Revelation 9

Today’s Passage: Revelation 9

This is the hardest chapter to look at so far, and you should know that before you begin. The fifth angel sounds, and a fallen star is given a key to the shaft of the Abyss. Smoke pours up like the smoke of a great furnace until the sun itself goes dim, and out of that smoke come locusts with the sting of scorpions. They are held back on every side: they may not touch the grass or any green thing, they may not touch anyone sealed by God, and they may not kill. They may only torment, and only for five months. John says that in those days men will seek death and not find it. Then he describes what he saw, and the description is a nightmare of familiar pieces put together wrong: crowns like gold, faces like men, hair like women, teeth like lions, iron breastplates, wings that sound like an army of chariots. They have a king over them, the angel of the Abyss, and John gives us his name in both of the languages his readers spoke, Abaddon and Apollyon, which both mean the same thing. That is the first woe. Then the sixth angel sounds, a voice speaks from the horns of the golden altar where the prayers of the saints had gone up, four angels bound at the Euphrates are released at an hour God had already fixed, and an army beyond counting kills a third of mankind. And then the chapter ends, not with the army, but with the survivors. They saw all of it. And they would not turn.

As you read, hold this: The fifth and sixth trumpets open a world of torment that is still under God’s restraining hand, and the terrible thing in this chapter is not the locusts or the horsemen but the last two verses: after all of it, they did not repent.

Revelation 9:1–4 (BSB)

¹ Then the fifth angel sounded his trumpet, and I saw a star that had fallen from heaven to earth, and it was given the key to the pit of the Abyss. ² The star opened the pit of the Abyss, and smoke rose out of it like the smoke of a great furnace, and the sun and the air were darkened by the smoke from the pit. ³ And out of the smoke, locusts descended on the earth, and they were given power like that of the scorpions of the earth. ⁴ They were told not to harm the grass of the earth or any plant or tree, but only those who did not have the seal of God on their foreheads.

Start with the key, because everything in these four verses hangs on it. A star has fallen from heaven to earth, and John speaks of it as a person, a “he” who opens the shaft. Readers have wondered for centuries whether this is a fallen angel or an agent sent on an errand, and the text does not stop to tell us. What the text does tell us, and tells us deliberately, is that the key was given. Whatever this figure is, he did not pick the lock. He could not have opened the Abyss (ἄβυσσος) abyssos, pronounced ah-BUS-oss. Strong's G12, the Abyss, the bottomless deep, a prison for spirits. Abyssos is a word built out of a negative and a bottom: it means, quite literally, without depth, unfathomable, the place where the measuring line finds nothing. When the Greek translators of the Old Testament needed a word for the primeval deep of Genesis, the formless waters over which the Spirit of God hovered, this is the word they reached for, and they used it again for the great deep that broke open in the days of the flood. So it carries in it every ancient association of chaos held down. In the New Testament it is where the demons are terrified of being sent: when the legion begged Jesus not to command them to go into the abyss, this is the word on their lips. And that is the strange comfort buried in it. The Abyss in Scripture is never an independent kingdom sitting alongside heaven as an equal power. It is a prison, and prisons have locks, and locks have keys, and this key is in the hand of the One who was dead and is alive forever and holds the keys of death and Hades. What is loosed here is loosed only because it was permitted, only so far, and only for a while. There is no such thing in this universe as evil that got out. on his own, and he does not hold the key at his own pleasure; it was placed in his hand, and it can be taken back. Hold onto that, because the moment the smoke rises, everything in you will want to believe that the world has come off its hinges. It has not. The hinges are in the hand of God.

Then comes the smoke, and it is the smoke of a great furnace, thick enough to blot out the sun and dim the very air. A reader raised on Israel’s Scriptures feels the ground under that image at once: the smoke over Sodom, the furnace-smoke over Sinai, and the darkness over Egypt that could be felt. Judgment in the Bible very often looks like light going out. And out of the darkness come the locusts, which are not locusts at all, since real locusts eat green things and these are forbidden to touch a blade of grass. That single restriction tells you what they are for. This is not an ecological disaster; it is an assault on human souls. And notice the fence around it. Three times in four verses the power is limited: not the grass, not the plants, not the trees, and not one person who carries the seal of God on the forehead. Chapter seven put that seal there, before a single trumpet sounded, and here is the first time we watch it hold. God marked His own before the smoke ever rose. He did not wait to see how bad it got. If you belong to Him this morning, you were sealed before the trouble came, and the trouble knows where the fence is even when you cannot see it.

