pp. 114–15). The fourth trumpet triggers a catastrophe which undeniably recalls the seventh Egyptian plague (cf. Exod. 10:21–23), when the sun was struck, and … moon, and … stars so that a third of the day was without light, and also … the night—the “darkness” of the creator’s judgment of a fallen creation (cf. Gen. 1:3–5).

Thus, John recognizes the vision of the trumpets by the biblical story of the Egyptian plagues. In doing so, he offers his readers a biblical background by which to better understand how the vision of trumpets relates to their own situation. According to the OT story of Israel’s exodus from Egypt, the purpose of the plagues was to assert the lordship of God over the world’s most powerful ruler, the Egyptian Pharaoh. The plagues were a concrete demonstration of divine authority that intended to convince the Lord’s people of God’s desire to lead them to a promised land more plentiful than Egypt. Recall also from Revelation 2–3 that the unfaithfulness of John’s audience is due in large measure to cultural pressures, which molded and shaped Israel into a people more like Egypt (i.e., Rome) than the kingdom of priests “made” by the Lamb (cf. Rev. 5:9–10). The biblical and societal contexts in which John’s believing audiences lived, then, interpret the significance of these trumpets: the various “Pharaohs” who rule over the anti-Christian kingdom in John’s world stand condemned, while the unresponsive believers found among the seven congregations, who lack devotion to God, are rebuked like the grumbling, unfaithful Israel of old.

This passage provides a good illustration of the dual role of many of John’s key symbols. Images used here to describe destruction are employed elsewhere of the redemptive Lamb. The purpose of this literary device is twofold. First, John intends to convey an apocalyptic understanding of salvation that locates all things—good and bad—under God’s sovereign plans for creation. Most noteworthy in this regard is blood, which is the focal point of the first two trumpet plagues (8:7–8), but which also symbolizes the death of Christ that purchased people from evil’s marketplace and placed them in God’s kingdom where they can serve the Lord rather than sin (cf. Rev. 5:9–10). The image of sun is used of the exalted Christ, whose “face was like the sun shining” (1:16), and also here as an object of divine judgment (8:12). The regnant Christ is called the “Morning star” (22:16; cf. 2:28), but another great star, an angel called Wormwood, is God’s current agent of destruction (8:10–11). And the “springs of living water,” to which the shepherding Lamb leads the eschatological sheep of God (7:17), are now poisoned by Wormwood (8:10–11).

Second, the multivalence of these symbols, which concentrate Revelation’s redemption-destruction dualisms, calls attention to the reversal motif of apocalypticism. The landmarks of a fallen creation are also the marks of a new creation in which evil is turned upside down at the triumph of God’s salvation through the Lamb.

8:13 / The portentous words of an eagle, spoken from the highest point in the heavens, prepare the seer for the blasts of the next two trumpets, which sound ominous fanfares to divine judgments against the inhabitants of earth far worse than the preceding four. In this regard, it is best to understand this verse as a preface to chapter 9 rather than as the conclusion to chapter 8.

Caird suggests two possible meanings of the eagle (Caird, Revelation, p. 117). First, it echoes God’s words to Moses on Sinai (Exod. 19:4) and continues the Exodus typology. If this is true, then the alarm of Woe! Woe! Woe! would sound the messianic woes that accompany the church’s pilgrimage to its promised shalom. Second, the word translated eagle could be translated “vulture” (cf. Luke 17:37), symbolic of the earth in the throes of death. In this light, the triad of woes would again refer to the messianic woes; the point of reference, however, is the fallen world whose evils justify God’s judgment against it.

The apocalyptic significance of this and other triads is symbolic: like John’s use of sevens, the eagle’s message conveys a sense of completion such that divine judgment accords with divine ordination. In this sense, the eagle’s triad of woes refers not only to the tribulation characteristic of the present age but to the divine plan that ordains and interprets it. It does not appear, however, that John correlates the messianic woes to each of the next three trumpet judgments, since the third woe is not disclosed at the blast of the seventh trumpet (cf. 11:14) which initiates, in any case, the concluding celebration of Christ’s coronation in heaven (11:15–18). According to the teaching of Jesus, these woes both begin and end with his triumph—in the empty tomb and at his parousia (cf. Matt. 24:4–31). In this light, then, we read the first two woes as referring to the fifth and sixth trumpet plagues and locate them at Christ’s exaltation; that is, the period of tribulation in salvation’s history commences with Christ’s death and exaltation. The third woe refers to the present spiritual crisis, concentrated especially in chapters 12 and 13, that continues to confront the church until history’s climactic moment, the return of Christ.

