Revelation: Seven Trumpets in Full

 Revelation: Justification by Faith

Seven Trumpets in Full

The seven trumpets follow directly after the silence in heaven. When someone reads this, the natural impression it gives is that the seven trumpets are part of the seventh seal.
In Revelation 7, there were four angels holding back the winds of destruction until God’s people were sealed. In the seven trumpets, we see destruction come upon the trees, the sea, and the earth — and even the sealing itself is mentioned. This makes us think that these judgments come after the sixth seal.

But I propose a different view. There is reason to believe that, although there is a clear sequence of thought and the seventh seal is certainly connected to the trumpets, the seven trumpets do not come chronologically after this seal.
We’ve seen the seven churches and the seven seals, so why wouldn’t the seven trumpets, which follow so directly, be parallel to these?

The four winds of the sixth seal seem universal.
But the judgments of the seven trumpets appear only partial.
We repeatedly read that a third is struck, and we read of an angel at the Euphrates who releases the winds. Again, there is a forward look to the return of Christ — the great Day — which is ultimately the seventh trumpet.
The seventh trumpet, in which everything is completed according to Revelation, is the final judgment Revelation has been anticipating all along.

But what if we see the first six trumpets as judgments from God throughout history — a foretaste of the final universal judgment?
Then the seventh seal announces God’s final judgment, followed by descriptions of partial judgments throughout history which serve as examples or previews of that final judgment.

This kind of thinking is not foreign to the Bible.
When Jesus spoke of His return in Matthew 24, He appears to blend the judgment upon Jerusalem — which was a judgment on a single nation — with the final judgment at His return.

Isaiah, when speaking of the fall of Babylon at the hands of the Medes and Persians, calls that day the Day of Judgment, when God comes with great wrath to judge. In this way, a local judgment from God becomes a foretaste of His ultimate judgment.

The final judgment is also often described with trumpets:

Matthew 24:30–31 (ESV):

Then will appear in heaven the sign of the Son of Man, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.
And he will send out his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.

Some might find the order in which Revelation is written confusing here. Why wouldn’t the seven trumpets follow after the seven seals if that’s the order they appear in? The word “and” that comes right after the seventh seal also doesn’t seem to help:

Revelation 8:2 (ESV):

Then I saw the seven angels who stand before God, and seven trumpets were given to them.

But writing in a format other than chronology is not unusual. Even the four Gospels are often arranged thematically rather than chronologically.
Revelation itself contains more examples of this.

In Revelation 11, for instance — in the sixth trumpet — the end of the 1,260 days is mentioned. But in Revelation 12, which is connected to the last verse of Revelation 11 (the seventh trumpet) with the word “and”, the focus returns to the 1,260 days themselves — breaking the chronology again.

We should also remember that the original text of Revelation did not have our modern chapter and verse divisions. So the fact that the seventh seal and the seven trumpets are placed in the same chapter doesn’t mean much.

The fact that a new cycle of seven begins after the seven churches and seven seals is reason enough to consider it a series in its own right — apart from the seals.

I’m aware that this may not be convincing enough on its own for some, but all doubts will eventually fade once we connect Revelation to actual history.