# Andrew Fuller - The Second Woe



## JM (Jan 17, 2009)

THE SECOND WOE – TRUMPET, OR THE ARMY OF HORSEMEN. Revelation 9. 13-21.

WE here enter on the sixth, or second woe-trumpet, which, embracing different contemporary events, may be expected to require several discourses. That part of it which we are now upon contains a description of the revival of the Mahomedan desolations by the Turks, in the thirteenth and following centuries. It will be recollected that the second woe was not to come quickly, but “hereafter.” Such was the fact. Several centuries elapsed between the ravages of the Saracens and those of the Turks. But as the desolations wrought by the followers of Mahomed, whether Saracens or Turks, would be less injurious to the causeof Christ than the abominations of popery, there is not only much less said of them than of the other, but what is said is finished before the other is particularly begun, that the thread of the principal subject might not be broken. There is no reason to think that the Turkish wars would have occupied a place in Scripture prophecy, but for their being the appointed means of crushing a corrupt part of the Christian church. For these reasons I question the propriety of calling the Mahomedan power the eastern antichrist. There is no doubt of its being opposed to Christ, and the same may be said of heathenism; but nothing is called antichrist in the Scriptures which makes no profession of being on the side of Christ. If there was an eastern antichrist, it was that community which the Mahomedans destroyed, namely, “the men who had not the seal of God in their foreheads!”


The leading facts corresponding with this part of the prophecy were as follows: – The Turks, a people who in the ninth century had migrated from the neighbourhood of Mount Caucasus, and settled in Armenia Major, by the eleventh century became formidable to their neighbours. They consisted of four sultanies, the seats of which were at Bagdad, Damascus, Aleppo, and Iconium; all in the neighbourhood of the Euphrates. Their principal struggles were with the eastern Roman empire, or the Christians of the Greek church. For about two centuries their ambition was restrained, partly it may be by the European crusades, or what were called the holy wars, for the recovery of Jerusalem; but the disasters which attended these undertakings inducing the European princes at length to relinquish them, they were then at liberty to pursue their objects. In 1281 they obtained a decided victory over the eastern Christians; and in 1299 a new empire was founded by Othman, composed of the four Turkish sultanies, which still subsists, and is called after his name the Ottoman empire. During the fourteenth century their successes continued. In the middle of the fifteenth (1453) Constantinople was taken, the eastern Roman empire fell, and with it the Greek church, neither of which, except in the religion of the latter being embraced by the Russians, has since liftedup its head.

DISCOURSE XI, The Complete Works of Andrew Fuller


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