Revelation 9:11 Commentary and Bible Study

These locusts have a king. It is Satan is in charge of all these locusts, and he is the destroyer. It is he who releases them from the pit. They belong to his kingdom and carry out his instructions. Their king is an angel, or rather was once an angel. He still retains the enormous power he was created with, but it is exclusively devoted to evil. He was created along with all the other angels, but fell from that high place. He is Lucifer, Satan, the devil. He is called ‘the angel of the bottomless pit’. The words suggests not just that he has come from the pit, but that he belongs there. Though the fifth trumpet started by saying that he was a star fallen from heaven, evidently that was long ago from the perspective of the Book of Revelation. Now he is the angel of the bottomless pit. This is now his proper place. Though he too will suffer its torments, he does not hesitate to inflict those torments on others as long as he is granted the limited freedom necessary to do so.Here he is given two other names, both of which have the same meaning. The first ‘Abaddon’ is a Hebrew word. It means ‘ruin’, ‘destruction’ or ‘the place of destruction’, i.e. the abyss. It comes from a word meaning ‘to perish’, ‘to be destroyed’ or ‘to die’. The Hebrew word is used as a name for the place of the lost in Sheol, the underworld (Job 26:6; 28:22; 31:12; Psalms 88:11; Proverbs 15:11), and translated Destruction, equivalent to the word Hades in the New Testament. The second word Apollyon is a Greek word. This word also means destroyer and is a participle of a verb meaning ‘to destroy’, ‘to abolish’, ‘to ruin’ or ‘to kill’. Satan is the organiser, the promoter of all hell’s policies. He cannot rest from doing evil. He does not tire. He never takes his eye off his objective – to destroy as many as he can and to damage God’s cause. He is creation’s greatest loser, for he has never successfully thwarted a single purpose of God. All that he has ever tried to do has only ever contributed to his own downfall and advanced the cause of God. ‘For we can do nothing against the truth, but for the truth’ (2 Corinthians 13:8) and this applies to Satan also.The fallen angels have followed him faithfully from the moment that they rebelled together against the Lord God. There appears to be complete loyalty to their king and to his cause. Never for a moment have they shown any inclination to rebel against him. Of course there can only be two sides in this battle, the side of righteousness and the side of evil and it is impossible for the demons who have sided with the devil, ever to be free of it. They have been eternally changed by their rebellion. There is no possibility of forgiveness for them.