Fr. Stephen De Young: Verse eleven: “And they had as king over them,” king of the locusts, “the angel of the bottomless pit,” the one who was given the key, the angel of the abyss, “whose name in Hebrew is Abaddon, but in Greek he has the name Apollyon.” Both of those words mean destruction.

Apollyon there is also playing on a very ancient archaic Greek version of the god Apollo. We tend to think of Apollo— Because we’ve been given the Justice League version of Greek mythology, where sort of each god has a different superpower, and Apollo is your sun-god, your shiny, handsome Brad Pitt guy, and he’s a sun-god and all of this. But there’s an earlier version of Apollo who shot arrows that caused plagues and was much more involved in that sort of thing. There’s kind of a Greek wordplay going on here between destruction and Apollo, in the same way we saw Zeus being identified with Satan in the letter to Pergamum.

Verse twelve: “One woe is past; behold: still two more are coming after these things.” So we get another “You think that’s bad? Wait till you see the follow-up.”

So verse 13: “Then the sixth angel sounded, and I heard a voice from the four horns of the golden altar which is before God.” This altar, remember we talked about, way back in chapter five, I think— This altar is an altar of incense. The altar of incense in the tabernacle and in the Temple was what’s called a horned altar. It was like a pedestal with a platform on top, and then there were sort of points in the four corners, if you could picture that. And those points in the four corners at the top were referred to as the horns of the altar. And then sort of the top, between those four points, those four horns, the top would be a little bit concave, and then you’d burn the incense on the top in that sort of— It wasn’t really a bowl, but little concavity at the top. So this voice is sort of coming out of the— Since it’s coming from between the four horns, it’s coming out of sort of where the incense is being burned. That’s where the voice comes from.

“Saying to the sixth angel, who had the trumpet: Release the four angels who are bound at the great river Euphrates.” The sixth angel is releasing these four angels bound before the river Euphrates, whom I just mentioned. [Laughter] Remember, I said in the story of the seven sages, the Bablyonian story of the seven sages, the apkallu, they get imprisoned— These are more ancient demonic spirits. These are the equivalent of, like, Prometheus and Pandora.

Q1: Are these related to the little, like, half-fish men in the backgrounds of the river?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. So the apkallu, particularly the first one, whose name was Atapa or Adapa, the first of the seven sages, came up out of the river and is usually depicted as part fish, part human. There are these— And that’s in keeping— Usually sea gods, ancient sea gods, were depicted as—here’s today’s word—theriomorph, which means beast or animal form. So we usually think of the Egyptian gods that way. The Mesopotamian gods are also that way. Baal is a bull half the time; he’s either depicted as a human with bull horns or as an actual bull. But that’s even true of the Greek gods originally, and there’s residue of that in very early Greek sources. So when you read Homer he talks about “cow-eyed Hera,” which—“cow-eyed”… I don’t think if I said to my wife when I got home, “Your eyes are like those of a cow,” I don’t think she’d be super happy with that compliment. [Laughter] But that’s a holdover from a point in time when Hera was depicted as a heifer—also not a good thing to say to a woman, referring to her as a heifer. [Laughter]

And that goes back into very early Indo-European— Sort of the earliest layer of Indo-European myth is that there’s a sky-god who’s usually depicted as a bull and an earth god who’s usually depicted as a heifer. That’s why when you go back into those very early Greek sources you get “cow-eyed Hera,” you get some bull stuff about Zeus turning himself into a bull and getting frisky. That’s holdover from that early Indo-European stage.

Q2: [Inaudible]

Fr. Stephen: Yes. So the fish-people, the Assyrian reliefs that we have of priests dressed like big fish that look kind of weird and kind of ridiculous, that’s what that’s connected to, is this legend, because these sages come up out of the water and reveal sort of secrets of technology. Now, this is— The ancient sense of technology includes stuff we would consider technology like metallurgy and that kind of thing, but it also includes, like, sorcery and those kind of things. It’s any sort of technique for manipulating the world, whether it’s manipulating the spiritual world or manipulating the physical world, to give yourself some kind of power and control and domination over it. These spirits sort of reveal that. That’s why I say Prometheus is kind of the Greek version of this: he comes and reveals the secret of fire to man, and whoever does that always gets punished. These guys got imprisoned beneath the river Euphrates as their sort of punishment, and now they’re getting let out, too.

