A Talking Eagle Rev, 8:8-13
Revelation 8:8-13 · Vern Peterman · Apr 21, 2002
Revelation (2001-03), No. 26
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/48262242207749

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

For those who are new creatures in Christ, good morning. As a number of you know, I tend to frequent all sorts of things on the internet and try to make good use of it. I came across an account I just couldn't pass up passing along to you. The story goes like this.

There were these two pastors and they were alongside this road and they decided to hold up a sign. And this sign said, the end is near. Turn around before it's too late. And so they made this sign. And the first car that came by, they held up the sign. And the people saw this sign and they said, you religious nuts!

Go away! Leave us alone! And a few minutes later, they heard splash as the car went off into the river. The bridge was out. So anyway, Pastors, they say, maybe we ought to change the sign, eh? Something like, the bridge is out, turn around. So anyway, I thought it was appropriate for what we're doing here this morning, just because we kind of have a similar sort of message, don't we? Sometimes the world doesn't quite get the idea. We're trying to tell them the bridge is out, and they think we're just religious nuts. But it really is. Only it's a whole lot more than a splash at the end.

And so what we want to do is take a look here at this passage that Jack read for us. This is Revelation 8, 8 through 13. And using this chart here, I don't expect you to read all the lettering, but just kind of keep oriented using it. We had talked about the last of the seven seals last week, which opened up the seven trumpets. And so this is the first of those trumpets we talked about last week.

And I think one of the things to just kind of keep in mind, this is in the big picture, this is a transition period we're looking at here. This is the transition period from the time where the church is on the earth to once the church is taken up, now it's a transition to a time when Jesus Christ, the little lamb, as we're reading about, will be reigning over Israel from Jerusalem over actually the entire earth and So we're kind of getting a glimpse of it But I think it's important to kind of keep the big picture in mind here as we move along There are a lot of people who are going to be going through these events who are going to be thinking that this is the end of the world Don't you think that if you're reading through this a lot of them will be thinking this has got to be the end of the world It has never been this bad And the truth is, and we know because if you've taken a sneak peek and looked at some of the things we've shown up here before, we know it's actually over a thousand years later. So this isn't the end of the world, but it's still going to be an awful, terrible time. Now, you have on your handout, and I'll get on the overhead so we can stay in sync, the seven trumpet judgments, and this is not identical but similar. And we'll be going over these three, the second, third, and fourth of these trumpet judgments.

And there's some interesting patterns here. You remember, starting with the seven seal judgments, the first four had something in common. The first four represented by horsemen. Remember that? Similar pattern here. The first four are all things coming out of the heavens. Okay? Similar pattern. The first four are all things coming out of the heavens, and that's identified in your handout in the red lettering in the titles. Also, five of these trumpet judgments include the fraction one-third. The Greek is triton, or we would pronounce it triton. This one-third number keeps coming up again. Five judgments, fifteen times in this set of passages we're looking at.

This is today's message we're looking at in the yellow highlight, and then these green references lead us to another subject that we've looked at previously and I don't want us to lose sight of, and that is these green references are actually very similar to the plagues that were brought upon Egypt as described in Exodus.

What's different about them is those plagues came upon Egypt alone. These plagues come upon the whole world. a major difference in scope. Similar plague, massive increase in scope. So those are some similarities as well as contrasts that you see. These plagues, we've been through a similar chart here, but these are the ones here, these ones that are highlighted, are the ones that are similar to the plagues in Egypt that we'll be going through this morning, or have gone through previously last week, And these are all in, how do I say, in offense against an Egyptian god. Isn't that interesting? One of the things that may well be is an increase in a lot of pagan deities coming to the surface once the tribulation era starts and the church is taken out.

Okay. Something else that is a pattern that I want to take a look at before we proceed here, too, is there have been seven trumpets before in the Bible. This is not the first instance, but it's actually a similar instance. Joshua 6. You remember the scenario.

Here's the Israelites. They've just crossed over into the Promised Land. They've miraculously crossed over the Jordan River, and the Lord has said, I am going to be the one who will give you victory over these cities in the land that I promised you." And as he does so, he tells them here in these verses, this is what's going to happen. This is how you're going to overtake Jericho. And what does he do?

