Revelation 9

Revelation 9 … About this time in the reading of The Revelation, you might feel like shaking your head for clarity and asking: “Where are we?” The answer is that we’re in the end-times, the final throes of a darkly sinful world that denies the existence of the Creator God and Jesus Christ whom He sent into the world for salvation.

The Church, faithful followers of Christ in the world when the end-times begin, is bodily taken out in the air to be with Christ in heaven (1 Thessalonians 4:13-18). Now the awfulness of the great Tribulation is before us. God’s judgment is directed from heaven toward sinful mankind, those remaining after the rapture of believers. Some of these remaining, through the evident and visible power of God exhibited during the Tribulation, may turn to Him in faith in this awful time, but many are hardened in unbelief and will not be saved.

The fifth and sixth trumpets of judgment sound in succession with terrible consequences. They’ve been announced by angels solemnly pronouncing “woe, woe, woe” and they’re awful to contemplate. It begins with a “star,” which had fallen, opening a bottomless pit. The “star” probably refers to Satan and the bottomless bit, called the “abyss,” we’ve seen before in Scripture (Luke 8:31), identified as the place of demons. These will be released in the Tribulation time, causing the great distress identified here in Revelation 9. Their presence seems to be symbolically represented and it’s difficult to characterize it beyond the suffering they inflict. The words Abaddon and Apollyon in 9:11, both mean “destroyer,” describing Satan and his demons as they really are. The “angels” of the sixth trumpet (v.14) are surely demonic as well and wreak murderous havoc over the earth, killing one third of the remaining population. Those who remain are truly hardened (9:20) and living in great fear, but not in any sense repenting or believing God. There is a future reckoning and it is terrible to imagine. How grateful we can be that God loves us and wants all to come to repentance, not willing that any should perish (2 Peter 3:9).