Would you pray with me?

Father, we do acknowledge you as the holy God, the one and only holy God. And Father, when we think about that, it astounds us that Jesus would condescend to come down and be a sacrifice for us, that we could be made holy in him. Father, we just thank you for this day that we have together as your people. Lord, we pray that we wouldn’t be here just because it’s what we’re supposed to do, but we’ve come to hear from you. And I just pray, Lord, as Pastor Chad speaks the words you’ve laid on his heart this week, that you would open our hearts and our minds so we could hear what you would say to us and not just be a hearer, but be a doer as well. And Lord, I just pray that you would just thank you for the moms. I thank you for what this day means. I thank you for what moms have meant in our life. And we just praise you and thank you for them and pray that you would bless them in a mighty way today. In Jesus’ name, amen.

Amen. Thank you, brother.

You know, good evening. It’s good to be with you. Happy Mother’s Day to all of our moms.

Chase and Rebecca are selfishly at the beach, so they’re not here this week. So that’s why I was playing a little guitar. Today, we’re going to be in Revelation chapter nine. Not quite a Mother’s Day sermon. But all the less, nonetheless, I believe it’s an edifying word for us. So let’s look at Revelation chapter nine.

Revelation. And we’re doing. The last two, well, fifth and the sixth trumpet last week, we did, if you remember the first four trumpets, remember the first four trumpets we saw was a foretaste of the woes. It was the hell and the fire and the great mountain or volcano thing being thrown into the ocean. And you had the fresh water being.

Poisoned and you you had darkness. Falling on on the thirds, if you remember, remember that. And that’s really bad. And if worse can get worse, then when we come to chapter nine, it gets worse. Because remember, we ended with the the eagle flying overhead and says he says, whoa, whoa, whoa. And so the last of the trumpets aren’t just trumpets of judgment from God on the wicked. They are. They are woes. They are woes. They are unbearable judgments from God. So we want to work through.

These with you.

In verse one. It says in the fifth angel blues trumpet and I saw a star. Falling from heaven to earth and he was given the key to the shaft of the bottomless pit. He opened the shaft of the bottomless pit. And from the shaft. Rose smoke like the smoke of a great furnace.

And the sun and the air were darkened with the smoke from the shaft. Then from the smoke came locusts on the earth and they were given power like the power of scorpions of the earth. And they were told not to harm the grass of the earth or any green plant or any tree. But only those people who do not have the seal of God on their foreheads. They were allowed to torment them for five months, but not to kill them. And their torment was like the torment of a scorpion when it stings someone. And in those days, people will seek death. And will not find it. They will long to die. But death will flee from them.

So we’re told this star falls. And if you remember, there was a fallen star in the trumpets before. And that was something like a great mass that fell to earth. Here, though, the fallen star is a living being. It’s a creature. Because this angelic creature has a key with which he will perform a function. And I think we obviously want to ask the question, well, is this a good angel? Is this a bad angel? What kind of angel is it? Is it of a demonic nature? And it’s one of those things where… You could see it both ways. If you take the language of a star that’s fallen. If you remember when Jesus said in Luke chapter 10, He said to them, I saw Satan fall like lightning. And then in Isaiah chapter 14, verse 12, which a lot of times is used the thought of kind of the fall of Satan from heaven. How you are fallen from heaven, O day star, son of dawn. So it seems highly liable. Likely, given the nature of the use of the word fallen, that it’s some kind of demonic angel. At the same time, the word there in the Greek just means descend if you wanted it to. So you could think that this was an angel carrying out a function in the book of Revelation. And of course, we see an angel at the end of the book throws Satan in the same bottomless pit. And he has a key as well. So it seems… It seems, though, I want to say, given the nature of fallen, it doesn’t say he came down, that this perhaps is a demonic figure. The point is, he’s doing what God intends. And he’s opening this bottomless pit. It says that he has a key to the shaft. So the shaft, it just means cavern. He opens this cavern, this hole, to the underworld. Somehow, somewhere, he unlocks this. And this… This subterranean underworld is open to the bottomless pit. What’s a bottomless pit? Well, it says bottomless pit, so we can take it to mean abyss. A lot of times you see kind of that. It’s the abode of evil is kind of the idea of it. Again, this is where Satan is bound for a thousand years during the millennial reign. It is not, as you would not imagine it to be, a pleasant place. In Luke chapter 8, it says, 8 verse 31, remember when Jesus is casting the demons out of the man, and it says they begged him not to command them to depart to the abyss. So it’s this horrible place, this terrible holding place of demonic forces. It’s the netherworld. It’s the underworld. It kind of carries the idea of like Hades in the New Testament. Or Sheol, the place of the dead, of misery for us. And from this subterranean furnace, we see thick smoke come out. And it’s so thick, it says that it knocks the light out. In verse 3, from the smoke comes these ominous creatures. And what are these creatures? It tells us they’re something like demonic locusts. Like creatures.