Seven trumpets. So now, again, we have an instance where in the past we saw Israel was saved, by plagues brought upon Egypt that are similar to what we're seeing now. Now we're seeing a recurrence of the seven trumpets that was the means of Israel's victory.

Isn't that interesting? We're seeing more and more images of Israel coming on the scene, and we'll look at the significance of that in a little bit here. Now, let's turn our attention to the passage at hand, starting with verse 8 there, okay? Revelation 8, 8-13.

The second angel sounded, and something like a great mountain, burning with fire, was thrown into the sea, and a third of the sea became blood." Alright, we'll proceed with that in a little bit, but one phrase at a time here. This little phrase, something like, the Greek word is real simple, it's hos, okay? Hos.

And it's used 64 times in Revelation. Isn't that interesting? That's a lot of usage of one little word, huh? But the reason it's used here, it's used 64 times in Revelation, 400 times approximately in the whole New Testament, but the reason it's used is John is in a descriptive mode.

He is trying to describe something that is in a scope, in a scale, that the world has never seen. He's trying to describe something that may at times include technologies and events that are certainly hard for people of his time to relate to, And frankly, even as we describe it, isn't it just almost mind-boggling to try to conceive of what all of them would be like? So here's John trying to come up with a comparative description, something that you can relate to, something you can understand. And so he's frequently calling upon this word, hoss, and it comes across here and it's a comparison to it, like, or something like. He's comparing it, something that they don't quite understand, to something they do. So that's his use of the word here. Now, what he describes for us, he sees as a great mountain burning with fire. The great mountain in the Greek there is Aros Megas. We use our word mega for something big, right? And if it's really big, we'll put a prefix in front of it. Mega this or mega that. And he's basically using that same word. He says, a great mountain. This is not some little hill. This is huge. He's trying to tell us it's a mountain, but it's even on the big end of that scale. This thing is huge. And what about it? We have these items to help us understand.

John says it is something like, so he's using comparative language, It's obviously very large, it's huge, right? His comparison with a great mountain reinforces the idea that it's of great size, but it would also seem to indicate rock or rock and soil. Doesn't that come across there when he uses that comparison? So he's trying to get this picture, here's this huge mass of rock or perhaps rock and soil in front of him, and he's seeing this in front of him.

Now, he says it's burning with fire. Now, that's got to get your attention. A little bit of burning is one thing. This is the whole mass, the way he's describing it. This whole mass is just a flame. So he's describing this thing, and then he says it's being thrown. And again, here's the use of the Greek word balo, from where we get our word ball. This thing is being thrown, cast into the sea.

Now, what's he talking about? Okay? I think it's fair for us to look at and say, okay, interpret this. What does this mean? Now, some people have suggested, I know what it is! They say it's a nuclear explosion. Okay. Personally, I'm reluctant to go there and tell you it's that. And here's why. For one thing, that would be something of human origin. Or could well be.

Besides, a nuclear explosion looks more like a huge cloud than it does a mountain, doesn't it? It doesn't quite fit. It would also not need to be thrown into the sea. As a matter of fact, if you've seen any of these movies, I've frankly not gotten close to one of those nuclear explosions. Hopefully you haven't either. But what you see when you see the movies is instead of something going into the sea, you see something coming out.

So the description there doesn't quite seem to match up. And this consequence, as we'll see in a little bit, is here's this blood. And that's not what you see with a nuclear explosion. So there's several things about it that don't quite seem to line up.

So I'm reluctant to go there and tell you that's what it is, okay? Now, others have suggested it's actually God picking up a mountain from the earth, just an existing mountain, picking it up and throwing it into the sea. Some have said that it's that.

That's probably a little more plausible than the nuclear explosion idea, but the text doesn't really say that a mountain is removed. It doesn't seem to communicate that. Nor does it describe any damage to land from ripping up this mountain. And John, rather than saying that it actually is a mountain, instead says that it's like a mountain. So there's a few things there that seem a little bit out of sync. This understanding also fails to explain why the mountain is burning, unless it's by some miraculous means or already some volcanic mountain.

I believe the best understanding is that this is, again, a meteor or some interplanetary object, some mass from interplanetary space. The various pieces of information that we have seem to suggest that. What's described could either be something already in space that comes down on Earth, is headed for the Earth already and just kind of fulfills its trajectory, or God directing an existing body that's out there, okay, head towards Earth, or possibly even creating something. That's not outside the possibility. As I mentioned some weeks past, NASA actually has a program.

