Christ rules the world in His Father's Name. That is the central conviction in which the book of Revelation is written.
In the exercise of His rule, the Church has a vital part to play. She plays her part, first, by her witness; that was the theme we were occupied with in the previous chapter. Prayer is the other. John introduces it with the breaking of the seventh seal in ch. 8.
We might expect that if the scroll of human destiny bears seven seals, the breaking of the seventh seal would represent the climax of history. But if we have read through ch. 7 in the expectation that John will then describe the end of the world, we are in for a surprise.
In the first place instead of the noisy upheaval which we might associate with the break-up of the world order, we are met with a complete and utter silence.
And in the second place, instead of the end, we find ourselves at a beginning again. The seventh seal leads on, not to a climax, but to a fresh series of judgments - another pattern of seven; only instead of being announced as seals are broken, they are introduced as trumpet-calls are sounded.
The way John develops his series of visions is rather like the progressive stages through which a space rocket blasts off. When the first stage of the rocket burns out, that is not the end. Instead it serves to ignite the second stage, which in turn ignites the third. So the last of the seven seals sets off a second stage, so to speak - a series of seven trumpets; and they are followed by a third series of seven bowls. Not until then will John's description of the end begin. So we must be careful. The breaking of the seventh seal is not intended to tell us that John will now describe the Second Coming, or anything like it. For what John is unfolding is not a sequence of events but a pattern of features, and what he will do in the second series (of seven trumpets) is introduce us to a whole new dimension in which Christ's rule on earth is to be understood.
That new dimension is introduced with the breaking of the seventh seal.
Look now at the picture.
8:1 The seventh seal is broken and there follows total silence. Why?
In that silence two things happen.
One (v. 2) : seven angels are given trumpets with which they will herald another series of judgments.
Two (v. 3) : the prayers of all the saints ascend before God.
Grasp the sequence:
i. Heaven is silent to hear the prayers of the saints.
ii. The result of heaven's attention to their cry is an intensification of disasters.
What on earth is John telling us? Does he mean that when the church prays, things get worse, not better?
The answer is "Yes, he does. He means exactly that."
Surprising! Is John right about that? Surely that is not what Christians want when they pray. No it is not. But it is what happens ... what must happen, if we think about it, when their prayers begin to be answered. For what is the prayer of the saints? What is the Church's cry?
It can be summed up very simply. It is, "Thy Kingdom come." Whether it is the prayer we pray for ourselves, or for our children, or for our families or our society, or nation, or the whole world - all our prayers boil down to that: "Thy Kingdom come."
His Kingdom is the Kingdom of Righteousness and Truth. That is what we want, is it not? We want righteousness and truth to triumph in the earth. Is that not the prayer of the saints? Of course it is. It is the only prayer the redeemed can pray.
But do we realise its implications?
"O Lord, vindicate your trusting people's faith in you. We have answered your summons; we have obeyed your call. In the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, we have chosen rather to suffer affliction with the people of God than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season. We have followed truth; we believe in you, Lord. Vindicate our faith. Let us see your salvation; let us enter into the full blessing of your reign; let your righteousness be established over all the earth."
And if God answers that prayer ... what then?
Why, if righteousness is to be established, unrighteousness must be overthrown; if truth is to prevail, the lie must be undone; if the faith of the righteous is to be vindicated, the scornful pride of the unrighteous must be vitiated; if the faithful are to be hastened to their reward, the faithless must be hurried to theirs. The prayer of the church "casts fire on the earth."
That is what John in his language of symbol says.
v. 3-5 "The angel was given much incense to mingle with the prayers of all the saints upon the golden altar before the throne, and the smoke of the incense rose with the prayers of the saints from the hand of the angel before God. Then the angel took the censer and filled it with fire from the altar and threw it on the earth."
He did not simply hold it, vain and useless, before the face of God. He turned back those prayers upon the world. They were answered. They were mingled with the fiery passion of love's sacrifice whose life-blood was poured out on that altar for the world's cleansing, and they were flung back on the face of the earth. And even as it is done, the seven angels (who are God's ministers of flaming fire) know what the result must be, and they lift their trumpets to herald the judgments that must surely follow.
