Interpreting the seven trumpets of Revelation

John MacArthur

1st trumpet

A third of the earth was burned up.  The result is going to be a blazing fire that's going to burn one third of the world.  Then a third of the trees were burned up.  The earth's forests are going to be devastated.  And then all the green grass was burned up.  No shrubs, no grass, no vegetation, no crops.  The devastation will result in the loss of wood for construction, the loss of watershed for protection, the massive death of animals, crops totally devastated, which provide food for animals which people eat as well, food directly used by us.  The earth becomes devastated and the globe is scorched.... God will destroy the rain forests. God will slaughter the plants and the animals.  And as I've been saying to you all along, if you think we're messing up this world, wait till you see what He does to it.

2nd trumpet

Some meteorite, some asteroid, some thing, some piece of a star or a sun will come out of the sky.  Only it's going to be the size of a continent.  It's going to be something like a massive mountain, crashing into the ocean.  Just what scientists now fear, a massive rock continent surrounded by combustible gases which ignite as they enter the atmosphere and make it a flaming ball.  And it's going to be steered right at the earth by the force of God's power. ... Poisoning a third of the sea is going to kill a third of its population from minute organisms to the large whales, fish.  The food chain will be terribly disrupted.  Whatever the poisonous effect might be, equally as dramatic is going to be this tidal wave that is going to destroy a third of the ships in the world.  The mad disruption of commerce that that will cause, no fishing, no ships, no transport.

3rd trumpet

So angel number three adds to the celestial fanfare and a great asteros, star, asteros, it simply means some kind of a celestial body, the word from which we get the word asteroid.  Falling out of heaven burning like a torch...could be a comet, a torch has a ball of fire, and then a flame going up like that, it could be something like a comet, we really don't know.  But it's certainly what Jesus called in Luke 21:11, "Fearful sights and great signs from heaven."  This celestial body disintegrates as it nears the earth, scatters over the globe.  Its flaming gassiest fire touches springs and rivers.  This is really devastating, this is really devastating.... Now the name of the star is called Wormwood.  It's an apt name.  The wormwood is literally in the Greek, the word apsinthos, it is the deadly liquor substance called absinth.  The word is used in the New Testament only in this one verse, so it's kind of hard to trace back its precise meaning.  But the term "wormwood" is also used several times in the Old Testament to translate the Hebrew la-anah, it's translated, by the way, once in the King James as Hemlock.  It's a poison.  There it is suggested that it's a poison derived from some kind of root.  You find it mentioned in Deuteronomy 29:18.  Proverbs 5:4 notes that it is very bitter.  It produces drunkenness, according to Lamentations 3:15 and eventually death.  It is associated with another poison that is called gall mentioned in Deuteronomy 29:18 and Lamentations 3:19. 

4th trumpet

What happens is for this time the sun is blocked a third, and that cools down the earth.  And a little while later God just reverses that.  This is an incredible thing.  It's just hard to imagine.  Somehow the Lord is just going to block out one third of the sun, one third of the moon, one third of the stars. Again, Henry Morris writes interestingly, "A naturalistic scientist might object that such a thing is impossible.  This, however, would be to say more than he knows.  The nature of both the internal reactions in the sun and the external reactions on the sun's surface are still unknown.  Solar physicists until recently were confident that the sun's output of radiant energy resulted mainly from thermonuclear fusion processes in the sun's interior.  Now, however, the absence of the flux of solar neutrinos from the sun which should be generated by such reactions is causing a complete rethinking of the whole problem.  Recent evidence that the sun is measurable shrinking in size apparently meant that much of the sun's energy output results from gravitational collapse.  Presumably this would be true of other stars as well.  Thus if the gravitational shrinking of the sun could be slowed down for a time, possibly its light output would also be slowed down."

5th trumpet

Something...it must be something like the cloud of a worldwide atomic blast, ...  Or something like a volcanic eruption that covers the whole world.  A strange and panic generating blackness that fills the sky and stifles the world's breathing.  And it blots out whatever is left of the sun and the moon and the stars and the sky.  And then in the middle of it come something like locusts.  And again that imagery is so profound because ordinary locusts plagues are unimaginable....  But as bad as that is with real insects, these are not real insects.  We know that because real locusts don't have a scorpion sting and real locusts don't have heads with crowns and faces like the face of men and hair like the hair of women and teeth like the teeth of lions and breastplates like breastplates of iron.  These are some kind of special locusts.  What is fascinating about this is that that concept of locusts is, of course, taken from the blackness of the cloud and the devastation.  These are demons.  And God must create for them some form. Since Satan can't create anything, when they're finally released as spirit beings, God must give them some form, at least in the vision they had a form.  And what they do is supernatural and it's just swarming, comprehensive desolation.  These are locusts from hell and they're not insects... Suffering caused by these demons is compared to that of a scorpion sting.  This insect as one writer says is one of the most irascible and malignant that lives and its sting is perhaps the most agonizing that any animal can inflict on the human body.  In tropical countries small children frequently die from the sting of the scorpion.  Interestingly the physiological response to a scorpion sting is similar to that which has been observed in many cases of demon possession.

6th trumpet

 I don't see this as a human army.  If this was a human army of men and women marching across the land, it would be pretty big.  If it were just a mile wide, it would be a hundred miles deep. That's a lot of people.  And how could they march and kill a third of the world?  I mean, how could they move across mountains and oceans and all of that?  Those who see it as a human army when they get into the description that we read in verse 17 and following see those descriptions as descriptions of guns and helicopters and jet aircraft and tanks and rockets.  The problem is, he describes all of them like that, so it would have to be two hundred million of those things, those human weapons, human machines. The language, I think, is better understood of a demon force, particularly when it's connected to four demons who are being held back.  So the cosmic war, a war of hell is hitting the earth with all its force.  And it's certainly going to appear as if hell is all over the world.

7th trumpet

This is not, though it is the last of the seven trumpets, the same as the last trump.  Some people get that confused in 1 Corinthians 15:52, a very important statement is made by the Apostle Paul.  He says, "In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet, for the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable and we shall be changed."  He's talking about the Rapture of the church.  That is a different event than the final judgment of the ungodly.  The last trumpet in 1 Corinthians 15 is the trumpet that calls for the Rapture of the church.   The seventh trumpet calls for the judgment of the ungodly and is parallel, not to the last trump of 1 Corinthians, but it is parallel to the trumpet blown back in the prophecy of Joel chapter 2 where in the first eleven verses we have the indication of a trumpet.  Chapter 2 of Joel verse 1, "Blow a trumpet in Zion and sound an alarm on My holy mountain, let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, the day of the Lord is coming."  And then it goes on to describe it.  So it is the kind of trumpet of which Joel speaks in judgment, not the trumpet that calls for the gathering together of the church.