Verse 15: “So the four angels who have been prepared for the hour and day and month and year were released to kill a third of mankind.” “Angels” is being used here in the fallen sense. These aren’t sort of good-guy angels who’ve just been sitting there waiting for all of history to go massacre a third of humanity! But notice “the third” again.

“Now the number of the army of the horsemen was 200 million. I heard the number of them.” So obviously there isn’t a Greek word. There aren’t numerals. There’s not really a good Greek way of saying “200 million.” This is like two hundred thousand thousand.

Q2: This bible says twice ten thousand times ten thousand.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. [Laughter] So the idea is: tons. There has never been and probably never will be an army that big, a 200 million— And that’s just the horsemen!

Verse 17: “And thus I saw the horses in the vision. Those who sat on them had breastplates of fiery red, hyacinth blue, and sulfur yellow.” Okay, whose flag—whose flag is it? [Laughter] No.

Q1: [Inaudible]

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] It’s Belize! Belize is coming for all of us! No.

“And the heads of the horses were like the heads of lions, and out of their mouths came fire, smoke, and brimstone. By these three plagues, a third of mankind was killed by the fire and the smoke and the brimstone”—which is sulfur, by the way—“which came out of their mouths, for their power is in their mouth and in their tails, for their tails are like serpents’, having heads, and with them they do harm.” That’s like a chimera. Okay, so again we have this venomous tail. This is sort of a remix of the last group, which again is what we would expect.

The imagery we’re still getting here is that everything that God has a leash on, everything that God is holding back— Humanity, through our wickedness, we would destroy ourselves; we would make our self prey to demonic powers, but God’s been sort of holding these things back to give us time to repent. And as we move ever closer to the end, God starts letting them loose in order to bring about that final repentance.

Verse 20: “But the rest of mankind, who were not killed by these plagues”—so the other two-thirds—“did not repent of the works of their hands, that they should not worship demons and idols of gold, silver, brass, stone, and wood, which can neither see nor hear nor walk.” Okay, so notice how he ties together demons and idols. The things they’re worshiping are actually demons, but the way idolatry worked in the ancient world is that they were— they believed they were creating a body for the god. In order to interact with a spirit in the ancient world, they believed you had to do that through a body.

And so in some cases, you have people who were possessed—I’m not just talking about demon-possessed people in the Bible—like the oracle at Delphi: Apollo would come and possess and speak through. And others: there were oracles all over the Greek and Roman worlds. We even see one of them in the book of Acts with the slave girl who’s telling fortunes and all that stuff. The emperor— The word “genius”—originally the genius of the emperor was the spirit. They would even say demonic spirit, daemonic spirit, because that word didn’t necessarily mean evil if you were a Greek or a Roman. The spirit, the divine spirit, that dwelt within the emperor: the emperor was sort of the body for one of the gods on earth. Socrates says he has a demon that whispers wisdom to his soul, which sounded less creepy at the time, I think, than it does now. [Laughter]

So you have that. Even more common than that, though, is of course idolatry. You make a statue, and then you look back to ancient Sumeria and the Ancient Near East. They had a ritual by which they opened the mouth—that’s what they called it, opening the mouth—where sort of this spirit—because spirit was connected to breath—would go into and dwell within the statue. And so then they had created this sort of body for the spirit. The spirit would indwell it, and that gave them an access point, because worship for ancient pagans was not just like worship for us. [Laughter] Worship for the ancient pagans was trying to get the gods to do something for them through ritual, whether it was send rain, give crops, get someone to fall in love with them. Whatever they were doing, they were there with a purpose: heal something. And so there was this quid pro quo where, once the spirit was indwelling the idol, they’d come and dress it every morning, they’d come and bring it food. They’d take care of it. The sacrifices: they believed they were feeding it. They would do all of these things in order to get that quid pro quo, get the spirit to do what they wanted.

