The Trumpets Sound

to Revelation chapter eight.

Revelation chapter eight.

Last week we were beginning this transition

into studying the seven trumpets

and we are beginning now tonight

to discuss the seven trumpets.

We're gonna look at the first four tonight, Lord Willen.

We'll see how far we get,

but the goal is to look at the first four

and remember that as we're studying the trumpets,

they kind of take us back in time, right?

Like we started with the seals,

but we said they don't progress,

just one after the other after the other,

but they work together and they all three move us

towards that common goal, that climactic event,

which is the final judgment.

We have to keep that in mind as we're studying here.

So as we begin with the trumpets,

we're actually moving back in time

and studying the course of human history,

but this time from a different perspective,

from a new perspective,

and the trumpets are interesting

because the trumpet judgments,

they show this conflict between human rebellion

and God's absolute sovereign rule over everything.

That's the conflict that these are really highlighting here.

If you're a parent, you're familiar with this conflict.

I thought it was very fitting.

Of course it was in the Lord's sovereignty that it happened,

but this past week ran into something like this

with Judah where I was trying to tell him to do something

and I told him to do this thing and he said,

well, I'm gonna go and do this instead.

I was like, well, actually you're not.

You're gonna do what I tell you to do.

And he said, no, no, daddy, you're not listening.

You're not listening.

And I hated how much of myself I saw in him

in this moment and what I used to do with my mom

because he was arguing with me like a lawyer.

My mom used to say you could argue your way

through a room with judges.

But he was like, okay, here's what we're gonna do instead.

He's like, I'm gonna go do this

and when I do this thing,

that's gonna satisfy both of us.

That's gonna take care of what we both want.

I'm like, that's not the point.

The point is in this house, I make the rules

and I was like, you can want to do your way all you want.

You can say it's a good suggestion.

You might think it's even better than what daddy says.

That's fine.

You can think that, but I said,

but at the end of the day,

what we're gonna do is what I say

because in this house, I make the rules.

And of course that went over well

and everything was super smooth after that.

But that's what we begin to see in this passage.

You see people in our world,

they want to do everything that they wanna do.

They wanna do things their way.

They wanna make the rules.

They wanna live according to their own ways,

their own understandings.

And they are actually rebelling against God.

But the thing is, no matter how much they rebel,

it's like I told Judah, it's gonna be God's way, right?

Like God's will will be done.

No matter how much people rebel,

no matter how much they might not like it,

how much they might disagree with it,

how much they might prefer something else to happen.

Literally none of that matters

because at the end of the day,

God's ways are going to be what happens.

His will is going to be done.

That's the whole point of this section.

It shows that he is sovereign over all creation

and his will will come to pass.

And so what I wanna do is I wanna start in verse six.

If you have your Bibles there, look there with me.

Verse six, the Bible says,

Now the seven angels who had the seven trumpets

prepared to blow them.

The first angel blew his trumpet

and there followed hell and fire mixed with blood.

And these were thrown upon the earth

and a third of the earth was burned up

and a third of the trees were burned up

and all green grass was burned up.

Now, the first thing I wanna mention again

as we're taking notes on this as we're studying this

is remember that there's an intensification.

As you move from the seals to the trumpets to the bowls,

there's an intensification of the judgment.

You begin to see that here.

Does anyone who's gonna be scholar of the night,

Bible reader of the night,

where do you see the intensification?

We just read it in here.

There's a key phrase that was used

that shows things have gone up a notch.

Kinda easy to miss.

You have to pay very careful attention.

Okay, mix of blood, maybe.

Not what I was looking for, but that is a good note.

Anybody else?

All right, so here's what we're gonna do.

Details matter, think back to the seven seals, right?

The seven seals, we already studied those.

This is what the Bible says in Revelation 6, 8.

And I looked and behold, a pale horse

and its rider's name was death and Hades followed him.

And they were given authority over a fourth of the earth

to kill with sword and with famine and with pestilence

and by wild beast of the earth.

Do you notice the difference there now?

Anybody got it?

Yeah, right?

So we went from a fourth to a third.

There's actually a funny story.

A third is more than a fourth.

There's a funny story.

There was an American restaurant.

