The passage: The fifth angel sounds his trumpet, and John sees a star fall from heaven to earth. This star is given the key to the bottomless pit; when it opens the pit, smoke pours out like the smoke of a great furnace, darkening the sun and the air. Out of the smoke come locusts with the stinging power of scorpions, but they are told not to harm any plants or trees—only those people who do not have God’s seal on their foreheads. They are not to kill these people but to torment them for five months, with pain like a scorpion’s sting, so that people will long for death but not be able to die. The locusts look like war-horses, with what seem like gold crowns on their heads, human faces, hair like women’s, teeth like lions’, iron breastplates, wings that sound like war-chariots, and tails like scorpions with stings, powerful to hurt for five months. Their king is the angel of the bottomless pit, named Abaddon in Hebrew and Apollyon in Greek. One woe is past; two more are coming. The sixth angel sounds, and a voice from the golden altar tells him to release the four angels bound at the river Euphrates, who were prepared for a precise hour, day, month, and year to kill a third of humanity. Their army numbers two hundred million horsemen, with breastplates of fire, jacinth, and brimstone, and horses whose heads are like lions’ and whose mouths pour out fire, smoke, and brimstone, killing a third of humanity. Their power is in their mouths and in their tails, which are like serpents with heads that do harm. Yet the rest of humanity, not killed by these plagues, still did not repent of worshipping demons and idols of gold, silver, brass, stone, and wood—idols that cannot see, hear, or walk—nor did they repent of their murders, sorceries, sexual sins, or thefts.
A voice from Heaven had told John that the woes following the last three trumpets would be far worse than those before them. This seemed to me to suggest that they would be of a different kind—more moral and spiritual misery, less merely physical suffering. Let us see whether the description of the first of these woes supports that idea.
I. “And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth.” I don’t claim these words settle the nature of the coming calamity. Taken by themselves, they might mean some harm to the earth itself, like what we heard when the first trumpet sounded. But I think the symbol feels far less strained, and far more like the ones we meet in prophecy and even in everyday speech, if it means the fall of some intellectual power—the dreadful change that happens when something that ought to give light to the world instead makes its darkness worse.
The next words, “and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit,” would mean nothing, I think, if the falling star stood for some physical disorder. But suppose some man, or some society of men, who had believed in a righteous and true God of Heaven and had witnessed to Him, became believers in a completely different kind of God—came in practice to acknowledge an evil God. Wouldn’t such a description then be fulfilled? A gaping gulf of atheism is uncovered beneath a surface that had been coated with a religious crust, on which fair fruit seemed to be growing. People begin to ask whether the universe has any foundation at all, or whether it is built on rottenness. Most will admit that this pit was opening beneath the heathenism of the Roman empire in the first century. But did heathenism hold the key of the pit? Was the bottomless abyss laid bare when Jove began to be treated as just another word for the air, or when the whole Pantheon came to be regarded as a gathering of malignant demons? No—to an apostle’s eye the worshippers of Jehovah were a far more horrible sight; their loss of faith in the God of their fathers, their putting a dark power in His place, was not only the meaning of the change in heathenism but in some sense its cause. For heathenism’s own cause we must look further back. It is set out, I think, in those tremendous words: “If I had not done among them the works which none other man did, they had not had sin. But now have they both seen and hated both me and my Father.” The revelation of Christ to them as the brightness of the Father’s glory had brought what was hidden in them into full awareness. They had been living in a twilight, with the light still struggling within them. But they saw the Perfect Image and fled from it. That was not their God. What was directly opposite to that image was their God. The witnesses for the deliverer became the witnesses and tools of the destroyer. The star had truly fallen from heaven. And because it was a star meant to light the whole world, the whole world must suffer from its fall. The broken, imperfect faiths of humanity—those still wavering between Ahriman and Ormuzd, still timidly confessing amid every monstrous contradiction and foul deed that good is Divine and must win—all take on darkness from this great apostasy. This is how the bottomless pit is opened; only in this way could it be opened.
“And there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace, and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.” There is a haze of mist through which we can still see heaven. Through that mist heaven may look to us sometimes like an enlarged earth, sometimes like the faint shadow of what is solid here. But this medium is not mist but smoke. A furnace burns beneath it. Nothing can be seen above but wrath and horror. And all of nature takes on the same look. Everything that once seemed beautiful becomes hideous. “The sun and the air are darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.”