And there are cases where, these interesting cases— For example, there was a period in Greece where they started chaining down the idols, not because people were stealing them but because it was kind of like the movie Misery: they were trying to keep the god there, keep it from leaving. [Laughter] They’re imprisoning it. One major case in Rome, when Arminius, the German general, wiped out the legion that tried to go into Germania, for months after that, the people went and threw rocks and the temples in Rome, because they said, “We did all the stuff we were supposed to do. Why did we lose?” They were mad at their gods for not following through on all their sacrifices and stuff. So that quid pro quo idea is real.

That is key to the traditional Jewish attack on idolatry, including here. He says: You’re worshiping demons. They’re doing it through idols, but notice the idols can’t see, hear, or walk. What’s the point there? Well, the point there is you want this spirit to send rain or give you good crops or have your wife get pregnant. It can’t dress itself, it can’t feed itself, it can’t walk—you have to carry it around to take it where it’s going to go. If the idol tips over, this god can’t come and pick itself back up. So if it can’t do any of those really simple things, like move from one place to another with your help, or stand back up when it tips over without your help, why would you think it can control the weather or give you crops or do any of these other things you’re asking it to do? That doesn’t make any sense. If it was powerful enough to do those things, it would be powerful enough to do these simple things. It wouldn’t need you. It wouldn’t need anything from you with this quid pro quo thing. So that’s being reiterated here.

But notice repentance is what’s in view here, because we get this “even though.” Even though God has unleashed all these things to try to drive people to repent, the people who survive all of these things—and you notice all of the escalation: first it’s just suffering for five months, then it’s a third dead, but the other two-thirds, they still don’t repent, change their ways.

Verse 21: “And they did not repent of their murders or their sorceries or their sexual immorality or their thefts.” So sort of the big two sins are idolatry and sexual immorality in the Old Testament, and they’re linked together. But this has those two, plus it throws in murder, theft, sorcery. They didn’t repent of any of it. They continued down that path despite everything. We can keep going.

Okay, chapter ten, verse one: “I saw still another mighty angel coming down from heaven, clothed with a cloud, and a rainbow was on his head. His face was like the sun and his feet like pillars of fire.” Remember, this is imagery that was attached to God earlier on. Remember the rainbow around the throne; remember when he saw Christ, the feet like pillars of fire and face like the sun. This is God imagery. And also coming on the clouds of heaven. This is specifically like Son of Man imagery, of Christ. So this isn’t an angel in the sense of angel as a species of being; this is like the Angel of the Lord in the Old Testament that most of the time is Christ. It’s “angel” in the sense of translating the word angelos, like messenger or representative.

Verse two: “He had a little book open in his hand, and he set his right foot on the sea and his left foot on the land.” [Laughter] So: very large, if he’s got one foot out in the Mediterranean and the other one…

“And cried with a loud voice as when a lion roars. When he cried out, seven thunders uttered their voices.” We get the imagery of God’s voice being like thunder over the waters in the psalms repeatedly, and that’s borrowing, just like the riding on a cloud—that’s taking imagery that’s related to Baal, and later Zeus, by the pagans and saying, “Nah, this is true of the true God.” And the lion’s roar is a reference back to Judah, the tribe of Judah in the Old Testament. It talks about Judah crouching like a lion. You have these two images. One of these is an image that’s used for Yahweh the God of Israel, and the other one is used to describe Judah, the Davidic king. So you’ve got those two brought together here.

“Now when the seven thunders uttered their voices, I was about to write.” So hears these voices, what he says. He starts to write it down—he’s writing all this stuff down. “But I heard a voice from heaven saying to me: Seal up the things which the seven thunders uttered, and do not write them.” So whatever he saw in this part of the vision, he doesn’t say.

