The Abyss Opens, Hearts Stay Closed

9:1-6A key, a pit, and a swarm

At the fifth trumpet, John says, "I saw a star from the sky which had fallen to the earth. The key to the pit of the abyss was given to him" (WEB). In Revelation, stars can stand for angels (1:20), and this star is a "he." Who is he? Some think he is Satan, recalling Jesus's words, "I saw Satan having fallen like lightning from heaven" (Luke 10:18). Others think he is a fallen angel, and others an angel acting under God's orders, as in 20:1, where an angel comes down holding the same key. The text does not decide for us. What it does say is that the key "was given." The star owns nothing.

He opens the pit, and "smoke went up out of the pit, like the smoke from a burning furnace," darkening the sun and the air. It recalls the smoke over Sodom (Genesis 19:28). In Luke 8:31, demons begged Jesus not to send them into the abyss, which tells us how they felt about it.

Out of the smoke come locusts, with "power was given to them, as the scorpions of the earth have power." Yet they are told not to harm the grass or trees, but only "those people who don't have God's seal on their foreheads." These are the sealed ones of chapter 7, now protected. Their torment lasts "five months," a period many think reflects a locust season, and it is torment, "not to kill them." People will "seek death, and will in no way find it." The limits are as striking as the horror.

9:7-12Locusts with faces

John's description is a nightmare assembled from parts. The locusts look "like horses prepared for war," wear "something like golden crowns," and "their faces were like people's faces." They have "hair like women's hair" and teeth "like those of lions." They wear iron breastplates, their wings thunder like chariots, and their tails sting like scorpions. Nothing in nature looks like this. That is the point. John is not describing an insect; he is describing something that mixes animal power with human cunning.

The background is Joel, who wrote of an invading locust army, saying "Their appearance is as the appearance of horses, and as horsemen, so do they run" (Joel 2:4). In Joel, the locusts are the army of the Lord on the day of the Lord, and so it is here. Behind Joel stands the eighth plague of Egypt (Exodus 10:14-15), a swarm that covered the land and left nothing green.

These creatures have a king, "the angel of the abyss," whose name is Abaddon in Hebrew and Apollyon in Greek. Both mean destroyer. Abaddon is an Old Testament word for the place of ruin, appearing in phrases like "Sheol and Abaddon" (Proverbs 27:20). Some scholars also hear a pun on the name of the god Apollo, whom some in Asia revered, though that is debated.

How should we read the swarm? Many Christians see demonic powers loosed on a world that has cut itself off from God. Others see symbols of warfare and human cruelty, and some expect a literal future event. Whichever you choose, the passage ends: "The first woe is past."

9:13-19Four angels at the great river

The sixth trumpet sounds, and a voice comes "from the horns of the golden altar which is before God." That is the altar of incense and prayer we visited yesterday, and the horns are the corners where blood was applied for atonement. The voice commands: "Free the four angels who are bound at the great river Euphrates!" They had been "prepared for that hour and day and month and year." Nothing here is improvised. The timetable is God's.

The Euphrates mattered. It was the northeastern edge of the land promised to Abraham (Genesis 15:18), and invaders like Assyria and Babylon had come from beyond it (Isaiah 8:7-8). In John's day, it marked the border beyond which Rome faced the Parthians. The river says: judgment can come from outside the walls.

The army numbers "two hundred million." John adds, "I heard the number of them," as if he could hardly believe it. Many scholars think the number is not a headcount but a way of saying 'overwhelming,' since John uses similar huge numbers for angels in 5:11. The horses have lions' heads, with "fire, smoke, and sulfur" from their mouths, like the fire that fell on Sodom, and they kill "one third of mankind." Their tails are like serpents.

Some read these horsemen as demonic hordes, others as human armies, and others as a combination of both. Whichever you hold, notice again that they are released only by a voice from the altar, and that they kill one third, not all.

9:20-21The rest who would not turn

This is where the chapter has been heading. After all of this, "The rest of mankind, who were not killed with these plagues, didn't repent of the works of their hands, that they wouldn't worship demons, and the idols of gold, and of silver, and of brass, and of stone, and of wood; which can't see, hear, or walk."

The description of idols echoes the Psalms. Psalm 115 says idols "have mouths, but they don't speak. They have eyes, but they don't see." Daniel told a king that his gods "don't see, or hear, or know" (Daniel 5:23). The tragedy is that people give their worship to things that cannot move, while the living God who can move mountains is ignored.

The sins John lists, "their murders, their sorceries, their sexual immorality, or their thefts," run through a good part of the Ten Commandments: worshipping other gods, taking life, sexual sin, and stealing. The word for sorcery, pharmakeia, is related to our word 'pharmacy,' and in the ancient world it covered both drugs and magical arts.

The point of the trumpets was never merely to hurt. They were meant to wake people, as the plagues of Egypt were meant to bring Pharaoh to his knees, and Pharaoh instead hardened his heart (Exodus 9:34). Suffering does not automatically soften a heart. It can set it like concrete. We will see the same thing in 16:9 and 16:11. And yet the very fact that the trumpets sound at all is a mercy. A God who had given up on the world would have stopped warning it.