Revelation 9

Sermon Notes

Revelation 9

Vision        Chapters          Content
1                    1-3                   7 letters to 7 churches
2                   4-8:1                7 seals
3                   8:2-11               7 trumpets
4                   12-14                Battle against Satan
5                   15-16                 7 bowls
6                   17-19                 Downfall of Babylon
7                   20-22                New Heavens & New Earth

“The opening of the seals and the sounding of the trumpets point us to the same great reality but from different perspectives. The seals view the unfolding of the redemptive purposes of God from the point of view of the Lord’s own people, those who are sealed; the trumpets view this same reality from the point of view of the unsealed, those who are not the people of God. The opening of the seals brings great consolation to the people of God. The sounding of the trumpets brings great woes upon those who are not the people of God. The seals are comforting, the trumpets are warnings.”
Derek Thomas, Let’s Study Revelation

Revelation 9

• 5th Trumpet – Torment of the Unsealed
• 6th Trumpet – Destruction and Defiance

“Trumpet 6, like the rest, is sounding the warning of God’s wrath against sin in reply to the prayers of his people that evil should not go unpunished and that justice should be done.”
Michael Wilcock, The Message of Revelation

Those remaining alive after the sounding of trumpets 1-6…

1. Did not repent of their idolatry
2. Did not repent of their murders
3. Did not repent of their sorceries
4. Did not repent of their immorality
5. Did not repent of their thefts

From Revelation 9 we are reminded that:

1. God is the one to whom we all will give an answer one day.
2. Some obstinately refuse the clear and kind offer of God’s mercy.
3. All actions and agents of God’s righteous wrath are under His command.
4. Because of the Cross of Christ we don’t have to become objects of God’s righteous wrath.

“Your problem and mine is not just that we are under the wrath of God. Your problem and mine is not just that we are by nature in bondage to sin. Your problem and mine is not just that we have nothing to plead before the judgment seat of God. Your problem and mine is all three put together.”
Sinclair Ferguson

“Do you show contempt for the riches of his kindness, forbearance and patience, not realizing that God’s kindness is intended to lead you to repentance? But because of your stubbornness and your unrepentant heart, you are storing up wrath against yourself for the day of God’s wrath, when his righteous judgment will be revealed.”
Romans 2:4-5

“Sin is the refusal of spiritual life, the rejection of the inner order and peace that come from our union with the divine will. In a word, sin is the refusal of God’s will and of his love. It is not only a refusal to ‘do’ this or that thing willed by God, or a determination to do what he forbids. It is more radically a refusal to be what we are, a rejection of our mysterious, contingent, spiritual reality hidden in the very mystery of God.”
Thomas Merton, Life and Holiness

“God’s love, as the Bible views it, never leads him to foolish, impulsive, immoral actions in the way that its human counterpart too often leads us. And in the same way, God’s wrath in the Bible is never the capricious, self-indulgent, irritable, morally ignoble thing that human anger so often is. It is, instead, a right and necessary reaction to objective moral evil.”
J. I. Packer, Knowing God

“The concept of substitution may be said, then, to lie at the heart of both sin and salvation. For the essence of sin is man substituting himself for God, while the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for man.”
John Stott, The Cross of Christ