Sabbath study, xvii: biblical apocalypticism vis-à-vis Islam
Zooming in on Revelation 9: fifth and sixth trumpets.
In a various number of previous Bible studies, I explained the gist of the first four assembly (church) dispensations of the New Covenant era—for instance:
Accounting for the details of the first four gospel dispensation periods isn’t too particularly difficult, because they almost entirely are the same providentially ordained time durations described from different angles in the assembly epistles, seal openings, and trumpet blowings. The first one was the apostolic age spanning cir. 30-cir. 100 A.D. (from Pentecost up until the death of the apostle John), the second one constituting the period of imperial Roman persecution (cir. 100-313 A.D.), the third one corresponding to the syncretic magnification of institutional abomination corrupting the Christian assemblies (313-538 A.D.), and the fourth one meting out to the Dark Ages when the light of the world was banned by the satanic culmination of presumptuously self-determined clerical supremacists usurping the prerogatives of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. (538-??? A.D.)
The latter three of the assembly letters, seal openings, and trumpet blowings, by contrast, do not comprise resolutely neat descriptions of parallel time periods in any simple 1-to-1 correspondence. Yet there appear to be intricately hinted clues permitting the diligent student of Jehovah’s word to understand in the clearest light what met out to the fulfillment of apocalyptic prophecy given to the 1st-century revelator and apostle John, the beloved disciple of the Messiah.
First off, as I explained before, mercy and justice are intertwined—Jesus fulfilled both the scapegoat (representing mercy, the expiation of sins) and the sacrificial goat (representing justice, dying a vicarious death in the place of the sinner sentenced to death according to the law) as the antitypical substantive fulfillment to the Day of Atonement. In Revelation, the seven letters to the seven angels of the seven assemblies represent Jehovah’s mercy towards His covenant people, commending and/or upbraiding them according to their standing before His face for the end purpose that they might inherit eternal life. The throne-room vision and opening of the seals outlined the heavenly-affixed positional standing of God’s plan of redemption to such an undeniable degree that no counterfeit can magnify to its height, and after that came the unveiled blowing of the seven trumpets, representing justice towards the punishment of the obstinately unrepentant masses outside Jehovah’s New Covenant.
Now, the practically universal historicist eschatological consensus on the fifth (and sixth) trumpet blowing is that it was fulfilled in the ascension of Islam. However, this baseline exposition has long been misconstrued and grotesquely misrepresented by the mainstream of Christendom, including historicist western Protestants who long indulged in instrumentalization of this argument for anti-Islamic polemical magnification of a “Christendom vs. Islam” dualistic binary framing. Such abhorrent crudity has not only insulted the sincere consciences of millions of traditionally pious and sincere Muslims, but also perverts the proper biblical dissection of exactly what it means that the fifth and sixth trumpets corresponded to the rise of Islam.
This is (anyone is more than welcome in good faith to correct me if I am wrong) the pericopal chiastic structure of the fifth trumpet account:1
C.ii.XII.a.I (9:1): And the fifth messenger did sound, and I saw a star out of the heaven having fallen to the earth, and there was given to it the key of the pit of the abyss.
C.ii.XII.a.II (9:2): And he did open the pit of the abyss, and there came up a smoke out of the pit as smoke of a great furnace, and darkened was the sun and the air from the smoke of the pit.
C.ii.XII.b.I (9:3): And out of the smoke came forth locusts to the earth, and there was given to them authority as scorpions of the earth have authority,
C.ii.XII.b.II (9:4-6): and it was said to them that they may not injure the grass of the earth, nor any green thing, nor any tree, but the men only who have not the seal of God upon their foreheads, and it was given to them that they may not kill them, but that they may be tormented five months, and their torment [is] as the torment of a scorpion, when it may strike a man; and in those days shall men seek the death, and they shall not find it, and they shall desire to die, and the death shall flee from them.
C.ii.XII.c (9:7a): And the likenesses of the locusts [are] like to horses made ready to battle,
C.ii.XII.d (9:7b-9a): and upon their heads as crowns like gold, and their faces as faces of men, and they had hair as hair of women, and their teeth were as [those] of lions, and they had breastplates as breastplates of iron,
C.ii.XII.c’ (9:9b): and the noise of their wings [is] as the noise of chariots of many horses running to battle.
C.ii.XII.b’.I (9:10a): And they have tails like to scorpions, and stings were in their tails;
C.ii.XII.b’.II (9:10b): and their authority [is] to injure men five months.