You all might have heard this, that they began

to try to combat McDonald's quarter pounder.

They were selling a third pounder and it did miserable

because Americans didn't realize

that a third was bigger than a fourth.

They saw the three and they're like,

oh, that's less than four, so that failed.

So it turns out, yeah, a third is more than a fourth.

So there's an intensification here, right?

Things are getting more heated.

There's more stuff involved here.

There's an increase, but notice that this has to do,

not with people, it has to do with creation.

You have hail and fire mixed with blood

and it burns up a third of the earth, the trees

and the grass.

Now let me ask you another question.

Does this sound at all familiar to you?

When you see this hail and this big storm that's coming down

and it's causing all this burning up of the trees

and the grass and all this kind of stuff,

does it remind you of anything?

Nuclear, okay, maybe.

Anything else?

How about this?

Does it remind you of anything else in the Bible?

Okay, that's another good reference.

Anybody else?

The flood, okay.

Think specifically, burning up, hail coming down,

specifically hail.

Yeah, there we go.

Michael Stevenson, plagues in Egypt.

So here's what's interesting.

The first four trumpets actually correspond

to the plagues that occurred in Egypt.

So the first trumpet, trumpet number one,

it corresponds to plague number seven.

This is what the Bible says in Exodus chapter nine,

verses 22 to 26.

Then the Lord said to Moses,

stretch out your hand toward heaven

so that there may be hail in all the land of Egypt,

on man and beast and every plant of the field

and in the land of Egypt.

Then Moses stretched out his staff toward heaven

and the Lord sent thunder and hail

and fire rain down on the earth.

The Lord rained hail upon the land of Egypt

and there was hail and fire flashing continually

in the midst of the hail, very heavy hail,

such as had never been in all the land of Egypt

since it became a nation.

The hail struck down everything that was in the field

and in all the land of Egypt, both man and beast

and the hail struck down every plant of the field

and broke every tree of the field,

only in the land of Goshen,

where the people of Israel were, was there no hail.

Now, do you notice all the similarities there?

Yeah, I mean, it's like,

it's almost like an exact picture in many ways.

There's a key difference.

Did you pick up on the key difference there?

No blood?

Okay, that's one.

Anything else?

What in Egypt, what did the hail fall on?

Man and beast and everything in the field.

What about here in Revelation?

What does the hail fall on?

Yeah, not mankind, right?

So the difference here is that when you're looking

at Revelation in the trumpet judgments,

it's talking about creation itself and the point

that's going to be repeatedly made

as we study the four trumpets,

the first four of the seven,

is that it's showing God's judgment upon the created order.

That man brought sin into this world,

but that sin has affected creation in many ways.

That creation has actually been corrupted

and contaminated by sin,

and it too actually suffers the judgment of God

because of man's sin.

Now, here's the other thing we should note.

When we look at the plagues,

that was a literal event that happened

literally as it was described.

When we're reading the trumpet and the trumpet judgments,

we shouldn't think of this as literal necessarily.

And the reason I say that is because here in the first trumpet,

it literally says that all the grass is burned up, correct?

Well, later in this same chapter,

actually I'm sorry, in chapter nine,

when we get to the fifth trumpet,

we see that the angel says to,

he literally tells the locus,

do not harm the grass.

But if the grass had already literally been burned up,

why would you have to tell the locus not to harm the grass?

It wouldn't make any sense, right?

So you see that this is not necessarily a literal event,

and if it's not, well, then how should we understand it?

And here's what I want you to understand.

The judgment is basically saying this,

living in God's world has many blessings,

and there are many good things about it.

Two thirds of the world's not affected, right?

But God's judgment does befall the world and the earth

because of our sins.

This doesn't happen all over the world,

all the time nonstop, but you do see it happen, right?

I mean, think about creation.

Like this word hail, when it's talking about hail coming down,

and you even saw it in Exodus as well,

it's hard to know if it's actually hail,

or if it's communicating like lightning

that also has hail, a hail storm that has lightning,

because the word's kind of ambiguous, you know?

So like in Exodus, it was talking about hail coming down

with flashes in the middle of it and things like that.

