Chapter 8 and 9 of the book of Revelation take his sermon out line this summer we had the opportunity to attend Church in Granger, Indiana, which is a suburb of South Bend. The pastor was hilarious, jovial, joyful, and we enjoyed his preaching and teaching. In the summer and once again forget that one Sunday in mid-July, when we went to church rather than his usual healthy persona, the pastor, wept, almost the whole service. He told us about his best friend, son, Lucas. Lucas was a terrific guy. They just all been together for the 4th of July of the previous weekend. They had played ball and shot off fireworks and shared watermelon and Lucas had his whole life in front of him. He just graduated from Indiana, Westland. He was a captain of the basketball team. He set a conference record in one game, his senior year making 11 free points shots in a row. He was the conference leader, career for a 3-point basket made, he set the school record for scoring. It was just an athletic marvel and a great young man. He's been a Christian since the age of 14. He'd been at the camps and missions trips and conferences. Lucas was the pride of his family, the pride of his hometown. When he finished college having been an academic high achiever, he went back to the small Indiana town he was from to settle into life as a farmer. July the 5th of Monday, he and his dad went out to work some of the land that Lucas had inherited from his family and there was a terrible accident. Somehow or another, some grain silo electricity had been misdirected so that it was grounding through the door of the silo. When his father got around the back of the building, this young man touched the side of the building and when his father came around 30 seconds later, he discovered his son frozen to the side of the building, took off his shirt that his father wrapped it around his son in a very cool thinking and was able to pull his son away from the current but it was too late. 23 years old and he was dead. And this pastor, Wes, Revelation chapter 8 and chapter 9 are a powerful warning that life is going to be filled with tragedy and hardship and devastation. That in this world there will be trumpet blast, after trumpet blast, after trumpet blast, telling us that in this world the consequences of man for valiant against God are going to be seen over and over and over again. Here's the question, why is God destroying the earth? The answer is not yet. These blasts come as warning that we might come to our senses, that we might wake up and respond to the living God before it's too late. You know what I hate? I honestly hate the alarm clock. Can I get a witness? I mean, in the midst of the most pleasurable moment of life, in some deep sleep, you know, your nerves are rattled, this alarm pierces through the darkness and I'm in a midst of total relaxation, boom, you're awake and you just want to kill that little thing, you know. And yet, we really need that, don't we? We need to be jared out of our sleep because there are important things to tend to and if we don't tend to them, we lose our jobs, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so Revelation chapter 8 and chapter 9 show us that God sounds the alarm by trumpet blast after trumpet blasts saying what? Wake up, wake up. Because when the last trumpet sound, it's too late. If you're not awake by then, you just press mute, mute, mute, smooth, smooth, then it's too late. And then we have a real tragedy on our hands. Lucas died way before, I mean the trumpet sound of his life way before anyone expected, but he was ready. This funeral was a celebration through the tears, great joy. And so the question really has to be pressed. How ready are you for no man knows the day or the hour when the trumpet will sound that last trumpet in your life. Take your sermon outline and we'll study these difficult passages and images and I want you to see first that God's wrath is revealed in these trumpet blasts. People of God have always been vexed by this. There's so much rebellion against God, there's so much evil in the world, if God is powerful and omnipotent and involved and in touch, why doesn't he do anything? Why does he let people despise his name? Why does he let people harm his children as the Psalmist, as a staff of the leader of the worship of the people of God, asks in Psalm 73, why do the wicked prosper? Why do those who are faithful to you get it in the teeth and why do those who despise you just do so well? I don't get it, God, show yourself, play your hand, get involved. How long, O Lord, we just read just last chapter, right? The martyred saints crying out, how long, O God, will you sit on your hand? And here comes the answer, Revelation chapter 8 and chapter 9, here's what I want you to see, the judgment of God is now. The Bible says that the wrath of God is being poured out against the unrighteousness of men, it says that in Romans chapter 1, doesn't it? Could anything be much more straightforward than that? Does the smack in the face, plain as it can be, the wrath of God is poured out against the unrighteousness of men. Romans 1 says it plain, Revelation 8 and 9 say the exact same thing, but it's not very plain, it's very dramatic in the book of