As you know, we are currently in a series in the book of Revelation, and I would invite you to turn in your Bible to chapter 8, Revelation chapter 8. You may have noticed the title of the message today, and it’s a pretty dramatic title, but it is far short of the drama that this text will unfold for us. I Googled this week “save the earth,” “save the planet,” and I found an endless array of ways to do just that—five ways to save the planet, ten ways to save the planet, fifteen ways, twenty-five ways, fifty ways, a hundred ways to save the planet—all the while realizing that God is about to destroy it, and that is absolutely certain.

And while we will do well to be stewards of the planet, the purpose for our stewardship is to preserve the treasures that God has built into this planet, and He put them there to enrich the life of humanity so that mankind would give Him thanks and give Him glory. We are basically given this planet as a treasure house, as a storehouse, as a reservoir of all kinds of marvelous things which we now experience in this particular generation; and at the same time that we have discovered all of these things, there are people who believe that the planet somehow is God, the planet is sacred—strange kind of thinking. Sixty-seven percent of non-religious Americans think the planet is sacred. Instead of honoring the Creator, we are bowing to the creation, and in many cases denying the richness that God has placed in this planet for our use, and in response to that, for His glory.

All those who intend to try to save the planet would do well to understand that that is sheer folly. This is a disposable planet. We’re going to see that as we move through the book of Revelation. Let’s pick it up in chapter 8.

As we approach this text, heaven is silent. We saw that in chapter 8, verse 1. The seventh seal has been opened, and the angelic hosts sees what is described in that seventh seal, and they are prepared to bring that into reality by the blowing of seven trumpets and the pouring out of seven bowls. Now let me just reconstruct that a little bit for you.

The future destruction of this world, the future judgment of God, the future Day of the Lord is described in the book of Revelation as the opening of seven seals; and out of the seventh seal, seven trumpets; and out of the seventh trumpet, seven bowls. That moves us through the seven-year period of Tribulation. Matthew 24, our Lord preaching on His own coming, referred to this as the Tribulation three times. And so we are looking, by going back to the future in the book of Revelation, into the future time of Tribulation, which also we have identified as the biblical Day of the Lord, the day when God brings final wrath.

So by the time we get to chapter 8 and to the seventh seal, a number of things have happened. The church age has ended. Chapters 1 to 3 describe the church and its life; and then in chapters 4 and 5, the church appeared in heaven, so the church has been collected to heaven in the Rapture; and then in chapter 6, the judgments on the earth begin. Those judgments are horrendous from the very outset. There’s a false peace with Antichrist, followed by war, followed by famine, followed by death, followed by a seal in which there’s prayer for divine vengeance. And of those seals, the sixth seal, I would remind you—go back to chapter 6 and verse 12. This is when the cataclysmic judgments on the creation itself begin to take place.

Revelation 6:12, “I looked when He broke the sixth seal, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth made of hair, and the whole moon became like blood; and the stars of the sky fell to the earth as a fig tree casts its unripe fruit when shaken by a great wind. The sky was split apart like a scroll when it is rolled up, and every mountain and island were moved out of their places. Then the kings of the earth and the great men and the commanders and the rich and the strong and every slave and free man hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains; and they said to the mountains and to the rocks”—this is representative of their worship of the planet; they are actually, in that time, praying to the planet. “They said to the mountains and to the rocks, ‘Fall on us and hide us from the presence of Him who sits on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb; for the great day of their wrath has come, and who is able to stand?’”

So it is that sixth seal that launches the great day of wrath, the Day of the Lord as we call it, the time that our Lord referred to as the Great Tribulation. So by the time we come to chapter 8, all of those things have already happened, those first six seals.

In addition to that, there has been salvation brought to the people of Israel—we saw that in chapter 7. There has been salvation brought to the world, so there is an innumerable number of people from every tongue and tribe and nation who have come to know Christ through the gospel. So the greatest outpouring of salvation in human history will be taking place.

So again, by the time we come to chapter 8, the church has been taken up to be with the Lord. God has begun to let loose wrath all over the earth, collapsing, finally, the heavens, and beginning the destruction of the earth in that sixth seal. And again, all of this is really called the Great Tribulation. This is the Day of the Lord, the final day of judgment. And again, the judgment that we call the Day of the Lord, the day of wrath, comes out of that seventh seal with the seven trumpets, followed in a few weeks and days with the final seven bowl judgments, which we’ll come to.