This program that they have is to go out and catalog and determine the trajectories of every killer asteroid out there. everyone they can identify. By the year 2008, they want to get 90% of the killer asteroids identified. Killer asteroid is anything in about the five-eighths of a mile and larger. They figure that diameter is going to totally strip all life from Earth if it hits.

Now, that's not what we just read about, is it? So the bottom line is everything that NASA is mapping is too big. They're going to get 90% of them, they figure, by the year 2008. So the bottom line is everything they're mapping is not what we're looking at for this event. So this event is going to be a surprise because it's not mapped, right?

So now, the next thing here is as we look at it happening, this is some description. artist's description, if you will, of what it would be like as this burning mountain hit the earth. What would that be like? And we have to understand, of course, John's words are not technically specific, so I don't want to get to the point where I'm trying to be more specific than scripture lays out. But I think it's also fair to say that John is describing something that is real, So to the extent he gives us details, what we envision that to be should fit the details that he provides.

Now, let's take a look at verse 9 to get the next clue here as to what's happening. So the third of the creatures which were in the sea and had life died and the third of the ships were destroyed. Now as we take a look at verse 8 and then at verse 9 that we read here, We've got one-third of the sea becomes blood. That's the end of verse 8 there.

And this one-third, this triton means, and it's not half, but it's still a large amount, isn't it? A third is a big percentage. As we noted before, this one-third figure is used repeatedly in the trumpet judgments, about 15 times, and it extends over five of these trumpet judgments. So this is one of them.

I think we have to allow John some use of comparative language, so when he says blood, that it isn't exactly hemoglobin. I'm not sure you can sit there and say, oh, this is type A. We're not talking about that. I think he's using descriptive language to say, this is what this stuff looks like. To him, John says, what does it look like?

It looks like blood. It has that appearance. And the same thing in terms of consequences, that you also have this kind of lack of transparency in this material as well. It was deep red in appearance. And it is possible, again we're in a realm of speculation, it's possible that the breakup of whatever this is that's falling then creates a lot of this mineral color, mineral oxides and sulfur compounds can be red. It's a possibility.

But while the water may or may not be directly poisonous as a result, either by the physical impact or by the blood-appearing contaminant in the water, or both, we read that one-third of the sea creatures died. Now, we've become accustomed to seeing all kinds of neat sea creatures on the earth. We see everything under the sea, just phenomenal things. Nancy and I even recently have been looking at some of these documentaries that have an undersea exploration, things like that. They're fascinating things that the Lord has made.

But what is going to happen in this event is that a huge percentage of those creatures are going to be impacted in an instant by this impact, by this physical impact. Now, it's great to see them here, but to think of one-third of the creatures out in the sea dying That is a big problem. That's huge. It's a problem because fish are a critical food item. That's one thing.

You have some parts of the world, especially in coastal areas, that rely substantially on the fish of the sea for their food supply. Right now, 16% of the people get their annual protein from the sea, a substantial amount from the sea. One-sixth of the world's population now gets more than a third of their animal protein from the sea.

In this event, one-third of that entire source will be gone in one instant. Now here's something else. There's an entire industry fishing from the seas, now all of a sudden gets chopped. A huge chunk of that is now gone. You've got about 200 million people worldwide that are employed in some aspect of fisheries out in the ocean. A third of that suddenly gets whacked off.

No resource because there's nothing to fish, there's nothing to process, there's nothing to sell. That's all gone. Right now we have countries like China, Japan, Chile, Russia, the United States are some of the major countries that are involved in and sea fishing, and so they're talking huge economic losses. But that's not all. You get out into these situations, and what we see here is just kind of a current, you know, small sampling. You can imagine what that's like when one third of the sea creatures are all of a sudden washing up on shore.

It's not only a huge public health problem, It really stinks. It's a smelly mess. Can you imagine trying to deal with the tons and tons and tons of dead fish matter that will result from this? It's serious. Besides that, just operational problems. One of the things I used to do years ago in the civil engineering area was deal with power plants. The power plants along the ocean use the ocean water to cool the power plant and they have intakes, right? What happens when those intakes get clogged with dead fish? All of a sudden the power plant is down. So you'll have impacts that are way far away from the fishing industry and way far away from the coast.