Revelation, a dramatic portrayal of the wrath of God being poured out in which God is saying, I am not sitting on my hand, the trumpets have been sounding for thousands of years, they're sounding even now and they'll continue to sound and so be encouraged my beleaguered children suffering under the hardship of Roman oppression that my judgment is now, not my final complete total judgment, that's yet to come, and you stop and think about it, the idea that we would ever say to God, where are you, why aren't you doing anything? I would add, you know, what if that page called obituary we see in the paper every day? What are all those names? What if all that represents? But what? The wrath of God. Justice for man's rebellion. So the Bible is very clear, the trumpets blast that we hear aren't about events that are going to happen in the future, this isn't a prophecy about something that's going to take place, it's a proclamation that what? The God's trumpets have been blaring ever since the Garden of Eden and they continue still, God's judgment is now, secondly, God's judgment is responsive. What are the first few verses of chapter 8 tell off? There's a scene that happens in heaven. So the question is, God, are you listening? God, do you hear the cries of your people who have been persecuted? Why aren't you doing anything? And the answer is God gives John a picture, doesn't he? There's seven angels, so standing, these are arch angels, these have some rank and significance and power and each has a trumpet, but before their trumpet sounds, there's another angel who comes and he has a sensor and his sensor is filled with incense which represents what? The prayers of the prayers of the saints, the prayers of God's people have been gathered up before God, the incense is what the aroma ascends to the nostrils of God and then the trumpets blare. You see the picture? Is that God hears their prayers? God hears the cries of his people. Do you remember thousands of years earlier, God's people were enslaved under Pharaoh who laid burdens on them. In fact, he was mass-occurring their children, wasn't he? And the Bible says that's the Lord God. Do you remember what it says? He heard their cries. He heard the cries of the children and he teemed down and he delivered them. So understand that the trumpet blasts, it's happening now and it's happening in response to the, to the woeful cries of the children of God. God asks, move! And the vision is very clear. God's saying to his people, I am moving and your prayers are connected somehow to that. Third, the judgment of God we see is comprehensive, don't we? Let's look at these seven trumpet blasts. The first four trumpet blasts reveal that God's wrath is going to be poured out in environmental collapse, right? The first trumpet says that there's a firestorm of hail that will just devastate the earth and its vegetation, right? The second trumpet says that there's a flaming mountain that will fall into the sea and the sea will turn to blood and ship will sink and sea creatures will die, right? So we've got the land devastated to sea. The third trumpet says that the water, the fresh water will become one. Undrinkable, bitter, even poisoning. And the fourth trumpet deals with the sky. Sun learning stars, darkened the sky in the midst of the day, even not their yielding is light. And so we get a picture in the first four trumpet blasts of this environmental devastation. Now, hearing that, would the people of God 2000 years ago, when that was read in their church, would they have said, hey, I wonder when this is going to happen? That's going to be a terrible day when this happens. Is that what they would have thought? Or would they have said, this sounds exactly like what? Egypt. When God visited Egypt, what did he do? Turned an aisle for what? Blood, brought on plays, darkened the sky, destroyed the livestock, destroyed each one of these prophecies is directly tied to the plagues we find in Egypt in which God was declaring that he was God and turning the Egyptian landscape into a nightmare. These people wouldn't have been saying, hey, someday, this is a prophecy, someday these things are going to happen. These people would have said, hearing these descriptions, they would have said, God does this. God's done this in the past. God's doing it now. God will do it again. These are people who would have lived in the days of of a volcano, volcanic eruption called what? Now, the Soviet bearing the city of Pompeii, burning its inhabitants, man, woman and child. That happened in 79 AD. They understood and this really represents that all throughout history, God's judgment has been poured out and so whether it was a famine, whether it was drought, or whether it was pollution, or whether it was flooding, or whether it was hurricanes, or twisters, or floods, etc., God's power to destroy what He has made as a consequence of Man's rebellion and sin. Trumpets one through four. Then the Bible tells us an eagle flies through crying out, whoa, whoa, whoa, because you haven't tasted anything yet. Trumpet number five, chapter nine, is really wild. A hole opens up in the ground, smoke pours out from the pit of hell, and what pours out of the hole? What comes out of the hole?
