Days of Vengeance - The Preterist Archive

8:6-7
rout the Midianites, in Judges 7:15-22: By surrounding
the enemy with lights, shouting, and the blowing of
trumpets, the Israelites were an earthly reflection of
God’s heavenly army in the Cloud, coming in
vengeance upon God’s enemies.) The Biblical
symbolism would have been very familiar to St. John’s
first-century readers, and “in any case John himself has
told them clearly enough that the trumpets were an
escort for the ark, a proclamation of the divine
sovereignty, and a summons to general repentance; and
by placing them in the hands of the Angels of the
Presence he has indicated their close association with
worship.’ 12
As J. Massyngberde Ford notes, 13 there are four striking
“reversals” in the text:
1. From the Throne and altar, the “mercy seat,”
comes wrath;
2. Incense, the “soothing aroma to the LORD”
(Lev. 1:13), becomes an agent of death (cf. 2
Cor. 2:14-16);
3. The trumpets, which called Israel to worship,
now become heralds of her destruction;
4. The heavenly liturgy itself, appointed for Israel’s
sanctification, becomes the means of her
overthrow and dissolution.
The First Trumpet (8:6-7)
6 And the seven angels who had the Seven Trumpets
prepared themselves to sound them.
7 And the first sounded, and there came hail and fire,
mixed with blood, and they were thrown onto the
Land; and a third of the Land was burned up, and a
third of the trees were burned up, and all the green grass
was burned up.
6-7 Not only reminding us of the fall of Jericho, the
judgments brought about by the sounding of these
trumpets also are reminiscent of the plagues that came
upon Egypt prior to the Exodus. Together, they are
represented as destroying one third of the Land.
Obviously, since the judgment is neither total nor final,
it cannot be the end of the physical world. Nevertheless,
the devastation is tremendous, and does work
to bring about the end of the Jewish nation, the subject
of these terrible prophecies. Israel has become a nation
of Egyptians and Canaanites, and worse: a land of
covenant apostates. All the curses of the Law are about
to be poured out upon those who had once been the
people of God (Matt. 23:35-36). The first four trumpets
apparently refer to the series of disasters that devastated
Israel in the Last Days, and primarily the events leading
up to the outbreak of war.
As the Seal-judgments were counted in fourths, the
Trumpet-judgments are counted in thirds. The First
Trumpet sounds, and a triple curse (hail, fire, blood) is
thrown down, affecting a third of the Land; three objects
in particular are singled out. St. John sees hail and fire,
mixed with blood, and they were thrown onto the
12. Caird, p. 111.
13. J. Massyngberde Ford, Revelation: Introduction, Translation,
Land. The blood of the slain witnesses is mixed with
the fire from the altar, bringing wrath down upon the
persecutors. The result of this curse, which has some
similarities to the seventh Egyptian plague (Ex. 9:22-
26), is the burning of a third of the Land and a third
of the trees, and all the green grass (i.e., all the grass
on a third of the Land; cf. 9:4). If the trees and grass
represent the elect remnant (as they seem to in 7:3 and
9:4), this indicates that they are not exempt from
physical suffering and death as God’s wrath is visited
upon the wicked. Nevertheless, (1) the Church cannot
be completely destroyed in any judgment (Matt.
16:18), and (2) unlike the wicked, the Christian’s
ultimate destiny is not wrath but life and salvation
(Rom. 2:7-9; 1 Thess. 5:9).
To those pagans who scoffed that God had failed to
rescue Christians from their enemies, St. Augustine
replied: “The whole family of God, most high and most
true, has therefore a consolation of its own – a
consolation which cannot deceive, and which has in it
a surer hope than the tottering and falling affairs of life
can afford. They will not refuse the discipline of this
temporal life, in which they are schooled for life
eternal; nor will they lament their experience of it, for
the good things of life they use as pilgrims who are not
detained by them, and its ills either prove or improve
them.
“As for those who insult over them in their trials, and
when ills befall them say, ‘Where is thy God?’ [Ps.
42:10] we may ask them where their gods are when they
suffer the very calamities for the sake of avoiding which
they worship their gods, or maintain they ought to be
worshiped; for the family of Christ is furnished with its
reply: Our God is everywhere present, wholly everywhere;
not confined to any place. He can be present
unperceived, and be absent without moving; when He
exposes us to adversities, it is either to prove our
perfections or correct our imperfections; and in return
for our patient endurance of the sufferings of time, He
reserves for us an everlasting reward. But who are you,
that we should deign to speak with you even about your
own gods, much less about our God, who is ‘to be feared
above all gods? For all the gods of the nations are idols;
but the LORD made the heavens’ [Ps. 96:4-5] .” 14
The wicked, on the other hand, have only wrath and
anguish, tribulation and distress ahead of them (Rom.
2:8-9). Literally, the vegetation of Judea, and especially
of Jerusalem, would be destroyed in the Roman
scorched-earth methods of warfare: “The countryside,
like the city, was a pitiful sight, for where once there
had been a multitude of trees and parks, there was now
an utter wilderness stripped bare of timber; and no
stranger who had seen the old Judea and the glorious
suburbs of her capital, and now beheld utter desolation,
could refrain from tears or suppress a groan at so terrible
a change. The war had blotted out every trace of
beauty, and no one who had known it in the past and
and Commentary (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co.,
1975), pp. 135f.
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