Revelation 9:15 Commentary and Bible Study

The description of these angels as ‘bound’ and needing to be ‘loosed’ shows that they are hostile angels, harmful to mankind. Hendriksen says, ‘These four angels are not the same as those mentioned in 7:1. They are evil angels here. They relish the idea of plunging mankind into war.’ They have been held back from doing what they wanted to do until this very time. Even though we should not see the book as giving history in advance, it is hard not to read these words as referring to a particular moment in history. The identification of the time is so specific. It seems to describe a single event that takes place at a definite time known to God. Thes later trumpets apply to events just prior to the end of the world, for they find mankind in an extreme state of sin. Paul tells us that ‘evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse’ (2 Timothy 3:13). The four angels have been prepared for this time: ‘which were prepared for the hour and day and month and year’. By whom are they prepared? By the Lord who governs all things, and uses these evil angels to bring further punishments on sinful men.The result of the releasing of the angels is not that they strike mankind directly, but that they are send an army of horsemen so vast that no such army has ever been seen in any battle during the course of world history. The number in Greek is two myriad myriads or twice ten thousand times ten thousand. It comes out in English as two hundred million, but in Greek it is the highest number possible multiplied by itself and then by two. It is a symbolic number intended to express a multitude, which no man could count, but which is known to God.The people who sat on the horses, with ‘breastplates of fire, and of jacinth, and brimstone: and the heads of the horses were as the heads of lions’ – this is all representative of war. There is brutality here and cruelty. The breastplates of the priests under the law were also coloured (Exodus 28:15; 39:8), but the colours here represent only the deadly effect of their warfare. They have the colour of shining fire corresponding to the fire that comes from their mouths, a fire that burns up their enemies. They are also the colour of jacinth or hyacinth, which could be dark blue or dark red and refers to the smoke, and they are a sulphur yellow or brimstone colour corresponding to the brimstone that issues from their mouths. The name of the last colour is cognate with the word for brimstone making the connection between the two more obvious.‘And by these three was the third part of men killed by fire, smoke, brimstone, which issued out of their mouths.’ At the end of time, just before the final judgement, there will be wars on a terrible scale. And the idea here is that these wars will be more vicious, more terrible, than any before. The Book of Revelation doesn’t say how it is more vicious, because the people of those days wouldn’t have understood it, nor throughout most of history would people have understood the kind of things which would describe the wars of the end of the age. But we can understand the intensity of this language now, where we have weapons of mass destruction, where we have the relatively small countries capable of firing missiles and rockets that can bring down whole groups of skyscrapers at a time, and cause so much ruin and destruction and death and heartache. We see things the ancients never dreamed of. In our day we can understand the extra intensity in the war descriptions in these prophetic visions. At the end of time there be wars so hateful, so destructive: men who have been turned into devils almost, by the vicious things they can do on such a scale in war, and we are seeing it. We are seeing decisions taken in warfare that are so excessive, and so disproportionate on all sides of every conflict.