Locust, a locust blade. We don't know anything about this today, but again, if you're a Bible reader, you're interested, you instantly are thinking back to the old testament book of,
free book in a bookstore. Who can get it? The book of Joel, the old testament book of Joel. These are common, you see, you can't understand the book of Revelation. The key to understanding Revelation isn't to look into the future, it isn't to read your paper and look at the world and understand what's happening now. The key to the book of Revelation is what? It's called the Old Testament. The prophet captures these images of the Old Testament and brings them to life for the people living 2000 years ago. And up out of the grounds comes this locust swarm. Locusts stay in an area for two or three days. Why? Because they've eaten everything they're asleep by then. Then they move on. This is a locust swarm that will stay for how long? Five months. And it doesn't touch the tree. It doesn't touch the fruit. It doesn't touch the vegetation. It's stings. It's barbs are all aimed at those who are not God. What does the Bible say about them? They are arms like scorpions, shapes like horses. They have the faces of man, they have the hair of women, they have the teeth of lions, they're armor plated, winged, and they move with the noise of a chariot, attack of thousands of horses. Clearly, these are United Nations helicopters. People believe that there are people who say, why don't I like to leave pre-travelation? Because I take a more literal approach. Nobody believes there's locusts that look like that, that there ever were or there ever will be or there ever could be. So clearly something else is meant. And what's meant by this kind of literature, what's pictured here is that this is the chronic hardship of unbelief that falls upon the people of God in every manner and form you can think of from age to murder to gangs to drive my shootings to drug abuse to broken homes to bankruptcies to malnutrition, I mean the whole kit in caboodle. God has the power to take the environment of men and destroyer. He has the power to take the lives of people and make them a living a living hell. I thought it was pictured this week in our Citrus County newspaper perfectly. A woman whose only son has been convicted of murder, her face was splashed on the front page of the paper in a twisted mask of agony. She related to the reporter, her husband being paralyzed, her husband abandoning the family, raising her son alone, seeing him go off and join again, trying to stop him and of no avail. Now her son's a convicted killer and her tears and her face twisted in the pain of living in this world. That's the fifth trumpet. And the sixth trumpet is worse yet. The sixth trumpet blasts millions of horses poised on the banks of the Euphrates river. Poised sweep over into age and minor and slaughter what? One third of all the people. The sixth trumpet is our greatest enemy and what's that? What's God's punishment for sin? The wages of sin is death. The sixth trumpet is death. The death no respecter of persons. Death visits every one of us. This is God's wrath poured out on mankind. We were not made to die. Death is unnatural. And what's the end of all this judgment and heartache and evidence that the world is broken? How does man respond? What does it say in verse 20 and 21 of chapter 9 of the Book of Revelation? It says that man does not want. Instead of falling on your face before a powerful God and confessing that we are complicit in the horrors that are visited on this world, man still does want. He raises his fist in defiance against God and he will not repent. And that's the last point to end you out on God's judgment is sparing. 200 million horses with tails like scorpion, I mean with tails like snake bringing death and devastation. Can I say something? Then the ministry for almost 20 years and that means I've done a lot of funerals. Is there any event that could be more poised to wake us up to ultimate realities and than coming to a service about the death of someone we love? I mean here's somebody who is there. They were walking. They were talking to our part of our life, our family, our neighborhood, their vibrant and now they are what? Where they go? What happened? They're gone. They're blotted out.
How the people there ought to be sobered but I can tell you that in 20 years I have rarely seen a life seen by a death. Pharaoh with each judgment of God, each play the Bible says he repented, tell it or he was. His heart grew hard. His heart grew hard. And it's so important for me to ask this morning what direction is your heart moving? When you read the papers, when you just now we live in the day of America's most wanted and bad boys, bad boys what you're going to do and you know these cop shows and these real time and video. I mean where we just see death and murder and mayhem and crime portrayed right in front of us all the time. When you see that is your heart so and realize these are the consequences of sin or does your heart go more talistic and hard and more determined that you can make it in this world on your own. Guide your heart. It's a horrible thing for God to pluck out of your life someone dear to you and to look at your life and say I am unmoved. All maybe for a couple days I shed a tear but then I go back and I lived as I did before.
