Lift up your eyes to the heavens, And look on the earth beneath. For the heavens will vanish away like smoke, The earth will grow old like a garment, And those who dwell in it will die in like manner; But My salvation will be forever, And My righteousness will not be abolished.
Isaiah 51:6 NKJV

The covid pandemic has caused me to take another look at the 7 Trumpets recorded in the bible in the book of Revelations. The catastrophes in the first four of the Trumpets will be seen as terrible natural events to all but God’s elect. (If you want to know who these elect are, just ask and I’ll muddle the water further.)

Laying aside the elect or those who were sealed with the Seal of God, the Holy Spirit, earlier in the book, trumpets are the call to judgment in the bible. This is best illustrated by the Feast of Trumpets that came 10 days before the Day of Judgment as recorded in Leviticus 23 as the 5th of the 7 Sabbaths of the ancient Hebrews. (I’ll write an essay soon on how the 7 Sabbaths given to the Jews as they came out of slavery in Egypt were the foretelling of the person and ministry of Jesus Christ.) So these 7 Trumpets of Revelation are God’s final and complete call to judgment as he brings to an end this world and all within it and begins the era of the New Heavens and the New Earth.

I enjoy studying paleontology and paleogeology. The fact that those who labor in those fields do so atheistically doesn’t bother me. It just means they don’t see the hand that guided and directed what they are studying – but I can! What I have gleaned from their studies is that this world we inhabit is the product of a God who has engineered matter, energy, and space through time (another of his creations) so that this beautiful blue planet with its interior seething with molten rock, and with just the right balance of the various elements and compounds and mixtures necessary to make up its structure, rotating in just the right orbit at just the right angles, with just the right moon, can reproduce and sustain life – our life.

I live in the Pacific Northwest. The ground on which my house is built and the terrain that surrounds it is the product of the last Ice Age (not the animated movie, but the geologic event). I know this to be a fact every time I want to dig a hole, rocks, nothing but rounded rocks! The world in which we live and the weather and climate it enjoys is a world at the tail end of that Ice Age. The last of its glaciers continue to retreat just about everywhere and with that retreat comes a change in this delicate balance of things that make our lives livable. Places that were fertile plains millennia ago are now deserts. Places that once were too cold for agriculture are now farmlands. The world is constantly changing and we live in this little blip of time when life here is possible.

I hope you get the picture. We are living in the moment in time when this planet is most hospitable to our needs. But this hospitality will not last forever. The time before ours was “without form and void,” (Genesis 1:2) and the time immediately after is likewise “without form and void.” (Jeremiah 4:23) Isaiah made it clear, this earth, this solar system, and perhaps even this universe we are just now observing in all its glory, is growing old, wearing out like a favorite pair of pants. The only thing permanent in all the universe is God, its Creator.

We are fragile creatures living in a fragile ecosphere. Our lives are so brief we think that because little changes in our lifetime, little changes – ever. That is utter foolishness. This world is in a state of constant change, and it will keep changing until the time set in which he will bring the world as we know it to an end. As this time approaches he will send natural disasters upon us to awaken us to our fragility and our need of that which is unbreakable. But only a few people will awaken to that reality.

I find this greatly disturbing. Jesus told a story once about a rich man who died and went to hell and a really poor man who died and went to heaven (Abraham’s bosom). Not that all rich men go to hell and all poor men go to heaven, but in truth not many rich will avoid hell and being poor won’t get you into heaven. But the point of the story wasn’t about rich men and poor men and who gets to go where. The story is about people turning their backs on the clear and plain revelation of God in Jesus Christ, or to make it simpler, None are so blind as those who will not see!

So these Trumpets will seal the vast majority of our race in their rebellion and awaken a sealed in Christ minority to the joyous fact of the soon return of their Savior.

I think the Trumpets span a period of about 7 years. I could be wrong, but if I’m wrong, sue me after the fact. That the trumpets are about to blow will be signaled by a great earthquake. I don’t know where or how grand it will be on the scale of big earthquakes. We are waiting for one here in the NW that can rip through a fault that stretches from Vancouver Island in Canada down to near Crescent City in California. (It’s overdue.) It’s called the Cascadia Subduction Zone and it’s where the Pacific Plate is pushing under the North American Plate. These plates get stuck, and when they get stuck they start compressing like a spring and more and more tension builds until it can’t take it anymore and the Juan de Fuca Plate (part of the Pacific Plate) shoots under the North American causing a great earthquake, a drop in coastal elevation, and a massive tsunami. The last time this happened (January 6, 1700) it caused a 9.0 earthquake with a tsunami that washed the shore of Japan.

I tell this tidbit of geologic history to say earthquakes are natural events and inevitable. The tectonic plates are part of this incredible engineering feat that is our planet. They are shifting and moving, and when they shift and move we have earthquakes. But if the series of events outlined in Revelation 8-11 start to occur after the great earthquake then those who are looking forward to Christ’s return can start rejoicing – the end is at hand.

I am convinced that every event in the Revelation up to the New Creation in the final chapters are to be folded into the 7 Trumpets. The beasts, the dragon, the antichrist, the mark of the beast, the 7 plagues, all of it are confined within this 7 year period of the Trumpets.

So here’s the Trumpet list:

1. A great meteor bombardment. I was going to say, “shower,” but that does capture it. If a bombardment fro space were to span 24 hours, it would belt the globe.
2. A large asteroid strikes one of the oceans causing widespread destruction and death. It’s not a big as the one that hit the Yucatan back when, but there is evidence around the globe of major asteroid strikes.
3. A large asteroid strikes one of the continents throwing cubic miles of debris into the atmosphere and causing deaths in the millions.
4. The smoke from the fires of Trumpet 1 and the debris from 2 & 3 blot out the sun causing massive global cooling and consequent famine.
5. Trumpet 5 is where it starts to get interesting. The earth is a mess, and as we have seen from the covid response, governmental response is haphazard and incompetent. Good science says that the first 3 catastrophes and their consequent 4th will bring the human race to extinction. The world is in a panic. Electric cars and a ban on coal isn’t going save the race. And in steps a savior. I don’t how he’s going to do it. Will he step off a spaceship like a Vulcan in Star Trek: First Contact? Or will he go from invisible to visible like something out of a transporter? The text doesn’t say. But what it does say is that Satan, the devil, the dragon, will appear as an angel of light to tell humanity that if it submits to his benevolent directives, the race will be saved.
6. With this Trumpet the whole thing falls apart. People are dying by the 100s of millions. What was once a world population of nearly 7 billions can now be numbered in the millions scattered about the planet and dying of all that is outlined in chapter 16. Sometime during this Trumpet the antichrist convinces the unbelieving world that their only hope of survival is to kill the followers of Christ. The covid response shows us how easily this could happen. Just as the no-maskers and the no-vaxers wear the stigma as killers of the innocent embracers of governmental dictate now, in the time of this Trumpet, those who worship Christ are condemned to death to be freely killed that the earth might be saved.
7. And then the Lord returns! This is the 7th Trumpet. The world has demonstrated the justice of God. He is right to destroy sin and sinners with it. If left to their ways they would gladly worship and serve the devil and kill all who will not bow to his rule.

God will not leave us without warning before he brings this present age to an end. His warnings fall on deaf ears of those who refuse his grace, but will be sweet music to those who love the Lord and long for his return.