Revelation 10:3

2. World-Angel announces that the seventh trumpet’s sounding will finish earthly history, Revelation 10:3-7.

3. A lion roareth The most majestic sound sent forth from living nature. But the voice of the representative Angel is at once reverberated by a voice of a diviner tone. Seven thunders has in the Greek the definite article.

They are co-ordinate, therefore, with the seven spirits, the seven stars, the seven churches, as a divine symbol. As these thunders are also a voice which uttered unrevealable mysteries, they seem to be the voices of none but the divine Spirit himself. The psalmist says, God thundereth marvellously with his voice. And is it not the true meaning that the lion-like roar of the representative Angel is answered by the loftier roar of God’s own voice? The literal words are: and when he cried, uttered the seven thunders their own voices. That is, the very own voices of the seven thunders were the divine response to the cry. Then as “the seven lamps” are the light, and “the seven eyes” are the omniscience of the Spirit, so “the seven thunders” are the expression of his omnipotence.

Seven thunders uttered On this mysterious passage we suggest: 1. The thunders were the utterances of that Spirit which convinces the world of sin and judgment. 2. As co-ordinate with the seven seals and trumpets, they were, being thunders, far more terrible than either. 3. They must be interpreted in close connexion between the cry of the angel preceding and his oath which follows. They must be a response to the first and be responded to by the latter. The cry was a wail of woe at man’s doom; the thunders might have been a menace of wrath at man’s sin. 4. Hence we understand the Holy Spirit as uttering the demands of absolute justice for sin; describing in terms too deep for human language the guilt of sin, the awfulness of the final sentence and doom, and the demand which absolute justice makes that execution should be immediate. To this the angel-oath responds that judgment, if not immediate, if even long delayed, is sure; for the angel swears that the seventh trumpet shall reach that result.