Revelation 1
Revelation 2
Revelation 3
Revelation 4
Revelation 5
Revelation 6
Revelation 7
Revelation 8
Revelation 9:1-12
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13. And the sixth angel sounded and I heard one voice from the horns [1] of the altar of gold that is before God, 14. saying to the sixth angel, the one having the trumpet, "Loose the four angels who have been bound at the great river Euphrates.
We have seen this altar before in 8:3-4. It is the Altar of Incense that represents the prayers of God's people, praying for justice. It is yet another hint that we are not seeing a sequence of events but a repetition of the same basic themes in different ways. The key concept with this image is that God cares about the oppression of his people and will bring justice to its perpetrators.
The sixth trumpet unlocks four angels who have been imprisoned at the Euphrates. The fact that they are bound suggests that they are fallen, evil angels (cf. 1 Enoch 10:4-6; 2 Pet. 2:4; Jude 6).
The Euphrates was generally seen as the final boundary between the Roman and Parthian empires. If the image of locusts with hair like women might have been an allusion to Parthian warriors, the possibility heightens here. Craig Keener suggests that the Parthians are certainly in view. [2]
Although the imagery may be built off the rumor that Nero would return from the east with the Parthian armies, we can take the image in a more timeless sense. The forces of evil work against each other. They defeat themselves from the inside, and therein is a type of judgment. It carries its judgment inside itself as it eats itself away from the inside.
15. And the four angels were loosed, who have been prepared for the hour and day and month and year in order to kill a third of humanity. 16. And the number of the armies of the horsemen [was] two hundred million. I heard the number of them.
Judgment comes on God's time table. There is a time when we want justice, but God will bring justice when he deems it to be the right time. The number two hundred million would have been terrifying. Keener notes that it was more than the population of the whole Mediterranean world. [3] That terror is likely the point rather than the precise number.
Many commentators note that the significance of a third is that it is not total annihilation. [4] The remainder have a chance to repent. As we will see, they do not.
17. And so I saw the horses in the vision and the ones sitting on them having breastplates of fire and hyacinth and brimstone. And the heads of the horses as heads of lions and from their mouths go out fire and smoke and brimstone.
This is the only place in Revelation where John reminds us that the imagery we are hearing is from a vision. It would not violate the conventions of apocalypses if, in the book as a whole, we have a mixture of material from John's vision later shaped by his community. The mention here, though, ties this specific imagery to John himself.
We will see fire and brimstone later in Revelation with regard to the lake of fire. The combination evokes associations with Gehenna and the final judgment of the wicked. The picture of a monster breathing fire reminds us of Job 41:19-20. The image of lion-headed horses is also not unlike that of the locusts in Revelation 9:8.
18. From these three plagues was killed a third of humanity from the fire and the smoke and the brimstone that was going out from their mouths. 19. For the power of the horses is in their mouth and in their tails, for their tails are like serpents, having heads, and with them they do harm.
The three plagues would seem to be fire, smoke, and brimstone or sulfur. We remember that Sodom was destroyed by brimstone. [5] The figure of the tails being like serpents is even more intense than the locusts, which had tails like scorpions. The mouths kill. The tails do harm.
20. And the rest of humanity who were not killed by these plagues did not repent from the works of their hands such that they would not worship demons and idols of gold and silver and bronze and stone and wood, which neither are able to see nor to hear nor to walk. 21. And they did not repent from their murders nor from their sorceries nor from their sexual immorality nor from their stealings.
Despite the fact that a third of humanity have died, the remainder do not repent. Perhaps this was also true in the image of those in 6:15-17 where the kings of the earth flee and call on the rocks to fall on them but are not said to repent. But here it is said explicitly.
Revelation gives us a list of the sins that especially typify the world under judgment. The world worships demons and idols that are unable to see, hear, or walk. Some in that world may have had a more sophisticated sense of idols as objects possessed by gods, but the ordinary person probably couldn't tell the difference.
Murder, sexual immorality, stealing--these are all actions bringing God's judgment on the world. Sorcery was related to idolatry for it tried to manipulate the dark spiritual forces of the world.
But still there is no repentance. What a picture of the human heart! The hard heart may know it is wrong. It may know that there is no hope if it keeps going in the direction it is headed. It may know that the logical course of action is to turn around, ask forgiveness, and change its ways.
But it so often doesn't. It would rather be destroyed than concede. To its last breath it fights the truth and the right. Pharaoh is a picture of such hardness. If we fail to understand how a soul could choose never-ending torment over submission to God, this is the place to begin understanding.
[1] Later manuscripts seem to have inserted the word four in front of horns: "the four horns," although it is also possible that the word was dropped by mistake.
[2] Keener, Revelation 270.
[3] Keener, Revelation, 273.
[4] Leon Morris would be typical: "It is a very stern warning, but not the blotting out of sinful mankind" (Revelation, 132).
[5] So, Robert H. Mounce, The Book of Revelation, rev. (NICNT; Eerdmans, 1998), 197.
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