Three angels stood ready in Heaven to sound the trumpets they held in their hands. Four angels had already blown their trumpets. The scenes that had followed those four brassy echoes had reminded readers of times gone by in Egypt when God had warned Pharaoh with plagues to let his people go. Of course, Pharaoh had not heeded the warnings that God had sent. He had convinced himself that he was God's equal and in control of all affairs dealing with Egypt. 10 plagues later, he changed his mind and acknowledged that God was more powerful than he was.
Those four scenes from the first four trumpet blasts had recalled some of those plagues as a way for God to announce that he was on the move again, this time in convincing the Roman Empire that his people were suffering at the hands of its leaders and armies. He was not going to stand for it. The Romans had the same complex that Pharaoh had exhibited because they, too, weren't convinced that God was their equal. Roman armies controlled Italy and all of its conquered territories. All of their enemies had crumbled before them. They weren't listening to God's warnings to them.
So, after the first four trumpets sounded, an eagle's sharp cry filled the air. "Ay-y-y-y! It was a most painful and agonizing cry." The cry reverberated across the sky to let people "still living on Earth... hear the doom of the trumpets of the three angels left," (Revelation 8.13). More horrors were in store.
Revelation 9
Verse 1
Καὶ ὁ πέμπτος ἄγγελος ἐσάλπισεν· καὶ εἶδον ἀστέρα ἐκ τοῦ οὐρανοῦ πεπτωκότα εἰς τὴν γῆν, καὶ ἐδόθη αὐτῷ ἡ κλεὶς τοῦ φρέατος τῆς ἀβύσσου
(The fifth angel sounded his trumpet. I saw a star fall from the sky. A key to the unfathomable depths below the Earth's surface was given to it.)
Verse 2
καὶ ἤνοιξεν τὸ φρέαρ τῆς ἀβύσσου, καὶ ἀνέβη καπνὸς ἐκ τοῦ φρέατος ὡς καπνὸς καμίνου μεγάλης, καὶ ἐσκοτώθη ὁ ἥλιος καὶ ὁ ἀὴρ ἐκ τοῦ καπνοῦ τοῦ φρέατος
(It opened the unfathomable depths below the surface of the Earth where thick smoke rose like smoke from a huge smelting furnace, blocking the sun and darkening the sky.)
God had caused leaders of great nations to fall before. Isaiah 14.12 refers to the king of Babylon as a bright morning star that had fallen from the sky. John used that reminder to Christians about Rome's leaders to say that they, too, would fall. He likened their fall to a star falling from the sky into the unfathomable depths of the Earth. Smoke rose from the opening to these depths, darkened the sky, then changed into locusts.
Verse 3
καὶ ἐκ τοῦ καπνοῦ ἐξῆλθον ἀκρίδες εἰς τὴν γῆν, καὶ ἐδόθη αὐταῖς ἐξουσία ὡς ἔχουσιν ἐξουσίαν οἱ σκορπίοι τῆς γῆς
(Locusts appeared from the smoke and covered the ground. The great bite of the scorpion was given to them.)
Locusts definitely would take a person's mind right back to the time of Moses' conflict with Pharaoh. Exodus 10.3-20 presents the original story. Moses told Pharaoh that God was sending a swarm of locusts like they had never experienced before. They would eat everything in sight. This was God's 8th plague on Egypt, so Pharaoh's advisors pleaded with Pharaoh to reconsider. They told him that he had already brought Egypt into a state of ruin. So Pharaoh recalled Moses and Aaron to talk to them, but Pharaoh only wanted to compromise, letting only a portion of the people to offer sacrifices to God. So, God told Moses to raise his staff. God unleashed a swarm of locusts like Egypt had never seen before. Swarm is probably too mild a word for the number of locusts attacking Egypt. It was an army with wave after wave of locusts. They covered the ground until it looked totally black and ate every green thing they could find to eat.
This imagery is notably used in Joel 1 & 2 to depict the desolation God allowed Israel to experience because they had turned away from him. Their conditions were as if a plague of locusts had swarmed them as they had done in Egypt long ago. Not one thing was left alive, not even for a sacrifice to offer to God.
Roman Victory Procession
by The Creative Assembly
So, John used the locusts as imagery to let the Christians know that God had not turned his back on their terrible conditions. He likened the destroying power of the locusts to the power of the Romans. The Romans had no army equal to them. They wore iron breastplates making them impervious to spears. There were legions of them, ominous-sounding, like the rumble of many advancing chariots. Their heads were adorned with helmets, many of them with plumes, some of them gold in color. Ranking officers wore robes of purple, and emperors wore gold crowns and red robes. Everywhere they fought, they caused pain and left scars like scorpions stinging again and again. They were an army of locusts all right. But their power to kill was limited to a short amount of time, five months figuratively speaking, so that total devastation was averted.
