Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Abyss Opened
Revelation 9:1-6
1 The fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star from the sky which had fallen to the earth. The key to the pit of the abyss was given to him. · WEB
A fallen star unlocks the abyss, darkness swarms out with scorpion power, and the sealed of God stand outside its permission.
The fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star from the sky which had fallen to the earth. The key to the pit of the abyss was given to him.
The star has already fallen — the tense looks at a past descent — and the book's decoded vocabulary identifies the figure: stars are angels Revelation 1:20, and this fallen one will be named two ways in verse 11, Destroyer in both tongues. The one cast down Revelation 12:9 Isaiah 14:12 is handed a key — was given, the book's tireless passive of permission Revelation 6:2 Revelation 13:5: even the abyss opens on authorization, and the same key will lock the same pit in the end Revelation 20:1.
He opened the pit of the abyss, and smoke went up out of the pit, like the smoke from a burning furnace. The sun and the air were darkened because of the smoke Revelation 9:2.
The abyss in this book is the holding place of the demonic Revelation 20:3 Luke 8:31, and what escapes it first is not an army but an atmosphere: smoke enough to darken sun and air — obscuring light at a depth beyond the fourth trumpet's third Revelation 8:12. The fifth trumpet's era is an era of darkness released: deception thick enough to blot the sky.
Then out of the smoke came locusts on the earth, and power was given to them, as the scorpions of the earth have power Revelation 9:3 — Egypt's eighth plague Exodus 10:14 crossed with Joel's locust-army of the day of the Lord Joel 2:1–10, but these locusts are anti-locusts: they were told that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing Revelation 9:4. Locusts that spare vegetation and torment people are no insects; they are the darkness's own offspring, stinging like scorpions — pain injected, not wounds dealt.
And their commission has two boundaries that govern the whole trumpet. They may touch only those people who don't have God's seal on their foreheads — the sealing of chapter 7 holds exactly here Revelation 7:3: the abyss's torment has no jurisdiction over the sealed, as Egypt's plagues drew a line at Goshen Exodus 8:22. And they may torment five months — a locust season, a bounded term — not to kill.
The torment's shape is the era's signature: in those days people will seek death, and will in no way find it Revelation 9:6 — anguish of mind so deep that death looks like escape and even that door seems shut: the misery of mankind under deception's sting, unsealed and unanchored, tormented by what it swallowed from the smoke.
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