So there's some ambiguity there about whether it's hail,

or lightning, and things like that,

but think about how we already see this

in our world today, right?

And how you see creation suffer the judgment of God

in this way.

So for instance, how many times over the past couple of years

have we heard about a wildfire that got way out of hand

and burned up an entire section of land?

We hear about literal national parks

that are being destroyed because of wildfires

that have started because lightning struck an area,

and that area sparked fire, all the grass was burned up,

all the trees were burned up, all the shrubs were burned up,

and it just kept spreading and spreading and spreading.

Did mankind do that?

No, what would insurance call that?

If you could claim it on insurance,

they'd call it an act of what?

An act of God.

And the Bible is saying here,

this is not the way that the world was supposed to be.

This wasn't supposed to happen.

You know, in God's good creation, when He made everything,

He made everything good, right?

After He creates everything in the beginning,

He says, and it is good.

Everything about creation was good.

And then who messed it up?

We did.

Mankind did.

We brought sin into this world,

and that fractured the world.

I mean, Romans 8 even talks about the fact that

creation itself is literally groaning,

waiting for the redemption of the sons of God

so that creation can be restored.

There is a restoration coming,

and creation is longing for it,

but until that happens,

creation is going to suffer God's judgment

because of man's sin.

That's why we have things like lightning hitting the ground,

sparking a wildfire and getting out of control.

When you see something like that on the news,

you should be listening for a trumpet

because that's what a trumpet sounds like.

You see a national park burning up

after an act of God like that?

That is God's judgment upon the world

because of mankind's sin and rebellion.

Remind yourself, it wasn't supposed to be that way.

It's not how God intended it to be,

but that's what we are suffering now,

because of our sin.

So look then to the second trumpet,

verses eight and nine.

The second angel blew his trumpet,

and something like a great mountain burning with fire

was thrown into the sea,

and a third of the sea became blood.

A third of the living creatures in the sea died,

and a third of the ships were destroyed.

Now, if revelation in the first four trumpets

correspond to the plagues in Egypt,

which one does this one sound like?

The first, that's right.

Yeah, so the second trumpet,

it corresponds to the first plague in Egypt,

which was what?

Yeah, the water of the Nile turning to blood.

You can read about that,

we don't have time to read everything,

but Exodus seven verses 20 to 21.

And so that was the first plague that happened in Egypt,

and then you see a picture of that here

in this final judgment, these acts of God,

where we have the trumpet judgments.

And it's doing this thing,

I want you to notice what the Bible is doing here,

especially as we move through these,

is it's showing the comprehensiveness of God's judgment.

Because the first trumpet had to do with what?

How to do with the earth?

What are we dealing with here?

The water, the seas.

And you're gonna see how this continues

to progress as we go on.

But understand that the idea is that

God's judgment is comprehensive,

it is all-encompassing, nothing at all escapes His judgment.

And so how do we understand this judgment?

What is it telling us?

Well, the first, when you remember,

it was saying that the earth was suffering

the effects of God's judgment because of man's sin.

And it's saying here with the second one,

well, the same is true of the waters as well.

It talks about sea creatures dying

and ships not making it out of the seas

and things like that.

And again, that's not how God created everything to be.

In the beginning, there was no death, right?

I mean, the Bible literally tells us in Romans chapter five

that death came into the world because of sin.

Sin entered the world and then death threw sin

and that sin threw one man.

So death did not exist in the beginning.

God didn't intend for sea creatures

to just start dying and stuff,

but think about our world today

and how we see this judgment.

How many sea creatures have gone extinct

over the course of human history?

Now we still have plenty, right?

So I mean, I don't know that it's an exact third,

I can't say for sure.

But we have a ton of sea creatures today,

but we also have a lot of sea creatures

that we used to have that have gone extinct at this point.

Why did some make it and others didn't?

Maybe it has to do with Revelation chapter eight

and a third of the animals are suffering the judgment

of God upon this world because of man's sin.

Maybe you have another way to think about how we see this.

I don't know if you all have ever,

I don't get to watch TV, but I've seen commercials.

And I don't know if you've ever seen any of those shows

where they go like crabbing in the deep sea and stuff,

or if you've ever seen a video of a ship out in the deep sea

where you think, oh, it's calm because it's in the deep sea.