With the prayer of the Church, John has now introduced the spiritual dimension of judgment which we must see.
The judgments of the seven seals happened at the cry of the four living creatures, representing the powers of the creation. The judgments of the seven trumpets happen at the cry of the Church representing the new creation.
The seal judgments come upon us out of the creation, because its powers react upon us in consequence of our sinful mismanagement of them.
The trumpet judgments fall upon us out of heaven because God in righteous anger reacts personally to our rebellious folly.
The one dimension of judgment is natural, the other is spiritual. For the conflict between good and evil is not a natural warfare merely; it is a spiritual warfare. "We wrestle, not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places." (Eph. 6:12).
And so in this trumpet series of visions, John will introduce us to the demonic element in the age-long warfare with evil under the symbols of ...
(1) a plague of locusts that rise in choking smoke out of the bottomless pit and torment men's minds; and ...
(2) a huge army of vicious cavalry that slaughters a third of mankind.
They picture the 'drivenness' of mankind - the demonic impulse, augmenting humanity's own evil impulse, which, as we have seen again and again in history, drives men - past all reason - into senseless self-destruction ... as the Gadarene swine were driven by the legion of evil spirits that had entered them, so they flung themselves down the precipice into the sea.
For we must understand that when men defy the God of Heaven they open their hearts to the power of pure evil, which robs them of the power of self-restraint. "It is this perception of the mystery of iniquity," says D. T. Niles, "which underlies the biblical conviction that evil can be mastered by the Word of God alone." "The Lord Jesus will slay him by the breath of His mouth." (II Thess. 2:8) John will develop this theme in his pictures of the little scroll he is bidden to eat, and the two witnesses that are slain, only (miraculously) to rise again, for the life and power of the Word of God cannot be extinguished.
But we have run on ahead of ourselves; the meaning of the seven trumpets must wait. Enough now to say that the first four trumpets describe the effect of God's personal judgments on the conditions of men's lives, the second two on their persons, and the last, the seventh, on the final retribution that overtakes them. (John's sequences of seven are regularly broken up into segments of four, two and one).
Come back now to the point about the world-changing power of the prayers of God's people.
We have seen that if there is to be a reaping of the wheat, so to speak, so that the harvest of righteousness is gathered in (and the prayers of the saints hasten it on), then there must also be a reaping of the tares, so a bonfire may be made of the harvest of unrighteousness (and the prayers of God's People hasten that on).
Prayer is a real part of the way God's children share in the exercise of His rule on earth; and its effects may be catastrophic.
Prayer is no mere toy for God's children to play with in His Kindergarten; it is dynamite. When we pray for God's Kingdom to come, we had better know what it is we are about. It may be that our prayer will be answered at first, not by sweetness and light, but by conflict and darkness.
How can God's truth shine with the light of day in this world but untruth be exposed, and shrivel in the blinding light and searing heat of it ... and with it, all who embrace it, who love the lie? Prayer troubles the world ("I came, not to bring peace," said Jesus, "but a sword." Matt. 10:34)
So what shall we do? Stop praying? Shall we say, "If to pray that righteousness prevail means that such grim effects are produced thereby, surely it were better not to pray at all - to go quiet, to lie doggo, to not enlist in the ranks of God's fighting men that way."
But that is to go over to the other side, to join the unrighteous who do not care; it is to become apostate, in fact. There is no middle ground. For once God gets busy converting the world to righteousness, the effect on some men will be to intensify their resistance to Him. The deepening of their resistance is not what He intends. But if He moves at all toward us, some will move against Him. They will.
One effect of God's working for righteousness therefore is an increase in unrighteousness. There is no help for it. The only way God can avoid that result is not to move at all - to do nothing, to leave men be, to ignore His people's prayers.
Is that what we want? Even if it were, we would not be given it. For God is not only righteousness, He is love. That means He ardently desires men's good. So He must work for the establishment of righteousness among us. He can do no other. He cares too much to leave us be.
