Now comes the time to destroy that which destroys God's earth. The point is not to destroy earth, not to destroy creation, not to destroy us. Hey there. Welcome to the channel. Some good news here.

I actually received a box in the mail, and so the book will be available July 5. And I'm really excited for this to land in your hands as as you read the book, and, hopefully, give me some feedback. Send me an email. Let me know what you're thinking as you're reading through. I'm kind of interested in the dialogue that this might create on a longer term basis.

But for this series, we're gonna do two, maybe three more videos working through a couple of the ideas now in Revelation. We've spent most of our time in the first three videos talking about the context. I think that's really important. If you're gonna try to read Revelation is to spend the time understanding structure and genre and, context because that is going to then interpret how you think about and make sense of the images that follow. That said, I know that most of us are probably most interested in actually looking at those images and interpreting them.

And that's what we're gonna do with a couple videos here. We are not at all gonna try to look through every image. You can buy the book and you can read through, as I interpret through most of those images on our way through Revelation. But there are a couple that we're gonna draw on. One from the second cycle, one from the third cycle, and then maybe we'll do another video wrapping up the whole series.

But let's look at the section called the seven trumpets. Now in Revelation, there's a lot of sevens. Right? There's the seven churches. There's the seven seals.

There's the seven trumpets. There's the seven vials. This is a number that keeps coming up over and over again. And that's intentional. That's setting the genre for you so that you know that these images are not just, you know, objective stories about the world.

These are mythical. These are metaphorical stories and images that are not meant to be mapped onto history, but are meant to give you a sense of the scope of God's victory in the world. That's what all these sevens are there for. They're meant to shift you into an apocalyptic mindset. And so when we read through this, what we shouldn't be looking for or imagining is a set of 21 terrible events, seven seals and then seven trumpets and then seven vials or bowls.

That's not the point. These are retellings from a slightly different perspective about how the story of God unfolds. So with that in mind, let's talk about the seven trumpets. And this is a really, really interesting passage because it is one of the sections that most readily gets attached to historical events, and that's been happening for thousands of years. Sir Isaac Newton, the guy who discovered gravity and co created calculus, he literally looked through revelation, tried to map the trumpets onto things that had happened in his world, and we are still doing that today.

This is the section where you read about locusts with faces of men and people think, oh, that must be a helicopter spinning rotors and stinging tails. I mean, obviously, this is describing modern warfare. But again, this is misreading the imagery because the imagery isn't about seven events you can map into history. It's about an alternate vision of how the world can be transformed. And I'll give you a little picture of that.

Just before we get to the seven trumpets, we get this story about those who have been martyred for their faith calling out and asking for vengeance from God. They want God to smite their enemies. They want God to step on all of the terrible people who have done terrible things to them, and that's very much in line with the apocalyptic genre that we talked about in the second part of this series. People are getting pretty cynical. The Jewish people have gotten cynical over all of these different successive empires that have conquered them.

The Christian community is getting pretty cynical because the emperors that are rising up are increasingly giving more attention to them and a little bit of sporadic persecution to them, but more than that, Jesus has not returned, has not set up his kingdom, and things are not going the way that they expected. So they are turning more and more to these sort of cathartic stories of enemies getting their comeuppance and how good that feels to revel in that when things aren't going your way. And we read that here in Revelation. The martyred souls call out to God, cry for vengeance, and that leads into the seven trumpets. The prayers of the people are gathered up like incense, and they are hurled at the earth.

Until we read this successive tale of worse and worse things happening to the earth. Let me read you a couple passages here. Most of this is in Revelation eight. The first angel sounded his trumpet and there came hail and fire mixed with blood and it was hurled at the earth. Not great.

The second angel sounded his trumpet and something like a huge mountain all ablaze was thrown into the sea. A third of the sea turned to blood, and a third of the living creatures in the sea died. Again, not great. Third angel sounded his trumpet, and a great star blazing like a torch fell from sky. A fourth angel sounded, and a third of the sun was struck, a third of the moon, a third of the stars, and a third of them all turned dark.

The fifth angel sounded his trumpet, and I saw a star that had fallen from the sky to the earth. Out of the smoke, a locust came down on the earth and were given power like that of scorpions. Again, what are these describing? I don't know, but it's getting worse and worse. And then we read a sixth angel sounded his trumpet.

Horse and riders, I saw in my vision looked like this. Their breastplates were fiery red, dark blue, and yellow as sulfur. The heads of the horpas resembled the heads of lions, and out of their mouths came fire, smoke, and sulfur. So you've got this sort of progressing story of creation itself kinda turning on us, wars breaking out, almost kind of like monsters attacking the world. And yet, at the end of these six trumpets, we read something really interesting.

After all of these trumpets and all of these tribulations, we hear that absolutely nothing changes. It doesn't work. People continue murdering. They continue their immorality and their witchcraft. They continue doing terrible things to each other.

And so a seventh and final angel appears. But he doesn't come with just a trumpet. He appears with a little scroll. And he says to John, who's about to write down what the thunders have said, everything all that has happened during the six previous trumpets. He says, stop.