Then, it tells us that one third of the ships were destroyed. We've got all kinds of ships around the world today and looking at the numbers that are out there. If this were to happen today, we'd get somewhere around 20,000 ships would be taken out of commission with this. That is a huge number. We're talking passenger ships, we're talking military ships, shipping operations, a great portion of the fuel, whether it's coal or oil, is transported via ship. And you're talking about losing a third of that shipping capacity. This is a big, big impact. Now, one of the things that's also going to happen, too, is, you know, in the past, human beings have had events like this.

Have been kind of legendary, haven't they? Now, let me ask you this. What page of the newspaper do they print this on when it's one of 20,000? This drops into insignificance, doesn't it? It just drops off the screen. By that time, the newspaper front page is full with the list. All you're doing is just printing a long, long, long, long list.

And you can imagine what it's like when you start just having to list the impact from this one single trumpet judgment. So this second trumpet brings this massive impact, horrible impact, to a huge chunk of the earth. And what's interesting, it sounds like it's going to hit one area and Possibly not others or not as much others. And we aren't told exactly what area is impacted. So basically people won't know. So that's a question mark. That's something yet to be determined.

Let's take a look at the 10th verse here. The third angel sounded and a great star fell from heaven. burning like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the springs of waters." In the Greek, this is Aster Megas, this word mega coming up again. Aster Megas.

It describes something in the nature of a disintegrating comet or something of that sort. John says it was burning like a torch or a lamp. Some translations have lamp. I hope your lamps don't burn at your house. Basically described again, here's something that's flaming. Flames are coming off it.

Perhaps it's disintegrating as a matter of coming into the Earth's atmosphere, coming apart. What John describes for us here is not so much of a physical mass impact. It's not like what we heard before where there seems to be more of a physical mass impact. It's more a matter of the contaminant deposits on fresh waters now is what gets described. Now, one of the things, I think, before we move on, he talks about this coming out of heaven, right?

And I want to take a brief side trip. Can you handle a side trip? Okay, all right, we'll go there. One of the things that you'll hear a phrase about, well, the third heaven or the seventh heaven. You hear phrases like that, right? And one thing to make clear, scripture teaches three heavens, okay? And they're these. The first heaven is the atmosphere, the one with birds and clouds. This is the one we breathe in and occasionally fly up into. John didn't get to do that, but we get to.

And there are instances of that in Scripture. The second heaven is talking about our solar system and on into outer space. And Scripture speaks of that in some places as well. For example, Psalm 19, the heavens declare the glory of God. That's the second heaven that Scripture makes reference to. The third heaven is actually God's dwelling place, and scripture makes reference to that as well. Paul describes where he was actually taken up into this third heaven.

So if you hear stories about seven levels of heaven or something like that, that comes out of Jewish mythology and a TV show. But anyway, that seven-level-of-heaven thing is not a scriptural teaching. Scripture teaches three levels. The three levels of highest heaven is a teaching of Joseph Smith of the Mormon background.

So, just to kind of keep it in context here, when it talks about heaven, we need to look at which one of these three is it referring to. And I think it's pretty clear he's talking about something that's coming in here out of the second heaven. It's some interplanetary mass that's coming down in towards the earth. Okay? Now, Verse 11, let's take a look at that.

The name of the star is called Wormwood, and a third of the waters became Wormwood, and many men died from the waters because they were made bitter. So the star is named Wormwood, it causes one third of the fresh waters to become bitter, like this shrub called Wormwood.

And there's actually a number of different species of Wormwood around the world. The five species that are in the area around the eastern Mediterranean and Israel, none of them are actually poisonous. So I think the use of this term here is to describe for us the bitterness, because they're all bitter. If you were to put them in water, they all create a bitterness, but those species there are not explicitly poisonous.

But John is wanting to convey to us the bitterness that apparently comes from the the deposits into the freshwater. And again, like the other, we're not told what sea gets this large meteor impact. We're not told, in this instance, what part of the earth gets this impact. What part of the earth has its freshwaters contaminated, apparently in a massive area.

