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The Book of Revelation, Part 11: Chapters 8 and 9
Talk by Metropolitan Jonah (Paffhausen)
August 20, 2024

Topics include:
(1) Discussion of the Temple images in 8:1-6 and how Christianity restores and fulfills the First Temple Liturgical religion of the Hebrew Patriarchs, not the foreign post-exilic bookish Judaism of the the Scribes and Pharisees and modern day Rabbis. First Temple Hebrew religion also had a nascent understanding of a multi-personal Godhead, revealed in its fullness in the Holy Trinity; 
(2) In the context of the blowing of the Trumpets, a discussion of the Jubilee every 50 years (a festal year in which debts were forgiven, slaves set free, and ancestral ownership restored) and in particular the prophecies surrounding the 10th Jubilee after Exile in the "Assumption of Moses": the coming of a Melchizedekian Messiah who would make the ultimate sacrificial self-offering to reconcile man to God, that being the original image of the Day of Atonement --- the sprinkling of the Lamb ("The Lord")'s blood as the atoning resanctification of the Temple and the people, and in an escatologocal sense, of the whole cosmos. This prophetical festive year is an image of the coming of the Messianic Kingdom of Christ; 
(3) The Trumpets of Chapters 8 & 9 parallel the plagues of Egypt and other sources in the Pentateuch and in the Assumption of Moses. Various discussions of these Trumpet plagues, including historical interpretations from Margaret Barker's "The Revelation of Jesus Christ". There are multiple levels of interpretation: (i) to the first century people as an explanation of the Roman obliteration of Israel because of their ungodliness, based on types used in the prophets, and (ii) Eschatological interpretations for the future of Christ, which seemed imminent to the early Christians, but requires repentance and patience on our behalf; 
(4) On "Still no repentance" in 9:20-21.