C.ii.XII.a’.I (9:11): And they have over them a king—the angel of the abyss—a name [is] to him in Hebrew, Abaddon; and in the Greek he has a name, Apollyon.
C.ii.XII.a’.II (9:12): The first woe did go forth; behold! there come yet two woes after these things.
In a nutshell:
a/a’: I) the star (a.k.a. angel2) of the abyss; II) endpoints of the first woe
b/b’: I) symbolic “locusts” carry features of scorpions; II) five (prophetic) months of providentially ordained torment against apostates
c/c’: horses in battle
d: physical description of the symbolized “locusts” in vision
Generally, the historicist Protestant consensus from old has been that the angel falling from heaven was fulfilled in the chief Islamic prophet Muhammad, and that the “locusts” meted out to some ambiguously defined plague of “Islam” that conquered Christendom. Simple as that, right?
…not quite. First off, note that in the fifth trumpet, it simply says that a “star” fell from heaven. Previously in the third trumpet, a great star fell from heaven,3 but those same historicists cannot appear to resoundingly agree to anywhere close to a firm consensus on who that “great star” from the third trumpet sounding details was. This is because the great star that fell from heaven in the third trumpet was obviously none other than Constantine the Great (as I explained before). How can any sincere pious Christian harp over Muhammad as this supreme bogey, all the while conveniently ignoring the far greater obvious apostasy of the great star, seeing that the “star” in the fifth trumpet blowing is notably NOT described as a great one? The very simple answer is that such two-faced, double-standardized hypocrisy is utterly unchristian.
Furthermore, take note at the chiastic structure’s ingrained implications: only the a and a’ branches refer directly to the symbolic “angel” which “fell from heaven”4 (remember, it was witnessed by the revelator John in a vision, and therefore the descriptions are symbolic, not outright literal). The text never says that the locusts which emerged out of the smoke of the bottomless pit were directly anointed and ordained by the angel which fell from heaven, only that those “locusts” took the angel as their “king.” If interpreted to mean that the fallen angel was a symbol pointing to Muhammad and that the “locusts” were the Sunni Ottoman authorities, then it is very obvious that the jarringly hybrid and terrifying “locusts” patently cannot refer to the original and true Islamic followers of their prophet Muhammad for the simple reason that Muhammad towards the end of his life in the clearest terms possible declared Ali as his preferred successor. The empirical Sunni collective, choosing to override a simple understanding of the obvious truth within Islam, contrived mental gymnastics to advance their self-magnifying, power-hungry purposes according to the conspiratorial schemes of Abu Bakr and Umar, cynically instrumentalizing a misrepresented image of Muhammad after his death to undermine and even ruthlessly liquidate the pious adherents coalescing around Ali, a.k.a. the traditionalist Shi’a.
Read the apocalyptic prophecy in the account of Revelation’s fifth trumpet sounding very, very carefully (if my temporally used translation is not deemed sufficiently precise, then here’s a Textus Receptus interlinear for you to consult!): nowhere does it EVER say that the angel of the bottomless pit himself consciously appointed nor approved of the factional Sunni empirical trajectory that consolidated into the Ottoman Empire! All it signifies in the most plain terms is that a particular messengerial chieftain of notable stature (of such monumental significance that he was prophesied of in the most apocalyptically Jewish book of the entire biblical canon!) “fell from heaven” (a.k.a. he possessed an understood and ingrained knowledge of Jehovah’s light but fell away from entirely abiding in it, choosing instead to pursue earthly ambitions), that he opened the “abyss” (again, symbolic, not literal) that caused smoke to emerge, and that secondarily from that smoke, emerged a particular set of “locusts” who claim that angel as their king.