Now, you would think that, well, people just stop drinking it. But the problem is that it ends up getting into everything. Initially it hits the surface waters, but then what does that do? That soaks down, gets into groundwater supplies. You can envision people in a large area of the earth will suddenly, basically overnight, be in a position where they cannot drink the water that is there.

They've either got to go through some processing to get to a place where they can drink it, And I'm sure that's going to be totally overwhelmed. It's like the ability to treat and to take out what it is will quickly get overwhelmed. They'll be in a position, okay, now we've got to import water and that gets expensive, trying to do that from great distances if you don't have, you know, pipe facilities and things like that in place. It will take time for human beings to even respond to this. And meanwhile, what's going to happen, even aside from toxicity of water, is people will say, I'm not going to drink that stuff. Well, what happens?

Dehydration, right? So you've got dehydration issues coming up real quick. And food preparation, there's another one. So you're getting into real problems. One of the other things that they found with people that get dehydrated, they get desperate. And then they will end up drinking things that they wouldn't ordinarily drink. It happens with people like Adam. in survival situations out in the oceans where people tell them don't drink the water, don't drink the water and they end up out of desperation doing it anyway to their loss. And so a part of the hazard for this is not just the toxicity but it's also the fact that people can't get the water and so the dehydration risk. And you can imagine this large geographical area all impacted by this toxic water and inability to get water to these people You can also imagine mass migration out, but not fast enough, especially from the middle of wherever this area is.

Now, let's take a look at verse 12. It's getting really good, right? Okay. Verse 12. The fourth angel sounded, and a third of the sun, and a third of the moon, and a third of the stars were struck, so that a third of them would be darkened, and the day would not shine for a third of it, and the night in the same way.

Now, we're not exactly told in this, are we looking at something where it is a portion of the time, or is this a percentage loss all the time? It isn't really made clear for us. But what is clear is that in either way, there is a reduction in the amount of light, whether by time or by percentage. There's a reduction in the amount of light getting to the earth.

And think of it, what are all the things that that light does? We rely on that light in order to be able to get around. And so you can imagine, here's the impact of, and this is unlike the previous two trumpet judgments, this is impacting the whole earth from what we read, okay? Now, suppose you have to have street lights, lights on in buildings on for longer hours.

Times when you didn't have to have it on before. Now you have to have more artificial light. What's that going to use up? Now you've got more, you know, fuel supplies are now strained. Guess how the fuel gets delivered? A lot of it by ship. What happened to the ships? You see the problem? This thing is compounding seriously. This is getting nasty.

What else about the light? The light also provides warmth. So how are you going to provide the warmth? To compensate for the fact that you don't have the light. Fuel, right? Same problem we had before with the lighting. You can see fuel supplies getting severely cramped and people just kind of huddling around it.

This in parts of the earth is going to have Stone Age kinds of impacts in terms of putting people back into a situation where they can only respond in a very crude kind of way. Now, we don't know whether it's this kind of thing where you've got an eclipse We don't know whether it's that, where you've got just kind of a discoloration that's there all the time. And we also don't know exactly how long it is. I don't get the impression reading this, is this something that goes on for a long, long period of time. And something very interesting, we're only given in a few instances the duration of the judgment.

And this is another case. Frankly, I'd have a hard time imagining this going on for that long and people surviving. It would be a tough one just because of the impact on the Earth's temperature, the impact on people's ability to survive, people's ability to continue to go on. So this would be difficult.

There is something about this, though, it matches up with a great deal of the warnings for the Old Testament prophets and that Christ gave in Matthew 24, signs in the heavens, okay? Signs in the Heavens. So all these things, including the previous judgments we've looked at, they all match up with things that the prophets have predicted 2,500 years ago and better, and Christ Himself predicted almost 2,000 years ago.

Okay, let's take a look at verse 13 here. Then I looked and heard an eagle, mentioned that a little bit here, flying in mid-heaven saying with a loud voice, woe, woe, woe to those who dwell on the earth because of the remaining blast of the trumpet of the three angels who are about to sound. Now there are several interesting things that come out about this verse. The text behind the King James Version has a Greek word angolos here and a lot of the other texts include actually the Greek word aetu which is actually an eagle.

