Fr. Stephen De Young: We’ll go ahead and get started. When we get started in just a moment or two, we’re going to be picking up in Revelation or the Apocalypse of St. John, other variations on the title, chapter nine is where we’re picking up. We left off at the end of chapter eight last time, as you likely deduced from me saying we were starting in chapter nine.

So just real quickly, to summarize where we are— As we’ve talked about before, St. John writes in this sort of cyclical pattern. That’s true of his gospel. Obviously, I’m not going to lay that out now, but it’s a little harder to see in his gospel, but you can notice certain things even on the surface, like in terms of the order he puts things in. So, for example, in St. Matthew, Mark, and Luke’s gospels, Christ cleanses the Temple at the very end of his ministry, leading into Holy Week; in St. John’s gospel it’s like the first thing he does. So there are surface things that let you know he’s doing something different in terms of the order of events, and when we went through 1 John—2 and 3 John are so short, they’re sort of longish paragraphs, that it’s sort of hard to establish structure for a paragraph—but 1 John we saw he kind of introduces themes and then he comes back to them, and each time he comes back to them, he sort of adds a little bit and it spirals forward.

The place where it’s most clear and where we’ve been seeing it as we’ve been going through the book of Revelation is we have these sequences of sevens. We had the seven seals that we went through several weeks ago, where the Lamb opened the seven seals and different things happened, and last time, right after the seventh seal was opened, then we immediately started getting the seven trumpets. Last time we did the first four trumpets. These angels came out with trumpets. As I mentioned last time, we might have in our head like the pinnacle of the Mormon temple, like the angel with the big, long trumpet; this is more a shofar. This is like a horned horn, a horn made out of a horn. [Laughter]

There’ve been these judgments, and we talked last time about how they kind of mirror the plagues on Egypt last time. Several of the first four, for example, that turned the seas to blood and those kind of things. So there’s this pattern paralleled to the plagues on Egypt. We talked a little bit about the plagues on Egypt culminating in the Passover, that this was about separating out sort of God’s people from others who did not desire to be God’s people, and how that is part of the judgment that’s going on here as depicted in these trumpets in this cycle of sevens as we spiral forward. It’s about this separation, this distinction being made.

And the other pattern we saw in the first four was this pattern of a third. Over and over again, these judgment fall upon a third of the seas or a third of the earth or a third of the people. So there’s this one third ratio; that’s leading somewhere that we probably won’t get to tonight, but we need to kind of hang onto it as we go forward.

Right before we stopped last time, after those first four trumpets, these angels came out and kind of pronounced woe on everyone, because— saying that the next three trumpets, the last three: “You think those first four were bad—wait’ll you get a load of these last three,” sort of as a warning. “Woe”—it doesn’t have quite the resonance in English any more, I think, than it originally did, or the original Greek did. They come and say, “Woe, woe, woe”: people think it’s Joey Lawrence or something. Nobody else is old enough to remember that. [Laughter] And Arthur’s too old to remember that! [Laughter]

But this woe really carries with it the idea of condemnation or even damnation. So when someone said, “Woe to you,” like when Christ says, “Woe to you, Pharisees, hypocrites,” he’s not just saying, “Hey, guys,” or giving them a warning. He’s saying, “You are in this accursèd position right now, and here’s why.” So when Christ says that, he says, “Woe to you, Pharisees, you hypocrites,” and then he lists off something they do: “And this is why you’re in this position.” The idea being: you need to repent and get out of that position. But that’s sort of what woe— So when in verse 13 of chapter eight, right at the end there: “Woe, woe, woe to the inhabitants of the earth,” they’re saying everybody on earth is in that position because of what’s coming. So this is sort of a dire kind of warning, but also carries with it, as we said, with that plagues on Egypt idea, the idea that there’s a possibility of repentance, that there’s a separation happening here. This isn’t just: God is angry at everyone on earth and is going to wipe them all out. We had that back in Genesis 6 with the flood, and God says he’s not going to do that again.

So, that said, unless there are any other leftover questions, comments, good hotel deals, we’ll go ahead and pick up in the Revelation of St. John, chapter nine, verse one.

