Trumpets
End of Days • Sermon • Submitted
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· 3 viewsThe hope of the church is our understanding that God is waiting to hear our prayers to act.
Notes
Transcript
So we took a couple of week break from the book of Revelation.
We had a chance to catch our breath - Revelation is pretty intense and it’s about to get even more intense.
So two weeks ago we had Noah and Tarin Madden, NAMB church planters from Boston with us.
We are partnering with Noah and Tarin for our mission trip in July.
If you are interested in going, you need to sign up asap - you can do that online at our website, or in the Realm event portal or see Austin Ussery.
Although I call him Sasquatch, he is easy to catch a glimpse of so get with Austin.
Last week was Mother’s Day - Cecil Ethridge did a great job with the roses, right?
I gave a shot at preaching about Mom’s and families and used as our text part of the creation story in Genesis.
I didn’t realize then how appropriate that would be for our message today - they fit together rather nicely.
Open your Bibles or phones to Revelation 8:1-13.
We were blessed with a reading of the text a few moments ago, and I’m sure it sounded pretty wild to you.
Because it is wild and it’s supposed to be wild - it’s apocalyptic literature - you are supposed to feel it as well as learn from it.
The opening of chapter 8 is the ending of what was happening in chapter 6.
In chapter 6, Jesus opened the first six seals of the scroll he received from the Father’s hand.
When he opened the sixth seal, all of the unrepentant people of the earth went running for their lives trying to hide from Jesus.
But then chapter 7 happened.
It was like the church asked a question: “Hey, this is pretty scary stuff? Where are we in all of this?”
So John’s vision takes a pause to reassure us that the full number of God’s elect will be saved.
Not only are we saved, we are sealed on our foreheads with the name of Yahweh and Jesus, nothing can ever steal us away.
That’s why the beast does his mark, because God does his mark first and satan always tries to pervert what God does, always.
And remember what we asked, why do we spend so much time worrying over the mark of the beast?
Remember what Paul said in Ephesians 1:13
In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit,
Christ followers are sealed with the Holy Spirit.
When folks start going crazy about the Mark of the Beast, don’t you be one of them.
Then we get to chapter 8.
Chapter 8 opens with Jesus opening the seventh seal and after the sixth seal you’d expect fire and brimstone, cries of terror and pain, chaos, craziness.
And instead we get, silence.
“There was silence in heaven for about half an hour.”
Not quiet - silence.
Not a sound, why?
Because the seventh seal is the final judgment.
Silence in the Bible often represents judgment and it makes sense.
Everyone and everything is very aware of the presence of God.
Zephaniah 1:7 says, “
Be silent before the Lord God!
For the day of the Lord is near;
the Lord has prepared a sacrifice
and consecrated his guests.
Habakkuk 2:20 says, “
But the Lord is in his holy temple;
let all the earth keep silence before him.”
All of creation is painfully silent.
There is nothing left to say or do.
The judge is on the throne - the end of days has arrived.
Now there is a very important question answered her that hasn’t been asked, “How did we get here?”
How did God arrive at this moment in time for the final judgment?
And if went around the room and asked people, I suspect we’d all be wrong.
How did God decide it was time for the final judgment to occur?
Revelation 8:3-4
And another angel came and stood at the altar with a golden censer, and he was given much incense to offer with the prayers of all the saints on the golden altar before the throne, and the smoke of the incense, with the prayers of the saints, rose before God from the hand of the angel.
Team, we’ve been missing something.
We’ve been told a million times to pray.
We’ve been told a million times what praying is beneficial to us and what to expect from God when we do pray.
I don’t remember ever being told that the reason God decides its time for the New Heaven and the New Earth is because of the prayers of his people.
But isn’t that what we are reading here.
The seventh seal is opened and silence.
An angel performs part of a worship service - he uses much incense because he had to match the many prayers “of all the saints.”
The other week we heard about the prayers of the martyrs - these are included.
But these are your and my prayers too.
“Rose before God,” means they were acceptable to him - it means he was waiting to hear them.
And when he did, Revelation 8:5
Then the angel took the censer and filled it with fire from the altar and threw it on the earth, and there were peals of thunder, rumblings, flashes of lightning, and an earthquake.
The censer that contained the prayers of all of the saints becomes the instrument of judgment on the earth.
God had heard enough - his people had cried out enough - it was time to act.
How does a Christian make war with evil?
I don’t know about you guys, but in the face of a lot I’m reading and hearing, I feel pretty powerless.