So those three images give us the chronological progression right to the end. And what is the end? At the end of the final bowl judgment, at that particular moment, Christ returns to destroy all the ungodly from the face of the earth, all who still remain, and to establish His millennial reign on the earth.

So by the time we come to chapter 8, the world will already have suffered through years of trouble, deadly destruction from God. The world will be under the terrorizing domination of Antichrist, who massacres the Jews, as many as he can, and does the same to Christians, as many as he can as well. He has successfully deceived the whole world into following him, so that even though this judgment is coming with this level of fury, and the gospel is being preached, people are hardened in their heart, and they maintain their loyalty to the Antichrist.

If you go over to chapter 9 and verse 20, you get this commentary on the human response to all these judgments. Verse 20, “The rest of mankind, who were not killed by these plagues, did not repent of the works of their hands, so as not to worship demons, and the idols of gold and silver and brass and stone and wood, which can neither see nor hear nor walk; and they did not repent of their murders nor of their sorceries nor of their immorality nor of their thefts.” In spite of all this massive, cataclysmic judgment and the gospel being preached, people’s hearts get harder and harder and harder.

So when we come to chapter 8, we see the seventh seal. The seventh seal, then, encompasses all the trumpet judgments and all the bowl judgments; so this really takes us to the end of the Great Tribulation, the Day of the Lord, right up to the return of our Lord Jesus Christ.

By the way, the angels have been waiting for this—not just for half an hour, although John said there was half an hour of silence as they anticipated the horrors of it. They’ve been waiting for this for years, for centuries, for millennia, and they are, according to verse 6, prepared now to sound the trumpets. This is the moment when the angels—the seven of them, verse 2 says, “who stand before God,” sometimes called the “presence angels.” They have a unique role to play, standing in the presence of God, worshiping God, obeying His commands, serving His purposes and His will. And for now, they become angels of judgment. They blow their horns; and with each one, there is a stupendous, devastating convulsion that falls on the earth and the sky unlike anything ever in the world’s history.

Thinking about a contrast, you remember that back in the sixth chapter of Joshua, Joshua and Israel came to Jericho; and that provides an interesting comparison to this. In Joshua 6 at Jericho, Jericho was about to be visited with judgment and destruction.

So here, the whole earth is about to be visited with judgment and destruction. And the parallels are interesting. In the case of Jericho, seven blasts on seven trumpets by seven priests after a sevenfold march on the seventh day signaled the destruction of Jericho. Here, seven blasts on seven trumpets by seven angels during the seven-year Tribulation signals judgment on the entire earth.

Now there are seven trumpets. We’re going to look at just four of them this morning, contained in verses 7 down through verse 12. It takes seven verses to cover these four. There are final three trumpet blasts that are going to take fifty verses to cover, and we’ll get to those next time. These four relate directly to the earth, to life on this earth.

Now there are some people who think these things are symbolic or metaphoric or illustrative of some political upheaval, some social upheaval, some commercial disaster, some economic disaster; but that will come later. The commerce side of things appears in the prophecies of Revelation 18.

So what are we talking about here? Well, you know me well enough to know I believe we take the Bible at face value. If it doesn’t mean what it says, then we have no idea what it means, and God would know we have no idea what it means. So why would He reveal something that was completely obscure? No, we only need to see what it says and affirm that that is the reality itself. It doesn’t stand for something; it doesn’t represent something. It is what it is.

So let’s look at these four trumpets, starting in verse 7: “The first sounded, and there came hail and fire, mixed with blood, and they were thrown to the earth; and a third of the earth was burned up, and a third of the trees were burned up, and all the green grass was burned up.”

Now we do know there has been judgment in the Bible in the past with hail. Isaiah 28, Job 38 talks about judgment by hail. There has been judgment by fire. We’re very familiar with that, Genesis 19, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. So we know those things God has used on a small scale in judgment. But this is a massive scale.

