Revelation 9:1-21

Really Bad Things

Chapter nine of Revelation is one of the most frightening in the Bible. It has also given rise to some of the weirdest interpretations.

Probably the most infamous interpretation isn’t really connected with Bible scholars at all, but with a notorious killer and cult leader named Charles Manson. In August of 1969 he led some of the most notarized killings of the last century. He was doing it to help start a race war in the USA. He felt that he had been called to it by the Beatles in their song Helter Skelter. And he claimed that the Beatles were the four angels mentioned in Revelation 9:14-15.

While the various interpretations this chapter advanced are generally less fantastical than the one Charles Manson espoused, and virtually always with less drastic consequences, most as still best described as “out there”. What are these creatures released from the Abyss who follow Abaddon? What to make of four angels bound at the Euphrates? How is a third of mankind to be killed? If that were a current event it would mean the death of over 2,000,000,000 people. Is this thermonuclear war?

I don’t know the answer to these question and I really don’t have any theories to share; however, there are two things I do know about this chapter which I will share with you.

First, whatever these things are, they are bad. I don’t want to be here when they happen, and if I am here I certainly want to be under God’s protection. I suggest that you adopt the same attitude.

Secondly, as bad as these things are the real tragedy in this chapter isn’t about locusts with scorpion’s tails or massive armies and war. The real tragedy is in the last two verses. “The rest of mankind that were not killed by these plagues still did not repent of the work of their hands; they did not stop worshiping demons, and idols of gold, silver, bronze, stone and wood—idols that cannot see or hear or walk. Nor did they repent of their murders, their magic arts, their sexual immorality or their thefts.”

Let us not be so blind. We can learn from bad things if we only will.