And, John wanted his readers to make no mistake about who this army of locusts belonged to and where they had come from.
Verse 11
ἔχουσιν ἐπ’ αὐτῶν βασιλέα τὸν ἄγγελον τῆς ἀβύσσου, ὄνομα αὐτῷ Ἑβραϊστὶ Ἀβαδδών, καὶ ἐν τῇ Ἑλληνικῇ ὄνομα ἔχει Ἀπολλύων
(They belong to a king, the angel of the unfathomable depths. His Hebrew name is Abaddon, Destruction, and his Greek name is Apollyon, the Destroyer.)
Although John used locusts as a symbol for devastation, they were not the tool of God this time. They were used to show destruction with a captial D against God. That kind of destruction was known and personified in Hebrew with the word Abaddon. The purpose of the scene was to show that God was more powerful than the locusts and their king in any setting and that God controlled this powerful force that people were intimidated by. He could blow them away with a single breath. In Exodus, Pharaoh called in Moses after the locusts and asked for forgiveness. So, God caused a wind to blow the locusts away from Egypt and into the Gulf of Suez. Just like that, the terror of the locusts was over, blown into the sea and eradicated. Easy for God. But not for anyone else. The Christians could expect this same thing. No matter how overwhelming the Roman Empire seemed at the time, God would make short work of this terror and agony.
However, God was not quite finished with his reassurance to his people.
Verse 12
Ἡ οὐαὶ ἡ μία ἀπῆλθεν· ἰδοὺ ἔρχεται ἔτι δύο οὐαὶ μετὰ ταῦτα
(The first agonizing terror is past. Look, two agonizing terrors are still to come.)
Verse 13
Καὶ ὁ ἕκτος ἄγγελος ἐσάλπισεν· καὶ ἤκουσα φωνὴν μίαν ἐκ τῶν [τεσσάρων] κεράτων τοῦ θυσιαστηρίου τοῦ χρυσοῦ τοῦ ἐνώπιον τοῦ θεοῦ
(The sixth angel sounded his trumpet. I heard a voice from one of the four horns from the gold altar in God's presence.)
This scene takes readers back to the place where the vision of the trumpets started - the golden altar of God. Another command is given, "Release the four angels being held in check at the mighty Euphrates River," (Verse 14). These four angels were symbols for another army, one of about two million cavalrymen. They ravaged the countryside killing people by burning their cities and heaping dead bodies up and burning them. The army's symbol was fire, smoke, and the smell of sulfur as a result of their trademark fighting style. They were feared because of the speed with which they could appear on a region's borders and the stealth with which they could mount an attack - like snakes striking. This was the trait of the feared Persian army. They had caused the Greeks grief in Alexander's time, and even in John's time they were still feared. The borders of the Roman Empire were on the eastern sides of Turkey and Palestine. These two regions served as a buffer between Rome and this eastern army. Occasionally, though, the Persians, called Parthians during Rome's days, would try to break the Roman stronghold on the area. They would ravage the people and the countryside brutally. They had no regard for God or his people. But, this army also was limited on the havoc they could wreak because they were allowed to kill only a third of the Earth, and they could not touch the ones who had been sealed in Chapter 6 of Revelation, those who had been given white robes.
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| Achaeminid Chariot |
John's reason to cite the Persian army was to show his audience that God was in control of Rome's opposition as well. The Christians were in despair because the only hope of removing Rome's power came from the Parthians, but they were not a better replacement. They exterminated God's people in taking control of the region. These ruthless Parthians thought they, too, were God's equals, controlling life and death of those in their way. Thus, John wanted the Christians of Turkey and Palestine to know that God was superior to all his people's enemies.
The presence of the Persian army in this vision would remind anyone knowledgeable of the Old Testament of the second most impacting event after the Exodus, the capture of Jerusalem and the events immediately following in Babylon. King Nebuchadnezzar had been powerful. But a passage in Daniel recounts how God dealt with Nebuchadnezzar for his terrible treatment of his people and for not acknowledging God as the Lord of Hosts (Daniel 5). Belshazzar, his successor didn't apply what Nebuchadnezzar learned. Therefore, Daniel 5.23 tells how God showed Belshazzar, too, who he truly was.