Remember now, the earth has already experienced the phenomena described in the sixth seal—collapsing sky, shattered earth. And then verse 5 of chapter 8, when the angel, the priest-angel who is in the throne room of God, takes the censer, fills it with fire from the altar, and throws it to the earth, there were “peals of thunder, sounds and flashes of lightning and an earthquake.” So that’s already taking place before the first trumpet is even blown. The earth is being shaken like never before. Some of this phenomena is similar to the seventh plague back in Egypt. You can read about it in the ninth chapter of Exodus.

Earthquakes, storms, hail, fire—what is all of this? Well, a massive kind of storm, massive kind of earthquake. The hail and the fire could represent the result of the storm, which would be the hail; and the result of the earthquake, which would be the fire; a massive enough earthquake to break open volcanoes, sending lava raining down all over the world.

Now notice this. This is worldwide to the degree that a third of the earth is burned up, a third of the trees are burned up, and all the green grass burned up. This is essentially the end of forests and plant life. The whole world is torched.

Now you probably remember when you were in junior high and you learned that 70 percent of the Earth’s surface is water; 30 percent of it is land. So 30 percent of that land is going to be destroyed. This means this is an attack on the food supply. This is beyond devastation.

When it says “grass” and “trees,” it’s talking about plants—no vegetation, no grass, no shrubs, no crops, no food. No wood for construction. No watershed for protection from the storm, the hail. Massive death of animal life all over the planet—scorched, desolate earth. Fitting judgment on man who worships the created order rather than the Creator.

Go back to Romans 1 for the indictment that our Lord gives regarding that. Romans 1:18, “The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them.” God planted the understanding of His existence in the heart of every human being. And we can see that there has to be a Creator by looking at the creation, verse 20: “Since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen . . .”

Anybody with half a brain can look, and understand the God who created the entire universe. You have to have a cause for this massive universe, and He has to be powerful and supernatural. This is so evident, he says, that “they are without excuse” to reject the knowledge of God. But they do nonetheless. “Even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures.”

Mankind, looking at the creation, then rather than concluding that he must bow to the Creator, bows to the creation, failing to recognize the Creator, the sustainer, not giving Him thanks, rejecting His manifest glory in the creation, and worshiping the creation itself. This is animistic false religion. And as a result of this, God is going to judge, and He’s going to judge exactly at the point where men have developed their own deity, and that is at the very earth itself, which they think gives them life. Common expression is “Mother Nature.” God will destroy everything with this hail, fire, and rain.

What do I mean specifically? Well, God will destroy the ozone layer. That’s right. God will destroy the ozone layer. So your buying an electric car is not going to protect the ozone layer. Your willingness to set aside hairspray is not going to save the ozone layer. All your efforts to somehow limit global warming is a kind of atheistic insanity. God is going to destroy everything. God is going to destroy the ozone. God is going to destroy the forests, the rainforests. God is going to devastate the world’s plants and the world’s animals. That’s just the first trumpet. And you can extrapolate from that what life is going to be like when the food supply is gone, both the animal supply and the human supply.

And the second angel sounds, in verse 8, “and something like a great mountain burning with fire was thrown into the sea; and a third of the sea became blood.” The first trumpet dealt with the land, and the second trumpet deals with the sea, the 70 percent of the remaining surface of the Earth. And God is going to judge that, “and a third of . . . [what is] in the sea,” verse 9, is going to die, and “a third of the ships [are going to be] destroyed.” This is cataclysmic, to put it mildly. Again, man’s ingratitude and refusal to honor the Creator, but rather to worship in one form or another—if not overtly, covertly—the creation will bring the judgment at that very god which he has falsely established.

Now what is it? What is the “great mountain”? Well, it’s exactly what Scripture says. This could be a meteor. This could be an asteroid. And by the way, there are scientists who understand that we could have an asteroid hit or a meteor hit this Earth the size of a continent, the size of a continent, crashing into the ocean somewhere. There have been movies made about this kind of threat, and the horror of a whole world watching this thing hurtling out of space on a direct collision course with the Earth—a massive rock-continent surrounded by combustible gases which ignite as they enter into the atmosphere, all steered right at the Earth from God. God is the force behind this, and He’s sending it as judgment. And the world is going to track it; they’re going to be able to see it; they’re going to know it’s coming. It’s going to be on television, and people will be helpless and hapless in stopping it.