And you see these huge waves that are like 20 feet high

and they're literally coming over the boat

and capsizing them and things like that.

Here's a comfort for you.

God didn't create the ocean to be that way.

Like that kind of a thing wouldn't have existed

in a perfect world.

The reason that you have storms raging at sea like that

is because God's judgment befalls man.

I mean, I read the statistic today that said

between 350 and 400 ships literally sink in the oceans alone.

So not rivers and lakes, but in the oceans alone

every single year, 350 to 400 ships.

And it just shows that you are suffering

the effects of God's judgment upon this world

because of our sin.

It's a depiction of what we see in our world.

And here's the thing about it.

It's not just the oceans,

but notice what the next trumpet says.

It talks about the waters of the rivers and the streams.

In verse 10 it says,

the third angel blue is trumpet

and a great star fell from heaven,

blazing like a torch.

And it fell on a third of the rivers

and on the springs of water.

The name of the star is Wormwood.

A third of the waters became Wormwood

and many people died from the water

because it had been made bitter.

So this one also relates to the first plague in Egypt

because you have the water becoming bitter.

You read about that in Exodus 7, 24.

It talks about the fact that they couldn't actually drink

the water because of what had happened to it.

But what's interesting here is it says that this,

this star's name is Wormwood.

And Wormwood shrubs, they produce this bitter green oil.

Back in these days people used to use it to kill

intestinal worms and things like that.

And so the name Wormwood became associated with bitterness

and in like sorrow and things like that.

And so the star name Wormwood,

it brings bitterness and poison to the rivers

and the streams of earth.

And so think about, when you're trying to think about

well practically what does this look like?

Well it looks like the fact that again,

when God created everything and it was good,

you could trust every bit of water

that you came into contact with.

Nothing wrong with it.

Not the case today though, right?

I mean, if you were stranded,

let's say you're in a plane crash,

but praise the Lord, you survived,

but you're in the woods somewhere,

you're trying to survive,

and you come upon a pool of water and you're like,

oh this is great, I know I need water to survive.

I'm so thirsty and you start drinking from it.

Everything gonna be good with you?

No, that's what's gonna lead

to some digestional issues, right David?

Thank you, yeah.

He doesn't have them, he's a nurse,

so he knows what I'm talking about here, okay?

I don't know, maybe he does, but he's not, okay?

It's gonna lead to all sorts of digestional issues

and probably some other issues that you're gonna have,

because there's all sorts of bacteria in the water,

that in germs and things like that,

that need to be boiled out of the water

so that it is actually drinkable.

In other words, you can't just come upon streams

and lakes and pools and trust every bit of water.

I mean, you go to like even the Whitewater Center

in North Carolina, you're thinking,

oh I'm gonna have a fun time,

we're gonna go kayaking and stuff.

You accidentally snored a little bit of water

and all of a sudden you got a brain eating amoeba.

Well, I haven't yet, two times,

so I'm two for two, I'm not getting them right now,

but that's where we were gonna go on our honeymoon

and then Anna read that story

and she's like, we're not going there.

That's the whole point of this,

is that there used to be in the earth,

water that you could just trust

and now that's not the case.

The world has been corrupted,

the water has been made bitter and not trustworthy

and again, it's not because creation is bad,

it's because mankind rebelled against God

and our sin has long lasting effects.

And so then notice the fourth trumpet here in verse 12.

The fourth angel blew his trumpet

and a third of the sun was struck

and a third of the moon and a third of the stars

so that a third of their light might be darkened

and a third of the day might be kept from shining

and likewise a third of the night.

So this one actually corresponds to the ninth plague

in Egypt, which was the plague of darkness.

You'll remember this one when darkness fell

upon all of Egypt for three days

and this one is corresponding to that

because what's interesting,

so you've gone from the earth, the seas, the waters,

like rivers and streams and stuff like that

and now what do we have?

We have the sky.

So notice here with these judgments,

you have literally all of God's creation,

it is all encompassing, nothing escapes it,

the earth, the seas, the waters, the sky,

everything's included, everything's affected

in these judgments and again,

we don't need to think about this as literal,

necessarily, I would think literally,

we shouldn't think this as literal

because if the sun stopped shining

for even a third of the day,

do you know what would happen to humanity?

