The Fourth Trumpet: Darkening of Sun, Moon, and Stars

Revelation’s fourth trumpet reads:

“The fourth angel sounded: and a third part of the sun was smitten, and a third part of the moon, and a third part of the stars; so as the third part of them was darkened, and the day shone not for a third part of it, and the night likewise,” (Revelation 8:12).

Rather than use our imaginations, we must “use Scripture to interpret Scripture.” As we learned in the previous section, biblical prophecy consistently uses celestial imagery to describe political authority. The symbolic meaning of the sun, moon, and stars is not left to speculation. Scripture itself defines these heavenly lights as ruling authorities, both supreme and subordinate. In prophetic language, the darkening of these lights signifies not cosmic collapse, but the overthrow of political and governmental order.

This same imagery is used by Christ Himself when describing the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70:

“Immediately after the tribulation of those days the sun will be darkened, the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from heaven” (Matthew 24:29).

Ancient readers—and the prophets whose language Jesus was deliberately echoing—did not understand this imagery as a literal cosmic catastrophe, but as the symbolic language of political and covenantal collapse. Even when modern readers impose a literal framework on the text, the biblical sources Jesus quotes interpret this imagery as national judgment, not astronomical destruction. It signifies the downfall of a ruling order. In precisely the same way, the fourth trumpet portrays the extinguishing of Roman authority in the Western “third” of the empire—the final collapse of Western Roman governance. To understand this imagery rightly, we must first examine the scriptural pattern behind it.

The Scriptural Pattern: Luminaries as Hierarchies of Rule

The foundational passage is Joseph’s dream:

“Then he dreamed still another dream and told it to his brothers, and said, ‘Look, I have dreamed another dream. And this time, the sun, the moon, and the eleven stars bowed down to me.’ So he told it to his father and his brothers; and his father rebuked him and said, ‘Shall your mother and I and your brothers indeed come to bow down to the earth before you?’” (Genesis 37:9–10).

Here, Scripture itself interprets the symbolism.

• The sun represents the supreme authority (Jacob, the patriarchal head).
• The moon represents a secondary governing authority (Rachel).
• The stars represent subordinate rulers (Joseph’s brothers, heads of tribes).

This is not merely a family metaphor. It establishes a political-symbolic hierarchy in which authority is portrayed as luminary governance—greater lights ruling by day, lesser lights governing beneath them. This interpretive pattern becomes foundational for later prophetic and apocalyptic imagery.

Daniel applies the same symbolism to imperial oppression:

“And it grew up to the host of heaven; and it cast down some of the host and some of the stars to the ground, and trampled them,” (Daniel 8:10).

In its immediate historical context, this vision refers to the persecutions of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, whose campaigns fell upon Israel’s leadership—priests, teachers, and covenant representatives—casting them down and trampling them underfoot. The “stars” are not celestial bodies, but leaders among God’s people, struck down by a hostile imperial power.

Again, the imagery is political and judicial, not astronomical. The fall of stars signifies the overthrow and humiliation of ruling authorities within a covenant community, a pattern that Daniel establishes long before John employs the same language in Revelation.

The New Testament confirms this meaning explicitly. Christ Himself declares:

“The mystery of the seven stars which you saw in My right hand… The seven stars are the angels of the seven churches,” (Revelation 1:20).

Whether these “angels” are understood as heavenly messengers or human overseers, the symbolism is unmistakable: stars represent authoritative representatives—those entrusted with leadership and governance.

Thus, Scripture consistently teaches:

• Sun = supreme ruler
• Moon = secondary governing authority
• Stars = subordinate rulers and civic authorities

With this interpretive framework firmly established, we are prepared to understand the fourth trumpet.

The Sun Smitten: The Fall of the Western Emperor

If the sun represents the supreme ruler, then the first stroke of the fourth trumpet must correspond to the removal of the highest authority in the Western Roman world.

Historically, this occurred in AD 476, when Romulus Augustulus, the last emperor of the Western Roman Empire, was deposed by Odoacer, leader of the Heruli. With that act, the Western imperial office ceased to exist. Though Roman civilization continued in fragments, the imperial sun of the West was extinguished.

As Historicist commentators have long observed, the trumpet’s language of a “third” precisely fits the political reality of the time. By the fifth century, the Roman Empire had effectively been divided between East and West. When the Western emperor fell, one third of the imperial sun was smitten, while the Eastern emperor continued to reign in Constantinople.