Who am I, up against the United States Government or the state of Georgia, or even Jones County or the City of Gray?
As I watch truth called a lie.
As I see how we are brainwashed and rope-a-doped into worrying over so many things, how do we stand against it?
If prayer is the measure of God the Father deciding it is time for Jesus to come again and make all things new, well, what do you reckon we ought to be doing?
And how do you reckon we do it?
Do we ask the Lord to bless us and give him our laundry list?
Nothing wrong with asking God for our needs - I do believe he told us to do that.
But maybe, at least every now and then, we should be disturbed enough to hurt and cry out for God’s honor.
Daniel watched his people face worse than we are facing - how did he pray, remember?
Daniel 9:19
O Lord, hear; O Lord, forgive. O Lord, pay attention and act. Delay not, for your own sake, O my God, because your city and your people are called by your name.”
We should do everything a good Godly citizen should do.
But a Christian citizen must do one more thing - we must pray for God’s honor.
We don’t deserve deliverance.
God’s son had to die to secure our sorry souls.
But the Lord himself, he does not deserve the derision and the insolence of sinful people.
The profaneness, the coarseness, the belligerence of the people we see in movies and the news and everywhere we go towards the creator - that should not be.
We need to think on this a bit.
We need to take God’s honor to heart - we wouldn’t even know we needed to be saved had it not been for him.
Why are we letting the world talk about our Lord this way?
We should be heartbroken, not at what this means to us, but what all of this means to Yahweh - our deliverer.
When enough people are moved deeply enough to pray for God’s honor, he will pay attention and he will act.
Revelation 8:5
Then the angel took the censer and filled it with fire from the altar and threw it on the earth, and there were peals of thunder, rumblings, flashes of lightning, and an earthquake.
Now here’s where things get a little bit different from what we expect.
The seven angels with the seven trumpets get ready to blow their trumpets.
With each trumpet something different happens.
But it’s not something new.
We’re going back in time again.
Where the seals gave us a 60,000 foot view of what was going to happen on the earth, the trumpets bring us in a little bit closer.
We see in much greater detail what the Lord’s wrath is going to look like on the earth.
And, and, when we get through with the trumpets, we’ll see seven bowls, and it will be the same thing.
Back in time one more time to an even more detailed view of what God’s wrath looks like when it is poured out on an unGodly world.
Now before you go, that’s not the way I learned it, think with me for a moment.
Seal number 6 showed us how every single person on the earth would recognize God for who he was and would hide to try to escape the judgment.
Seal 7 was judgment.
If that is true, then how can the trumpets happen after the final judgment?
It can’t.
The Lord is giving us a different perspective on what he’s doing.
And what he is doing is not new - he’s been using the same model forever.
Ezekiel 38:19-20,23
For in my jealousy and in my blazing wrath I declare, On that day there shall be a great earthquake in the land of Israel. The fish of the sea and the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the field and all creeping things that creep on the ground, and all the people who are on the face of the earth, shall quake at my presence. And the mountains shall be thrown down, and the cliffs shall fall, and every wall shall tumble to the ground.
So I will show my greatness and my holiness and make myself known in the eyes of many nations. Then they will know that I am the Lord.
Then they will know that I am the Lord.
All of the calamities going on the earth.
All of the geopolitical upheavals.
All of the violence, bloodshed and tyranny that we explain away as science or bad people or whatever.
It’s the Lord making himself known in the eyes of many nations.
That’s what the seven trumpets are doing.
Just as an aside, the different things that happen here might remind you of the plagues that happened in Egypt.
There’s a good reason for that - they are very similar because, before God delivers his people, listen to me, he sorts people out.
The plagues were not to drive people to repentance, although some people saw God at work and they did repent.
The plagues were to show the hardness of the people’s hearts and the power of God working among them.
And when the sorting was done, God delivered his people.
Just saying, I truly believe what we are seeing right now is part of that sorting.
And if God holds true to himself, which he will, he will soon deliver his people.
You may see something else in this too though.
Remember last week we said that God gave us everything we needed to live for his glory.
God makes that point in Genesis 1:30.
He created everything that was.
He formed man and woman and put them in the garden to reign.
He gave them and all living creatures everything they needed to live for his glory.
Now God is de-creating.
Guys, he’s not going to repair this earth.
Remember Revelation 21:1?
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.
It’s going to be a new heaven and a new earth.
He’s de-creating.
Trumpet one begins de-creating the land - the plants and trees for food begin to burn.