Again—just to in advance refute any bad-faith miser who might attempt to misconstrue and misrepresent my exposition as “Islamophobic”—it is important to clarify that the proper biblical assessing of Islam is definitively NOT in any way shape or form to denigrate sincere pious and traditionalist Muslims through some crudely binary framing of any sort of “clash of civilizations” racist garbage whatsoever. Rather, it is an appeal towards universal human self-abasing pious humility out of a universal recognition that “higher [is the] heaven from land”5 and that mortal human beings—who have no righteousness of their own apart from what is imputed by God—must turn to God with all their heart and all their mind, seeking after the heavenly-defined circumcision of the inner heart. For as nothing all new is under the sun,6 Jehovah deals in antitype as he dealt in type,7 towards both those within and without His covenant.8
The core, fundamental matter here is that even while the general implications of the Revelation text would appear to portray Muhammad through a tragic lens as an enlightened messenger who fell away from communion with God, none of it whatsoever is a denigration against pious Muslims. Note that the “locusts” (the empirical Sunni Ottomans) are explicitly described as taking Muhammad as a king over them. This definitively proves that the Sunni-Ottoman “locusts” did not operate as directly ordained successors of Muhammad, because the chief Islamic messenger is described in none other than the Qur’an (Surah 3:144, 18:110, 6:50, 11:12) as someone who himself only served as a humble communicator who was intended to magnify God, and not someone who himself—according to the traditionalist, orthodox Islamic standpoint—was ever meant to be magnified to the level of luxuriously man-centered earthly prestige.
In a nutshell, the implied great tragedy of the origins of Islam—as prophesied through a “glimpse” lens in the Book of Revelation, and which is documented from the horse’s mouth within internal Islamic historical chronicles—is that Muhammad in some manner paved the way for a self-magnifying empirical machine (that must have been none other than the substantive fulfillment of “falling from heaven”—while obviously not to the same extent as Constantine’s apostasy, it was nonetheless some significant acquiescence towards empire-building that supplanted a wholly kenotic emphasis of earthly-power-denying simple faith in Jehovah) that turned around to consume him in his final days, when he tried to reverse the monster but by that point was unable to, because it became too late. As the inevitable result, Muhammad’s Islamic adherents became factionalized between traditionalists (i.e. both traditionalist Shi’ism and the traditionalist Sufi/Ash’ari element of Sunnism) who sought a devoutly heartfelt and conservative reading of their religious Qur’anic/hadith texts, and the empirical-conquest collective within primarily the Sunni realm which implicitly treated the land as higher than the heaven.
The apostle Paul, writing to the Galatians, mentioned this:9
Tell me, ye who are willing to be under law, the law do ye not hear? for it hath been written, that Abraham had two sons, one by the maid-servant, and one by the free-woman, but he who [is] of the maid-servant, according to flesh hath been, and he who [is] of the free-woman, through the promise; which things are allegorized, for these are the two covenants: one, indeed, from mount Sinai, to servitude bringing forth, which is Hagar; for this Hagar is mount Sinai in Arabia, and doth correspond to the Jerusalem that now [is], and is in servitude with her children, and the Jerusalem above is the free-woman, which is mother of us all, for it hath been written, ‘Rejoice, O barren, who art not bearing; break forth and cry, thou who art not travailing, because many [are] the children of the desolate—more than of her having the husband.’
And we, brethren, as Isaac, are children of promise, but as then he who was born according to the flesh did persecute him according to the spirit, so also now; but what saith the Writing? ‘Cast forth the maid-servant and her son, for the son of the maid-servant may not be heir with the son of the free-woman;’ then, brethren, we are not a maid-servant’s children, but the free-woman’s.
The “abyss” in prophetic symbolism is not a reference to a literal bottomless pit of physical darkness imprisoning its inhabitants in a caricature depiction of hellish gloominess. Rather, it means the abode of desolation—obviously in the spiritual connotation, it means an “abode” devoid of Jehovah’s light (a.k.a. Jesus Christ). In the context therefore of the fifth trumpet blowing, the identification of the abyss with the “Saracens” of Arabia broadly fits—remember that the fifth trumpet is the pronouncement of the first woe out of three declared right before, in the conclusion of the fourth trumpet sounding.10 The fourth trumpet marked the beginning of the Dark Ages, when the light of the world was taken away from the laity by the apostate, satanic Constantinian-Nicene Christianizers (who propagated a superficially and outwardly Christianized form of Hellenistic/cabalistic syncretism) within the Christian church, depriving the truth of God’s inspired word from the planet. The culminated effects of the fifth trumpet’s sounding were therefore a circumstantially necessitated reactive measure of judgment that operated in an environment that was darkened to begin with. In simple terms: there would never have been any materialized “need” for the splinter offshoot establishment of an entirely differentiated “Islam” apart from Christianity, had the once-apostolic Christian church never apostatized into abominably wretched theological perversion to such a wretched extent, all for the same reason that—in the typifying example—there would never have been the “need” for the consolidation of a “Samaritan” syncretic identity if ancient literal Israel did not apostatize to such a grotesque extent that necessitated Jehovah to destroy the northern Ephrathite kingdom.