And certainly that’s wild and that’s strange. But what John’s doing here, it looks a lot like what the Lord showed the prophet Joel concerning the coming of the day of the Lord. In Joel, we see description of locusts coming on earth. But unlike those locusts, unlike the locusts, the Exodus plagues, remember when Moses was there and one of those plagues was the locusts, and they came to do what? To destroy the vegetation. That’s very different here. Because here, they’re told not to devour vegetation, which is what locusts usually do. And that’s an ancient problem. And actually, I was looking it up this week. It’s a modern problem. Apparently, in East Africa, in surrounding areas, locusts are still a very serious threat. Just a couple of years ago, there was a devastating plague of locusts in Africa and those areas in the East. But that’s not what these demonic creatures are doing. They’ve come to inflict agony and pain upon the unbelieving world. And you say, well, how do you know that? Well, because it says that. It says they were not allowed to touch those who had the seal of God on their foreheads. So this is happening. I want us to always see this point as we go through Revelation as weird and scary as it gets. It’s happening the way that God is allowing it to happen and unravel.

And this is God’s wrath on the unbelieving world. You know, the details get strange because unlike a locust you’ve ever seen or heard of, this locust has a scorpion-like tail. And the scorpion-like tail is able to sting and inject venom, not to kill people, it says, but to torment them. It’s to torture the wicked and to do so for five months. Now, why five months? That’s kind of the period of that season in which locusts could attack. But it’s kind of vague past that. We don’t know why five months. And you think, well, five months is a really long time to be dead. Day and night, attacked and tortured by this creature. At the same time, it’s brief in terms of what we deserve. And it’s brief because God isn’t once and for all judging the wicked here. What is there when we see this? And we’ll see this at the end of the chapter. It’s a chance for the wicked to repent. So again, God’s not just this vindictive, angry guy in heaven looking for people to destroy. He’s punishing. He’s punishing the wicked.

And apparently it’s so bad. It’s so bad, it says that they’re going to look for death and they’re not going to be able to find it. So they’re pushed either supernaturally, they can’t die, or it’s saying that they are in such great pain, they long for and think about and would rather die.

And in verse 7, we get even more.

It says that in appearance, the locusts were like horses prepared for battle and on their heads were what looked like crowns of gold. And their faces were like human faces and their hair like women’s hair and their teeth like lion’s teeth. They had breastplates like breastplates of iron and the noise of their wings was like the noise of many chariots with horses rushing into battle. They have tails and stings like scorpions and their power to hurt people for five months is in their tails. And they have as king over them the angel of the bottomless pit. His name in Hebrew is Abaddon and in Greek he is called Apollyon.

So we get this description of these locusts and the first thing that John sees in his vision is he says it looks like horses. He’s reminded of a mighty unstoppable. Calvary. And the noise sounds like a mighty Calvary rushing. And he says there’s something like crowns on their head. They’re coming victorious in their campaign against the unbelieving world. And then we then were struck with this, that they apparently have something like human faces. And I think I think what we again, just as a kind of a side note as we go, you kind of have to let apocalyptic literature be apocalyptic literature. It just kind of says. It does what it says and take it for what it means. I think if you try to draw this creature out, it’d be super creepy.

But the human face tells us it’s not like a natural locust. It has intelligence. Unlike a locust would.

And then we’re told it has teeth like a lion. Obviously, they’re aggressive and they’re vicious. And they have breastplates of colors of orange. Red and yellow. Which means what? You can’t stop them. That’s what John’s trying to tell us.

