"The first angel sounded, and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood, and they were cast upon the earth: and the third part of trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up. And the second angel sounded, and as it were a great mountain burning with fire was cast into the sea: and the third part of the sea became blood; And the third part of the creatures which were in the sea, and had life, died; and the third part of the ships were destroyed." Revelation 8:7-8
I am convinced the Bible is meant to be understood literally in every case, except, of course, where the context indicates that figurative language is clearly intended. The passage quoted, above, I firmly believe, should be taken literally and not figuratively. I have been seeking for many years to understand what kind/s of events could account for the unimaginable scale and manner of destruction that is described in (many different places in) the Revelation. About a year of so ago - thanks in part to a number of scientific discoveries that have been made within the past handful of years, I began to construct what to my mind is a highly plausible theory, regarding the actual nature of events comprising a series of judgments described in the early chapters of the Revelation.
"Hail and fire mingled with blood...." Admittedly, the phrase sounds rather mystical than literal. Many no doubt suppose that such language could not describe any real events. But they do.
"Hail" does not necessarily imply "ice"; though it does at least imply some kind of substance falling with great volume and force from the sky. But...blood? How can blood - falling from the sky - be accounted for?
According to the "Smithsonian Magazine" (online): "At any given moment there are about 5,000 commercial airplanes in the sky over the United States". The Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) reports that about "2,900,000 passengers fly every day in and out of U.S. airports".
Try, if you will, to imagine a direct earth-facing impact of an historically large coronal mass ejection (CME) from our sun; or, far worse, a micronova-type event of our sun (which evidently has occurred before, in the ancient past): Easily many billions of cubic meters of material - weighing probably trillions of tons, together with a cosmic tsunami of highly charged particles of various kinds (X-rays, gamma-rays, etc.), racing through space in a stream of super-heated plasma stretching tens-of-thousands of miles long, impacting earth in an avalanche mostly on the then sun-facing aspect of the earth . . . consisting of about 1/3 of the planet's surface....
But hours before the fiery debris would reach the earth, an enormously powerful electromagnetic pulse (EMP) would pound the earth, mere minutes from the onset of the event on the sun. The EMP would arrive at about exactly the same time as anyone would see the first brilliant flash of light exploding on the sun. Every airplane in the skies, on the sun-facing side of the earth, would be instantaneously disabled, their electronics completely fried.
The prophet who foresaw these events in a vision, nearly two-thousand years ago, described what appeared to him as "hail and fire" . . . "mingled with blood". How could he then have known anything about 3,000,000 human beings flying above the clouds . . . on that day?
It's going to happen. And when it does, it is coming without warning. "Without warning", that is, to nearly everyone.
Though some, few, have eyes to see.
And that is just the beginning of even more severe judgments to follow.... "And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them....." (Revelation 9:6)
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