Days of Vengeance - The Preterist Archive

8:3-5
God’s fire – fire from the altar. 5 Thus, when a city was
to be destroyed, the priest would take fire from God’s
altar and use it to ignite the heap of booty which served
as kindling, so offering up the entire city as a sacrifice.
It is this practice of putting a city “under the ban,” so
that nothing survives the conflagration (Deut. 13:12-
18), that the Book of Revelation uses to describe God’s
judgment against Jerusalem. 6
God rains down His judgments upon the earth in
specific response to the liturgical worship of His people.
As part of the formal, official worship service in
heaven, the angel of the altar offers up the prayers of
the corporate people of God; and God responds to the
petitions, acting into history on behalf of the saints.
The intimate connection between liturgy and history is
an inescapable fact, one which we cannot afford to
ignore. This is not to suggest that the world is in danger
of lapsing into “non-being” when the Church’s worship
is defective. In fact, God will use historical forces (even
the heathen) to chastise the Church when she fails to
live up to her high calling as the Kingdom of priests.
The point here is that the official worship of the
covenantal community is cosmically significant.
Church history is the key to world history: When the
worshiping assembly calls upon the Lord of the
Covenant, the world experiences His judgments.
History is managed and directed from the altar of
incense, which has received the prayers of the Church. 7
In my distress I called upon the LORD,
And cried to my God for help;
He heard my voice out of His Temple,
And my cry for help before Him came into His ears.
Then the earth shook and quaked;
And the foundations of the mountains were trembling
And were shaken, because He was angry.
Smoke went up out of His nostrils,
And fire from His mouth devoured;
Coals were kindled by it.
He bowed the heavens also, and came down
With thick darkness under His feet.
And He rode upon a cherub and flew;
And He sped upon the wings of the wind.
He made darkness His hiding place, His canopy around Him,
Darkness of waters, thick clouds of the skies.
From the brightness before Him passed His thick clouds,
Hailstones and coals of fire.
The LORD also thundered in the heavens,
And the Most High uttered His voice,
Hailstones and coals of fire.
And He sent out His arrows, and scattered them,
And lightning flashes in abundance, and routed them.
Then the channels of waters appeared,
And the foundations of the world were laid bare
At Thy rebuke, O LORD,
At the blast of the breath of Thy nostrils. (Psalm 18:6-15)
Several areas of the symbolic significance of trumpets
are in view in this passage. First, trumpets were used in
the Old Testament liturgy for ceremonial processions,
particularly as an escort for the Ark of the Covenant;
the obvious, prime example of this is the march around
Jericho before it fell (Josh. 6; cf. 1 Chron. 15:24; Neh.
12:41). As G. B. Caird says, “John must have had this
story in mind when he wrote; for he tells us that with
the blowing of the seventh trumpet the ark appeared
(11:19), and also that one of the consequences of the
trumpet blasts was that a tenth of the great city fell
(11:13).” 8
Second, trumpets were blown to proclaim the rule of a
new king (1 Kings 1:34, 39; cf. Ps. 47:5): “John’s
seventh trumpet is the signal for the heavenly choir to
sing their coronation anthem, praising God because He
has assumed the sovereignty and begun to reign
(11:15).” 9
Third, the trumpet sounded an alarm, warning Israel of
approaching judgment and urging national repentance
(Isa. 58:1; Jer. 4:5-8; 6:1, 17; Ezek. 33:1-6; Joel 2:1, 15).
“John too believed that the purpose of the trumpet
blasts and the disasters they heralded was to call men to
repentance, even if that purpose was not achieved.
‘The rest of mankind who survived these plagues still
did not renounce the gods of their own making’ (9:20;
cf. Amos 4:6-11).” 10
Fourth, Moses was instructed to use two silver trumpets
both “for summoning the congregation” to worship and
“for having the camps set out” in battle against the
enemy (Num. 10:1-9). It is significant that these two
purposes, warfare and worship, are mentioned in the
same breath. Gordon Wenham observes that “like the
arrangement of the camp with the tabernacle at the
middle, and the ordering of the tribes in battle
formation, the silver trumpets declare that Israel is the
army of the King of kings preparing for a holy war of
conquest.” 11 The irony in Revelation, of course, is that
God is now ordering the trumpets of holy war blown
against Israel herself.
Fifth, trumpets were also blown at the feasts and on the
first day of every month (Num. 10:10), with special
emphasis on Tishri 1, the civil New Year’s Day (in the
ecclesiastical year, the first day of the seventh month);
this Day of Trumpets was the special liturgical
acknowledgement of the Day of the Lord (Lev. 23:24-
25; Num. 29:1-6). Of course, the most basic
background to all this is the Glory-Cloud, which is
accompanied by angelic trumpet blasts announcing the
sovereignty and judgment of the Lord (Ex. 19:16); the
earthly liturgy of God’s people was a recapitulation of
the heavenly liturgy, another indication that God’s
redeemed people had been restored to His image. (This
was the reason for the method Gideon’s army used to
5. To offer a sacrifice with “strange fire” (i.e., man-made fire, not from the
altar) was punished with death: Lev. 10:1-4.
6. For an in-depth study of this whole subject, see James B. Jordan, Sabbath-
Breaking and the Death Penalty: A Theological Investigation (Tyler, TX:
Geneva Ministries, 1986), esp. chaps. 3-5.
7. The symbolic use of incense is therefore appropriate (but of course not
binding) in the liturgy of the New Covenant.
8. G. B. Caird, The Revelation of St. John the Divine (New York: Harper &
Row, Publishers, 1966), p. 108.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., p. 109.
11. Gordon J. Wenham, Numbers: An Introduction and Commentary (Downers
Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 1981), p. 102.
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