And they’re unrelenting in what they do. I remember the very first time I moved to Alabama. I was at a rest stop. I don’t know if you’ve had this experience. And all of a sudden, my feet were on fire. And I looked down and I had fire ants that had bitten me like all over, like up in my shoe. And I was like, oh, my God. And all over my ankle. And I thought, what is this? Because in Kentucky, you don’t have, there’s no such thing as a fire ant. Like, ants don’t do anything. They’re just there. Alabama, you have to watch out for that, don’t you? I remember once when Darcy was probably three or four. She was down in the yard playing. And she runs up to the house screaming because they’re all over her body. And so I’m picking her up and I’m whacking them off. And that hurts and it burns and it’s unbearable. But what we’re seeing here is something truly you couldn’t begin to fathom.

That for five months, God allows an unrelenting demonic force to inflict physical pain of unparalleled proportions on the world.

And he says, this is the first woe. So as if that was not enough, we come into a second woe.

It says, Then the sixth angel blew his trumpet, and I heard a voice from the four horns of the golden altar before God, saying to the sixth angel who had the trumpet, Release the four angels who are bound at the great river Euphrates. So the four angels who had been prepared for the hour, the day, the month, and the year were released to kill a third of mankind. The number of mounted troops was twice 10,000 times 10,000. I heard their number. And this is how I saw the horses in my vision and those who rode them. They wore breastplates the color of fire, sapphire, and sulfur. And the heads of the horses were like lion’s heads. And fire and smoke and sulfur came out of their mouths. By these three plagues, a third of mankind was killed. By the fire and the smoke and the sulfur coming out of their mouths. For the power of the horses is in their mouths and in their tails. For their tails are like serpents with heads. And by means of the fire and the smoke and the sulfur coming out of their mouths, by means of them, they wound. So it goes from really, really weird to even stranger because we don’t just have these locusts, scorpions, human face, long-haired looking things. John goes on now to we have horses with riders and they don’t just wound the way that the first ones did, but these kill. And the way that they kill is with these three plagues of fire and sulfur. And smoke.

Again, though, I want you to notice this about the four angels. And this is not the four angels that we talked about several weeks ago at the four corners. These four angels, it says they’re prepared for the place and the time in this very moment. Again, what comfort do we have from this? It’s that God is always in control of what’s happening in the grand scheme of human history.

Why the river Euphrates? What’s the significance of the river Euphrates? What’s the significance of saying these four angels are being kept at the river Euphrates? If you go in the Old Testament, the river Euphrates is always the border of Israel. So in the mind of God’s people in the Old Testament, their land was from the waters all the way to the Euphrates. So what’s beyond the Euphrates is always evil. It’s what’s out east. It’s what’s wrong. So that’s where this plague, this horde is coming from.

And John says there’s some people want to call it 100 million. Some people want to call it 200 million. It really just means literally two myriads of myriads. So John just says, I see this innumerable host of these horses and their riders. And these horses have lion’s heads and they spit out fire, smoke and sulfur. And that’s how they kill their powers in their mouth. And then they have these tails like serpents to wound.

So what do you do with all that? Because as weird as it was last week, this is this is just so strange. And as much as you try to read into what is that, what does that mean? How does that work? I think you can just kind of make guesses at it. And I think there’s a mistake to do this. And people want to do it with these texts and go, oh, that’s a helicopter. And that’s a bomb. And that’s a tank. And I think what we’re doing when we’re trying to do that is, we’re trying to import like our 21st century mindset onto the Bible, right? We’re trying to say, oh, this is definitely what it is because we’re this far along. We don’t know when these things will happen. Sure, it’d be great if Jesus came back really soon. This could happen 5,000 years if the Lord waited to return. So we can’t say that we know in our time what these things are. We can say that these are demonic forces at work. And the Lord is allowing a very dark, gloomy, wicked, painful time to come upon us. To come upon the unbelieving world. And that’s bad. And that doesn’t sound very Mother’s Day friendly. But it’s in the Bible. And friends, I want us to have a few implications to add to our implications last week about what this text does for you and I as followers of Jesus and why it’s relevant that we continue to look forward into the future with hope and with joy and with a great seriousness. So last week, here are my implications from the trumpets. It was that we should fear the Lord always because God is holy and God is powerful and it’s by His grace that any of us are saved. Second, we said that we need to invest in eternity, not the present life that fades.

Third, the wicked will always be destroyed and we should hope and long for that day. And fourth, we said that there’s urgency in evangelism.