Trumpet two begins two things - de-creating the sea and all of the things living in them.
And, mountains also represent governments - God is de-creating the social structures.
Trumpet three begins de-creating people - you can’t be fruitful and multiply if your water is poisoned.
Trumpet four begins de-creating the heavens - the lights that govern the day and night begin to fail.
And we are watching it happen - do I need to give you statistics again on how many have died - how about just in the 20th century from famine?
70,000,000 people died that we know of - which doesn’t include the estimated 40 million that “failed to be born” in China due to the severe malnutrition of the mothers.
How about that garbage patch in the Pacific ocean that’s as large as the state of Texas.
Governments collapsing? You have watched the news a little lately, right?
And the heavens - well the lights haven’t gone out, but there are interesting celestial phenomena happening.
Go outside on May 26th and you’ll get to see a “Super Flower Blood Moon.”
That might not mean anything, right?
And it just might mean everything too.
So what do we do?
First, as a Christ follower, be ready for service.
To stand before God on his side is to be ready for service.
Be ready to testify on God’s behalf.
Some of you need to run for office and then remember who you belong to.
We need to be ready to stand for truth in our workplaces.
We need to be ready to stand for truth in the church.
We need to make up our minds whose side we are on, and then be on that side.
“Choose this day, who you will serve.”
Second, we must learn to do battle with prayer.
We have a men’s class studying prayer right now - study hard gentlemen.
‘What are the real master-powers behind the world and what are the deeper secrets of our destiny? Here is the astonishing answer: the prayer of the saints and the fire of God. That means that more potent, more powerful than all the dark and mighty powers let loose in the world, more powerful than anything else, is the power of prayer set ablaze by the fire of God and cast upon the earth’ (Torrance).
Let’s examine our prayer.
Are we complaining or are we praying for God’s reputation?
Are we simply doing our laundry list every day or are we praying fulling concerned that all we pray for uphold’s God’s reputation
The world has gone quite mad and the governments are coming unhinged.
We know that some people are praying; let’s go to battle with them.
Pray with me as we pray Daniel’s prayer from Daniel 9 together.
English Standard Version Chapter 9
“O Lord, the great and awesome God, who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments, 5 we have sinned and done wrong and acted wickedly and rebelled, turning aside from your commandments and rules. 6 We have not listened to your servants the prophets, who spoke in your name to our kings, our princes, and our fathers, and to all the people of the land. 7 To you, O Lord, belongs righteousness, but to us open shame, as at this day, to the men of Judah, to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and to all Israel, those who are near and those who are far away, in all the lands to which you have driven them, because of the treachery that they have committed against you. 8 To us, O LORD, belongs open shame, to our kings, to our princes, and to our fathers, because we have sinned against you. 9 To the Lord our God belong mercy and forgiveness, for we have rebelled against him 10 and have not obeyed the voice of the LORD our God by walking in his laws, which he set before us by his servants the prophets. 11 All Israel has transgressed your law and turned aside, refusing to obey your voice. And the curse and oath that are written in the Law of Moses the servant of God have been poured out upon us, because we have sinned against him. 12 He has confirmed his words, which he spoke against us and against our rulers who ruled us, by bringing upon us a great calamity. For under the whole heaven there has not been done anything like what has been done against Jerusalem. 13 As it is written in the Law of Moses, all this calamity has come upon us; yet we have not entreated the favor of the LORD our God, turning from our iniquities and gaining insight by your truth. 14 Therefore the LORD has kept ready the calamity and has brought it upon us, for the LORD our God is righteous in all the works that he has done, and we have not obeyed his voice. 15 And now, O Lord our God, who brought your people out of the land of Egypt with a mighty hand, and have made a name for yourself, as at this day, we have sinned, we have done wickedly.
16 “O Lord, according to all your righteous acts, let your anger and your wrath turn away from your city Jerusalem, your holy hill, because for our sins, and for the iniquities of our fathers, Jerusalem and your people have become a byword among all who are around us. 17 Now therefore, O our God, listen to the prayer of your servant and to his pleas for mercy, and for your own sake, O Lord, make your face to shine upon your sanctuary, which is desolate. 18 O my God, incline your ear and hear. Open your eyes and see our desolations, and the city that is called by your name. For we do not present our pleas before you because of our righteousness, but because of your great mercy. 19 O Lord, hear; O Lord, forgive. O Lord, pay attention and act. Delay not, for your own sake, O my God, because your city and your people are called by your name.”