Don't write that down. Instead, take this little scroll and eat it. It will taste sweet in your mouth, but it will be bitter in your stomach. As if to say that all of this story that you've been hearing and imagining, all of this trial and tribulation and terrible things that God has enacted on the earth, all of this tastes good in your mouth. It's it feels good to enact out and call for violence, but it's actually not good for you.

It's corrupting to your soul. It will break you down from the inside. Instead, now is the time for God's mystery to be accomplished with the seventh trumpet. This is a really interesting contrast. We see the martyrs of God call out for vengeance and say, do it our way.

Do it the apocalyptic way. Crush the bad people and bring suffering and terror on the earth. Please just avenge our deaths. So God says, okay, let's see what would happen. Here's one and two and three and four and five and six trumpets, all kinds of tribulations.

But what happens? Nothing. No one changes. There's no repentance. There's no transformation.

There's no redemption. So instead, shut that up. Don't write it down. Eat it. Swallow it.

Allow the brokenness of that story to be digested in your soul so that you can see there is something better, the mystery of God's final trumpet. And with this final trumpet, we see two witnesses that appear in the temple. Now, a lot of people who want to try to map the trumpets onto historical events get stuck here because the temple doesn't exist at this point. We are probably writing revelation in the eighties under the reign of Domitian. The temple was destroyed in the seventies, and the temple has not been rebuilt since that time.

And so no matter how you wanna map the first six trumpets, you are left stuck waiting to map the seventh trumpet until a new temple is built. And unfortunately, you can't just build a temple anywhere. It has to be built on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, and that plot of land is currently occupied by the Dome Of The Rock. It's it's a Muslim holy site. And so all of the speculation kind of coalesces around when Israel is going to regain control of that plot of land and when eventually there will be a new temple rebuilt.

But again, that's a misreading of what's happening in these images because they aren't meant to be read literally. Again, there's seven of them. They're meant to be read metaphorically. And where have we heard? Where have we talked about the temple of God already in Revelation?

Well, we've talked about it as the people of God. We actually see that in the seven letters that the church is called the temple of God. And here we see two witnesses that appear in the temple. They have all kinds of these magical powers. They can turn the water to blood like Moses.

They can stop the skies from raining like Ezekiel. They preach and call out like Jeremiah. They give their lives like Christ, and eventually they are resurrected just like Jesus. These are not people who show up in Israel, in Jerusalem, in a rebuilt temple. These are composite images of the people of God throughout history leading to the full revelation of God in the person of Jesus.

These are collages of history showing us that everything we have seen all through the Hebrew Scriptures, all through the prophets, has led us to Jesus, and in that we see the fullness of God. The nonviolence of Jesus that serves in nonviolent testimony that gives its life away for those who need it. That's exactly what the witnesses do. They are an image of true nonviolent witness in the model of Christ and how that accomplishes the mysteries of God. The seven trumpets are not one story.

They are two stories. A first story imagining what would happen if God acted the way that we wanted. And the answer is nothing. There would be vengeance, there would be violence, but there would be no transformation or redemption. And so there is instead the mystery of God and everything that God wants to accomplish, and that is done in the model of Jesus.

When you and I and the people of God follow the way of Christ through the world, we give testimony to the grace and the nonviolence of Jesus, and in that, we actually change people's hearts. We bring the world to repentance. We bring the world to a new way of being, and we contribute to the kingdom of God in the world. That's what the trumpets are about. They are not telling you that God is angry, God is vengeful, God is violent.

They are telling us that we are often all of these things, and God is trying to give us a new story, something that will actually accomplish the transformation of the world. And again, this is what apocalypses do. They hand us our world and what we expect to see, and then they shift just enough that we might see something new, that we might actually, in the vein of the prophets of the Old Testament, change our patterns and our behaviors to align with the goodness, the grace, the justice, and the righteousness of God. And that's what we're seeing here in this second story. And that is very much in line with what we are seeing over and over again in Revelation.

In the lead up to this passage, we have the seven seals in the throne room scene. And there, and I think one of the most important scenes in Revelation, you have John hearing about this dominant warrior personality who can succeed the one on the throne. But when we turn, that is not what we see at all. Jesus is not in the model of David. Jesus is the slain lamb looking as if it has been murdered, and instead that slain lamb comes, takes the scroll, and redirects the path of history.

That's what Revelation is telling you. What you expect is not what you will see when you see Christ revealed. What you think God should act like, how you think God should deal with evil is not how God actually will. Because God interest is not in destroying the world and crushing evil, it is in redeeming the goodness of creation. Now in that, all that destroys will need to come to an end.

That's sort of the mission statement of Revelation. It's found in Revelation 11. Now comes the time to destroy that which destroys God's earth. But the point is not to destroy earth, not to destroy creation, not to destroy us, but to break down, to defeat, to eliminate everything within us that calls for violence and vengeance and selfishness and greed and sin and brokenness all the time. All of that is about to be overcome.

All of that has been overcome in the cross already. And now we simply have to lean into the way and the story of Jesus that leads us back to God. Whenever you see violence and frustration and vengeance in Revelation, the key is not to stop. The key is to read just a little bit farther to see where the rug is pulled out from under you, to see where what you expect is going to be shifted just enough for you to see things differently.