Okay, here’s the next one I want to add for us tonight here. It’s a few. And the first one is this. There comes for every person a point of no return. There comes for every person a point of no return, if so chosen. And look at verse 20 and you’ll see what I mean. It says, The rest of mankind who were not killed by these plagues did not repent of the works of God. Nor did they give up their hands, nor give up worshipping demons and idols of gold and silver and bronze and stone and wood, which cannot see or hear or walk. Nor did they repent of their murders or their sorceries or their sexual immorality or their thefts. In other words, it didn’t even matter how bad both of those plagues were. People still said at this point, no to God. It wasn’t lost on anyone that this was from God. Yet you have people who are so hard-hearted, that they’re, regardless of the pain and suffering that it costs them, they’re still saying no to God. And hopefully what that works in you is a realization that you and I need to live to be tender to the Spirit. It’s no small thing when the Spirit convicts you of sin and you push Him off. It’s no small thing, friends, when we don’t take sin serious in our lives. So what’s the Apostle Paul say? He constantly says, test yourself. Test yourself that you’re in the faith. So do I have fruit in my life that’s telling me I’m actually responding to the Holy Spirit? I’m responding because I desire God. I desire to do right. I’m experiencing conviction. Playing games with sin, playing games with God is fatal. And I think sometimes we get this thought, we talked about it last week in terms of progressive Christianity, like, you know, you know, can’t God just kind of forgive everybody? And I think there’s that notion kind of today in progressive Christianity, like God’s just going to kind of forgive everyone. And, you know, that’s not really fair to send people to hell and to judge people like this. And I want you to remember this. God never gives anyone anything other than what they want. I think we imagine sometimes that people in hell are like, oh, I can’t believe I missed it. If only I had said yes to Jesus. But that’s not the case. Because what are you seeing here in Revelation when these people are being pressed by God with great suffering to turn and to change? And they’re not willing to. So you and I can never take it for granted when the Holy Spirit knocks on the door of our heart for conversion or continually knocks on the door of our heart for sanctification. It’s a dangerous thing to constantly push off God. And this is why the Scriptures talks about the heart that’s seared. It talks about those who know the faith. They’ve heard of it, but they push it away. And Hebrews has a lot to talk about. There comes a place for some people, if you say no to God enough, where the Holy Spirit just kind of lets you alone and your heart becomes calloused and you’re seared from hearing the voice of God at all. That’s terrifying, isn’t it? And what it should do, again, is ask us to say, Lord, where in my heart am I calloused and not listening to your voice? Here’s the second implication. Wickedness has to be punished if God is good. If God is good, it has to be punished. You and I don’t have a problem when we turn on the TV and someone is being thrown in jail for some serious, horrible crime, whatever it may be. None of us think, well, that murderer should get to walk. Let him just go out in society and do whatever he does. Like, no, because you like living in a just society, don’t you? I think you do. Man, I like living in a just society.

You know, we don’t always like it when we get tickets and small things like that, but it’s right. And yet we’re imperfect people with imperfect laws. How much more should God, how much more should God execute justice in His universe? And He’s perfect. When you and I don’t want justice for wicked, we’re essentially asking God, hey, God, be less than holy. God, be less than. Perfect. Hey, God, couldn’t you do something crooked and just kind of sweep everybody’s sins under the rug? Well, God can’t do that because He hates wickedness, the Scriptures tell us. So the fact that there is anything, the fact that there’s anything past the first three chapters of Genesis is amazing. It’s not, God, how could you send people to hell who reject you? Lord, how could you give anybody at all a chance past Adam and Eve to respond to your grace and mercy and receive salvation?

Here’s the third implication. God is in control no matter how evil the times become. You saw in verse four that those locusts, demon, scorpion, human face things, they weren’t allowed to harm the grass or vegetation. In verse 15, we saw, that the angels, they were kept at the river Euphrates, it says, for this very time. So evil is not a free agent that can do whatever it wants to do. Evil works under the hand of the Lord for God’s purposes. I mean, I was watching someone recently who thought, that’s just a disgusting thought that God could ever allow evil or use evil in believers’ lives. Yet we look at Job, don’t we? And what does the Lord say to Job? He says, you can do this and this to Job and go no further. God has holy and good purposes for why he allows evil to play out in our lives. When you think about Jesus with Pilate, and Pilate says, like, hey, don’t you care that they’re trying to, don’t you want to like, you know, I have the authority to like, you know, let you go. And Jesus says, you only have the authority you have because my father gave it to you. Friends, everything is under God’s thumb. Nothing. Nothing takes God by surprise. Nothing isn’t planned by God. Yes, God writes himself into the story and he truly interacts with us, but it’s not a surprise to him. He’s not making it up. He doesn’t respond as if he didn’t know. And that should give you and I all peace, all joy, all hope when we see the world falling apart. God, you are in control. And I don’t understand why you let things that happen in my own life. I don’t understand why you let things happen on a global scale the way that you do. But I know you’re doing it for your own good purposes. And so I can have peace and joy and hope knowing that. And because of that, that means you and I can live obediently, knowing that our obedience to the Lord, even in the hardest place, it will end in glory and it will end in victory.

