reply to post by TheRedneck
Yeah, I did the sixth seal with was parallel with the struggle for power within the Roman Empire, culminating with the emergence of Constantine.
THE SEVENTH SEAL
After this. After the opening of the sixth seal I saw four angels, and another angel having the seal of God. The seal of God on the forehead would
be visible to everyone; hence the seal in the forehead has been understood to be the public confession and profession that Christ was the Son of the
Living God.
All Christians belonging to the spiritual Israel, but note the specifics mentioned here. 1. Those sealed are taken out of the tribes of Israel.
They are the remnant, while the great body of the membership of the tribes is left unsealed. 2. The Gentile Christians are named immediately after.
Observe the marks of the countless multitude of the Gentiles saved. A.) They are clothed in white robes. White robes are the mark of triumph. B.) The
have palms in their hands. Palms belong to victors. C.) They join in a song of praise to the Lamb as the author of their salvation.
What do the symbols of the vision signify? It is evident that they indicate that four destructive agencies were to be checked and restrained until
some great work of the gospel was accomplished. We find that at the end of the fourth century, the civilized Roman world was Christian.
CHAPTER VIII
Remember that in the opening of the seventh Chapter, we are told of the four angels holding back four destructive agencies until a great work was done
for the Church. That now is accomplished.
The seventh seal was opened. There was silence in heaven about the space of an hour. It would appear that this is a hush of awe before the march of
the terrible judgments to come.
The first six verses describe the preparations and deliberation of the angels, as the seventh and last seal will not be exhausted until the seven
trumpets have discharged their mission.
Does this immediate period of history correspond in successive order to the four trumpet blasts?
1. In about 400 AD the "four winds" could be held no longer. The Goths gathered out of the mysterious lands of the far north and migrating
southward, threw themselves like a savage host on Rome. They left a wake of blackened, bloody lands. In 409 AD Alaric led then into Italy. This
land had not seen an invader for 800 years. They reached the city, and after a long seige, in the dead of night, the gates were opened by traitors
and for three days the sack of Rome continued before they were exhausted with killing and spoil. The iron hail of war, the fire of burning towns and
blackened lands denuded of fruit trees and grass churned underneath the feet of the invaders seem to correspond to the descriptions in scripture.
It should be noted how the infidel Gibbon has chosen the very language of inspiration to describe some of the events of this period. "The tremendous
sound of the Gothic trumpet" stirred the hosts to invasion. "At the first sound of the trumpet the Goths left their farms" to rush on in invasion.
"The Gothic conflageration" consumed the Empire. "Blood and conflageration and the burning of trees and herbage marked their path."
Here surely is the fulfillment of the first trumpet.
2. The second trumpet implies a warfare upon the sea. Look at it. The Goths completed their work about 409 AD. About ten years later, yet another
horde of northern barbarians was sweeping south. These were the Vandals. They rushed over Gaul, swept through Spain, leaped over the narrow straits
at Gibralter, and wrested northern Africa from the Roman Empire, lands that fed much of the remainder of the Empire.
Then they threw themselves like a burning mountain upon the sea and filled it with fire and blood. In order that they might assail Rome on the seas
and carry their armies to the islands and to Italy, they built fleets and struggled for the mastery of the Mediterranean. For six hundred years
prior, no ship hostile to Rome had disputed their mastery of the sea, but now it becomes the theatre of war. Fleets meet in the shock of battle' the
sea is redened with the blood of the slain; the Roman ensign goes down, dyed in blood, the islands of the seal fall into the hands of the fierce
barbarians, and at last, nearly thirty years after the contest began, their fleets land armies in Italy, and they rush upon Rome. The city is
beseiged, falls, and for fourteen days a pitiless barbarian soldiery spare neither age nor sex. The spoil gathered for eight hundred years, from a
hundred conquered nations, is carried away and loaded upon the Vandal fleets, and the blasted, scourged, and pillaged Capital is abandoned as unworthy
to be held as a permanent possession.
This would appear to conform with the blowing of the Second Trumpet.
3. "A blazing meteor" follows the sound of the Third Trumpet. A meteor is a sudden, brilliant phenomenon with a sudden appearance and fairly quick
lifespan. This description would seem to imply some mighty leader who suddenly appears and begins his destructive work. Right at this point in
history, is there such a fiery leader? Before 440AD, the Romans knew nothing of the Hungarian nation. About that time a fiery leader suddenly
appeared as a meteor would flash across the sky, a warrior upon the banks of the river Danube, with eight hundred thousand fighting men under his
banner.
They had come from the depths of Central Asia, marched north of the Euxine Sea through Russia, and now knocked at the river boundary of the Roman
Empire. Overcoming opposition to their passage at the river Danube, the rushed westward, crossed the river Rhine, and on the river Marne, were met by
the armies of Rome. The historians tell us that the blood of the slaughter mad the river run with blood, and that from 150,000 to 300,000 bodies of
the dead attested to the fury of the fighting.
Turning southwards, on the banks of the river Rhone, the hosts met again in fury. Then descending from the Alps, the fierce warrior, on the banks of
the river Po, contended for mastery of Italy. Victorious, he marched southward to seize the imperioal prize. Unable to contend any longer, Rome sent
a priestly deputation to ask him to depart. By rich bribes and by using his superstition they succeeded, and he retire, made Buda, on the river
Danube, his capital and founded the Hungarian nation. When he died, his followers turned the waters of the Danube from its course, buried him in its
bed, and then let the waters again flow over the grave of their founder, where his body still remains. There lies the bones of the star called
Wormwood, that fell most violently upon the rivers.
The trumpets have blown, three awful blows have been struck, and the weakened Empire is ready to fall when the Fourth Trumpet blows.