Everyone would die, a pretty gruesome death

and it wouldn't take very long.

Even if after a third of the day, the sun came back

and it just continued that way, we would all die.

It's just not possible to live without the sun for that long.

Also interesting fact, it takes eight minutes

for the light of the sun to get here

so if the sun did stop shining,

we wouldn't even know about it for eight minutes.

Just think about that at any given point of your day

and see if it freaks you out at all.

Like you see the sun, it might be there, it might not.

You won't know for another eight minutes.

That's just a fun science fact for you,

don't let it scare you but notice how these things

are actually a reality that we see in our world today.

You look up at the stars, another fun fact,

you see stars and it looks like there's a star there

but in space, many of those stars have already died

and we're just seeing the afterglow of the effect

of those stars that have already died

and it's not every star, is it a third?

I don't know exactly but it's a lot of them.

I mean think about the sun where it suffers

all these solar flares and things like that

and it's not gonna last forever.

Scientists tell us that one day our sun is gonna burn up

and then everything is going to die very quickly after that.

It's not eternal either.

So like you see that the sun is affected,

the moon is affected because of the sun,

the stars are affected.

Like this is happening in our world today.

We are watching this take place.

We are hearing the trumpet's sound even now

and I don't want you to lose,

don't lose the forest for the trees here.

You can get bogged down in the details

but the big picture of all this is to demonstrate to us

that all of creation from the earth, to the seas,

to the rivers, to the skies, they've all been affected

by God's judgment because of our sin.

All of creation suffers because of us.

And so as we kind of wrapping up the first four trumpets,

I was wanting us to consider, well,

what does this passage teach us?

I mean we've seen God's sovereignty ever creation.

We've seen the comprehensiveness of his judgment

but what can we take home from this?

And the first thing that I really want you to understand

and take home from this is that there are real consequences

for sin.

I think that's very apparent in this passage.

There is no such thing as a secret sin

or a sin that only affects you.

It's just not possible.

I know a lot of people think that way

and they think, well, it's only me.

What does this have to do with anyone else?

It's never the case.

Sin always affects more than just you.

Think about Adam and even the garden.

When they rebelled against God

and they ate of that fruit,

at no point when Adam was eating that fruit,

do you think he thought to himself, well, if I do this,

then thousands of years later,

there's gonna be some crabbing guys on a boat

who are gonna be just totally overturned by a 50 foot wave.

Probably don't eat this.

You know what, he didn't think about that.

He didn't think if I take a bite of this,

then there are gonna be stars exploding in space

and dying in the sky as I do this.

They're not thinking about the fact

that you're not gonna be able to trust the waters anymore

and you gotta start boiling your water

and all this kind of stuff.

None of that was going through his mind.

He just thought, hey, my naked wife said to eat this fruit.

She seems to think it's tasty.

I'm gonna take a bite too.

Everything's good.

He was just thinking in the moment.

Immediate gratification, immediate pleasure.

And yet, look at what happened.

Literally, because of that one bite of a fruit,

that rebellion against God,

you literally have all of humanity falling into sin.

Every single person, apart from Jesus,

has been born with a sin nature because of that.

Bearing the marks of original sin,

having this tendency and this droll towards sin,

that's why parents say all the time,

you don't have to teach children how to sin.

They come out of the womb knowing how to sin.

They're bent towards it.

We all are.

I'm not just hating on children.

I mean, it's all of us until Jesus saves us,

but all of that came from one sin.

And then we have the audacity and the arrogance to think,

well, my sin's gonna be different.

My sin really will only affect me.

It's not gonna hurt anyone else.

There will be no effects for other people,

and that's not the way it works.

This passage is teaching that there are real consequences

for sin.

I've said it many times before,

sin's shadow is very long, very long.

The other thing I want you to take away from this passage

is that our world is not what God intended it to be.

It's a beautiful world.

I think we all admit that.

Gorgeous.

I mean, God's creation is absolutely amazing.

The heavens declare the glory of God.

I mean, we look at this world, it is beautiful,

it is amazing, but it's also terrifying.