“And there came out of the pit locusts upon the earth, and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power. And it was commanded them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree; but only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads. And to them it was given that they should not kill them, but that they should be tormented five months: and their torment is as the torment of a scorpion, when he striketh a man.”
One of the most vivid passages in all ancient poetry is the prophet Joel’s description of the locust army that invaded Palestine in his day. Travellers have confirmed how literally accurate it is; a statistical table or an agricultural report might state the facts of such a disaster more drily, but not more precisely. That description shows better than any other how we go wrong when we talk about “making allowance” for the figurative language of the prophets. We need make no allowances for it. We should study it and interpret it carefully and strictly, and then it will give us a living rather than a dead picture of events that really happened; it will set before us an actual past that can be compared with an actual present.
I point to that passage from the oldest of all the prophets because none helps us better to decide what this passage in Revelation must mean. “A nation,” says Joel, “is come up upon my land, strong, and without number, whose teeth are the teeth of a lion, and he hath the cheek teeth of a great lion. He hath laid my vine waste, and barked my fig tree: he hath made it clean bare, and cast it away; the branches thereof are made white.” And again: “The field is wasted, the land mourneth; for the corn is wasted: the new wine is dried up, the oil languisheth. Be ye ashamed, O ye husbandmen; howl, O ye vinedressers, for the wheat and for the barley; because the harvest of the field is perished. The vine is dried up, and the fig tree languisheth; the pomegranate tree, the palm tree also, and the apple tree, even all the trees of the field, are withered: because joy is withered away from the sons of men.” And once more, in his second chapter: “The land is as the garden of Eden before them, and behind them as a desolate wilderness; yea, and nothing shall escape them.”
There can be no mistaking what this language means: its whole force is lost unless it points precisely to the destruction of grass, trees, and crops—the kind of destruction that a swarm of insects, and only insects, could cause. Now notice how carefully the Apostle, clearly with Joel’s words in mind, rules out the very things Joel dwells on. These locusts were “not to hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree.” I hardly need point out that such expressions, if they mean anything, must equally stop us from supposing that the locusts figuratively stand for the invasion of some human army. Imagine a horde of Huns or Avars leaving no mark of their march on the ground or on any tree! Imagine it being said of such locusts that they were to torment but not kill their victims! Surely it is our own fault if we refuse to take these hints—if we suppose that a prophet, just because he has a Divine commission to teach us great truths, is more careless with his symbols, and less able to make us understand them, than an ordinary teacher.
The locusts, then, that rose out of the smoke of the pit—those that were to touch only the men without God’s seal on their foreheads and to strike them as a scorpion strikes—must point, I take it, to those superstitions, and especially those restless speculations about the future, that beset people from whom all belief in God’s goodness has departed; people who feel the world is ruled by an enemy instead of a Father; whose accusing consciences make the worst expectations about their fate seem believable. We can all know how these locusts darken sky and air; how they breed hateful suspicions that poison dealings between people; how they attach themselves to each person’s memory of what he has done and what he is; how one moment they tell him that what he is now he will always be, and the next moment urge him to see whether he can escape his own existence, his immortal self. Oh, my friends, these torments really are the torment of a scorpion when it strikes a man; no other comparison could be as true.
V. It is to anguish of this kind that these words apply so exactly and so sadly: “And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.” A constant craving for death as the end of these scorpion stings, and at the same time a constant horror of death, as though the sting were inside it, and could never be drawn out. The rest of death seems delicious; the man would give worlds for it. “Not to be!” But—does not that really mean “never to have been”? Is there any other terms on which such rest is possible? The conscience answers, “No! The grave must be deep and wide enough to shut in everything I have been as well as everything I am to be, or it is not deep and wide enough for me.”