“A third of the sea [will turn to] blood.” What does that mean? I don’t know anything, other than to say that it will be turned to blood. When the moon is spoken of as looking “like blood,” it’s simply something that obscures, it’s something dark that obscures it like blood. But this is not “like blood,” this is “blood.” Some suggest some blood-colored combination of elements that are out of the fiery explosions filling the sky as the Earth, blasted by the earthquake and erupting volcanoes everywhere, is belching out all kinds of fire and brimstone as well as the hail. Somehow in the mix, it appears as blood. It doesn’t say that. It says it’s blood. It could be the accumulated blood of the sea animals that are destroyed and the humanity that is destroyed. That would certainly be reasonable.

If a third of the creatures are killed, a third of those who had life are killed, and if a third of the ships are destroyed, that’s a lot of humanity because there are a lot of ships. This is a destruction that I think will finally make the save-the-whale people freak out, to put it mildly. Also, the folks in Malibu who have voted to make dolphins citizens of Malibu will be equally distressed. Whatever the content of the blood is, it poisons the sea; it poisons the water; it kills a third of its population, from marine organisms to the largest mammals.

The food chain is affected with this devastating judgment. Remember now, already all shrubs and trees have been burned up. “A third of the ships were destroyed.” What does that mean? Commerce is ground to a halt. The supply chain, as we hear it referred to these days, the shipping of goods around the world will stop. The arrival of this massive mountain hitting the sea is going to send out tsunamis, the likes of which no one could ever comprehend, flipping massive ships like sticks and shattering them in the harbor—all over the planet.

This is something the prophets saw, by the way. Hosea 4. Read Isaiah 2. I won’t take time to do that. They saw this coming in the future. So the whole judgment is beyond anything that everyone in human history, collectively, could have ever seen. It’s beyond that.

The third trumpet blows in verse 10, “and a great star fell from heaven,” and it was “burning like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and the springs of water.” Now we’ve seen the Earth hit; we’ve seen the salt water, the oceans hit, seas; and now the fresh water. And apparently, this great star that falls, burning like a torch, splits up, fragments, and falls on a third of the rivers and the springs of waters. This is an assault, obviously, on life. Nothing lives without water, nothing.

This is one of the fearful sights and “great signs from heaven” that Jesus referred to in Luke 21:11. A flaming star—asteros is the Greek term—a flaming star, like this “great mountain” previously, comes and splatters, as it were, and destroys a third of the drinking water, scattering all over the globe its foaming, gaseous fire. The destruction is beyond belief. One third of all fresh water destroyed; one third of the world has no water. And man, again, is judged at the point of his godless preoccupation with the creation. Nothing lives without water.

And then in verse 11 we are told, “The name of the star is . . . Wormwood.” That’s an interesting name. “Wormwood” is translated from a Greek word, the Greek word apsinthos, from which we get absinthe. And in the Old Testament, this word appears as the word “hemlock.” And there are a couple of places in the Old Testament where it is used, and it talks about it being a poison, very bitter, and bringing about eventual death.

So this particular star is named Hemlock, or you could say, Poison. So now you have a third of the fresh waters poisoned. This is a very ordered judgment on God’s part. The whole world begins to be poisoned. And people need to drink, and they’re going to drink when they have to drink or die, and so they will drink poisoned water. Death will be massive across the earth. And that’s what it says in verse 11: “Many men died from the waters, because they were made bitter,” or poisoned.

And then in verse 12, “The fourth angel sounded”: “The fourth angel sounded, and a third of the sun and a third of the moon and a third of the stars were struck, so that a third of them would be darkened and the day would not shine for a third of it, and the night in the same way.” Now attention moves from the surface of the earth to above the earth, and eclipses start happening all over everywhere. We had one a couple of weeks ago, and there was a strange fear that gripped people across the country over something as obvious and familiar as an eclipse. But this is going to be the eclipse of the sun, the eclipse of the moon, the eclipse of the stars, all taking place at the same time. This is going to generate panic beyond anything, as they realize days are now gone. No more 24-hour days, no more weeks, no more seasons. Everything is in total disarray and chaos.