This is a common thing when you read apocalyptic Jewish literature from the Second Temple period, meaning from about 500 BC to, well, the book of Revelation. [Laughter] In Jewish apocalyptic literature—and St. Paul even references this when he talks about the man he knows who, as we saw when we’re reading 1 Corinthians—it’s actually St. Paul himself—who was caught up to the third heaven and heard things that it is not lawful to utter and repeat. That there are things that, when someone has one of these sort of mystical experience where they’re caught up in heaven, they hear things said by God, by angelic beings, they see certain things, and those things are not to be communicated to other people. It’s a very common thing.

The idea is not that “Oh, this is some secret that will be revealed in the end times.” The idea is that with especially these very powerful spiritual experiences, there are elements of it that are given to a person to share—that’s why he’s been told several times, “Write this down. Communicate this. People need to know this”—and there are other things that are just for that person and that shouldn’t be shared. That’s a substratum all the way through the New Testament. We read things like the Theotokos, after the Archangel Gabriel comes to her, tells her she’s going to give birth to the Messiah, after she meets with Elizabeth, we’re told she “treasures these things up in her heart,” meaning she doesn’t go around telling everybody. “Hey, guess what! An angel came down and told me I’m going to have the Messiah!” [Laughter] She doesn’t go around— but she treasures these things in her heart.

You’ll find again when you read a lot of our Church’s monastic literature that one of the signs of someone who may be spiritually deluded, someone whom maybe we shouldn’t trust, is that they go around boasting about their spiritual experiences. Even St. Paul sort of uses that dodge. “I know a guy whom this happened to… ” “Asking for a friend.” [Laughter] He uses this circumlocution because he doesn’t want to boast about his own spiritual experience. That that’s a bad sign that someone’s going around saying, “I had this vision! I… I… I am this important, special person.”

This idea that certain parts of it aren’t to be shared and aren’t shared is reflective of an idea of humility, and is opposed to the sort of self-aggrandizement that we might otherwise see. “I am the one to whom God has revealed all these things!” And that’s how people start cults, is by coming and making these sort of grandiose claims. [Laughter]

Q1: I read an explanation of that, and it was like: “Oh, well, this is something too horrible to tell.” Is that part of it or not?

Fr. Stephen: Well, not terrible, but it’s just something that shouldn’t be sort of put out there.

Q1: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: Verse five:

The angel whom I saw standing on the sea and on the land raised up his hand to heaven and swore by him who lives forever and ever, who created heaven and the things that are in it, the earth and the things that are in it, and the sea and the things that are in it, that there should be delays no longer, but in the days of the sounding of the seventh angel, when he is about to sound, the mystery of God would be finished, as he declared to his servants the prophets.

So basically this is testimony that that point we were talking about, where the balance shifts? This is it. This is sort of the announcement that gets made. This is it. This is the end. When the seventh angel sounds his trumpet—which he hasn’t done yet—this is going to be the end.

Verse eight: “Then the voice which I heard from heaven spoke to me again and said: Go, take the little book which is open in the hand of the angel which stands on the sea and on the earth. So I went to the angel and said to him: Give me the little book.” [Laughter] So he gets told, “Hey, that little book he’s holding…” Now, we don’t know how little the book is. Considering he has one foot on the sea and one foot on the land, his hand is probably pretty big. It may just be little compared to his hand; it may be one of those tiny bibles that you have to read with the super-magnifier; somewhere in between.

Verse nine:

So I went to the angel and said to him, “Give me the little book.” And he said to me, “Take and eat it, and it will make your stomach bitter, but it will be as sweet as honey in your mouth.” Then I took the little book out of the angel’s hand and ate it, and it was as sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it, my stomach became bitter. And he said to me, “You must prophesy again about many peoples, nations, tongues, and kings.”

