Revelation 9:1 Commentary and Bible Study

The next trumpet is to do with spiritual catastrophes. This is quite different from those before, being the direct punishment of people who persecute the saints and who reject the Lord. ‘The fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit.’ What does that star represent? Clearly it represents an individual, and who else can it be but Satan, who fell from heaven? Stars are more than once used in Scripture to stand for angels (Job 38:7; Psalm 148:2; Isaiah 14:12-3; Revelation 12:14). Isaiah 14:12, on which this verse is based, refers to Lucifer – the Hebrew word means shining one, light bearer or morning star. This is Isaiah’s ironical name for the king of Babylon drawing attention to his faded former glory. But Christ’s application of this passage to Satan in Luke 10:18 tells us that the king of Babylon is a type of Satan and that, as so often in Isaiah, there is a dual fulfilment to the prophecy. John is not telling us that Satan has only just fallen; this happened as soon as he rebelled against God, right at the beginning of the world. Satan is a star that once belonged in the heavens, a star of great beauty and splendour. As a shooting star might seem from man’s perspective to fall to the earth, so he lost his place in heaven. He lost his place because pride entered his heart and he desired to exalt himself even to the point of equality with God. His pride was his downfall. Revelation 12:9 refers to the same scene in which Satan loses any remaining claim to a place in heaven as a result of Christ’s victory over him on Calvary.Now he is operating on earth. He operates under the sovereignty of God, and his power is limited, but a new development takes place and this is the basis of the seventh trumpet. He is given the key of the bottomless pit. He didn’t have the key. He didn’t possess the power to open the bottomless pit, but God, to bring about the next punishment, gives him licence and power to open the bottomless pit. The star falling from heaven is named later in the chapter as Abaddon, or Apollyon. The bottomless pit represents hell or the place to which the devil and demons are condemned, but it also represents the centre of their operation (Matthew 16:18). It is the place from which the beast of Revelation 11:7 and from which the beast of Revelation 17:8 ascend – representing parallel passages. The fifth trumpet finds the demons already imprisoned in the bottomless pit. How did they get there? We are used to thinking in terms of Satan and his demons not being placed in captivity until the final judgment, but the New Testament teaches us there is a sense in which Satan, the strong man (Mark 3:27), was bound during the ministry of Christ, in that his powers were limited. It is the will of God that he be released from this state for a terrible but short period at the end of the gospel age. That is what we are reading of here.