“Then a fifth angel sounded”—sounded the trumpet or horn—“and I saw a star fallen from heaven to earth. To him was given the key to the bottomless pit.” First we have a star that’s fallen from heaven to earth. Stars are what?

Q1: Angels.

Fr. Stephen: Angels, right. All the way through we’ve been seeing that, and it was even spelled out very early on, before the letters to the seven churches, it said, “The seven stars are the seven angels of the churches.” So this is a fallen angelic being when it says he’s thrown down to the earth. That’s not as obvious in Greek, but in Hebrew and in Aramaic, aaretz, the word that’s used for the earth, is also used for the underworld. And you see— To bring about that idea in Greek, you see references throughout the New Testament to those “under the earth,” which of course—Unterwelt is where we get “underworld”: under the world, under the earth.

So this being who is a fallen angelic being is given this key to the bottomless pit. You say, “Well, there’s like a door on the bottomless pit? That’s a weird image.” But what’s being translated as “bottomless pit” here is the abyss. The abyss is part of the underworld. There were in the ancient world sort of somewhat different ways of conceiving the underworld. The earlier you get, the more horrible it is, frankly. When you look at stuff about Sheol in sort of Ancient Near Eastern sources—Sumeria is really bad—the underworld, which is where the afterlife is, pretty much for everybody in the Ancient Near East, is pretty much like a slasher movie. It’s just full of horrific monsters and demons, and you go down there with them and it’s a bad time. Everything is sort of dark and horrific. When you get to the Greeks, Hades is sort of more emo: everybody’s just kind of sitting around being really sad and depressed. [Laughter] So a little less slasher movie and a little more, you know, The Cure. So everybody’s kind of sad.

But all of them have some part of the underworld that’s worse. It gets called the abyss. The Ancient Near Eastern’s usually the abyss. The Greek version is Tartarus. But there’s some really bad part of the underworld. Tartarus is sort of like an upside-down mountain, like if you inverted a mountain into the ground. The abyss is usually seen as connected to water, because water sort of represented chaos in the Ancient Near East, so you have this bottomless depth of water. For example, in early Hebrew cosmology, you have the earth, and the earth is sort of supported by pillars, and then down underneath those pillars in the water, that’s the abyss. When you read the book of Jonah, he gets swallowed up and taken down below the pillars of the earth; so he’s down in the abyss, the worst part of the underworld. When you read the apkallu story, the story of the seven sages in Babylon, the spirits that bring knowledge to humanity that weren’t supposed to do it get imprisoned under the rivers, like the bottom of the water, beneath the water in the abyss. That story’s sort of the ancient, the Babylonian version of Prometheus. The Greeks were more creative in their punishments, getting your liver pecked out by a buzzard and that kind of thing, but there’s always this place where they’re talking to you about the Ancient Near East—Greece is really the last Ancient Near Eastern civilization. There’s this worst part of the underworld where some kind of evil or rebellious or criminal spirits are imprisoned.

So the idea is that this fallen angel is given the key to that place where they’re all imprisoned. Like when we read in 2 Peter and in St. Jude’s epistle about the angels who sinned who were imprisoned, and the chains of darkness and all that. That’s what this is talking about. This fallen angel gets given the key to the chains and stuff.

Q1: The key?

Fr. Stephen: He’s going to release them. That’s basically what it is. Spoilers! He’s going to release them; he’s going to let them loose. These ancient spirits of chaos and malevolence that God imprisoned for all this time are about to get let out. That’s why we got the “woe"s before this stuff happens.

Verse two: “And he opened the bottomless pit, and smoke arose out of the pit like the smoke of a great furnace. So the sun and the air were darkened because of the smoke of the pit.” The other image that’s usually attached to this place, Tartarus or the abyss— So for example, the book of Enoch: when Enoch goes to see where the Watchers, the sinful angels, are imprisoned, they’re all chained to a flaming mountain; they’re on fire. The idea here is once he busts it open, the smoke from that fire is now sort of unleashed also, and there’s so much smoke coming out of this pit that it sort of blots out the sun. Finally we’re getting to some apocalyptic stuff, right? I know I’ve been boring you until we got here.

