We have seen how the wrath of God against sin revealed in the Seven Seals is paralleled in the Seven Trumpets. Thus, the first four seals were about conquest and war; the first four trumpets were about political instability. Do we get the feeling John teaches we as believers should never trust human government? There's a concrete reason, as we shall see. The Fifth Seal was a revelation of God's saints; the Fifth Trumpet is a revelation of those who are not saints.
The falling star echoes Isaiah 14:12 and Luke 10:18. Neither mentions a discrete event on some specific date, but a reference to Satan's place in the grand scheme of things. A signal part of his punishment for rejecting his role in Heaven was to be cast down and confined to the earth, forbidden to come into God's presence in Heaven. John sees him given authority to open the holding place of all demons until the Final Judgment: The Abyss. This is the same place the legion of demons hoped to avoid when Christ confronted them in the soul of the man in Gadara. Once opened, a foul cloud obscures the light of revelation. The smoky haze resolves into a massive cloud of locusts. These were no ordinary locusts; they had the power to torment. Unlike ordinary locusts, they do not eat every hint of greenery in sight. Rather, they go after those lacking the Seal of God. Whatever it is they do, it has no effect on Christians.
In that part of the world, few things were dreaded so much as a locust plague. Joel 2 provides a graphic description of the normal locusts plague as the army of God's judgment, likening their noise to horses drawing chariots. Their image makes no sense, except to project the idea of fearsome and unstoppable pests. Rather than marching relentlessly to devour, they attack and destroy the peace of mind of the Lost. They do not kill, only torment; they do not devour food, but devour souls. The span of time is roughly the entire life cycle of normal locusts, but also the standard season of warfare. If we step away from the gritty details, we see a broad symbol of fallen mankind increasingly blinded by the Lord of Darkness. This is the darkness that can be felt deep in the soul, a spiritual famine. It makes people suicidal, yet at the same time fearful of death which delivers them more fully to Satan, whose name here is Destroyer. But there's more.
With the Sixth Trumpet, the authority of God's power, symbolized by the horns of the altar, calls for the release of the Four Winds. These are the same winds held back until the people of God were marked. We have just seen what happens to those not marked. The winds were held beyond the Euphrates, not a literal place, but the place beyond the boundaries of the familiar, far from home. It's the place from whence came every real threat to Israel and Judah, the legendary land of every danger and deepest spiritual darkness and death. The Four Winds stir up this spiritual death, represented as a demon army so limitless John had to be told some fantastic number: 200 million.
If the Lost souls around us were merely spiritually dead, that would be bad enough. Worse, this world will increasingly come under the influence of evil spirits without number. This is a uniform force, drawing on lost souls to build up a massive, unitary world of unspeakable evil. Good old fashioned hedonism and idolatry is almost harmless by comparison. This growing darkness turns all of human existence into a spiritual black hole, sucking in the entire Creation. While no such force can stay God's divine election from pulling souls out of this gravity well, it is clear those who come away from it late will have much farther to go just understanding what has happened to them. John saw every element of human existence torn and twisted away from the Light so that virtually nothing in the minds of newly born souls can find a recognizable point of reference in the Kingdom. It's not just a new spiritual birth, but an utterly alien existence. Today, we see countless souls apparently reborn, but unable to move beyond the doorway of Life. Their human souls are in shock at the vast array and depth of changes it brings. This is what John sees in the Army of Darkness from across the Euphrates.
The vast gulf between Light and Darkness will widen greatly. Thus, it's actually no surprise there is no repentance. Such would be simply inconceivable to those enslaved by this fearsome army. With so much in common, it's no surprise there is really very little preventing some dark purpose from binding all humanity under a single government. As the years, decades and centuries grind past, every generation is that much closer. Yes, it's clear there is room to see a final One World Government of evil without buying into the heresy of Dispensationalism.
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Ed Hurst
07 September 2007
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