And here’s the fourth implication from the Bible. Um, these two woes, um, the spiritual realm is very real. And you and I as 21st century people, we are woefully dull to it. You and I are woefully dull to the spiritual realm. Um, you know, Satan and, and evil works tirelessly to deceive you, to corrupt you. To misguide you, to discourage you, to attack you. And I think we as the 21st century church today are busy, aren’t we? We’re distracted.

We’re doing this. We’re doing our jobs. We’re doing this. We’re obsessed with, you know, life on social media and the internet. Today in the 20th and 21st century, we’re so rationalistic where, you know, we want everything to make good sense. And we want to see hard evidence. We want to see hard evidence about things. And we love to say things like logic. And, you know, we love to use our own minds to come to conclusions. We love technology with all the ways it’s empowered us or gives us the illusion of control, right? That we can do all these things past centuries haven’t done. Modern medicine, not a bad thing, but modern medicine, it makes us feel like we’re in control. We’ve, we’ve harnessed certain evils. We’ve harnessed certain sicknesses and it’s left us less. I’m aware of the spiritual reality that’s happening around us. That’s affecting our everyday lives. It’s why Paul says your war. Is it with flesh and blood? No. What Paul says it’s with evil. It’s with demonic forces. This is why Paul says you’ve got to be armed. So it’s such a good trick of the devil to keep you thinking about the physical realm, being a busy body, worrying about this, that and the other and failing to do the thing we should be doing daily. And that’s arm ourselves spiritually.

Prayer. This comes down to prayer so much and knowing God’s word. Friends, it’s in your distraction that you stop believing you need God. You stop realizing his power and his goodness. And it’s in prayer and it’s in being armed with the scriptures and the power of God that you’re able to be kept from evil.

So.

All of these trumpets from these terrible plagues we looked at last week to these fifth and sixth trumpets that are woes and they’re unimaginable and all the ways I could try to talk about it and conjure up these images and get you real scared and freaked out like some crazy sci-fi movie. I couldn’t do that if I wanted to. We just need to let those pictures and those images just kind of hang there in front of us and say this is wickedness. This is. Evil. This is God letting darkness come upon the earth, hopefully to turn some to repentance. Yet it seems like it comes at a time where the spirit’s not at work, at least not at work the way he is now.

So, friends, we we need to now be about the business of the kingdom. We need to both fortify ourselves in Christ. And we need to be proclaiming Christ to the nations before such a horrible, dreadful end comes. And there is no reverse button and there is no do over. I mean, if you’re like reading all of those trumpets and there’s like, OK, Chad, you got all these implications about trusting God and don’t get caught up on this and don’t do this and that. And you feel like you’re carrying like 15 things in your hands. It’s like, oh, goodness. Like, I don’t know. I don’t know. This is all scary. How can I be sure I’ll be kept? I think we just need to rest. In this truth here, I just leave us with this. He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world. I think that’s what we do with those trumpets. We just say, man, God is good that if I just trust in his son, Jesus, I will be kept to the very end. So let’s look to Jesus, trust in him, live for him, proclaim Christ to the nations. Amen. All right. Let’s pray together. Lord, we.

Just kind of look at your word and we see, Lord, things certainly in Revelation that are beyond us. And Lord, we can’t fully grasp. And there are things that we don’t know what they mean.

But God, we just pray that we would be obedient.

To take it serious, obedient to live. To live God, to be found approved on that day and not want. God, that we wouldn’t even by the skin of our teeth, just make it. But Lord, we pray that we would cross the finish line, whether you come back in our time or Lord, we go home to be with you. Lord, help us to finish well and just to trust your grace and to know that evil has no power over us. And we are kept in your son, Jesus. And we thank you for the peace and the security. That only he can give. And we pray that in his name. Amen.