Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Revelation · About this commentary
They Did Not Repent
Revelation 9:17-21
17 Thus I saw the horses in the vision and those who sat on them, having breastplates of fiery red, hyacinth blue, and sulfur yellow; and the horses’ heads resembled lions’ heads. Out of their mouths proceed fire, smoke, and sulfur. · WEB
The cavalry kills by what proceeds from its mouths, and the trumpet-series ends on its saddest audit — mankind unrepentant twice over.
Thus I saw the horses in the vision and those who sat on them, having breastplates of fiery red, hyacinth blue, and sulfur yellow; and the horses' heads resembled lions' heads. Out of their mouths proceed fire, smoke, and sulfur.
The army wears its arsenal's colors — fire-red, smoke-blue, sulfur-yellow — and its lethality is located in one organ: out of their mouths. Fire, smoke, and sulfur are Sodom's triad Genesis 19:24 Revelation 14:10, and the verse doubles down on the anatomy: the power of the horses is in their mouths and in their tails. For their tails are like serpents, and have heads Revelation 9:19. Mouths that destroy and serpent-tails that deceive from behind — the sixth trumpet's cavalry kills by what proceeds from mouths, which in this book is the geography of false word against true: the two witnesses' fire also proceeds from their mouths Revelation 11:5, and Christ's own sword from his Revelation 1:16. The second woe's warfare, whatever its historical instruments, is at bottom the war of proclamations — destroying doctrine riding at full charge, serpent-headed at both ends Revelation 12:9.
By these three plagues, one third of mankind was killed Revelation 9:18 — the woe executed at its permitted fraction, and then the series arrives at the verse it was always driving toward, the audit of the warnings:
The rest of mankind, who were not killed with these plagues, didn't repent of the works of their hands, that they wouldn't worship demons, and the idols of gold, and of silver, and of brass, and of stone, and of wood, which can't see, hear, or walk. They didn't repent of their murders, their sorceries, their sexual immorality, or their thefts Revelation 9:20–21.
Didn't repent — twice. The trumpet-thirds existed for this: judgment measured to leave room for turning Revelation 8:7, and the room went unused. The indictment is the prophets' oldest: idols that can't see, hear, or walk Psalms 115:4–7 Daniel 5:23, worship rendered to demons behind them Deuteronomy 32:17, and the four working sins of a world so ordered — murder, sorcery, immorality, theft.
The audit explains everything that follows in the book. Warning at a third has not turned mankind; the next movements will send not more thirds but a final gospel summons Revelation 14:6–7 — and after it, the unmixed bowls Revelation 16:1. Between here and there, the book pauses to recommission its prophet, because what the world needs after the sixth trumpet is not another plague but another word Revelation 10:11.
held with reason What this mark means