The Persians of John's time had not changed one bit. Their society touted the intrigue of murder, magic, sex, and stealing. They loved to give glory and attribution to their gods for a lifestyle of ease and intrigue. The Christians in John's time needed to know that their God, the true God, did have eyes to see, ears to hear, and legs to act upon their pleas for help, unlike the images towering in the public places of Persia.
Verse 20
Καὶ οἱ λοιποὶ τῶν ἀνθρώπων, οἳ οὐκ ἀπεκτάνθησαν ἐν ταῖς πληγαῖς ταύταις, οὐδὲ μετενόησαν ἐκ τῶν ἔργων τῶν χειρῶν αὐτῶν, ἵνα μὴ προσκυνήσουσιν τὰ δαιμόνια καὶ τὰ εἴδωλα τὰ χρυσᾶ καὶ τὰ ἀργυρᾶ καὶ τὰ χαλκᾶ καὶ τὰ λίθινα καὶ τὰ ξύλινα, ἃ οὔτε βλέπειν δύνανται οὔτε ἀκούειν οὔτε περιπατεῖν
(The people not killed by these military rampages never changed their minds about what they made with their own hands and worshiped - their deities of gold, silver, bronze, and wood that cannot see, hear, or walk. )
Verse 21
καὶ οὐ μετενόησαν ἐκ τῶν φόνων αὐτῶν οὔτε ἐκ τῶν φαρμάκων αὐτῶν οὔτε ἐκ τῆς πορνείας αὐτῶν οὔτε ἐκ τῶν κλεμμάτων αὐτῶν.
(And they didn't change their minds about their slaughter of people in general and people chosen to die for others, their sexual license, and articles they looted.)
The armies of the two fiercest empires on Earth were stubborn and arrogant. But they would encounter God for the errors of their wanton ways. They nor the people of the regions they terrorized never gave a second thought to changing from worshiping Gods that weren't real or from murder, plunder, and a life of luxury and free sex. Christians could take heart because they would not have suffered in vain for their morality as Christ's people. God would no longer tolerate any power on Earth to stand against him.
There is a tasty little morsel in verse 11. The scene representing the Roman Empire ends with the name of the king the Romans served. Anyone, any group, opposing God, the giver of life, serves this ruler. Jesus himself used the idea in John 10.10 referring to his enemies. He called them thieves who steal, kill, and destroy the life of his people. So, as John was presenting the overwhelming evil force of the Roman Empire, he chose to coin a word along the lines of what Jesus had taught. The Christians were thinking of the Romans as plunderers of life by stealing, killing, and destroying. John's coined term changed the normal verb for to destroy to a name - Ἀπολλύων, Apollyon. The Destroyer. He also used the Hebrew noun as a term of address for the same idea Ἀβαδδών, Abaddon. Destruction. The name of those who take life and who end life after it has been given. People had opposed God before like Pharaoh and Nebuchadnezzaar. Apollyons both of them. Both rulers took God's life from his people. Destroyers both of them. Now these Roman imposters of God were in the business of Destruction. They could never give life. They could only take it.
I live in a society so much like the ones shown in this 5th and 6th trumpet. People in America oppose God at every turn. There are groups promoting Jesus as a prophet, not the son of God; groups that don't acknowledge that Jesus came from God, only that he spoke of God, and represented him falsely; groups that say the creator of the billions of universes, stars, planets, and galaxies is a higher power, but not a deity with a son. America opposes God on many fronts using science, government, military, higher education, sports, entertainment, medicine, and wealth to denigrate the one who holds the power of life in his hands. Its people use things intended as benefits to accomplish their own agendas of Destruction. Abbadon, and meet those who would speak words of life as The Destroyer. Apollyon. It takes everything not to be ground under into the milieu of American society, to march to the tune of the different drummer, God and his son Jesus, for it is so easy to do otherwise. God show up for his people in America!
[Songs used are Eye of the Storm by Ryan Stevenson and Show Us Your Glory by Jesus Culture.]
[First artwork Roman Victory Procession by the Collective Assembly, retrieved from
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEgdKH7jTlmMVhZFJ9prQAnSAFVWdEu7w2gWX-BLu0oObT-oxKumv5f1lTiXbw_NfS-Y9JLC4VOghM4sFA7p8Mn8BFhcNRLFVJe-eZ1eeOmLAohwIXTjrKAdikO5oosxNaT1wKy82BmoSkIdK8tUCw90Jn8Ig6ZgWpp7ud-fApbqjW7s=, Second artwork, Achaeminid Chariot by Weapons and Warfare, retrieved from https://weaponsandwarfare.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/achaemenid_chariot.jpg.]
[The Greek text used is the Nestle-Aland 28th edition.]
[Translations from Greek are my own.]
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