As Horae Apocalypticae summarizes:

“Thus of the Roman imperial sun, that third which appertained to the Western Empire was smitten, and shone no more.”

The sun of Western imperial authority had set.

The Moon Darkened: The Extinguishing of the Consulship

If the sun represents the supreme ruler, the moon represents a secondary but still authoritative governing light. In Roman political life, this corresponds naturally to the consulship, one of the most ancient and revered offices of Roman governance.

Though the imperial sun was extinguished in 476, the consulship lingered for several decades—no longer wielding real power, but still reflecting the memory and symbolism of Rome’s former authority. It functioned as a pale and fading light, a ceremonial remnant of an earlier age.

That shadow finally disappeared under Justinian, when the office was effectively abolished in AD 541.

Secular historian Edward Gibbon records this moment with characteristic clarity:

“The succession of consuls finally ceased… The dignity which had once commanded the respect of nations sank into oblivion,” (Decline and Fall, Vol. IV, chap. 40).

Thus, the moon of Western Roman authority—already dim—was fully darkened.

The Stars Darkened: The End of the Senate and Civic Luminaries

The final stroke of the trumpet falls upon the stars—the subordinate rulers and civic authorities that once gave structure, continuity, and administrative coherence to Roman life.

As established earlier, Scripture repeatedly uses stars to represent lesser authorities under a supreme ruler (Gen. 37:9–10; Dan. 8:10; Rev. 1:20). In an imperial context, these stars correspond to the senatorial class and remaining civic institutions that operated beneath imperial and consular authority.

After the fall of the emperor and the extinction of the consulship, the Roman Senate lingered briefly, a faint glimmer of Rome’s former greatness. But amid the Gothic wars, repeated sackings, and the devastation of Italy, even this final light was extinguished.

By AD 553, following the campaigns of Totila and the destructive wars that wracked the peninsula, the Senate had been effectively dissolved—stripped of authority, scattered, and banished from meaningful political life.

Gibbon again captures the moment with poetic finality:

“Rome saw her glories star by star expire.”

Prolonged Political Darkness

Revelation adds a final explanatory clause to the fourth trumpet:

“So as the third part of them was darkened, and the day shone not for a third part of it, and the night likewise,” (Revelation 8:12).

This statement does not introduce a new symbol, nor does it describe a literal alteration of time or light. Rather, it describes the effect of the preceding judgment. With the sun, moon, and stars smitten—supreme, secondary, and subordinate authorities extinguished—the Western Roman world entered a condition of sustained darkness in its civic and political life.

In Scripture, the purpose of the heavenly lights is not merely illumination, but governance and order:

“Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens… to rule the day and the night, and let them be for signs and seasons,” (Genesis 1:14–18).

From the beginning, Scripture defines the lights functionally rather than astronomically. They are appointed “to rule,” to mark seasons, and to sustain the rhythms of ordered life. Day and night, therefore, represent more than the passage of hours; they symbolize regularity, structure, and the predictable functioning of life under authority. When those ruling lights fail, the result is not momentary eclipse, but the collapse of ordered rule itself.

This is precisely what followed the extinguishing of Western Roman authority. With no emperor, no consulship, and no effective senate, the West no longer possessed a stable rhythm of governance. Authority became intermittent, fragmented, and often arbitrary—shifting between barbarian kings, military strongmen, and provisional administrators. There was no longer a political “day” of clear rule or a “night” of orderly succession. Both were darkened.

Historicist commentators have therefore understood this clause to signify a prolonged condition, not a single event. As Elliott observes in Horae Apocalypticae, the imagery points to the continued obscuration of civil order, not merely its initial overthrow. The darkness endured because the governing lights themselves had been extinguished.

This usage of “darkened day” language is firmly grounded in the Old Testament prophets. Isaiah and Jeremiah repeatedly employ the same imagery to describe the overthrow of kingdoms, not astronomical catastrophe.

Isaiah declares against Babylon:

“For the stars of heaven and their constellations will not give their light; the sun will be darkened in its going forth, and the moon will not cause its light to shine,” (Isaiah 13:10).

Likewise, against Egypt:

“When I put out your light, I will cover the heavens, and make its stars dark; I will cover the sun with a cloud, and the moon shall not give her light,” (Ezekiel 32:7–8).

