John goes over the top with extreme images of sadistic violence committed
by the God of love
A SCEPTICAL BIBLE READING OF REVELATION 9
The fifth of the seven trumpets is blasted. A second star (or meteorite /
comet) is sent crashing into the Earth. It opens a deep, bottomless pit, like a
key in a lock. Sulphur, smoke and flames erupt from the pit, (the door being
the entrance to Hell, in effect, now located under the Earth’s crust). The
smoke is so thick it blots out our view of the Sun (already weakened by a third
of its light earlier in the slow sadistic persecution of Earth’s sinners).
The Bible now presents its most extreme and nightmarish image of all as
locusts erupt in swarms from the pit. They are no ordinary locusts. They have
been given the poisonous tails of scorpions, and instructions to attack people
instead of crops. Anyone except the 144,000 liberated souls (any not already
transported to Heaven in the so called Rapture) is vulnerable. The locust
stings are not intended to kill, but to inflict us with spasms of extreme
agony, over a five-month period. The pain is God’s way of making us turn to him
in hope of relief and salvation.
With most people being kept alive but in pain, it’s hard to tell what Death
is going to do in this five month period as he is already supposed to be busy
killing us off with the other three Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
The description of the locusts gets increasingly bizarre. They are horse
like in body with human faces, women’s hair and lion’s teeth. They are each
encased in full battle armour. This is an image modern Warhammer game
players and fantasy authors would love to have invented. It’s utterly bonkers.
A powerful king called Abbadon leads the locust army. He also has another
name, Appolyon.
The creatures are now redefined as tempters, sent to torment us, so that we
struggle between worldly and sensual needs and religious faith. Quite
what worldly desires are left to us in a World of poisoned blood red water
supplies, perpetual cold twilight, ravaged by plague and war, with screaming
dammed everywhere and the constant fear of lion bites / scorpion stings from a
tin-plated locust –horse-woman hybrid entity is unclear. This isn’t
temptation at all, but a scourge of punishment for those who gave in to temptations
in life. Abbadon is not a devil, or Satan / Lucifer. He is an agent of God.
The sixth and penultimate Trumpet horn is sounded. Four angels bound and
tied down into the depths of the now dried up River Euphrates are released with
God’s orders to kill off a third of the human population within the space of a
year, a month, a day and a single hour.
This not only seems to under-cut Death’s duties. It fails to explain who
these angels of death are or why they were held in captivity. Their
imprisonment may be to do with God creating them as beings of unrelenting
hatred and fury. Much of the imagery of Revelation draws comparison to
the Greek myths concerning Harpies and Furies.
The angels launch into their duty with an army of 200,000 heavily armed
warriors, armoured and riding horses wreathed in fire & brimstone.
Despite the grossly exaggerated layer on layer of carnage as John’s imagination
goes into overdrive, a great number of sinners still seem to be at large, at
least for now, but God is still only getting warmed up.
Chapter Nine is the Bible’s most extreme display of information overload.
This is John writing in Cinemascopic vision. There is just too much going on.
It’s hard to envisage anyone surviving what we’ve seen even so far, but more
and more chaos is piled on, and there is much more to come.
Arthur Chappell
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