And he opened the bottomless pit; and smoke went up out of the pit, like the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by the smoke of the pit. And out of the smoke came forth locusts upon the earth; and power was given them, as scorpions of the earth have power.
Revelation 9: 2,3
Years and years ago, when we were too young to know any better, for a period of time we were fixated upon the idea that the world was about to end. Hal Lindsay had just published The Late Great Planet Earth; most of the Christian teachers to whom we were exposed were of a Dispensational persuasion; and “newspaper exegesis” was rife.
For those of you who don't know, “newspaper exegesis” is a time-honoured, but spurious method of biblical interpretation, whereby one reads the latest news of the day, then then uses its content to interpret the Bible. The Six-Day War had just occurred; the Soviet Union was aligned with the Arab states; we were warned that the great battle to end human history, Armageddon was about to be unleashed. All of these geo-political events, we were told, were specifically predicted in the Revelation. It was rubbish, of course. This approach turns the Bible, and the Apocalypse specifically, into little more than a Nostradamus-like fable of spurious predictions.
As time passed, in the gracious providence of the Lord we were led to sit under better, more faithful teachers of Scripture. We gave away dispensational pre-millennialism as an unreliable and error-ridden way of interpreting Scripture. We came to understand that all of Scripture, including the Apocalypse, must be interpreted within the religious, redemptive, historical, literary, and cultural context in which it was written.
This meant that the book of Revelation needed to be interpreted in the context of the greatest techtonic shift in redemptive history—the ending of the Old Covenant, and the superimposition of the New Covenant over the Old. We came to hold the view that Revelation was written to encourage and sustain the Church as she lived through those tumultuous times. Consequently, the focus of much of the book of Revelation was upon the devastation of Israel in general, and Jerusalem in particular, during the Wars of the Jews during AD 66-70.
The relevance of the Apocalypse to the Church thereafter is the same as the rest of Scripture: it contains truths, principles, patterns, instructions, and promises which by which God circumscribes His dealings with His people throughout all generations. In Revelation 9 we are confronted with some of these vital truths. Amidst a chapter which speaks of awful judgment and devastation (as indeed occurred during the Wars of the Jews) we learn some very important truths.
The first of these is that evil destroys itself. It is self-immolating, and self-destructive. The fifth angel sounds its trumpet of woe: an angel of the Lord unlocks hell—and from hell comes forth the locust-scorpions to torment all who do not belong to God's people. An effective, modern literary image is Tolkien's hosts of Isengard, swarming out of the caverns of the earth to destroy men.
When a culture rises up to shake the fist at God, despising Him, using His Name and the Name of His Son for cursing and contemptuous expression, the gates of Hell begin to open. The demons come forth and begin to torment. Evil grips the culture, and its poison is painful. Lawlessness, murder, rapine, anger, tumult, drug addiction, abortion—all these have one feature in common. They all are instances man turning in upon himself and destroying himself and those nearest to him.
But these self-immolating plagues do not affect the Lord's people. As Revelation 9:4 indicates, they are protected—but once again their protection is due to what arises from within. The Covenant community walks in the Spirit and continues to worship, to marry, bear and raise children, instructing them in the fear of the Lord, turning away from the lusts of the flesh, encouraging and supporting each other, and those who seek their help—and so escapes the scorpion-like sting.
But Unbelief, which does not repent of its murders, its sorceries, its immorality, nor its thefts (Revelation 9:21) reaps the fruit of these things—and they are exceedingly bitter and painful. Inevitably, this is what our Unbelieving culture will come to, if it continues to rush headlong down the broad road.
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