Revelation: - Knights of Columbus, Supreme Council

corners of the earth, holding back the four winds of the earth, that no wind
might blow on earth or sea or against any tree,” who, in other words, are
symbols of God’s power over all the earth, and who are bidden by another
angel, God’s messenger, not to harm the earth until His elect have been
chosen. These angels, again, are from the imagery of Zechariah 6:1-8, another
application of the same text John has used before. The threatened destruction
is not to fall until God has determined the number of those who are to be
saved. These are given under the symbolic number 144,000, which is the
“heavenly” number of perfection: 12, raised to the thousandth power, and
multiplied by another 12 taken from the number of the Israelite tribes. The
tribes are not given quite in their Old Testament form, however, since there
was no tribe called Joseph. They, too, are symbolic for the chosen of God, and
should not, therefore, be re stricted to Jewish Christians. They are the Church
on earth who are to live through the last days.
Immediately after this is a cor responding picture (7:9-12) of the Church
triumphant in heaven, those who have triumphed over persecu tion. Such is the
explanation given this vision by one of the elders (vv. 13-17), in language
borrowed from several Old Testament sources, including Ezekiel 34:23, Isaiah
49:10, and Isaiah 25:8. With this comes the opening of the seventh seal (8:1)
which is in turn the vision of the seven trumpets.
The Trumpets
The seven trumpets retrace the ground of the seven seals, but they are
not a simple repetition. There is in this series of visions a greater sense of
urgency, a better perspec tive of the completeness of the divine plan, and a
keener insistence of how God is in complete control of the destinies of the
future. As with the seven seals (5:8-10), be fore the trumpets begin there is a
preliminary vision of the role of the prayers of the saints in their power to
bring about God’s intervention in history (8:2-5), described in almost the
same terms.
The first four trumpets are (vv. 6-12) joined together, as the first four
seals. Once more the imagery is similar – thunder, earth quake, blood, and the
rest. The figure of the trumpet occurs with Saint Paul, in the apocalyptic
1 Thessalonians 4:16. The Old Testament source on which John has leaned
most heavily for his description of the things to come is the tenth chapter of
Exodus, the story of the plagues of Egypt. As there, we have here hail (first
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