I remember a guy whose brother got drummed and was killed in a car accident. This guy had a terrible drinking problem. I remember after his brother died, he said I won't touch that stuff again. I remember about a month later we were playing basketball and he came in the gym and his breath just wreaked about the hole. He's only brother, dead, rabbits by alcohol. I'll never do that. Right back to it. Hard and hard. What's God going to have to do in your life? It's often your heart. Do you hear the trumpet sounding?
Terrible things for all this warning to come and for you just to keep hitting the snooze button and think you're going to get away with it. It's often your heart. It's often your heart. That's what I want to talk about as we wrap this up. The character of God that's revealed in that. First, I want you to see that the character of God revealed in these sounding compasses that he is a God of justice. If there's one universal truth, it's this. What you so you show also just that's clear, right? What you so that's you're going to read. It doesn't get violated that law. Somebody sent me this story this week of two boys and college that are a science exam the next day but they partied all night and said they went into the professor and they said we're not ready for the exam. We had a car broke down. We had a flat tire. We couldn't pull it together to study. We give us one more day and so the professor said no problem. With this reprieve, I mean they studied all night the next night to get ready. They went in and the professor gave them both an exam to them the separate rooms. They sat down and the first question was what are the parts of an atom? Five points for that. I'll just take, wrote them all down. You know, greedily looked to the next question. The next question was for 95 points. Which tire was it? What you so you can also read. 198 United States Olympians were surveyed. Swimmers, archers, weightlusters, distance runners. They were surveyed and asked, this posed with this situation. If would you take performance enhancing drugs that were illegal? If number one, they guaranteed that you would win your event in the Olympian. And two, it was a guarantee that you would not be caught. Would you do it? 198 were asked that question. 195 said yes. In the heart of man's existence, I can get away with it. I am so crafty that I can do that which is wrong. I know it's wrong. And yet somehow I know that I'm going to find a loophole and I'm going to slide by. But friends, nobody ever gets away with anything, ever. And if you understand anything about Christianity that leads you to believe that people get away with things in God's economy, you are woefully misled. And nobody ever gets away with anything before the eyes of the omniscient God. Sin has consequences. God never averts his gaze. Hitler was king of the world for a day. Wilk Chamberlain, the finest sculpted athletic body our century perhaps has ever known, dead. Dead and gone. Such it is. The wrath of God reveals his justice. Now, here's just a caveat to be careful. It aids the curse of God on this behavior. Is that the wrath of God? What's the answer? Of course. Of course. And so is cancer. And so our car rest. And so is every other malady that man experiences. Where else do they come from? The Lord give it. And the Lord why? Take it away. Satan is not the power, the king of death and destruction. God is the king who is sovereign overall. Be careful that you don't look at yourself as one escaping the ravages of living in this world because you've been wise enough to line up with God. But well, everybody else deserves it and they'll get what they deserve. Guard your heart about that too. They came to Jesus one day and they said, what about those Galileans, the pilot killed? Were they worse sinners than anyone else? They said, what about those 18 upon whom the tower and siloam fell and killed them? Were they worse sinners? Is that why God allowed that to happen? And what was Jesus respond? Jesus said, no, unless you repent, you'll perish like that too. In other words, what they got is what you deserve too. And the real question we face every day is not why the bad things happen, the real mystery of the universe is why do good things happen to people like God? Second, understand that the wrath of God reveals his justice, but second, the wrath of God reveals his mercy. Did you notice that it kept saying a third, a third of the creatures die. A third of the people die. A third of the vegetation is spoiled. A third of the rivers are made bitter. A third, a third, a third, a third. What have all that indicate? That this isn't God's destruction. He's not going to wipe everything out. He's doing what? He's warning. He's sending a limited thunder, a limited trumpet glass of judgment so that those others, the rest could see it and repent. It's the mercy of God that's being revealed. Do you understand that man in his heart, Romans 1 says, no, we know that we're