Reading: Revelation 7-9, Psalm 42

Yesterday we left off with a question. John sees the lamb open the seven seals upon the scroll containing God’s plan of salvation, with the result that the entire creation is crushed in righteous judgment. Ring any bells from the book of Genesis? Seems the world was once wiped clean in righteous judgment as it had been filled with violence and wickedness. The problem is, nobody could pass muster in the judgment. There were no righteous ones. So the last thing we read was a question. The great day of wrath has come, and who can stand?

Today we get an answer. John hears a command go out to the angels who were set to crush the creation to hang on a second while we seal 144,000 people, 12,000 from each of the tribes of Israel. Then John turns and sees a multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and language, standing before the throne and the lamb. So we have 144,000 from the tribes of Israel, that John hears about. But then we have an innumerable multitude from every nation who stands before the lamb. So the answer is somehow both. He then has a little conversation with an angel about how these people, who can in fact stand before the throne of God, have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the lamb. The people who can stand do so by the blood of the lamb.

Then we finally have the seventh seal opened, which reveals another take on the judgment that would totally crush the creation if carried out as revealed in the sixth seal. There are again seven steps to this, signified by seven trumpets. Which, if you think about it a moment, will make it clear that this series of events will be a kind of proclamation. Trumpets have been used to herald oncoming people and events for pretty much as long as there have been humans to blow on them. It seems like the obvious connection to make is that while the seven seals were an unveiling of a plan, the trumpets are a proclamation of what is coming next.

The first four trumpets are similar in many way to the first four seals. There is a lot of pain, disease, death, and disaster. Intense images of suffering brought on by what we might call natural disasters. Water turning poisonous, hailstorms, massive fires that wipe out huge forests, and smoke that blots out the sun. Pretty nasty sounding stuff, but all coming from inanimate objects- rocks, hail, fire. Then a bird flies over and basically says, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet! Three more incoming!” The fifth and sixth trumpets are different. The fifth involves some crazy supernatural stuff- stars falling from heaven and unleashing some sort of wild horse-locust-scorpion deals on the world. The sixth is about some bound angels getting turned loose to kill a bunch of people. I’m not going to pretend to know exactly what is going on here, but I really don’t think the point of telling us this is to freak us out about what where the scorpion-horse-angels come from. Much more likely we are to pay attention to the closing paragraph of chapter 9.

Despite the natural disasters, the eagle’s warning, and the weird supernatural stuff, the rest of mankind not killed by these plagues did not repent. The tragedy we see here is more than natural and unnatural disaster. Those things happen all the time around us, like the four horsemen of the apocalypse. They shouldn’t even surprise us much anymore, unless there is a point to them. It seems clear that the idea is that the humans to whom such things happen might look at them and say, “perhaps there is something to this wisdom of God thing, and I should repent of defining good and bad for myself and listen to it.” But no. That does not happen. That is what has been proclaimed by the trumpets so far. Despite the great judgment, the human problem persists.