In both cases, the referent is unmistakable: the collapse of imperial power, the extinguishing of national authority, and the loss of ordered governance. The prophets deliberately borrow creation language to describe de-creation—the unraveling of political and covenantal order under divine judgment. Ancient readers—and the prophetic writers themselves—understood this imagery not as a prediction of astronomical extinction, but as the symbolic language by which Scripture announces the overthrow of ruling powers and the descent of a society into sustained political darkness.

Historical note: Babylon’s fall to Medo-Persia is dated to 539 BC (commonly placed under Cyrus’s conquest of Babylon; cf. Daniel 5). Egypt’s prophetic “darkening” imagery (e.g., Ezek. 32) coheres with the historical reality that Egypt was repeatedly brought low and subordinated within the great power struggles of the era (Assyrian, then Babylonian pressure, and later Persian dominance), illustrating the prophetic point: the “lights” going out signal a kingdom’s ruling order being eclipsed, not a literal astronomical event.

Jeremiah uses the same imagery when describing covenantal judgment:

“I beheld the earth, and indeed it was without form, and void; and the heavens, they had no light,” (Jeremiah 4:23).

Here again, the language signifies ordered life undone, governance withdrawn, and society reduced to chaos under judgment—not the undoing of the physical universe, but the undoing of a nation’s stability. The immediate context leaves no doubt that Jeremiah is describing the judgment of Judah and Jerusalem, not the dissolution of the physical cosmos; creation language is employed to portray covenantal de-creation—the collapse of land, leadership, and social order under divine judgment.

Christ Himself draws on this prophetic vocabulary when describing the fall of Jerusalem:

“The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from heaven,” (Matthew 24:29).

Neither Jesus nor His first-century hearers understood this language as literal cosmological collapse. It was the recognized prophetic way of describing the downfall of a ruling order.

The fourth trumpet stands squarely within this prophetic tradition. Its darkened day and night depict not an eclipse in the sky, but the long twilight of Western Roman governance—a world in which the lights of authority had gone out, and the structures of rule no longer gave guidance, protection, or order.

The Western Empire After the Lights Went Out

Thus, when Revelation says that “the day shone not… and the night likewise,” it describes the lived historical reality of the post-476 Western world:

No supreme authority to rule by “day.” No orderly succession or stabilizing institutions to govern by “night.” No predictable cycle of law, justice, or administration.

Edward Gibbon’s description of the period unintentionally echoes the imagery. Roman life continued, but without illumination—without the lights that once ordered it. Civilization persisted in fragments, but governance no longer functioned as a coherent whole.

The darkness was not total across the Roman world. The Eastern Empire still retained its emperor and institutions. This is why Revelation carefully limits the judgment to a third part. But in the West, the political night had fully fallen, and this trumpet explains why the world that followed felt dark, unstable, and disordered. The lights by which it had been ruled were gone.

The Completion of the First Four Trumpets

Thus the fourth trumpet completes the symbolic darkening: sun, moon, and stars—emperor, magistracy, and senate—are all smitten in the Western third.

This trumpet marks the completion of the first trumpet cycle. In the span of roughly seventy-six years, the Goths, Vandals, Huns, and Heruli dismantled the Western Roman Empire. For this reason, Revelation devotes only seven verses to the first four trumpets. They describe rapid, catastrophic, and irreversible collapse.

The pattern is deliberate:

First Trumpet – devastation of land and civil stability

Second Trumpet – destruction of maritime power

Third Trumpet – poisoning of internal life-sources

Fourth Trumpet – extinguishing of governing authority

The Western imperial world no longer possessed any ruling “lights.” Night had fallen.

A Threshold in Prophetic History

This fourth trumpet does more than conclude a chapter—it opens a new era. With the Western imperial sun extinguished, the restrainer spoken of by Paul in 2 Thessalonians 2 had been removed. Pagan Rome no longer stood in the way of the rise of a new power.

As historicist interpreters have long recognized, the fifth and sixth trumpets will span far greater periods of time and receive far greater detail because they unfold within the vacuum created by this collapse. The Roman world is about to be revived under a new form, not imperial but ecclesiastical, not pagan but Christianized.

As Horae Apocalypticae concludes:

“So ended the history of the Gothic period… On returning West again, it will be to contemplate the Roman empire revived in its old capital, under a new aspect, and, as it were, a new head.”

The fourth trumpet, therefore, marks the end of pagan imperial Rome and prepares the stage for the long prophetic era that follows—the rise of a power that would oppose Christ not by denying His name, but by claiming it.