Revelation 8:7-13

These verses give us the sounding of four trumpets. As the four seals had a similarity in the four horses, so the four trumpets have a similarity, and may be considered together. At the sounding of the trumpets certain plagues fall. The first plague fell on the land; the second on the sea; the third on the rivers; and the fourth on the heavenly bodies. And each plague destroys one third of what it touches. One third of the trees are burned; one third of the sea becomes blood; one third of the rivers and fountains become wormwood; and one third of the day and night are deprived of light.

It is useless to attempt to attach these trumpets to successive periods of history, and say that the first applies to so many centuries and the second covers so many centuries and so on. Some have tried to do that, and labored to show what periods of time each one covered; but with no satisfactory results. It is much better to regard them as all belonging to one time and one event, namely the destruction of the first great persecutor of the Christian church. Christ, in speaking of the fall of Jerusalem, described it in sufficiently alarming terms; and history fills out the event of about ten years before the fall of the city with scenes of crimes, and terror, robbery, and murder, and carnage sufficient to justify such symbols as these.