Revelation 9:5 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Revelation 9:5

Comments

This isn’t the final judgement. You see that from the symbolic period of time assigned to this judgment – ‘that they should be tormented five months, and their torment was as the torment of a scorpion when he striketh a man.’ The word ‘torture’ in the Greek has an interesting origin. It’s a kind of very hard stone, so hard that you can test metals on it. If you want to test a piece of gold, or something of that kind, you would rub it on this hardest of stones, and you would be able to tell which metal it was by the residue that it left after you had scratched it on the stone. What was the colour of the dust residue? What did it look like? But the idea here is the scraping of one hard thing against another, and the Greek verb ‘to torture’ comes from that kind of picture language. Why five months? It is obviously a symbolic figure; it’s a mysterious figure. The period of the gospel age is symbolised by different figures that amount to the same kind of length of time in the Book of Revelation. You get forty-two months; you get three and a half years; you get the same period expressed in days. All three expressions of the same period of time are used to describe the whole of the gospel age, which we know now it is already over 2000 years. But this five-months is, in the symbol, considerably shorter than three and a half years, forty-two months, so this is not for the entire duration of the age. This is just for the end time. We certainly don’t have the licence to say, ‘What fraction of three and a half years is five months? That will be the length of time – say, as a fraction of 2000 years already – that this dreadful last phase of torment is going to last.’ You can’t do calculations like that, because they are symbolic figures. All the symbolic figure tells you is that it is a definite time in God’s program. God knows the time. The other thing, it tells you is that it is considerably shorter than the whole of the gospel age. That is really all that you can deduce. But you do deduce that much. This ninth chapter is speaking about is a woe which is at the very end of the period of this present age, when things get to their worst.

Application

We could think of another leading atheist, who has gone through three desperately unsuccessful marriages. Is that the sting of the scorpion? Perhaps it is something like that. We have to be very careful. We can’t say: that punishment was given for that sin; but in general terms we can include the pain that people bring on themselves by their immoral behaviour. They cannot even live their lives and know abiding happiness. Great troubles and pains and consternation: the sting of the scorpion!

Of course there is the possibility – because all these things are foreshadowing of hell – that this is what it be like in hell. Remember the Parable of the rich man and Lazarus, and a rich man says to father Abraham, ‘I am tormented in this flame. Through this judgement, God tells man that this is what it’s going to be like, cut off from God forever – in eternal punishment with all your fellows who hated Christ and persecuted Christians and denied his truth. ‘I give you a little taste of it now as a warning – a foretaste of hell.’ Believers by contrast have a foretaste of heaven.

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Introduction

Revelation 9:5 Commentary and Bible Study