What are the trumpets - the first trumpet

The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, 'You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.' "
"You will not surely die," the serpent said to the woman. "For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." -- Genesis 3:2-5

Philosophers throughout recorded history have weighed in on something we commonly call,
'the problem of morality.' It goes like this: for something to be morally good, something must be morally better, all the way up the chain until you arrive at some sort of moral best that serves as the basis for knowing good from bad, right from wrong. The trick has been to try and find a way around this since, if true, you are left in the uncomfortable position of admitting that the moral ideal -- that moral 'best' we just mentioned (ie: God), is always right, and anytime you disagree with him you are quite simply wrong. Examples of this are rife throughout the Bible. This brings us to the first challenge.

The first challenge -- why do we need God to determine right and wrong? Why can't we, as humans, just agree on our own definition of moral good and bad, and once we've agreed, why would our moral code be any less 'ideal' than any other?


The first angel sounded his trumpet, 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 the green grass was burned up. -- Revelations 8:7

When we last left our intrepid ancestors, they were having trouble understanding each other, breaking off into smaller tribes, and trekking to the far reaches of the planet to get away from each other(see: What does Babylon mean). About a century ago they got back together. You see, through the industrial revolution and the invention of something called the internal combustion engine the world suddenly became a much smaller place. Trips that used to take months could now be made by ocean liners in a matter of days. Mankind became a global community of sorts, and for the first time we were able to answer the question: what would have happened if the pre-Sumerian culture at Babel had remained intact?

If you've seen the movie, Saving Private Ryan, you may think that you've seen a realistic depiction of just how horrifying war can truly be. But World War II was almost gentlemanly compared to the fighting in World War I.

Explaining how the first world war got started is like explaining a bar room brawl. "Well, you see, we were playing pool and Tommy spilled his drink on some guy at the next table. The guy shoves Tommy into some other guy who falls on another guy, and this guy doesn't really know what's going on, he just punched the guy that ran into him and all of the sudden everybody in the bar starts swinging." Why did the fight happen? It happened because everyone was already prepped by the attitude that it might happen. Then, all it took was a spark. Fear and suspicion did the rest.

In 1914, the "global community" was a collection of colonial empires and their colonies. It was a great mass of haves and have nots, some possessing vast resources and fearing the loss of those resources. Others seeing that the new industrial age required tremendous inputs of resources and looking for a way to add to their own resource base. Like the bar in the last paragraph, it was a world on edge. All it needed was the right spark and when Archduke Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated, the first drink was spilled. Fear and suspicion did the rest.

The war itself was, more than anything else, a three year long artillery barrage conducted by the grand weapons of that era -- enormous cannons that left craters so large you could drop a house into them. But the cannons weren't the only horror; the combatants used everything they could invent to try and kill each other: they launched clouds of poisonous "mustard" gas that made the skin blister and peel away, they fired fragmentation bullets from sniper rifles that created festering wounds inflicting long, slow deaths. The war's hot spot, it's "Western Front" endured so much of this falling artillery (hail and fire mixed with blood), that it became a landscape dominated by a single topographical feature -- mud (all the green grass was burned up). The mud in places like Verdun and The Somme ran in rivers into trenches were the men were hiding from the exploding artillery shells all around. Those trenches, filled with mud and the bodies of the dead, became toxic open graves, havens of vermin and disease. The soldiers lived in the trenches for weeks at a time before "going over the top", charging an enemy trench line, and getting gunned down in numbers that stagger the imagination.

A generation of European men were obliterated in the span of three years. And I'm not simply referring to the number of those killed, I mean that the survivors bore psychological scars that I'm not sure I can even imagine. This was the fruit of mankind's glorious reunion, the first act of the global community.

The answer to the first challenge -- you can't agree on your own definition of good and evil because there is no true agreement apart from God. There is only power, manipulation, control, and rebellion.

I'll explain why as we go.

Next, the second trumpet and a mountain of fire over the Pacific Ocean.