Voice of an Angel

When I was younger, I remember being on a campout when we had to wait in the back of a camper with its back open because it was raining. At that moment, we experienced a white flash and a deafening thundercrack. The flash and the thunder were simultaneous. The sound was so startling, I lost my strength and fell to the camper's floor.

If you’ve ever been close to a lightning bolt, you’ll agree it’s a terrifying experience.

What's the loudest sound ancient people ever heard? My guess is it would be thunder.

Throughout the Bible, the voices of heavenly beings are described as very loud (Job 37:4-5; John 12:28-30; Rev 5:1,12; Rev 6:1; Rev 10:1-3; Rev 14:1-3, 6-7). Angelic and other divine voices are compared to thunder, the rushing of great waters, and the sounding of trumpets.

Even when angels deliver good news, they often begin their message with, “Fear not,” or “Be not afraid.”

Acoustical data

Just how loud are angelic voices? Here are some interesting numbers:

Not very interesting? Consider that every increase in 10 dB is a ten-fold increase in sound energy.

Thus, a lightning bolt is,

• 10 times louder than a trumpet

• 100 times louder than Niagara Falls or human shouting

• 1,000,000 times louder than human speech.

With all this noisy commotion, let's focus on just one of these sounds: that of the modern trumpet.

Question: If a trumpet does not have

electrical speakers or power chords,

where does its blaring sound come from?

Answer: The musician’s lips.

All a trumpet does is increase the efficiency of human lips for creating sound. That’s all!

The efficiency of a trumpet

The next question we should ask is, what’s the acoustic efficiency of a trumpet?

According to this study, a trumpet's “overall acoustic efficiency”

is “0.01% to 0.03% for low notes and 0.03% to 1% for high notes."

This means that if a trumpet were somehow manufactured to be 100% efficient, it would be at least 100 times louder than an ordinary trumpet—making it a screeching 130 dB, or ten times louder than a lightning bolt!

How loud is an angel's voice? Where would we place it in the chart above? My hunch is an angel could out-shout a trumpet.

The trumpet bell

While we're talking about trumpets, and to reward you for reading this far, here is an interesting fact about the bells of all brass instruments.

The bell's shape follows an “exponential curve,” pictured in the view below.

The bell has the following unique quality:

No matter where sound energy is within the bell or in what direction it is moving,

after it bounces off the interior of the bell several times,

it will always end up moving in the direction the bell is pointed.

Each of the red, green, blue, and purple “sound energies” portrayed above eventually travel outward in front of the bell.

Walls of Jericho

In Chapter 6 of the book of Joshua, the Lord told the Israelites to walk around the walled city of Jericho once every day for six days, and then on the seventh day, walk around it seven times, but this time with seven specially designed trumpets made of rams' horns. Read verse 5:

"And it shall come to pass, that when they make a long blast with the ram’s horn, and when ye hear the sound of the trumpet, all the people shall shout with a great shout; and the wall of the city shall fall down flat, and the people shall ascend up every man straight before him."

Does this story demonstrate the ultimate power of seven trumpets and many people shouting? Or is there a much greater potential sound yet unknown?

Stun Grenade

I bet ancient people never came across stun grenades. Evidence of this is that nowhere in the Bible are angelic voices compared to stun grenades.

How many times have you seen movies where someone throws a stun grenade into a room filled with people? Care to guess the acoustical energy of a stun grenade? How does 170 dB strike you? That makes them 100,000 times louder than a bolt of lightning.

I bet that in real life, people are more disrupted by stun grenades than what is depicted in movies.

Voice of an angel

If a trumpet could theoretically be increased to 100% efficiency, making it ten times louder than a bolt of lightning, imagine the acoustic capability of a 100% efficient angelic voice!

For this reason and a host of others, I hope to never be on the bad side of a divine messenger.