Revelation 9:5–8 (BSB)

⁵ The locusts were not given power to kill them, but only to torment them for five months, and their torment was like the stinging of a scorpion. ⁶ In those days men will seek death and will not find it; they will long to die, but death will escape them. ⁷ And the locusts looked like horses prepared for battle, with something like crowns of gold on their heads; and their faces were like the faces of men. ⁸ They had hair like that of women, and teeth like those of lions.

The restraint continues, and it is severe: they were not given power to kill, but only to torment (βασανισμός) basanismos, pronounced bas-an-is-MOSS. Strong's G929, torment, testing that reveals what is there. Basanismos has a strange history. It begins with basanos, the touchstone, a dark stone that jewelers rubbed gold against to see whether the gold was real. From testing metal the word moved to testing men, and in the ancient world that meant examination under torture, and from there it settled into the plain sense of torment. Something of the first meaning still clings to it. A touchstone does not create anything; it reveals what was already in the metal. And that is very close to what this chapter is doing. The trumpets do not manufacture the condition of the human heart. They rub against it, and what was already there comes out into the open, which is exactly why the chapter ends where it ends. But hear the mercy in the limit, too, because it is real mercy and it is easy to miss under the horror. They were not given power to kill. This is torment and not execution, and torment that stops short of death is torment with a door still open in it. As long as a man is alive he may yet turn. That is why this is a trumpet and not the last trumpet, a warning shot and not the verdict. God is not finished calling. for five months. Five months is worth a moment. That is roughly the span of a locust’s life, spring into late summer, the season when a swarm can appear and do its work and be gone. So even the length is bounded by something ordinary and natural. And the torment is like the sting of a scorpion, which anyone in that part of the world could picture without help: not a wound that kills a grown man, but a fire under the skin that goes on and on and leaves him unable to think of anything else.

Then verse six, which is one of the saddest sentences in the Bible. “In those days men will seek death and will not find it; they will long to die, but death will escape them.” Sit with that a moment, and do not rush to a doctrine. Here is a man so far into his misery that the grave looks like a mercy, and even the grave will not have him. Job said something near it in his own darkness, and Jeremiah said it over a ruined city, so this is not an unfamiliar note in Scripture. What makes it unbearable here is that these are people who could still have called on the name of the Lord and been saved, and they are hunting instead for a way out of the pain that costs them nothing. Understand what that reveals: the human heart under judgment will look everywhere for relief except upward. It will seek death sooner than it will seek God.

And then John describes them, and the description works by piling up things that do not belong together. They looked like horses ready for battle, crowned with something like gold, with faces like men’s faces, hair like a woman’s, teeth like a lion’s. Do not flatten this into a list of symbols to be solved. Feel what it does. Each detail on its own is familiar and even beautiful, and the combination is monstrous. That is precisely the effect evil has when you finally see it whole: it is made entirely out of good things bent. And note the little word John keeps using, “like”, “something like”, “as it were”. Even the seer will not claim to have seen the thing itself. He is reaching for comparisons, the way you do when you try to tell someone about a dream. The prophet Joel had reached for the same ones long before:

"Their appearance is like that of horses, and they gallop like swift steeds. With a sound like that of chariots they bound over the mountaintops, like the crackling of fire consuming stubble, like a mighty army deployed for battle." Joel 2:4–5 (BSB)

John is not inventing. He is being shown the thing Joel was shown, and he is describing it in Joel’s own words, because that is how this book talks. The pictures come from the Bible the church already had.

Revelation 9:9–12 (BSB)

⁹ They also had breastplates like breastplates of iron, and the sound of their wings was like the roar of many horses and chariots rushing into battle. ¹⁰ They had tails with stingers like scorpions, which had the power to injure people for five months. ¹¹ They were ruled by a king, the angel of the Abyss. His name in Hebrew is Abaddon, and in Greek it is Apollyon. ¹² The first woe has passed. Behold, two woes are still to follow.