Verse three: “Then out of the smoke, locusts came out upon the earth, and to them was given the power as the scorpions of the earth have power,” which is what? What power, what dynamis do scorpions have? It’s venom. They can poison you, inflict suffering. Even though they’re a small thing, they can inflict great suffering and poison on people.

“They were commanded not to harm the grass of the earth or any green thing or any tree, but only those who do not have the seal of God on their foreheads.” Remember we saw the 144,000 who all got stamped. We talked about how, even though everybody always talks about the mark of the beast, there’s also a mark of the God of Israel. They basically get let loose and say, “Hey, anybody who doesn’t have God’s seal on them, fair game! Go for it.”

Verse five: “And they were not given authority to kill them, but to torment them for five months. Their torment was like the torment of a scorpion when it strikes a man. In those days, men will seek death and will not find it. They will desire to die, and death will flee from them.” So that’s a pretty nasty scorpion. Of course, he’s using scorpions because that’s something that his original readership would have been familiar with. You go out in the desert, like the Judean desert: look out for scorpions.

A couple of points here about the image. This image of venom of various kinds goes back into the Old Testament as an image for sin and its consequences, because how does the devil show up in Genesis 3? As a serpent. And in the book of Numbers, when they’re out in the wilderness and Israel’s disobedient, remember the snakes come and bite them and they’re in this horrible pain from the venom, and Moses puts the bronze serpent up on the pole to release them. So the idea is that people, when we give ourselves over to sin, it’s not just, again, like “oh, we broke a rule—stop breaking rules.” It’s you get some of the venom, which is connected to these demonic powers, into you. And that means it causes suffering, it causes pain.

But notice, they’re not allowed to kill the people; they’re just allowed to torment them, these people who haven’t signed on with God. They have the power to torment them, and even that has a time limit on it. Why would that be said? This is St. John using an image that’s pretty common in the prophets and the Old Testament, where it will take, like old Canaanite gods and demons— We talked about this a little bit with the four horsemen of the apocalypse. It will talk about them, and it will talk about Yahweh the God of Israel having them on a leash, sort of like having them— We see this with Satan in the book of Job. He has to come and ask permission, like: “Oh, hey, can I go do this to him? Can I go do that to him?” [Laughter] He can’t—

And this image is used in, for example, the book of Jubilees, to explain why God allows there to be demons in the world in general. In that story, the demons are all getting banished to the abyss by God, and one of them named Mastema comes and sort of tries to bargain with God, like “I don’t want to go to the abyss yet.” [Laughter] And so after his bargain, God says, “Okay, I will allow ten percent of you”—in the book of Jubilees it’s ten percent—“to stick around in the world in order to torment the faithless.” And it’s stated in the book of Jubilees that the reason God does that is he’s hoping that them tormenting those people will drive them to repentance.

That story’s actually reflected a couple places in the New Testament. The most prominent one is— It’s a lot in the exorcisms in Ss. Matthew, Mark, and Luke’s gospels, but in particular when he’s—the Gerasene demoniac, when Christ shows up they say, “Are you here to torment us before the time?” They’re basically saying, “Hey, we had a deal!” [Laughter] “It’s not the end of the world yet. Why are you—? Don’t throw us into the abyss!” And so they sort of bargained to get sent into the pigs instead. But then you notice, where do the pigs go? The pigs run and jump into the sea, the abyss, so they end up there anyway. [Laughter] But that story’s kind of reflected there, or at least that idea, that that’s why demons are in the world, is that they’re sort of serving this purpose.

What St. John is saying here is that, as we get closer to— We’ve talked about how, when the end comes, biblically, there’s sort of a scale where on one hand God wills that none should perish but that everyone should repent and come to life; on the other hand, with our sin and our wickedness, we’re like victimizing people and committing horrible atrocities and doing horrible things in the world. So in Scripture any given person, any given people group, any given clan, any given nation, any given— has a point where the scale tips from giving them time to repent to God will not allow any further wickedness and evil and victims. And when that scale tips, that’s when the person dies and faces judgment, that’s when the clan is destroyed, that’s when the nation collapses, that’s when the— And then that is blown out, as we saw St. Peter say in 1 Peter, to the whole world, that there is a point where God will look at the whole world and say the wickedness that’s going on now and his goodness and compassion towards the victims of it—saw this earlier in Revelation with the martyrs, saying, “How long?”—will overwhelm the desire for more repentance. So that’s when the whole thing will end.