All in all, the simple conclusion on how truly pious, Jehovah-fearing, Christ-obeying Christians must interact with traditionalist pious Muslims, is that until the separation of the wheat from the tares (no mortal human being can know in advance who will and will not be redeemed, because no single mortal human being is qualified to unseal and gaze upon the heavenly scroll sealed with seven seals—Jesus and Jesus alone qualified to open the seals and behold the scroll because He alone was the antitypical substantive fulfillment to the Day of Atonement11) is complete in the undetermined far future, one must respect each other’s sincere consciences and seek to magnify the message of Jehovah’s unity of justice and mercy, communicating in good-faith forthright honesty and sincerity from one’s inner conscience.
In my own experience, I can safely and assuredly say that I would far rather prefer honest and robust theological dialogue with sincerely pious traditionalist Muslims than with lukewarm, hypocritically disgusting and stubbornly impenitent “Christians,” and that it is the former whom I authentically respect from the bottom of my heart, not the latter. If any “Christian” ever demands or expects that I adhere to some crudely reductionist “Christianity vs. Islam” binary and stand behind some self-supremacist “Christian front” of theirs, I will more than gladly stand in solidarity alongside my traditionalist Islamic friends and revile any such “Christians” in the most scathingly denunciation possible to their faces.
Now then, to press forward and understand the second woe-trumpet of Revelation—this is the pericopal chiasm of the account of the sixth trumpet blowing:12
C.ii.XIII.a (9:13-14): And the sixth angel did sound, and I heard a voice out of the four horns of the altar of gold that is before God saying to the sixth angel who had the trumpet, ‘Loose the four angels who are bound at the great river Euphrates!’
C.ii.XIII.b (9:15): And loosed were the four angels who have been made ready for the hour, and day, and month, and year, that they may kill the third of men.
C.ii.XIII.c (9:16a): And the number of the forces of the horsemen [is] two myriads of myriads;
C.ii.XIII.d (9:16b): [and] I heard the number of them.
C.ii.XIII.c’ (9:17): And thus I saw the horses in the vision, and those sitting upon them, having breastplates of fire, and jacinth, and brimstone; and the heads of the horses [are] as heads of lions, and out of their mouths proceeds fire, and smoke, and brimstone.
C.ii.XIII.b’ (9:18-19): By these three were the third of men killed, from the fire, and from the smoke, and from the brimstone, that is proceeding out of their mouth, for their authorities are in their mouth, and in their tails, for their tails [are] like serpents, having heads, and with them they do injure.
C.ii.XIII.a’ (9:20-21): And the rest of men, who were not killed in these plagues, neither did repent from the works of their hands, that they should not bow before the demons, and idols—those of gold, and those of silver, and those of brass, and those of stone, and those of wood, that are neither able to see, nor to hear, nor to walk—and they did not repent from their murders, nor from their sorceries, nor from their whoredoms, nor from their thefts.
The sixth trumpet is where it gets exciting! See, the fifth trumpet’s prophetic “five months” met out perfectly to 150 years (a day in prophecy metes out to a literal year,13 so 30×5 prophetic days = 150 literal years) from July 27, 1299, into July 27, 1449. That was the 150 years of Ottoman rule when apostate Christendom (a.k.a. the Constantinian-Nicene syncretist confederation) was “tormented” through empirical confiscation of their earthly civic power standing, albeit an era when those apostate Christians were explicitly spared from any killings and lived through their lives under the authority of Turkish-Islamic rule.
By contrast, the sixth trumpet’s sounding marked the empirical hardening of the Ottomans into a destructively ruthless empire—whereas for the 150 years its subjugation of apostate Christendom was restrained, afterwards it was essentially enflamed in intensified fury and providentially handed a sword for the purpose of killing the third of men, a.k.a. the same apostate Christendom (in both the papal/Catholic west and Byzantine/Orthodox east) whose ranks did not repent in the name of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ to seek after Jehovah out of a pure heart. When the prophetic time of “the hour, and day, and month, and year” is calculated, it is: 15 days (prophetic hour = 1/24 of a 360-day Hebrew year = 15 literal days) + 1 year + 30 years + 360 years, which adds up to 391 years and 15 days. July 27, 1449, marked the end of the fifth trumpet’s 150 years and the beginning of the sixth trumpet’s 391 years + 15 days, and when the latter sum is added, the resulting end-date is Aug. 11, 1840, the exact day that was correctly predicted by Josiah Litch to be the monumental watershed when the Ottoman Empire faced a deprivation of its civic authority.