Iron breastplates and a noise like an army arriving. Anyone who has stood in a field when a swarm came over knows that the sound is the worst part, a dry roar filling the whole sky with no visible source. John hears it as cavalry, and the picture says something true about affliction of this kind: it seems armored, unanswerable, impossible to stop or reason with. Then verse ten repeats the five months a second time, and the repetition is not clumsy writing. It is a mercy said twice. Five months. Not forever. Whoever first read this aloud in a persecuted congregation in Asia knew what it was to feel that a season of suffering had no end, and the Spirit put the limit in the text twice so they would hear it twice.

Now the king. Ordinary locusts have no king, as Israel’s proverbs had noticed, and these do. There is a mind behind this, a will, an organizing malice, and he is named “the angel of the Abyss”. John gives the name in both languages his churches spoke, Hebrew and Greek, and both names mean the same thing. He is Abaddon, and he is Apollyon (Ἀπολλύων) Apollyōn, pronounced ap-ol-LOO-ohn. Strong's G623, Destroyer, the one who ruins. Apollyōn is not really a name at all. It is a participle, the ongoing form of the verb apollymi, to destroy, to ruin, to lose utterly. Rendered into English it is simply the Destroyer, the one who is destroying. The Hebrew name John pairs it with, Abaddōn, comes from a root meaning to perish, and in Israel’s wisdom books it stands as a name for the place of ruin itself, the realm of destruction lying open before the LORD. So this figure has no personal name in the way you and I have names. What he is called is what he does, and it is all he does. He builds nothing, makes nothing, gives nothing, and heals nothing. There would have been an extra shiver in the Greek name for a first-century reader in Asia Minor, since it sounds very like the name of Apollo, one of the great gods of that world, whose emblem was the locust and whose favor the powerful of the day were eager to claim. John is not afraid to let that echo hang in the air. But set the name beside the voice that opened this whole book, the One who says He was dead and is alive forever, and hear the contrast. The enemy’s entire biography is destroyer. Our Lord said, in words the church has never gotten over, that He came so that they may have life, and have it in all its fullness. One is a wrecker. The other is a Savior. They are not two similar powers. Give thanks that the difference is that absolute. , and that is the whole of his identity.

And then the little bulletin: “The first woe has passed. Behold, two woes are still to follow.” A voice from heaven counts it off like a watchman calling the hours, and the counting itself is a comfort. Someone is keeping track. This is not chaos spilling out at random; it is a sequence with a first, a second and a third, announced in advance, moving toward a known end.

Revelation 9:13–16 (BSB)

¹³ Then the sixth angel sounded his trumpet, and I heard a voice from the four horns of the golden altar before God ¹⁴ saying to the sixth angel with the trumpet, “Release the four angels who are bound at the great river Euphrates.” ¹⁵ So the four angels who had been prepared for this hour and day and month and year were released to kill a third of mankind. ¹⁶ And the number of mounted troops was two hundred million; I heard their number.

Do not hurry past where the voice comes from. It comes from the four horns of the golden altar before God, and you have been at that altar already in this book. It is the altar where an angel took the prayers of all the saints and offered them with incense before the throne, and then filled the censer with fire from that same altar and threw it to the earth. The prayers of God’s suffering people went up from there. The command that releases the sixth trumpet comes down from there. Those two facts belong together, and a frightened reader needs to hold them together. The judgments falling on the earth in this book are not indifferent to the cries of the persecuted. They are, in some way we are not asked to fully explain, the answer to them. When the saints under the altar cried “How long?”, heaven did not go silent.

Then four angels, bound at the Euphrates, are released. Bound, again. Held. Not roaming free until now. And look at the astonishing precision of the next line: they “had been prepared for this hour and day and month and year”. Not simply for the year. For the hour. There is a moment fixed in the calendar of God for this, and it does not come one minute early and it does not slip one minute late. Consider what that means for the reader who is frightened by this chapter. The same God whose diary contains that hour has numbered the hairs on your head. Precision on this scale is not cold; it is the precision of a Father who is running nothing by accident.

The number of the cavalry is given as two hundred million, and John adds, almost helplessly, “I heard their number”. He did not count them. Nobody could count them. He was told. And the figure is not offered as a census to be checked against the population of the ancient world; it is a number meant to be felt, a number past the horizon of counting, an army you could not outrun or outlast. Feel it, and then remember who told them to wait at the river.