9:1–4 / At the sound of the fifth trumpet, a star that had fallen from the sky to the earth … was given the key to the shaft of the Abyss. The nature of the descending star is debated, although most modern scholars agree that it is angelic. Like that great angel of destruction, “Wormwood” (8:10–11), this angelic star also comes from heaven on a mission of destruction. Its mission is apparently approved by God since it is given the key, which suggests divine sanction (cf. Matt. 16:19; Rev. 3:7). There is a certain interplay between this angel’s role in opening up the Abyss to release its terrors, and that of the angel who accompanies Christ at his return to lock the agents of terror back up (Rev. 20:1; cf. 1 Enoch 19:1; 20:2, where the angel is identified as Uriel). Both angels serve the redemptive interests of a sovereign God; both are sent to carry out divinely ordained tasks—one which concerns God’s judgment upon evil and the other God’s redemption from evil, and one which comes at the beginning of the last days and the other at its consummation.

Caird is no doubt correct to understand that this angelic star is responsible for those human institutions—social, political, economic and religious—which promote evil and destroy creation and creature alike. Thus, while the believing community dwells on the margins of the world order, “in the world yet not an institution of it,” it is empowered by the sevenfold Paraclete that comes from the exalted Lamb to teach and to comfort. The church is not harmed by the evils released from the Abyss; they “pass over” those who have the seal of God on their foreheads, corrupting only those who do not.

The key given to the angelic star unlocks the shaft leading down to a bottomless pit, called the Abyss. The location of this pit is important but for theological rather than geographical reasons. According to ancient mythology (no doubt John’s cipher in understanding what he envisioned) the Abyss was located below the earth and was the invisible dwelling place of evil powers, such as Tiamaet and Leviathan, and their agents of evil and death (cf. 1 Enoch 18:12–16; 21:7–10; 108:3–6). It is a place of disorder and chaos, from where forces of death and darkness come to wreak their special kind of havoc. Hence, when the angel opened the Abyss, smoke rose from it like the smoke from a gigantic furnace. Through this subterranean smokestack, agents of terror were released onto earth, promoting human sinfulness and natural catastrophes—that is, chaos in the physical world (cf. James 3:15–16).

In John’s vision, therefore, he sees locusts coming out of the smokestack and upon the earth. Because they are evil agents from a spiritual world, they do not act like locusts of the natural world. In fact, they ignore the grass of the earth or any plant or tree and are ironically given power like that of scorpions to harm only those destined for their own domain—the unbelieving world. God’s people are excluded from the evils of the trumpet plagues, because according to Johannine teaching “the evil one cannot harm anyone born of God” (1 John 5:18).

9:5–6 / Throughout his vision of the trumpet plagues, John has indicated that the devastation of God’s judgment is not yet complete. Typically, one third of the earth is touched and destroyed. This sense of an incomplete judgment conveys God’s admonition: there is still time for lost humanity to repent and turn to God before the end comes and total destruction with it (cf. 2 Pet. 3:9). The marauding locusts, therefore, were not given power to kill, but only to torture (the unbelievers) for five months. The end is not yet here; a warning is given to repent before it is too late.

The meaning of five months is variously understood. Some commentators have suggested this period of time refers to the locust’s life cycle. This interpretation mixes together the symbolical locusts with biological ones. While we find John mixing the symbolic and real worlds elsewhere in Revelation, the present phrase is best read for its symbolic value, since elsewhere Scripture uses “five” to refer to the “short-term” (cf. Morris, Revelation, p. 126). In this sense, then, the reign of locusts does not exact fatal or ultimate consequences—which may explain John’s next observation that people suffered agony … like that of a sting of a scorpion when it strikes a man. Their work is nasty but temporary.

In fact, from the locusts’ perspective, their mission is to torture people; from humanity’s perspective, their experience is sheer agony. In a poetic couplet, John speaks of humanity’s response to those days, when men will seek death, but will not find it/when they will long to die, but death will elude them. Quite possibly, John interprets what he sees by Job’s lament of his birth which this echoes (cf. Job 3:21). Thus, the theological questions raised by Job’s response to his suffering might suggest another way of understanding this trumpet plague. Job felt persecuted by God. If suffering be persecution by God, then life itself is without meaning. Although Job is a righteous man, he misunderstood his suffering. Its purpose was to disclose a reigning God in control of humanity’s existence. The outcome in Job’s case, of course, is that he realized his limitations and acknowledged that a sovereign God places limits around human life and that human suffering reflects those very real limitations.

