The Seven Angels

The angels who receive trumpets are identified as “the seven angels who stand before Yahweh.”  The phrasing suggests that they have already been identified somewhere, somehow. Where?

The angels who perform various actions in Revelation are the twenty-four elders that were identified at the beginning of the book. These are seven of the twenty-four.

But they seem to be introduced as a group: You know, the seven angels who stand before the Lord’s throne. The only other place where we have heard anything about seven angels is in Revelation 1, when Jesus first appears to John in His glory. Jesus walks among seven lampstands, and has seven stars in His hand. The stars are the angels of the seven churches, and the lampstands are the churches themselves (1:20). 

The lampstand shows up again in John’s initial vision of the heavenly worship service (Revelation 4): Seven lamps burn “before the throne,” which are the seven Spirits of God, and the seven eyes of the Lamb are also the seven fiery Spirits of God. So, we have the association of star-lamp-angel-Spirit-eyes. Stars are the lamps of the night; as lamps of the night, the stars are (at least?) symbols of angels. Everything depends on the Spirit. The Spirit is the fire who makes the angels burn like starry lamps in the darkness, the Spirit who gives the angels fiery eyes like the eyes of Jesus. The eyes of the angels are the eyes of the Spirit, their capacity to function as stars in the dark night is a gift of the Spirit. When the Spirit departs, the fire goes out; when the Spirit departs, eyes go dim, the darkness closes in, angels cower in the shadows.

Now, to this already complex knot of associations, Revelation 8:1 adds that the angels are going to be given trumpets. We can thus add this: The seven angels before the throne are the starry lamps before the throne, and they are the eyes of the Lamb, and they are the seven Spirits. By the Spirit, they see and illuminate the night; by the wind of the Spirit, they blow trumpets that announce and enact judgments. Sight leads to sound; fire expresses itself in the wind blown through a trumpet.

These seven don’t seem to be identical to the angels that are mentioned in 1:20. These seven angels “stand before God,” which is not where the angels of the churches are: they are in Jesus’ palm. But the seven trumpet angels are associated with the seven angels of the churches, and hence with the lamps on the lampstand, the seven Spirits of God, the fiery eyes of the Lamb. These are the archetypes of the seven angels of the church. 

We might reason somewhat differently: What group of seven have we seen before the throne prior to Revelation 8? And the answer is: the seven Spirits. Revelation 1:1’s reference to a revealing angel is, arguably, a reference to the Spirit. Perhaps the seven angels is another way of saying “the seven Spirits.” That would suggest that the trumpets are blown by the very Breath of God who is the Spirit. It would explain the power of these trumpet blasts, as the Spirit joins the Lamb in bringing judgments to earth.

Even if we go with this interpretation, the seven trumpet angels are archetypes of the angels of the churches. Because they are archetypes, though, we can infer from their actions something about the work of the earthly, pastoral angels of the church. In Revelation, the angels before the throne blow out the wind of the Spirit. Soon enough, the saints will be before the throne, and the angels will hand over the trumpets. For the past 2000 years or so, trumpeting has been a human privilege, and Spirit-filled pastors have blown the call to arms and worship, blown down the walls of cities, announced Jubilee.