The noise, the hail, the fire mixed with blood falling from heaven. It had to be a quite a revelation for the apostle John and those early oppressed Christians of the first century to receive in Rev. 8:7. They would have immediately taken hope. Why? Because their future was assured by God. The unprecedented thunder and lightning and hail would have reminded them of the plagues God sent upon Egypt to rescue the Israelites from oppression and slavery. And while all of Egypt suffered, only the Israelites were spared. Was God going to do the same for them under the oppressive hand of Rome? Apparently so.

In Rev. 8:2 John tells us he saw the seven angels who stand before God who were given a trumpet. Then, before they could blow their horns, another angel came and stood before the altar. He had a golden censer in his hand which held a burning coal from the brass altar in the outer court where sacrifices were made. He came and stood at the golden altar in the Holy of Holies before God’s throne where he was given much incense to offer, with the prayers of all God’s people. The smoke of the incense and the prayers of all the people rose before God from the angel’s hand. Then the angel took the censer, filled it with fire from the altar, and hurled it on the earth; and there came peals of thunder, rumblings, flashes of lightning and an earthquake. The time had come. These seven angels can now prepare to sound their trumpets.

And so, the first sounded his and there came hail and fire mixed with blood, and it was hurled down upon the earth. A third of the earth was burned up, a third of the trees were burned up, and all green grass was burned up (8:7). This would have reminded the Jewish Christians of the seventh plague in Egypt when Moses stretched out his staff toward the sky and the LORD sent thunder and hail and caused lightening to flash to the ground creating the worst storm in the history of Egypt since it had become a nation. The hail struck everything in the fields – both people and animals. It beat down everything growing in the fields and stripped every tree. The only place it didn’t hail was in Goshen, where the Israelites lived (Exod. 9:22-26).

It is also reminiscent of the first plague that fell on Egypt when Moses struck the water of the Nile and turned it into blood in Exod. 7:17-21, which devastated the food and water supply.

Why was God doing this? He tells us by this demonstration they’d know that He, not their idols, is Lord over Egypt. The Nile, with its irrigation canals and reservoirs, made Egypt the breadbasket of the Mediterranean and its economy prosperous. The Nile was turned to blood and the land judged to make Egypt experience its vulnerability and need for God. But still, they wouldn’t believe. So, judgment after judgment came to get their attention. Ten in all. But God proved more powerful over those who oppressed his people a miraculous way. And if He rescued his people in the past, wouldn’t He do it again in John’s day and ours? The Roman Empire was founded on bloodshed, and it could only reap more blood as it burned up the lands with its wars (Josephus, Jewish War 6.404-7). The land was devastated and the food supply cut short numerous times in the first century.

By reusing the plagues such as thunderstorm and hail from heaven in Exodus and God’s protection of his own people in Goshen, Revelation alludes to God’s acts in the past, reminding us that His work in history is our finest assurance for the future. Aberra would agree. While working with Christian youth in the southern part of Ethiopia under Communist rule (1974-91), Aberra Wata almost lost his life. He told the following story to fellow missionary John Cumbers with SIM Missions, Ethiopia:

Word came from the commandant that the Party leaders had studied my report about. The work among the Christian you people. The authorities decided I had to be executed because of my “treasonous” words. “The only way you can overturn this sentence,” said the commandant, “is for you to deny that you are one of the believers.

I told the commandant, “If they execute me, I will be with the Lord.”

The commandant replied, “That’s what I expected you to say.”

As I awaited execution in prison my Savior gave me songs to sing, I had never heard before. He turned me into a composer. My fellow prisoners and revealed in the joys of praise to our God. The guards tried to silence us, but with the threat of execution hanging over us, why should we keep quiet? Seven men came to Christ in that prison, and we all sang together.

One guard took delight in mocking us. He would put filthy words to the tunes we sang, one night he patted his revolver and promised, “Tomorrow morning you won’t be in the land of the living.”