not right with God. We know something's wrong. Then it's an eye God. They know something's wrong. There was a Seinfeld episode on which George gets a little spot on his whip. He goes to get it checked out and when he discovers that it looks cancerous or pre-cancerous, he loses it. He says to Jerry, God is out to get me. And Jerry says, but George, you don't believe in God. And he says, well, yeah, I don't. Except in bad things. You really think God's out to get you? It's God makes the water of your life bitter because the water of your life does he satisfy your soul anyway. Is that the hatred of God or is that what? Is that the love of God? When God pulls the rug out from under you because the foundation on which you're standering, standing, it's tottering and it's going to fall, is that God out to get you or is that the kindness and mercy of God saying, get off of the foundation you're standing on. It's shrinking his sand. Get out of there. Come to me. It's not rare for people to come to me and say, every turn my life takes, it's a mess. God's against me. Then in the middle. If your life working out great, while you walk away from God, then I can tell you God's against you. But if God keeps causing the caveans to happen, it's because He's alive. He loves you. The prodigal son comes to his senses, doesn't he? Where? In ruins, in a pig pen, bankrupt, with nothing, everything caving in. And it's there. His mind clears up. But he says, I'm a fool. I ought to go back to my dad, even as a slave of my father. I'm better off. So when God rips the currents out when the stock market, when your stock plummeted at the end of this week, it may just be because God loves you. Quit trusting your retirement on your investments and start trusting me. I might strip you of everything that brings you security. But if I do, I do it because I want you to find your security. And that which is eternal, and that which will last forever. If I take away all your idols, it's because I love you.
In the trumpet blast, we see the justice and the mercy and last of all the love of God. There are some people who say, I can't stand this God of wrath. I'm not buying a God of wrath. I want a God of love. Friends, I don't know where you get a God of love who doesn't have wrath because wrath demands love. Love demands wrath. If you're walking with your wife through a park and someone jumps out and begins to pummel her, then you watch the scene unfold, don't you? And do nothing. Because after all, you're a person of love. If you're a person of love, what do you do? What do you do? You jump in the fray and you attack your wife's attacker because true love demands wrath against anything that threatens or assaults what you love. What kind of God would be to make his creation, his beauty, the work of his hands, and then stand idly by while others destroy it. The fact that God reacts strongly and powerfully to destroy those who would destroy what is beautiful and good means that God is a God of love. And where does God love and God's wrath intersect? What place? That place. Because it's there, the wrath of God that you and I deserve was absorbed by God. Jesus Christ drinks the cup of the wrath of God. Don't you dare think that any sin that you have ever committed was overlooked by God? God doesn't overlook sin. He paid for them. He paid for every last one of them in your stead. That's the beauty of the gospel. God hates sin. And he pours out the fury of his judgment on it. And yet for us, he steps in the way and takes that judgment on himself. Hallelujah. The gospel is true. Little Cecilia Tcha'an got on a plane north west flight 220 leaving Detroit 12 years ago. August 16, 1987. The plane took off. The plane plummeted to the ground across the freeway, killing every occupant of the plane and drivers on the freeway as well. That is every occupant but Cecilia, all of four years old. The only survivor, when they found her, they were sure she had been in a car on the highway. Nobody in the plane had survived. They checked the flight manifest. Her name was there. And through piecing together details and where they found her and how they found her. And then through her own testimony, they discovered what it transpired. But when the plane began to shudder and shake and lose altitude, her mother rapidly unstratzed her seatbelt, got on her knees in front of her four-year-old daughter and wrapped her body around her and around the seat covering her daughter so that everybody died. But one little girl sat in the arm of her mother. Brothers and sisters, I don't know how more clearly I can say it, but that if you hear the trumpet sound and you walk away from Jesus Christ, you shall surely die. Not in the way that every man dies. No, you will die forever. But if you hear the trumpet sound and you run to the embrace and the hasty and the covering of your father, then you will live. Not in the way that other people live. No, you will live forever. We bow your hand.