“When the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.”
Revelation 8:1
The seventh seal, as we have already pointed out, opens out into the seven trumpets of God. The significance of this is that what is next unfolded to the Apostle is another vision, which we may take as covering the same ground as the previous two have done, - the entire dispensation of grace from the Ascension of Christ to His Second Coming, developing the theme a little further than the last. Thus, in chapters 8-11, John sees the course of world history from another standpoint, leading up to its final climax and judgment. That this is how the trumpet judgments should be interpreted seems to be borne out by the fact that there are several marked similarities between them and the seals in chapters 4-7. Thus in both, the first four stand distinct from the last three, and also between the sixth and seventh seals we have interjected the subsidiary visions of the Church militant and the Church triumphant, while between the sixth and seventh trumpets we have other subsidiary visions, the little book, the seven thunders, and the measurement of the temple of God. The two series of visions are not however identical but show development. They do not follow one another chronologically so much as stand alongside one another in the complicated pattern which is life as the Christian knows it. The trumpets follow the seals in this sense that if the seals represent the persecution of God's people, the trumpets are God's judgments on the persecutors, not however final judgments, but warning judgments, to lead men to repentance. (This is the force of the words 'neither repented they' in 9:21). Finally, the vision of the seals, as someone has put it, shows us the way through trouble to rest; the trumpets show us the way through conflict to victory.