This is not survivable. This is not survivable. And that’s why it’s so important to understand that these judgments are happening at the very end because, obviously, this is without remedy. And you can imagine that people all over the world are going to be coming together and having some kind of meetings and conferences and discussions about, “What do we do?”—the scientists of the world, the businesspeople, the capitalists, the politicians, the common people. If there has ever been an interest in saving the earth, they’re going to be doing it at that particular point, doing everything they can to comprehend and counter the impossible. They can’t stop divine judgment. Everything is gone: Food is gone, fresh water is gone, the weeks are gone, time is disrupted, seasons are gone. Everything is assaulted.

And by the way, this darkening of a third of the sun and a third of the moon and a third of the stars. And in the case of the sun is temporary, at least in some sense, because in chapter 16, and look at verse 8. Later on when the four bowls are poured out—those are rapid-fire at the very end—“The fourth angel”—in Revelation 16:8—“poured out his bowl upon the sun, and it was given to it to scorch men with fire. Men were scorched with fierce heat; they blasphemed the name of God who has the power over these plagues, and they did not repent so as to give Him glory.”

Again we are reminded of several things. God is in charge of all these plagues. Number two, they are being judged for their blasphemies; and instead of repenting, they blaspheme all the more. They refuse to give Him glory—and that is taking us back to Romans 1 again. They refuse to give glory to the Creator, and so God brings this horrible judgment. The sun is cut down to a third, but later on, whatever is left of the sun, God is going to turn the temperature up in a way that is beyond comprehension and scorch the whole earth.

These are simple words, straightforward statements. It’s pretty amazing, really, how little detail there is, but how terrifyingly precise these judgments are. Things don’t grow anymore, there’s no water anymore, no transportation anymore, no sense of time. This is not something new either. Isaiah wrote about it in chapter 13, this kind of final judgment. Jeremiah wrote about it. Ezekiel wrote about it. Amos wrote about it. Joel wrote about it. Zephaniah wrote about it. This is the Day of the Lord.

Can it get worse? It can. Verse 13, “Then I looked, and I heard an eagle flying in midheaven, saying with a loud voice, ‘Woe, woe, woe’”—that’s an onomatopoetic word, like, “Oy, oy, oy”—"‘to those who dwell on the earth, because of the remaining blasts of the trumpet of the three angels who are about to sound!’” Can it get worse? It can get worse. It does get worse.

The first four trumpets are discussed in seven verses. The next three, it’s going to take fifty verses to describe. But what is so sad about this is that no matter what the judgments are, men refuse to repent. They will not repent. We saw that at the end of chapter 9; we saw that, as I read to you from chapter 16: they blaspheme the God of heaven.

An old commentator, I think, summed this up beautifully enough to read. He wrote this: “Though sentence against an evil work be not executed speedily, it will be executed at last. Jezebel may flourish in her iniquities for many years, but, finally, the horses trample her body in the streets, and the dogs gnaw and crunch her royal bones. Long was the old world left to drive its crimes, jeer at Noah . . . fling defiance [in] the face of God; but [soon, soon,] . . . beneath their feet, [were] lifeless bodies dashed upon each other amid the waves of an [unimaginable storm]!”

He goes on, “The trampled law will assert its rightful honor . . . Christ will not endure the smiting[s], [the torments], [and] the wrongs of Pilate’s hall forever. And when these trumpets once give . . . their [charge], the vibrations will run through the universe, and everything created for human blessedness shall turn into a source of disaster . . . to them that know not God and obey not the Gospel of Christ."  This is what is coming.

As we come together this morning to the Lord’s Table, we rejoice because we are not children of the night. We are children of the day. We are not destined for wrath. The New Testament says we are not destined for wrath; we are kept from the wrath to come. Those of us who know the Lord Jesus Christ will be taken to glory before this begins. When the Lord comes from heaven with a shout—the shout of an archangel, the trump of God—the dead in Christ shall rise first; the rest of us who are alive and remain shall all, together with them, meet the Lord in the air and enter into His presence in glory.

We will not participate as victims of this. We will not experience wrath—not eternal wrath, and not even the temporal wrath of the Day of the Lord. This is another reason for us to be grateful for our salvation, right? And that’s what we express when we come to the Lord’s Table.

Thank You, Lord, for the forgiveness of sins. Thank You for delivering us from the wrath to come.