Revelation 9:17–21 (BSB)

¹⁷ Now the horses and riders in my vision looked like this: The riders had breastplates the colors of fire, sapphire, and sulfur. The heads of the horses were like the heads of lions, and out of their mouths proceeded fire, smoke, and sulfur. ¹⁸ A third of mankind was killed by the three plagues of fire, smoke, and sulfur that proceeded from their mouths. ¹⁹ For the power of the horses was in their mouths and in their tails; indeed, their tails were like snakes, having heads with which to inflict harm. ²⁰ Now the rest of mankind who were not killed by these plagues still did not repent of the works of their hands. They did not stop worshiping demons and idols of gold, silver, bronze, stone, and wood, which cannot see or hear or walk. ²¹ Furthermore, they did not repent of their murder, sorcery, sexual immorality, and theft.

John describes the second army the way he described the first, by colors and animals: breastplates the color of fire and sapphire and sulfur, red and dark blue and a sickly yellow, and the heads of the horses like lions, with fire and smoke and sulfur pouring out of their mouths. Their power is in their mouths and in their tails, and the tails are snakes with heads of their own, so that a thing which looks harmless from behind turns and bites. Notice again that this is not a machine catalogue and it is not meant to be. It is a portrait of a killing force that strikes coming and going and cannot be safely turned your back on. A third of mankind dies. That is a horror, and it should be read as one, soberly and without the slightest relish. John does not gloat over it and neither may we. He simply records the number and moves on, and where he moves is the whole point of the chapter.

Because here is verse twenty, and it lands like a stone dropped in a quiet room. “Now the rest of mankind who were not killed by these plagues still did not repent.” Read it again. They survived. They had watched the sun go dark and the locusts come and a third of the human race fall, and they buried their neighbors, and then they went home and went on exactly as before. That, and not the cavalry, is the terror of Revelation 9. The trumpets have been sounding since chapter eight, and their whole purpose was to shake a sleeping world awake. A third of the sea, a third of the rivers, a third of the light, and now a third of mankind, and every one of those thirds is a proportion and not a totality, which is God’s way of saying that there was still time. And after all of it, they still did not repent (μετανοέω) metanoeō, pronounced met-an-oh-EH-oh. Strong's G3340, to repent, to change the mind and turn. Metanoeō is put together out of two ordinary pieces, meta, meaning change or afterward, and noeō, to perceive or think. At its root it means to change your mind, but the New Testament never lets it stay that shallow. It is the whole person turning: the mind changes about God and about self, and the feet follow. It was John the Baptist’s first word in the wilderness and it was the Lord Jesus’ first word when He began to preach, and it stands at the head of the Christian message in every sermon in Acts. And here is what you must see in Revelation 9. The word does not appear as a command. It appears in the negative, as a report, twice: they did not repent, and again, they did not repent. Heaven had been calling in the loudest voice a world has ever heard, and the answer was no. But notice, too, what the verse quietly assumes. Repentance was possible. Nobody says they could not; it says they would not. That is the ground under every gospel invitation ever given. The door was not locked from the outside. And that is why this word, of all the words in this dreadful chapter, is the one to carry away with you. It can still be done today, and gladly, and without one plague falling first. .

And then look at what they would not let go of, because John lists it and the list is not random. They kept worshiping demons and idols of gold, silver, bronze, stone and wood, “which cannot see or hear or walk”. That last phrase is not John’s own invention; it is a line the church had sung in the Psalms for a thousand years, and Israel had used it to laugh at the futility of idols:

"Their idols are silver and gold, made by the hands of men. They have mouths, but cannot speak; they have eyes, but cannot see; they have ears, but cannot hear; they have noses, but cannot smell; they have hands, but cannot feel; they have feet, but cannot walk; they cannot even clear their throats." Psalm 115:4–7 (BSB)

There is the pity of it laid bare. Under the fifth and sixth trumpets, a world in agony clung to gods that could not so much as clear their throats. And the next verse follows in the Psalm like a verdict: those who make them become like them. That is what idolatry does. It does not merely offend God; it hollows out the worshiper, until a man who bows to something blind and deaf becomes blind and deaf himself, which is exactly why the plagues could not reach him. Then verse twenty-one adds the rest of the account, and every item on it is a way of using another human being: murder, sorcery, sexual immorality, theft. Take a life, manipulate the unseen world for your own advantage, take a body that was not given to you, take property that was not yours. Idolatry upstream, and the ruin of neighbors downstream, exactly as the Ten Commandments always taught. The two tables of the Law stand together here at the end of the chapter, broken in the same order they were given.