- This scorpion-torment is the chief sign of all the superstitions that rise out of the bottomless pit of unbelief. But they have other marks that seem hardly to fit together. The first is this: “Their shapes were like unto horses prepared for the battle.” There is haste, eagerness, and terror about them. They look as if always getting ready for some encounter, but they never are ready. Fear where there is nothing to fear; no fear of the real crisis actually approaching; an inability to measure danger clearly and steadily—here is a token of that day’s trouble, as it has been of the like in every later day. Here is the second mark: “And they had on their heads as it were crowns of gold.” Fantastic hopes of possible happiness alternate with terror. Gold crowns float before the dupe’s eyes; the dealer in omens and enchantments keeps holding them out. A sensual paradise, with no tree of knowledge—or one that may be freely eaten from—seems about to be restored. Here is the third sign: “And their faces were like the faces of men.” The various superstitions and dreams take their different looks from the tastes, moods, likings, and dislikes of particular teachers; they all reflect human faces; none has any lasting or Divine substance. Here is the fourth feature: “And they had hair as the hair of women.” There was a feminine element in them—not just weakness and timidity, though that was surely present. We have already seen the part the false prophetess played in the church at Thyatira; in the forty years before Jerusalem’s destruction, when men like Simon and Elymas were scattered so widely, the Jezebel was found at least as often as the Balaam, one always standing beside the other. And the dreams of the future, along with the immediate fantasies, showed the qualities of both. Again, “The teeth of these locusts were like the teeth of lions.” In Joel’s bold language these teeth had been given to actual insects; he was comparing things not by their size but by their effects. The prophet of the Apocalypse does the same. However soft an air they put on, however human and feminine they may seem, these superstitions that come out of the bottomless pit are still murderous; they are tearing to pieces whatever righteousness and truth remain on the earth.
Again, “They have breastplates as it were breastplates of iron.” Most missionaries could tell what iron breastplates protect the world’s cruel superstitions and dark worships. They have learned that fearful truth, I trust, not only from their experience of the heathen but of themselves; they have found what an unnatural and terrible hardness any falsehood we have given in to, and that has wrapped itself around us, can take on. So it need not surprise us that these locusts in John’s vision—those that had spread over the earth in Jerusalem’s last days and were darkening earth and air—should have this among their signs. And again, “The sound of their wings was as the sound of many chariots running to battle.” The Divine seer, like the false prophets, was expecting a battle. And all those various forms of evil that gathered up the falsehoods and false worships spread over the world until then sounded in his ears like chariots hurrying to the fight—the forerunners and heralds of a conflict between the powers of good and evil unlike any there had ever been. But whatever else marks these locusts, we must keep to the end the mark noticed first: “They had tails like unto scorpions, and there were stings in their tails.” There may be gold crowns on their heads, but all their power comes from the torments they can inflict on the conscience. That which makes cowards of us all is what makes these thoughts of the future terrifying and real; without it they would be mere lies from the father of lies.
For “they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name is in the Hebrew tongue Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon.” Here we reach the root of the matter. Devil worship—the worship of the destroyer—is the source of all the foul and hurtful fancies that fill people’s hearts. These men have bowed down to him; they have confessed him as their lord and master. Until now there had always been a protest against his tyranny. Wherever there is a nation, wherever there is law, justice, freedom—even the struggle for law, justice, freedom—he is defied; from there goes out a proclamation: This is not our Lord; we owe him no allegiance. In one nation that protest had been clear, formal, carried on from age to age. In one nation the voice—“I am the Lord thy God, which brought thee out of the house of bondage; I am the Lord God, merciful and gracious; I am the Righteous Judge of the earth”—had been heard through every law and every sacrifice. And now that nation was reverencing Abaddon, or Apollyon, under the name of Jehovah. Was this not a woe that foretold woes to come? Was it not a trumpet announcing that the holy city was to fall?
“One woe is past; and, behold, there come two more woes hereafter. And the sixth angel sounded, and I heard a voice from the four horns of the golden altar which is before God, saying to the sixth angel which had the trumpet, Loose the four angels which are bound in the great river Euphrates. And the four angels were loosed which were prepared for an hour, and a day, and a month, and a year, for to slay the third part of men.”
Doesn’t this vision look more like those of the first four trumpets than like the one we have just been considering? An actual river is named, the Euphrates. A third of humanity is said to be killed. Two hundred million horsemen form a huge army. Shouldn’t we look for some physical rather than moral calamity in this language? I have no doubt this is most readers’ first impression. But I think it can hardly be the final one.
