Revelation 10 in the trumpets answers to Revelation 7 in the seals. It forms an important parenthesis, that comes in between the sixth and seventh trumpets, just as the sealing chapter, Revelation 7, came in between the sixth and seventh seals: so orderly is the Apocalypse. Accordingly we have here again the Lord, as it seems to me, in angelic garb. As before in high-priestly function, He is the angel with royal claim here. A mighty angel comes down from heaven, clothed with a cloud—the special sign of Jehovah’s majesty: none but He has a title to come thus clothed. And, further, the rainbow is on His head; it is not now a question of round the throne: here there is a step in advance. He is approaching the earth; He is about to lay speedy claim to that which is His right. “The rainbow was on His head, and His face was as the sun”—supreme authority; “and His feet as pillars of fire”—with firmness of divine judgment. “And He had in His hand a little book open: and He set His right foot on the sea, and His left on the earth, and cried with a loud voice, as a lion roareth.”
John was going to write, but is forbidden. The disclosures were to be sealed for the present. “And the angel whom I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up His right hand to heaven, and sware by Him that liveth for the ages of the ages, who created heaven, and the things that therein are, and the earth, and the things that therein are, and the sea, and the timings that are therein, that there should be no longer delay.” There was no more to be any lapse of time allowed; but God would terminate the mystery of His present seeming inaction as to government. He is now allowing the world, with slight check, to go on its own way. Men may sin, and, as far as direct intervention is concerned, God appears not, though there may be interferences exceptionally. But the time is coming when God will surely visit sin, and this immediately, when there will be no toleration for a moment of anything which is contrary to Himself. This is the blessed age to which all the prophets look onward; and the angel here swears that the time is approaching. There is going to be no more delay; “but in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he is about to sound, the mystery of God also shall be finished.” The mystery here is, not Christ and the church, but God’s allowing evil to go on in its present course with apparent impunity.
And then John is told at the end of the chapter that he must “prophesy again before peoples, and nations, and tongues, and many kings.” The meaning of this more clearly appears soon. There is a kind of appendix of prophecy where he renews his course for especial reasons.
Meanwhile, I would just call your attention to the contrast between the little book which the prophet here takes and eats, and the great book we have seen already sealed with seven seals. Why a little book? and why open? A little book, because it treats of a comparatively contracted sphere; and open, because things are no longer to be described in the mysterious guise in which the seals and yet more the trumpets set them out. All is going to be made perfectly plain in what falls under it here. This is the case accordingly in Revelation 11.