John’s adaptation of Job’s story to his own visionary situation clarifies the ultimate purpose of the suffering of humanity, which is to bring it to repentance (Morris, Revelation, pp. 125–26). The plagues are symbolic of limits that God places upon the unredeemed, who are without the transforming power of God’s saving grace. That sinful humankind does not repent (cf. Rev. 9:20–21) only indicates the firm hold evil has on the world order.

9:7–11 / The recapitulation of episodes serves a rhetorical rather than a chronological purpose; it provides a second, often closer look at what is happening in order to clarify its significance. In this regard, John changes the action of the episode from aorist (9:3, 5) to present (9:10; incorrectly translated by NIV) in describing the locusts’ scorpion-like appearance. No doubt this shift of tense indicates that “the scene becomes increasingly vivid to him” (Morris, Revelation, p. 127). As John looks again at the visionary scene before him, he recognizes the locusts to be warriors rather than torturers: they looked like horses prepared for battle. Because of this second look, he recognizes their mission to be more like the prophet Joel than Job. In Joel’s two visions of the eschatological locusts (1:2–12; 2:1–11), they are also likened to war horses (cf. 2:4), rushing into battle (cf. 2:5), and as having lion’s teeth (cf. 1:6). Joel reports that at sight of them, “the nations are in anguish” (2:6; cf. Rev. 9:10) because they have left the “garden of Eden” as a desert wasteland (cf. 2:3).

In the context of Joel’s use of the plague typology, the images of natural devastation portray the spiritual condition of God’s faithless people (1:13–20; 2:12–17). Repentance is required of them if they are to enter into the day of the Lord’s eschatological salvation (cf. 2:18–32). John’s allusion to this prophetic tradition, so critical in early Christian preaching (cf. Acts 2:14–21), is once again centered by the deeper-logic of his message: the purpose of suffering is repentance and ultimately the future fruit of God’s salvation.

John no doubt is aware that Joel’s prophecy was first given to a people struggling to live for God in an anti-God world. Their two situations are further similar in that, like Joel, John is vitally concerned that the faithless members of his Israel repent. In both cases, disobedience jeopardizes their future entrance into God’s new “garden of Eden” on the day of the Lord.

John returns to Job to interpret the significance of his vision of the angelic ruler who presides over the Abyss, whose name in Hebrew is Abaddon, and in Greek, Apollyon. Abaddon means “Destroyer” in Hebrew and personifies the verbal root, “to destroy.” The word is used as a synonym for “death” in Job 26:6 (cf. 28:22; Ps. 88:11) for obvious reasons. However, the Greek “equivalent,” Apollyon, does not actually transliterate the Hebrew name, even though it approximates the Greek root for “destroy,” apollymi, also translated “perish” (cf. John 3:16!).

Even so, the reasons for mentioning the angel’s name remain unclear. Most modern commentators think that John wished to connect the angelic “Apollyon” (and the locust plague) to the Greek deity, Apollo, who was followed by the same Caesars guilty of persecuting the church (cf. Krodel, Revelation, pp. 203–4). Domitian, for example, believed himself to be the incarnation of Apollo, leading Beasley-Murray to conclude: “(John’s) last word about the fifth trumpet was a master stroke of irony: the destructive host of hell had as its king the emperor of Rome!” (Revelation, pp. 162–63).

9:12 / Although the seer claims that the first woe is past, the reader is not clear which field John is now viewing when adding this footnote to his vision of the fifth trumpet plague. Is he recounting the prior visionary episode, which has now been concluded? Or is he saying that the historical reality which the first woe infers has passed? Because John’s vision is not to be construed chronologically, he probably has the fifth plague in view, and the reader is now prepared for the blast of the sixth eschatological trumpet and John’s vision of the second woe.

9:13–15 / At the sounding of the sixth trumpet the seer returns to the golden altar that is before God (cf. 6:9–10; 8:3), which is a place for worship and prayer. Rather than assuming, as most do, that the golden altar presumes that prayers are once again offered for vindication by divine judgment, we prefer to understand this symbol of true worship in contrast to the subsequent images of idolatry (9:20–21) as the essential conflict of the current cosmic battle between God and the Evil One. This contrast further brackets and interprets the significance of the second woe that is sandwiched between the images of worship and idolatry: idolatry is nothing more than the foolish rejection of God, who alone can restore people back to wholeness. Again and again John reminds his readers that rebellion against God is self-destructive. If God’s chief desire is to restore humanity, and to rebel against God is to repel God’s chief desires, then to sin is to forsake the spiritual powers of personal transformation.