And it is bearing the effects of our sin.

It's groaning, waiting for the redemption of mankind.

This world is not what God intended it to be.

He made everything good, and we messed it up.

And so as we look at our world and we see how bad it is,

it should remind us of how far we have fallen

from where God started everything.

When we see the wildfires, when we see the stars exploding,

when we see the meteors causing these great catastrophes

on Earth and in other places, when we see all the raging

waters and people dying of bacteria and brain eating amoebas

and all this kind of stuff, it should be a reminder to us

that this is not what God intended.

He had better things in mind than this.

But then, as you're realizing that,

I want it to also fill you with hope,

knowing that one day it's not gonna be like this anymore.

As a Christian, we look forward to not just the redemption

of the sons of God, but we look forward

to the regeneration of this Earth,

where God is gonna make all things new.

I mean, the great thing about Revelation is literally,

Jesus at the end, he says,

"'Behold, I am making all things new.'"

Present tense, ongoing, I'm doing it now.

I am currently in the process of making all things new.

And one day, he is going to totally regenerate this Earth

and he's gonna be brand new, he's gonna be free of sin,

and he's gonna be better and more spectacular

and more glorious than we can even think or imagine.

It's, I mean, even just as we get a glimpse of heaven,

assuming that Jesus comes back and everything

before we can actually spend a lot of time in heaven,

we'll get to spend some time up there,

so glory and eternity will be on the new Earth for us.

Just skip ahead to Revelation 21 for that spoiler.

But, I mean, just thinking about the things

that we can't even imagine,

it should just fill you with wonder and hope, right?

Like, I was trying to explain to Judah,

I was like, hey, you know, his favorite color is blue.

And I was like, did you know in heaven,

there are gonna be colors that we've never seen before?

And he's like, like what color?

So I was like, I don't know, that's the thing.

No one's ever seen them before, we have no idea, you know?

So I said, our brains are so limited,

we can't even imagine a new color, you know?

We can just work with what we've got,

but when we get there, we're gonna see things

that we've never seen before.

And he was like, that is so cool,

I can't wait to see the new colors.

Can we still keep blue?

I was like, yes, blue will still be there, we'll keep blue.

But it was just cool to see through his eyes

the wonder of trying to look forward to something

that we can't even think or imagine.

And that's what this passage does for us,

it reminds us that one day,

it's not gonna be like this anymore.

It is gonna be totally different

because God's gonna completely regenerate the earth.

And then last thing, and we'll close,

I want you to understand that the Christians

only security is Christ.

You read about these judgments,

the fallen, the earth, people suffering their effects.

We're gonna get even more into God's judgment

on what's gonna happen and how terrifying that is.

The Christians only security is Christ.

Do you remember during the plagues of Egypt,

do you remember why the people of Israel

were never harmed by the plagues?

We read it in one of the verses we were referencing.

It's because they were aware.

Where were the people of Israel

because God was pouring out the plagues on Egypt?

David Berryhill, in the land of Goshen.

So God's judgment, fallen upon the land of Egypt,

but they had this little slice,

I don't know if you remember this from our Genesis study,

but we said Goshen was like a little Eden

because it was this very tropical place near waters

and a very humid desert location.

There's like a little slice of Eden there

and it's this beautiful picture of God dwelling

with his people again after all these years

and as long as they're in Goshen,

they do not suffer the judgments of God.

Do you get that?

Yeah?

Well, Christ is our Goshen.

Isn't that a beautiful picture?

I mean, everything in Exodus is paradigmatic of salvation,

so you can just go through that.

There's a whole study to be done there,

but Christ is our Goshen.

And the Bible says as long as you are in Christ,

as the people of Israel were in Goshen,

you're safe from the judgments of God.

You don't have to worry about the wrath of God.

You won't suffer the effects of this judgment

that is coming upon the whole earth

because you are in Christ.

He is the believer's only source of security and safety.

And that's comforting for us,

is it not to know that in the midst of all this,

we have a place of refuge, a strong tower,

and as long as we're in Christ, we are safe.

All right, so that's all I've got for you tonight.

Gene, you want to hit us with a word of wisdom from back there?