Take careful note! while undoubtedly the Turkish-Islamic Ottoman power as described in the sixth trumpet description is terrifyingly brutal, the text itself never hints that those fiery mass-murdering “horsemen” themselves are the chief satanic entity that constitutes the problem, but rather implies they served as an antitypical rod of Jehovah’s anger,14 instrumentalized and used by God to punish the backslidden, apostate masses who broke the covenant. In a nutshell, both the fifth and sixth trumpet descriptions treat the Sunni Ottoman empirical power through an implied détente lens, never directly insinuating that they themselves were the problem, but rather that they served the cause of divinely ordained justice by hurting and killing the unrepentant apostates within Christendom.
The concluding a’ branch of the pericopal chiasm of the sixth trumpet sounding account is of course a passage I’ve quoted before in my apologia postings defending Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Note that it implicitly in referential context encompasses the period after the 391 years and 15 days of empirical Ottoman brutality, wherein all of mankind—out of those who remained unhurt from the plagues of the Ottoman Empire from those 391 years and 15 days—refused to repent from the lessons of those nearly four centuries. Does this mean that not only did those outside God’s New Covenant refused to repent, but that even the Christians within the covenant also likewise failed to repent of their demonic idolatries, murders, sorceries, fornications, and thefts? Let’s real quick check out the pericopal chiasm of the last of the seven epistles!15
B.iii.III.a (3:14a): ‘And to the angel of the assembly of the Laodiceans, write:
B.iii.III.b (3:14b-15): These things says the Amen, the witness—the faithful and true—the chief of the creation of God: I have known your works, that neither cold are you nor hot; I would you were cold or hot!
B.iii.III.c (3:16-17): Therefore, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to vomit you out of my mouth, because you say, “I am rich, and have grown rich, and have need of nothing!” and have not known that you are the wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked.
B.iii.III.d (3:18): I counsel you to buy from me gold fired by fire, that you may be rich, and white garments that you may be arrayed, and the shame of your nakedness may not be manifest, and with eye-salve anoint your eyes, that you may see.
B.iii.III.c’ (3:19): As many as I love, I do convict and chasten; be zealous therefore, and repent!
B.iii.III.b’ (3:20-21): Behold! I have stood at the door, and I knock. If any one may hear My voice, and may open the door, I will come in unto him, and will sup with him, and he with me. He who is overcoming, I will give to him to sit with me in My throne, as I also did overcome and did sit down with My Father in His throne.
B.iii.III.a’ (3:22): He who is having an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the assemblies!’
Notice there is an explicit call to repentance, for obviously, if Jehovah’s covenant people within “Christendom” had already repented and maintained hearts of penitent faithfulness towards Him, there would be no need to explicitly exhort them to repentance! It’s not too difficult, then, to realize that the last gospel dispensation began on Aug. 11, 1840, and extends into the close of probation, by which point everyone predestined unto sanctification towards eternal life will have been ingrafted at some point in the far future. In a short and simple nutshell: you and I are living in the last gospel dispensation era—there is no eighth one after this, only impending destruction awaiting those who are so conformed to this world they will be destroyed with it at the Second Coming of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
And for anyone of an authentically pious heart, it is evident that the end does NOT justify the means. The simple fact that that end result is a promise is not a license to undercut obedience towards God in any way whatsoever to objectively justify ungodly behavior from Jehovah’s mortal human servants. There remains still a long journey ahead wherein awaits each individual Jehovah-fearing person a seemingly neverending onslaught of tripping, bruises, dejection, and en masse castigated revulsion from the rest of the world that refuses to repent of their sins. To walk in the paths of Jehovah’s everlasting righteousness means to continue even after enduring the embittering of one’s stomach.
Rev. 9:1-12.
Rev. 1:20b.
Rev. 8:10-11a.
Cf. Heb. 6:4-8.
Isa. 55:8-9.
Ecc. 1:9b.
Cf. Am. 9:7.
Cf. Rom. 2:5-16.
Gal. 4:21-31.
Rev. 8:13.
Rev. 5:1-5.
Rev. 9:13-21.
Num. 14:34; Ezek. 4:6b.
Cf. Isa. 10:5.
Rev. 3:14-22.