1 When the Lamb opened the seventh seal there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.
2 Then I looked at the seven angels standing before God who were given seven trumpets.
3 Another angel came and stood before the altar of incense with a golden censer. He was given much incense to be offered with the prayers of all the holy ones, on the golden altar before the throne;
4 and the cloud of incense rose with the prayers of the holy ones from the hands of the angel to the pres ence of God.
5 Then the angel took the censer and filled it with burning coals from the altar, and threw them on the earth: and there came thunder, lightning and earthquakes.
The seven trumpets
6 The seven angels with the seven trum pets prepared to sound them.
7 When the first angel blew his trumpet, there came hail and fire, mixed with blood, which fell on the earth. And a third of the earth was burned up with a third of the trees and the green grass.
8 When the second angel blew his trumpet, something like a great mountain was thrown into the sea, and a third of the sea was turned into blood.
9 At once, a third of the living creatures in the sea died and a third of the ships perished.
10 When the third angel sounded his trumpet, a great star fell from heaven, like a ball of fire, on a third of the rivers and springs.
11 The star is called Wormwood, and a third of the waters was turned into wormwood and many people died be cause of the water which had turned bitter.
12 The fourth angel blew his trumpet, and a third of the sun, the moon and the stars was af fected. Daylight decreased one third, and the light at night as well.
13 And my vision continued: I noticed an eagle flying through the highest heaven and crying with a loud voice, “Woe, woe, woe to the inhabitants of the land when the last three angels sound their trumpets.”
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Comments Revelation, Chapter 8
• 8.1 When the Lamb open ed the seventh seal. We have come to the end of the Old Testament; the silence that follows announces the coming of God, and the coming of the Word of God (19:13). The trumpets signify messages; the seven trumpets, the fullness of God’s message: the Good News. In fact, the terrible end of Jerusalem is only a stage. The end of history is postponed. With the seven trumpets a new series of plagues begin. We are not quite sure what is hidden behind those symbols. They surely referred to events already known to John’s readers, events that happened shortly before.
In the following chapters there are numerous interventions of angels. We said in the Introduction that the interventions of angels are images commonly used in apocalyptic books: here all is said with images.
We should also mention that John shares a conviction expressed in the Bible and also outside the world of the Bible: God’s creation is much vaster than what we see and measure. Not only because it extends further but also because it is the theater of a tragedy in which humans are not the only ones involved. The spirits who serve God have a place in history and even in our relationship with God (Rev 3:3). We remember Luke’s reproach to the Sadducees – materialists – “They believe neither in the angels nor the resurrection of the dead” (Acts 23:8).
• 6. These paragraphs intend to show the punishment of the Jewish people who did not welcome Christ: they contain images taken from the plagues of Egypt, from Ezekiel 38–39, and from other popular writings. With the first four trumpets punishment is shown in the very forces of nature, which later will turn against the guilty people. The third one shows the evil forces of the devil crashing down to earth from the sky. The fifth one may refer to foreign invasions: this is the time of the Jewish war of the years 66-70, which culminated in the capture of Jerusalem.
This chapter is without doubt one of those that attract curiosity and which gives to the word “apocalypse” the meaning many attribute to it: all the calamities on a world-scale. The Book of Wisdom already showed (Wis 5:20-23) that nature turns against sinners. Ecological movements began rather late to discover that our sins against creation lead us to death and the media informs us that hundreds of millions of humans live this apocalypse. It is not by chance that God created the world, and it is not by chance that Adam’s race could feasibly disappear.
Just as in the Gospel prophecies about the end of the world, the first event was an image of the second one, so too here, the sixth trumpet announces a punish ment extended to all the pagan peo ple.