We shall see, I think, that this trumpet follows the fifth in natural chronological order. The bottomless pit is opened; swarms of dark superstitions spread abroad; then comes the removal of a spiritual chain that had until now held an evil host in check. But what of the river Euphrates? On any scheme of interpretation, that river must be symbolic; it cannot point to events visibly happening on its banks or nearby. So the question is: what does such a symbol most obviously and naturally mean? A Jew would always connect the Euphrates with Babylon; he would think of it as the river of the Asiatic monarch. He would take it to stand spiritually for the dividing line between the two great kingdoms—the Babel kingdom and the Israelite kingdom; the kingdom founded on self-will, and the kingdom founded on the God of Righteousness. So he would understand the command to release the angels bound at the Euphrates as the Divine decree that the barriers between these kingdoms—so far as the second was represented in Jerusalem—should exist no longer. The moral basis of the distinction had been destroyed. Jerusalem was now part of the Babel society; may we not boldly say it had become its center and capital?
- The year, the day, and the hour of this crisis, we are told, were fixed. The long pent-up evil broke loose. But it had gained no all-powerful might. A higher Will decided when it would become a lie for Jerusalem to keep pretending to be a witness for God, and when it was right that Jerusalem should be declared the great witness for the Devil. That year, day, and hour were not a matter of indifference to the rest of the world. They affected it in ways it did not know. How, in the end, we shall be taught later. How, at once, we learn from this present passage. I find nothing here that makes me doubt that my interpretation of the Euphrates is the right one. The number of the horses is clearly not one that would be used in an account of a real event. It is deliberately chosen to indicate an army that could never have been gathered on any earthly battlefield, yet that carries a wide, mysterious desolation. The description of the horses and riders is of the same kind. The “breastplates of fire and of jacinth, and of fire and of brimstone” point to no armor made in earthly forges; the “fire, and smoke, and brimstone” do not come from the mouths of any animals man can tame.
X. Still, I do not in the least mean to explain away the statement that “men were killed by the fire, and the smoke, and the brimstone that issued out of their mouths.” By this I do not mean spiritual death. Wars and fighting came then, as they come now, from the lusts in people’s bodies; the brutality, greed, self-glorification, and atheism of a land were then, as now, the causes that destroy hundreds of thousands. The loosing of the angels may have been the removal of restraints from powers of moral evil. But if so, it was necessarily also the removal of hindrances to the murder of people’s bodies. The crossing of the Euphrates may have been the breaking of the boundary between a kingdom of righteousness and a kingdom of mere power. But once that boundary is gone, nothing earthly is safe from the violence of power. That strange description in verse 19, of the horses’ power—“It is in their mouth and in their tails, for their tails were like unto serpents, and had heads, and with them they do hurt”—means, I take it, a complete union of intellectual with animal force, with all moral purpose shut out. There is the mouth that can speak wisdom; there is the tail that strikes and kills. All the wisdom is serpentine: the tail has heads; these obey the lower instincts; to do harm is their only function. Surely when such creatures are turned loose for a little while, they will carry out that function. Woe to the world because of them. Lifted to high places, nothing they have imagined doing will be held back.
- Six trumpets, then, have sounded. We ask: what effect did they have on those living within earshot of them? How did they affect the heathen world? How did they affect the Jewish world? The seer answers: “And the rest of the men which were not killed by these plagues yet repented not of the works of their hands, that they should not worship devils, and idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone, and of wood: which neither can see, nor hear, nor walk: neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornications, nor of their thefts.” So it was in the beginning, and so it will be to the end. All outward plagues, all outbreaks of moral evil, all apostasies within Divine Societies, were and are God’s trumpets; those who acknowledge His goodness and truth will tremble and rejoice that He is speaking to them, calling them to repent, preparing the way to reveal Himself. But these trumpets, however loud and long they sound, rarely move a man who disbelieves in a living and good God to confess Him. The terror in them stuns rather than awakens. The sleeper is half roused from his dream, is bewildered, takes a fresh dose of opium, flees to the gods that cannot see, hear, or walk, and flees from Him whom he has known only in thunder and lightning. The saying is forever true that it is not the fire, nor the earthquake, nor the wind splitting the mountains, but only the still small voice that reaches the heart and makes it bow. Jew and heathen alike hear the notes of coming doom and are unmoved. Both alike shall at last look on Him whom they have pierced, and mourn as one mourns for an only son.