What St. John is saying is part of that will be, as we move closer to that end point, which only God knows, God is going to give the demonic powers more free rein, and he’s doing that because God’s efforts to drive people to repentance will increase as it gets closer and closer to their last chance. So this is sort of— The image is of, for example, a parent who keeps escalating consequences on their child in order to try to get them back on the right road, sort of tougher and tougher and harder and harder, with the goal of getting them to snap out of it. So as God knows the time is growing short for repentance, these efforts to get people to repent, by giving them over—this is the language St. Paul uses in Romans—giving them over to the consequences of their own sin, not shielding them from it any more, not protecting them from the consequences of their own evil—that’s going to increase, in an attempt, again, to get them to come to repentance.

So the image here is not just of, again, “God’s really angry and so he’s letting all the monsters out to go and terrorize everyone,” because you notice there’s these very specific limitations: there’s only certain people and it’s for a certain period of time and they can’t kill them. It’s aimed at this one thing: bringing these people to repentance, because there aren’t many opportunities left. So that will intensify as we move through history toward the end. God will give a longer and longer leash to these sort of things, again to try to bring about repentance.

Q2: So whom is God trying to drive to repentance, the tyrants or the victims?

Fr. Stephen: Well, this is presuming— Anyone who’s not sealed by God. So this is anyone who is still in unrepentant wickedness. If there are victims of tyrants who are themselves wicked, they would be included, but the tyrants are also included. Sometimes tyrants punish actual criminals. [Laughter] Sometimes they punish innocent people, but sometimes they’re actual criminals.

Verse seven:

The shape of the locusts was like horses prepared for battle. On their heads were crowns of something like gold, and their faces were like the faces of men. They had hair like women’s hair, and their teeth were like lions’ teeth, and they had breastplates like breastplates of iron, and the sound of their wings was like the sound of chariots, and many horses running into battle. They had tails like scorpions, and there were stings in their tails. Their power was to hurt men five months—

We’ll pause there. So clearly, as we were talking about before we started, this is heavy metal musicians, as I was told by Chick tracts in my youth. I’ve also heard that these are very clearly attack helicopters from China and/or Russia.

Q1: [Laughter] Sure.

Fr. Stephen: Right? [Laughter] That are attacking, I think, Israel, usually? Right. But so we already know, based on their purpose, what these are. The idea that we’re supposed to take this as St. John seeing Twisted Sister in a vision and trying to describe them, or seeing an Apache helicopter and trying to describe it is… not what’s happening. [Laughter] So, in general—we’ve already talked about this and we’ve been doing it and will continue to do it—if you want to look for the source of imagery in the book of Revelation, you don’t go forward to today and look at photos and try and match it up; you go backward into the Old Testament and see what is being picked up from the Old Testament.

If you read the book of Amos in Greek or in a translation from the Greek, there’s an interesting identification. This isn’t there in the Hebrew, and nobody’s exactly sure how it got into the Greek. Likely because nobody can figure out how you got from the Hebrew to this Greek, the Greek of Amos is based on a different Hebrew tradition. They were looking at a different Hebrew text and translating it. But it identifies Gog—our old friend Gog, of Gog and Magog fame, in Ezekiel and in the Old Testament—as the king of the locusts. If you then look at other Gog stuff, which also— Interestingly, in some versions of the text, instead of Gog they have Og, like Og the king of Bashan from back in Numbers and Deuteronomy who was that giant king, the last of the Rephaim, this symbol. But when you look at the Gog stuff, Gog—and Magog, for that matter—is the leader of this army that’s going to come and attack God’s people, sort of in the end times.