Just after midnight, a tremendous storm burst above us. Huge hailstones fell, wrecking several roofs, including the one where the insulting guard was sleeping. He was terrified, pulled out his revolver, and shot at random into the darkness, using up all his bullets. The storm took roofs off the commandant’s house and the offices of the chief judge, the administrator, and his deputy. The prisoners in cells three, four and five got a soaking from the rain, too. We were in cell one and stayed dry.

At 9:00 the next morning, the nasty guard was pushed into our cell by the commandant, who was whipping him with his belt. Other people in the background were yelling, “We told this man to leave the believers alone, but he refused and so God has sent this terrible punishment on the town and prison. He deserves to be given some of his own medicine.”

After the guard was finally released, he told us, “I know that the Lord was with you. I know the way I should have treated you, but Satan persuaded me otherwise. Please forgive me.’ We did, and several more men in the prisoner came to Christ.

Unfortunately, though, many surviving unbelievers today will refuse to repent of their idolatry and immorality, as they did in the time of Egypt and Rome (Rev. 9:20-21). Through the punishment by plagues of Exodus and Rome and others through the centuries, God uses the self-destructive power of evil to pour out his wrath. He even uses demons to torment those who refuse to believe and accept His gift of salvation. God’s people, however, are protected and will never experience God’s wrath.

When the second angel sounded his trumpet, something like a huge mountain, all ablaze, was thrown into the sea. This causes a third of the sea to turn to blood, kills a third of the sea creatures, and destroys a third of the ships (8:8). Is this an asteroid or an angel? Whatever it is, this disaster evokes again the first Egyptian plague (the turning of the Nile to blood) and especially the aftermath, in which all the fish die (Exod. 7:21). We are also reminded of Jeremiah 51:25, where God promises to make the “destroying mountain,” Babylon, into a “burned-out mountain.” Here the burning mountain is Rome, which the Jewish people considered a second Babylon (Dead Sea Scrolls, Pesher Habakkuk 1.6, 12-13; Rev. 18:8). The destruction of the ships in the sea is a symbol of Rome’s decline as an economic power (Rev. 18:19), since the sea was a means for prosperous trade and international commerce. Those remembering the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Southern Italy and the scorched lands and dead life in its wake would find this vision especially terrifying.

In the late summer or autumn of 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius violently spewed a deadly cloud of super-heated tephra and gases to a height of 21 miles, ejecting molten rock, pulverized pumice, and hot ash at 1.5 million tons per second, ultimately releasing 100,000 times the thermal energy of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

At the time, the region was a part of the Roman Empire, and several Roman cities were obliterated and buried underneath massive pyroclastic surges and ashfall deposits, the best-known being Pompeii and Herculaneum.

The total population of both cities was over 20,000. The remains of over 1,500 people have been found at Pompeii and Herculaneum so far, although the total death toll from the eruption remains unknown.

The eruption lasted for two days. The morning of the first day seemed normal according to the only eyewitness to leave a surviving document, Pliny the Younger, who was staying at Misenum, on the other side of the Bay of Naples about 18 miles from the volcano.

Around 1:00 PM, Mount Vesuvius violently erupted, spewing up a high-altitude column from which ash and pumice began to fall, blanketing the area. Rescues and escapes occurred during this time. At some time in the night or early the next day, pyroclastic flows in the close vicinity of the volcano began. Lights seen on the mountain were interpreted as fires. People as far away as Misenum fled for their lives. The flows were rapid-moving, dense, and extremely hot, wholly, or partly knocking down all structures in their path, incinerating or suffocating the remaining population and altering the landscape, including the coastline. These were accompanied by additional light tremors and a mild tsunami in the Bay of Naples. By evening of the second day, the eruption was over, leaving only haze in the atmosphere through which the sun shone weakly.

Pliny the Younger wrote an account of the eruption:

Broad sheets of flame were lighting up many parts of Vesuvius; their light and brightness were the more vivid for the darkness of the night… it was daylight now elsewhere in the world, but there the darkness was darker and thicker than any night.

Only two angels have sounded their trumpets to this point, but already we can see in Revelation that the same Creator and Redeemer who exposed the idolatrous values of the Egyptian and Roman world will expose ours today. The fall of these two Empires is a testimony to that fact in history. When that happens what will it reveal about our world and you and me?