Because He is righteous, righteousness is what He must promote. Because He is love, He cannot cease from striving to promote it; and the effect of His loving, holy striving on some men is to harden their hearts. This is the tragedy John knows we must recognise.
The people of God have always known it. They knew it in their beginnings, in the days of Moses and of Pharaoh. Indeed, it is no accident that the judgments John shows us must follow upon the prayers of His saints are all so reminiscent of the plagues that befell Egypt at that time (the first 4 trumpets 8:6-12). The prayers of God's people then rose to heaven out of the oppression with which the world oppressed them. God heard their cry - and the result was a chain of catastrophes.
"I will harden Pharaoh's heart," said God to Moses. Not because God wanted it that way; not because Pharaoh was putty in God's 'perverse' hands and had no choice in the matter; but because for the sake of His suffering people He brought pressure to bear on Pharaoh to repent of the evil he committed in oppressing them, and let them go. For Pharaoh's sake as well as for the Hebrew's sake, God acted. God did not make Pharaoh evil; God would have made him good.
But Pharaoh was not interested in any growth in this own righteousness if it meant he lost the worldly advantage he enjoyed of a slave labour force. So whilst God would have made Pharaoh a worthy man, Pharaoh hardened his heart to become a wicked man.
And what could God do about that ... except take the pressure off? But that would mean abandoning the Hebrews, and leaving them to languish. How could God be righteous and turn a blind eye to their need, even for Pharaoh's sake?
There is no way to promote Christ's Kingdom of Light except as you provoke Satan's Kingdom of darkness, and with it the escalation of judgments. And this is why the Bible warns us over and over again that as God's plan to cleanse the world of evil nears its climax, the world's troubles will increase. The day of final victory will be heralded by a time of tribulation, conflict and calamity such as the world has never seen.
"Let no-one deceive you," wrote Paul, "for that day will not come, but the rebellion comes first, and the man of sin is revealed, the son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself against everything that is called God or is worshipped, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, and proclaims himself to be God." (II Thess. 2:3)
If all we have been saying should be thought slightly incredible, a bit 'way out' or fanciful, then a simple personal experiment will test the truth of it.
Begin to pray - meaning it - for your own growth in personal holiness, and see if conflict does not arise. The moment we seek the establishment - the real establishment of Christ's rule of righteousness - deep in our souls, then resistances that have lain dormant in us for maybe many a year awaken and stir, and stand up and fight. "I came to cast fire on the earth," Jesus said (Luke 12:49), and we are none of us made truly His but somewhere its flame touches the sin in our own souls.
Let me end this exposition on a positive note of hope and confidence, however. Beyond the tribulation of life we must always be looking for the triumph that will surely burst through and overwhelm it.
Remember what Jesus said: "Now when all these things begin to take place" - (and He had just outlined a catalogue of crisis and convulsion) - "then look up; lift up your heads, for your redemption is drawing near." (Luke 2:28)
Jesus reviewed history in that chapter with as realistic and sombre an eye as John does in Revelation - a history full of the confused cries of men in ceaseless strife, suffering endless calamities, wars, famines, plagues, terrors in the sky ... seething hatreds, black betrayals, justice overthrown. It is a picture of the world unhinged, and torn apart.
"Then," said Jesus, "look up, because your redemption is on the way." The darkness of the long night really will end in the breaking of a new day.
The writer Hilaire
Belloc told how he and a friend of his camped one night somewhere in
the Pyrenees. Belloc knew the mountains well - better than his friend
did. The greater part of the night was still, but toward dawn a
tearing wind sprang up, so strong it ripped their tent away and had
them hanging on in desperation to anything that would hold. Above the
shrieking of the wind and the keening of driven snow, his friend
cried out, "Is this the end of the world, or what?"
"No," Belloc shouted back, "This is how the dawn comes in the
Pyrenees."
When the storm of history is at its height, then is when the Son of Righteousness will arise with healing in His wings.
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