First of all, the word “book” here does not mean book. It’s like book of the Bible: it’s a scroll. Eating a scroll doesn’t sound that much better. You’re still eating paper, papyrus. But this again—try to figure out what imagery means—go back. In Ezekiel 2, the same thing happens with Ezekiel. Ezekiel gets given this book to eat, and that’s part of Ezekiel being commissioned as a prophet. So what’s happening here is St. John is being commissioned as a prophet. St. John’s just been an observer so far. He’s written down what he was told to write down. He’s been seeing these things and relating what he sees. Now he’s being commissioned as a prophet the way Ezekiel was, by eating a scroll. [Laughter]

But what that’s symbolic of is that there’s this message that’s written on the scroll. There’s something written on the scroll; it’s not a blank scroll: this message that he’s being told to bring. And before he brings that message, he has to eat it and metabolize it. What we see when he eats it and metabolizes it, being called to be a prophet, being chosen by God to be a prophet, that’s a good thing till you think about what happened to most of them, but even with that it’s a good thing to have this calling from God. That’s the “sweet as honey” when he puts it in his mouth. But then, when he metabolizes it, it becomes difficult. It becomes difficult with what his calling is going to be, what he’s going to have to prophesy and what he’s going to have to pronounce.

This is a key idea, this idea that if someone is going to have a prophetic ministry, they first have to sort of metabolize, in their own life, the message they’re going to be bringing to others. This is something we’ve kind of lost sight of in the modern day, because everyone on the internet thinks they’re the next St. Maximus the Confessor. They are the layperson who’s going to come and condemn all of the corruption and injustice in the Church and in the world. They’re going to correct everybody. They’re going to— And what they fail to realize is the prerequisite for that is being a saint. The prerequisite for that is that they have to root out all the corruption in themselves; they have to root out all of the sin in themselves. They need to pull the log out of their own eye. And then, once they’re a saint, they can be the next St. Maximus the Confessor, who, by the way, in his trouble in condemning the corruption of the Church, got his right hand cut off and his tongue cut out, which is also a part that I don’t think most of those folks want to emulate: his sufferings. But that piece has to happen first.

And what you see is when there’s corruption in the Church—because there is, because it’s full of humans; we’re all sinners—when there’s corruption in the Church, when there’s problems in the Church, God sends saints to correct it. But they don’t become saints by correcting it; they become saints and then they’re in a position to correct it. So when you see the last flowering of the Russian Church at the end of the 19th century, where the Russian Church before that was not doing real great since the reforms of St. Peter—or not St. Peter: Tsar Peter the not-so-great— After his reforms, the Russian Church was not doing well. But when you have this flowering at the end of the 19th century, it’s because of St. Seraphim of Sarov, who goes out into the wilderness by himself, who ultimately sees the vision of Christ in uncreated glory, who himself becomes a saint, and then opens his door to receive pilgrims, and then this resurrection happens in the Russian Church. It’s not some layperson looked around and said, “All these bishops are corrupt, and I’m going to go rail against them!” That’s not how it works. It’s not how St. Symeon the New Theologian worked when he worked to correct the Byzantine Church. It’s not how any of this works.

Anyone who wants to follow God and be a prophet, bring some kind of message, that message has to get metabolized first in their own life. Their own life has to be transformed before they can transform anything and anyone else. Otherwise, as St. Paul says, they’re a clanging gong and a clashing cymbal, and they’re not going to help anybody else; they’re just going to hurt themselves by doing that. And it’s not just people on the internet; there are plenty of people who do that in real life, too. [Laughter] But that’s the key. The key is: become a saint first. Then once you’re a saint, you’ll know what you’re doing in terms of trying to help the Church get back on the right foot.

This is a good place to stop with, I think, before we get into chapter eleven. So next week we won’t have Bible study, because I will be in jolly old England. I’ll see if everyone— I don’t think everyone there is super jolly right now, but I will be over there. So, Lord willing, the week after, though there’s variables with my flights and stuff— but, Lord willing, the week after, we’ll come back and pick up in chapter eleven, read about Enoch and Elijah coming back and running around and shooting fire out of their mouths. There’s a teaser! Thank you, everybody.