Either way, the message is the same, and the message comes from the same place. This being is giving a warning, and it's one of these loud voices again, coming from heaven, and the Greek word here is translated in a lot of places, in the midst of heaven, or mid-heaven, and the meaning there is the position of the sun at high noon. Now, when you think of what's the position of the sun at high noon, That makes it where everybody can see it. So what's happening here is the world, basically, is getting a warning. Folks, it's getting really bad. You think you've gotten it bad so far? It's worse. How many trumpets are left? We've had four. There's three left, right? Seven trumpets. How many times is he saying, whoa? Three. So there's a warning for each one. Whoa, whoa, whoa.

And here's something else interesting about the way this word, woe, is said. A word that was also used for grieving people, when they would have weeping and wailing, like at a funeral ceremony or on the death of somebody important, and it basically comes across, OI! Okay? That's the sound that they would make. So it isn't just a, woe, you know? This isn't just, woe, okay? Here's this warning, and you can imagine, here are people on the earth, okay?

They have been seeing these incredible things, and after having the light diminished, again, whether by part of the day or percentage all the time, we're not clear, but they've been having their light diminished, and now they're having a warning, OI! OI! OI! That would get their attention, right? Okay.

And then, what's the message here? to those who dwell on the earth. And this dwell on the earth, again, that's a phrase that is used specifically of the tribulation. Those who dwell upon the earth. Repeatedly is used only during the tribulation period. That phrase is tribulation specific. Because of the remaining blasts of the trumpet. You've had four.

It's been awful. You put a list, and I'm just saying the number, if it's today's number of ships, 20,000 ships on your newspaper you've listed that have gone down, okay? You've had this massive marine die-out. You've had a third of the seas turned to this icky blood. You've had these things coming out of the skies, this awful stuff going on, and now you get this warning up in a place in the sky, mid-heaven, which again, that's the sun at high noon, this warning coming out of the sky, it's getting worse, folks. It's getting worse. Now, when you look at these, you've got to say, you know, this is really, really awful. And you can't help but think that many people in the midst of the tribulation period are going to start to think, you know, what really matters in life? Don't you think they're going to be thinking that? What really matters in life? Wouldn't you?

In the middle of all this stuff? I wonder what's going on. You know they're asking that, right? I wonder what's going on. Gee, this didn't happen when I was a kid. Very much. Anyway. So they're going to be asking these kinds of questions. They're going to be wondering.

And really, you think about it, these agonizing catastrophes, one after another, and even things like this. Now we get this big warning. Everybody's seeing this warning. It's getting worse, folks. Three more! Maybe they might begin to see that God's in control. Maybe they might begin to think about the things that matter eternally. Maybe they might begin to see that the earth isn't so solid after all. They might begin to see that the things on this earth cannot be depended upon.

You see that? You can imagine them beginning to think that, can't you? In truth, all of us gathering here this morning We've been asking those kinds of questions, and we haven't been through this, but we've been asking those kinds of questions already, haven't we? And obviously, if you're here this morning, you've been convinced that there are some answers to these questions.

There comes a place where we start to realize that what this world has to offer is not by itself enough, is it? What this world has to offer is not really going to satisfy, it's not really going to provide the significance that we long for. It's not going to provide that security of relationship that we have a longing for. We've come to a place where we're recognizing that there's nothing more important than knowing Christ.

The truth is that a great many people in the middle of this tribulation event will come to that place. We read about it in the previous chapter. There will be a great multitude who will see this kind of thing go on, and it will dawn on them, you know, something, you know, must be more significant, more important than all the stuff I've been trying to gather here on planet Earth, which has just burned up, or just been lost in the ship, or I can't find it anymore, or I've got to leave it because I've got to get water. They're going to come to a place of thinking this thing through, and a great many of them will realize that knowing Christ cannot be exceeded by anything else.

See, not only, we've come to realize this, not only have we been seated with Him positionally, but eternal life with Him starts right now. It isn't a matter of waiting until then. It starts now. even though we're looking forward to seeing Him face-to-face. It isn't a matter of waiting entirely until that time. But for us, we're not in a position of looking at these trumpets and saying, hey, I've got to live through that. We know that. But we are in a position of drawing the same conclusions that many during this time will. And that is that knowing Christ is first and foremost. And that there really isn't anything better