Days of Vengeance - The Preterist Archive

8:8-11
came upon it suddenly would have recognized the
place, for though he was already there, he would still
have been looking for the city.” 15 Yet this was only the
beginning; many more sorrows – and much worse – lay
ahead (cf. 16:21).
The Second Trumpet (8:8-9)
8 And the second angel sounded, and something like a
great mountain burning with fire was thrown into the
sea; and a third of the sea became blood;
9 and a third of the creatures that were in the sea and had
life, died; and a third of the ships were destroyed.
8-9 With the trumpet blast of the second angel, we see
a parallel to the first plague on Egypt, in which the Nile
was turned to blood and the fish died (Ex. 7:17-21).
The cause of this calamity was that a great mountain
burning with fire was cast into the sea. The meaning of
this becomes clear when we remember that the nation
of Israel was God’s “Holy Mountain,” the “mountain of
God’s inheritance” (Ex. 15:17). As the redeemed
people of God, they had been brought back to Eden,
and the repeated use of mountain-imagery throughout
their history (including the fact that Mount Zion was
the accepted symbol of the nation) demonstrates this
vividly. But now, as apostates, Israel had become a
“destroying mountain,” against whom God’s wrath had
turned. God is now speaking of Jerusalem in the same
language He once used to speak of Babylon, a fact that
will become central to the imagery of this book:
Behold, I am against you, O destroying mountain,
Destroyer of the whole earth, declares the LORD,
And I will stretch out My hand against you,
And roll you down from the crags
And I will make you a burnt out mountain. . . .
The sea has come up over Babylon;
She has been engulfed with its tumultuous waves.
(Jer. 51:25, 42)
Connect this with the fact that Jesus, in the middle of
a lengthy series of discourses and parables about the
destruction of Jerusalem (Matt. 20-25), cursed an
unfruitful fig tree, as a symbol of judgment upon Israel.
He then told his disciples, “Truly I say to you, if you
have faith, and do not doubt, you shall not only do
what was done to the fig tree, but even if you say to this
mountain, ‘Be taken up and cast into the sea,’ it shall
happen. And all things you ask in prayer, believing, you
shall receive” (Matt. 21:21-22). Was Jesus being
flippant? Did He really expect His disciples to go
around praying about moving literal mountains? Of
course not. More importantly, Jesus was not changing
the subject. He was still giving them a lesson about the
fall of Israel. What was the lesson? Jesus was instructing
His disciples to pray imprecatory prayers, beseeching
God to destroy Israel, to wither the fig tree, to cast the
apostate mountain into the sea. 16
And that is exactly what happened. The persecuted
Church, under oppression from the apostate Jews,
began praying for God’s vengeance upon Israel (6:9-
11), calling for the mountain of Israel to “be taken up
and cast into the sea.” Their offerings were received at
God’s heavenly altar, and in response God directed His
angels to throw down His judgments to the Land was
destroyed. We should note that St. John is writing this
before the destruction, for the instruction and encouragement
of the saints, so that they will continue to pray
in faith. As he had told them in the beginning, “Blessed
is he who reads and those who hear the words of the
prophecy, and keep the things that are written in it; for
the time is near” (1:3).
The Third Trumpet (8:10-11)
10 And the third angel sounded, and a great star fell from
heaven, burning like a torch, and it fell on a third of the
rivers and on the springs of waters;
11 and the name of the star is called Wormwood; and a
third of the waters became wormwood; and many men
died from the waters, because they were made bitter.
10-11 Like the preceding symbol, the vision of the
Third Trumpet combines Biblical imagery from the fall
of both Egypt and Babylon. The effect of this plague –
the waters being made bitter – is similar to the first
plague on Egypt, in which the water became bitter
because of the multitude of dead and decaying fish (Ex.
7:21). The bitterness of the waters is caused by a great
star that fell from heaven, burning like a torch. This
parallels Isaiah’s prophecy of the fall of Babylon, spoken
in terms of the original Fall from Paradise:
How you have fallen from heaven,
O star of the morning, son of the dawn!
You have been cut down to the earth,
You who have weakened the nations!
But you said in your heart,
I will ascend to heaven,
I will raise my throne above the stars of God,
And I will sit on the mount of assembly,
In the recesses of the north.
I will ascend above the heights of the clouds;
I will make myself like the Most High.
Nevertheless you will be thrust down to Sheol,
To the recesses of the pit. (Isa. 14:12-15)
The name of this fallen star is Wormwood, a term used
in the Law and the Prophets to warn Israel of its
destruction as a punishment for apostasy (Deut. 29:18;
Jer. 9:15; 23:15; Lam. 3:15, 19; Amos 5:7). Again, by
combining these Old Testament allusions, St. John
makes his point: Israel is apostate, and has become an
Egypt; Jerusalem has become a Babylon; and the
covenant-breakers will be destroyed, as surely as Egypt
and Babylon were destroyed.
The Fourth Trumpet (8:12-13)
12 And the fourth angel sounded, and a third of the sun
and a third of the moon and a third of the stars were
smitten, so that a third of them might be darkened and
the day might not shine for a third of it, and the night
in the same way.
14. St. Augustine, The City of God, i.29 (Marcus Dods, trans.; New York: The
Modern Library, 1950, pp. 34f.).
15. Josephus, The Jewish War, vi.i.l.
16. According to William Telford, this mountain was a standard expression among
the Jewish people for the Temple Mount, “the mountain par excellence”; see
The Barren Temple and the Withered Tree (Department of Biblical Studies,
University of Sheffield, 1980), p. 119.
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