Revelation 8:1-5

May 31, 2020

Lord’s Day Worship

Sean Higgins

The sermon starts around 16:55 in the audio file.

Or, How the Prayers of the Saints Fuel the Judgment of God

Every prayer we make adds fuel to the fire of God’s wrath. When we feel pain and cry for help, when we observe evil and cry for deliverance, when our chests pound with longing for God to do something, God does something. Even our tastes of blessing and our gratitude for His goodness makes the fury of the furnace of His righteous anger hotter.

Christians are gun-shy when it comes to imprecatory prayers, that is, prayer-curses, such as asking the Lord to break the teeth of His enemies and let them be like the snail that dissolves into slime (Psalm 58:6, 8). Many church-goers in this generation imagine themselves to be the kinder, gentler type of believers, but softness does not decrease God’s vengeance. We pray that God would grant repentance, and if He won’t, that He will do what is right.

The church cannot have it only one way. Christians cannot love grace and how grace teaches us about God and brings us to God without recognizing that grace is also great because of what wrath we deserved. It can be reverse engineered as well. The more we consider wrath, the more valuable we see His mercy to us in Jesus, and the glory of the Lamb slain and resurrected. The evaluation of one side isn’t one-sided. For another example:

But there are two vast, spacious things,

The which to measure it doth more behove:

Yet few there are that sound them;

Sin and Love.

(George Herbert, “The Agony”)

Try to get to the bottom of love without understanding love’s reach to the sinner. Try to consider the depth of sin without understanding its rejection of love. At the cross we see both; Christ took God’s judgment to ransom a people for Himself, and at the end of the world we see God’s love for righteousness and love for the righteous as He judges the sins of men.

The martyred souls under the altar in Revelation 6:9-11 prayed for justice, and while those cries may be included in this paragraph (Revelation 8:1-5), nothing in the text or context limits the identity of the pray-ers to martyrs or limits the nature of the prayers to calls for judgment.

Verses 1-2 describe the scene and introduce seven angels and seven trumpets. Verses 3-5 describe the work of one angel and one instrument.

Worship of the Lamb happened immediately preceding the seals being broken by the Lamb (chapter 5 then 6), and worship of the Lamb happens again immediately before the trumpets being given (chapter 7 then 8).

The Seventh Seal (verses 1-2)

When the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour. (verse 1)

Every one of the seven seals is opened by the Lamb. To the one who has born the judgment of God by being slain and ransoming people for God by His blood (5:6, 9, 12; 7:14), jurisdiction is given. Jesus taught this Himself, that the Father has given to the Son to the Son to execute judgment (John 5:22, 27).

The seventh seal is the last one (cf. Revelation 5:1). The scroll is now fully open. This may indicate that the final judgments on the earth will begin, the end of world history as anticipated.

Silence seems significant contrasted with the great multitude “crying out with a loud voice” in the previous scene (Revelation 7:10) along with the angels praising, presumably with the same loud voice (Revelation 5:12).

This is the only silence in Revelation, which would be a unique feature as a hinge in the judgments. It is silence around the throne in heaven, not on earth, and again, “silence is not a characteristic of heavenly rest” (Thomas).

Silence doesn’t mean empty, it means full of tension, pregnant. This silence consumes. Silence is often connected to awe and judgment.

That the silence lasted for about half an hour begs for some attention. Why so specific about a time, 30ish minutes, rather than even something vague such as “[...]