And so this is further demonic imagery that St. John is picking up on and re-utilizing here. He’s connecting those stories. That’s why you have all of the military imagery, because you’ve got Gog and his locust army. That’s what he’s aiming at here, which is connected through that other stuff to the condemned giant spirits and all of that stuff. It all sort of connects here. So that is the purpose of this depiction is to connect it to Gog, the invading army of Gog, the locust idea, the spirits imprisoned in the abyss. He’s kind of pulling all that together into one thing.

And connecting— The reason why connecting those is important is that the judgment that comes upon us for repentance from our sin and wickedness isn’t just like a spiritual affliction. St. John isn’t just talking about… It’s very easy when we talk about “sin is like venom of a scorpion” and this and that, to take it in sort of this “spiritual” way, which is basically woo-woo, which is sort of not-real, which is some sort of idealist kind of thing where it’s just like: “Oh, yeah, I hurt somebody else and I feel bad or I feel guilty or something.” [Laughter] And so connecting the idea of physical armies and demonic powers, what he’s doing is reflecting actual suffering, not just mental or emotional suffering, or spiritual suffering, but actual physical suffering that comes into our life—this is an overarching idea, that that comes to us for the purpose of our repentance.

This is reflected in a lot of the monastic literature in the Orthodox Church, where monastics will have something bad happen—disease, illness— I once heard a nun say this after her workshop burned down. She had a little candle-making workshop which was how she sort of supported herself, and it burned down. When asked about it, she said, “Oh, that was given to me for my repentance.” She said, “This is a gift from God to help me repent more of my sins.” [Laughter] I’m not there yet! I don’t say that. When I’m driving and I get a flat tire, I don’t stop and say, “Well, God gave me this for my repentance.” I say other words that I won’t repeat here at the church. [Laughter] So I’m not spiritually there yet, but I do believe the principle is true, at least intellectually, as much as I struggle to apply it, that these things are allowed into our life.

And what does it mean that it’s given to us for our repentance? Well, it’s given to us to help us overcome our pride, to help us overcome our impatience, to help us overcome our lack of self-control—to help us overcome these things. We need these things. This is how St. Paul talks about the thorn in his flesh. Remember how he said he has this thorn in his flesh? He prayed repeatedly for it to be taken away, because none of us like suffering when it comes into our lives. But St. Paul is ultimately told by God that his grace is sufficient for him, meaning “I’m not going to take it away, but I am going to work in you to make something good come out of this.” And St. Paul indicates that it was given to him for his humility and for his— If everything always went well for me—I never faced an obstacle—I would be even more of an arrogant jerk than I already am, if I was just successful at everything I put my hand to and everything came easily.

And so, as much as we don’t like it, because we kind of want things to be that way, it really is a concrete thing that we have limitations and we have weaknesses. The position of the Scriptures and our Tradition, this monastic literature, is that we should actually thank God for those things, for weakness and limitations and struggles, because they’re there for a reason: to help us toward repentance and to help us toward salvation. And so that’s why St. John here is connecting physical things—the very real thing of an invading army. We in the United States today, like here in southern Louisiana, we aren’t worried that all of a sudden the Cuban army is going to come sailing up the bayou and come in and attack us and there’s going to be looting and shooting in Lafayette. [Laughter] But in the ancient world, this was a real possibility at any given time, and the closer you were to the border of the Roman Empire, the more likely you were to have some barbarians show up at some point and loot and pillage and burn and destroy. So invading armies were a real threat, so that’s why he combines this sort of physical or material threat of an invading army with the idea of also spiritual, emotional, mental suffering, that all of this is something that God allows to happen in order to bring about our repentance and therefore, ultimately, for our good, even if we don’t always see how or why or what’s going on.

And it’s also, again, potentially for our good, because God isn’t forcing these people to repent. They’re perfectly capable of suffering for this figurative five months and still hating God and not learning a darn thing! [Laughter] I’m capable of going through all kinds of things and not learning a darn thing. So it is given for the possibility; it’s another call to repentance, but that’s something we still have to answer—or not. We can allow the sufferings that come into our life to embitter us and make us angry, or we can use them as these opportunities to find repentance that leads to salvation. So it’s a question of how we receive it. They can receive this one way or the other; that’s up to them.