John heard a voice coming from the horns of the golden altar, probably angelic and certainly sanctioned by God, which gave instructions to release the four angels … at the great river Euphrates. This group of four angels is not the same as that which earlier had held back “the four winds of the earth” (7:1). Rather these four angels … are bound, suggesting to some commentators that they are evil and experts in the art of destruction to which they are now called by God. Their captivity, however, is not the result of prior evils; rather, they had been kept … and were released to kill a third of mankind. The passive voice of the verbs John employs presumes that these angels are bound by God who has kept and now releases them for this very hour and the redemptive task at stake.

For biblical writers, geographical places hold theological meaning. For John and his first audience, the river Euphrates where the four angels will mount for their attack symbolizes two realities. First, it symbolizes a vulnerable Roman Empire. Beyond the river lay the Parthian Empire and the world’s finest fighting cavalry. They had thrashed Roman armies twice in recent memory, once at Carrhae in 53 B.C. and again at Vologeses in A.D. 62, and they were not defeated by Rome until A.D. 116, two decades after John’s Revelation was written and first read. The renowned Parthian skill of shooting arrows while on horseback and the snake-like tails on their horses might have helped John describe what he saw; however, this supernatural cavalry led by the four angels would suggest an even greater military presence than found in Parthia, which will surely bring the mighty Rome to its knees.

Second, the Euphrates is used in the OT as the eastern boundary of the promised land (cf. Gen. 15:18; Josh. 1:4). The great river, then, symbolizes the entirety of the promised land (Ladd, Revelation, p. 136), which for John is the entire created order. The eschatological battle is both on and for that land. The assurance of victory for God’s ordained troops over the armies of pretenders to God’s throne envisions the final stanza of the “new song,” which claims that the blood of the slain Lamb ensures the reign of God’s people “on the earth” (cf. 5:10b).

9:16–19 / John does not tell us anything about the recruitment of the troops that the four angels lead into battle; he mentions only their exact number, two hundred million. So vast (and unbelievable) is this number—impossible to count in any case—that John must add, I heard their number (cf. 7:4) before describing their appearance. The appearance of the soldiers reflects their weapons. The colors of their breastplates were fiery red, dark blue, and yellow as sulfur, the same as their horrific breath that consists of a toxic mixture of fire, smoke and sulfur. These are the constitutive elements of the eschatological lake where the evil powers (cf. 19:20; 21:8) and the “second death” (cf. 20:14) are finally cast at Christ’s second coming. Although found in different visions, the same symbol system is used in both passages to portray the harsh realities of divine judgment. This interplay between John’s visions of the sixth trumpet plague and of Christ’s parousia is completed by his description of the horses, whose tails were like snakes and heads with which to inflict injury, the soldiers kill a third of mankind by the breath which came out of their mouth. As destructive and terrifying as this weapon is, it only foreshadows the “sharp sword” which comes from out of the mouth of the returning Lamb “to strike down the nations” (19:15; cf. 1:16). What comes from the mouth of the Lord consumes and promises to be even more devastating than this second woe for those who fail to turn to God and who reject the Lamb.

9:20–21 / Given the terrible consequences of unbelief, it would seem logical, even expected, that the rest of mankind that were not killed by these plagues would surely repent and turn to God. Yet, they still did not repent of the work of their hands … nor stop worshiping demons, and idols … nor (repent) … of their murders, their magic arts, their sexual immorality or their thefts. John’s vice list, which enumerates social and spiritual evils, only reinforces his realistic assessment that universal conversion will not take place. The very intention of Christ’s death and exaltation, and of God’s judgment on the evil order hidden within Christ’s triumph, goes unfulfilled (cf. 2 Pet. 3:9). Pagan religion, which worships demons … and idols that cannot see or hear or walk, has shaped a people who do not have “eyes to see and ears to hear” the word of God and the testimony of Jesus. The world’s resistance to God’s reign and to God’s transforming grace found in Christ is constant and pervasive. For John, the nature of rebellion against the creator is that the spiritual resources found within the community of faithful disciples, which are the means of spiritual and societal transformation, are ignored or rejected.

In a slaughtered Lamb, so easy to dismiss, the sovereign God is disclosed as completely faithful to the promise that a fallen world would be restored to wholeness; and God’s terrible judgment only discloses the world’s need for restoration. Yet, in its response to God’s warning and invitation to repent, lost humanity’s essential failure is vividly exposed: they misunderstand God, whose trustworthiness is revealed in the Christ who is executed as Anti-christ. One is reminded of the pagan’s folly described by Paul: “They became fools … and exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised” (Rom. 1:22b, 25). How ought God’s people respond to such a desperate situation? How ought they live as the continuing “testimony of Jesus” on earth? John responds to these questions in the following interlude.