1 And the fifth angel blew his trumpet, and I saw a star fallen from heaven to earth, and he was given the key to the shaft of the bottomless pit. 2 He opened the shaft of the bottomless pit (abyss), 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. 3 Then from the smoke came locusts on the earth, and they were given power like the power of scorpions of the earth. 4 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.
(https://sermons.logos.com/sermons/1052156-revelation-9) The fifth trumpet is blown and John sees a star fall from heaven, I did not read one commentator that believed that this a literal star, but a person, angel, or Satan the star referring to a high or prominent person like we call athletes and actors stars today. One historicist view is that this star is Mohammed, who was of princely pedigree but the previous generation of his family had lost its rule, and the locust plague he releases is the Saracens or Muslim Arabs and their campaigns against the Eastern Roman Empire. There was also mention that the Hebrew word for locust and Arab are very similar in sound, arbeh of the locusts, and arbi of an Arab. Unlike actual locust this plague was commanded not to harm the grass and all green things growing on the earth, this is in striking parallel to Mohammed’s instructions in the Koran not to destroy the palm trees, nor any fields of corn and not to cut down any fruit trees. The Saracens were not able to kill papal Rome as a political body but did torment them “for a while”. The five months that are given to the “locust” are seen as five prophetic months of 30 days each for a total of 150 days, if you take each day as a year this very closely lines up with time Mohammed adopted the policy of making converts by the sword in AD 612 to the time when the ceased from their ravages and moved their capital to Bagdad in AD 763. Quick math is 151 years but the months were not listed so it may be 150 and a few months. Even some of the pre-millennial commentators agree that this interpretation is well founded.
Mohammed claimed to start the religion of Islam through a prophetic angel. He claimed the angel was Gabriel, the archangel. We see here the angel was a demon from the abyss, and its prophecy to Mohammed clouded the truth like heavy smoke from a furnace. The sun, Mohammed the prophet and political leader of Islam, inspired a holy war - jihad - that spanned the middle east like an infestation of locusts, going to Egypt, Syria, and north into Spain. They were to inflict pain on individuals to get them to convert to Islam, not go to battle to take over a nation’s government.
history.net https://www.historynet.com/muhammad-the-warrior-prophet/ - Muhammad’s belief in Islam and his own role as the “Messenger of God” revolutionized Arabian warfare and resulted in the creation of the ancient world’s first army motivated by a coherent system of ideological belief. The ideology of holy war (jihad) and martyrdom (shahada) for the faith was transmitted to the West during the wars between Muslims and Christians in Spain and France, where it changed traditional Christian pacifistic thinking on war, brought into being a coterie of Christian warrior saints, and provided the Catholic Church with its ideological justification for the Crusades. Ideology—whether religious or secular—has remained a primary component of military ventures ever since…Muhammad did not seek the defeat of a foreign enemy or invader; rather, he sought to replace the existing Arabian social order with a new one based upon a radically different ideological worldview.
5 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.
6 And in those days people will seek death and will not find it. They will long to die, but death will flee from them.
The torment of a scorpion causes much pain, but not death. The Mohammedans were not allowed to eradicate the apostate Christians. They gave them a choice, convert, be killed, or be a second-class citizen & pay tribute. Many chose not to seek death but became subservient to the Muslims, causing pain to their conscious and walk with God.
7 In appearance the locusts were like horses prepared for battle: on their heads were what looked like crowns of gold; their faces were like human faces (faces like men), 8 their hair like women’s hair, and their teeth like lions’ teeth; 9 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. 10 They have tails and stings like scorpions, and their power to hurt people for five months is in their tails.
biblehub.com Barnes commentary: in that most characteristic of Arab poems, Antar, a poem written in the time of Muhammed's childhood, we find the moustache, and the beard, and the long flowing hair on the shoulder, and the turban, all specified as characteristic of the Arabians: "He adjusted himself properly, twisted his whiskers, and folded up his hair under his turban, drawing it from off his shoulders," vol. i. p. 340. "His hair flowed down on his shoulders.
https://byzantinemilitary.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-arab-conquest-of-cyprus.html: For 700 years in the east the Romans had fought against the organized conventional armies of the Persian Empire. The final great contest between Rome and Persian lasted from 602 to 628 AD. The Romans were victorious but both empires were shattered politically and economically.
Because of the endless warfare in the east, Persians were always on the minds of Rome. The Arabs, if they were thought of at all, were considered bandits and raiders. In September of 629 the newly created Muslim armies of Arabia first appeared in battle against Rome just to the east of the Jordan River. In 632 Saint Maximos the Confessor wrote a contemporary reference to the barbarian ravages on the frontier that must have been about the Arabs:
"What more unfortunate circumstances could there be here than these that hold the inhabited world in their grip? . . . What could be more lamentable and more terrible to those upon whom them fell? To see how a people, coming from the desert and barbaric, run through the land that is not theirs, as if it were their own; how they, who seem only to have simple human features, lay waste our sweet and organized country with their wild untamed beasts." Heraclius, Emperor of Byzntium - Walker Kaegi
From 629 to 637 saw the Muslim Arab conquest of Palaestina Prima and Syria. Egypt fell in the 640s. In 647 the Muslims started their march across Byzantine North Africa to Carthage. These were huge changes to the Empire in a short 20 year span of time.
11 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. 12The first woe has passed; behold, two woes are still to come.
In Islam, "Allah the Destroyer" is often associated with the name "Al-Mumeet" which translates to "The Inflictor of Death" or "The Bringer of Death."
God used the most unlikely of people to conquer the Persians and the Eastern Roman Empire. In 659 a peace treaty was signed between the Byzantine Empire (Eastern Roman Empire) and Rashishun Caliphate. Caliphate is the name given to an Islamic leader.
2nd Woe
13 Then the sixth angel blew his trumpet, and I heard a voice from the four horns of the golden altar before God, 14 saying to the sixth angel who had the trumpet, “Release the four angels who are bound at the great river Euphrates.” 15 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. 16 The number of mounted troops was twice ten thousand times ten thousand; I heard their number.
(4thewordofgod.com/revelation-9/) The Ottoman Empire under Malek Shaw meets the requirements of the text. Consider that it was divided among his four sons at his death. It was divided into four parts: 1) Persia, 2) Syria, 3) Asia Minor, and 4) India. (See Gibbon, 4, p. 169.) “Yet their progress was bounded by the Euphrates.” (Gibbon 6, p. 419) “Accompanied by his four brothers, he passed the Euphrates: the Turkish camp was soon seated in the neighborhood of Kutaieh in Phrygia; and his flying cavalry laid waste the country as far as the Hellingspont and the Black Sea.” (Gibbon, 6, p. 24) They marched out of Baghdad in 1057, crossed the river and the next century their conquest extended to the Hellingspont, and embraced all Turkey. Then came the mighty crusades. For a while, they beat back the Moslem power and recovered a portion of Turkey, between Europe and Asia. The contest lasted for two centuries. Europe weary of its fruitless struggle withdrew. The Turks reorganized and passed over into Europe. The eastern empire was shorn of all its territories and reduced to its city of Constantople.
In 1453 two hundred thousand Turks with cannons, battered down the walls. One hundred thousand of its citizens were slain upon her ramparts. The interval was 396 years. This rapacious, licentious, bloodthirsty, brutal power educated in their religion to believe that all unbelievers (they call anyone who is not a Mohammedan an unbeliever or infidel) were fit for death. Each Pasha is an absolute Lord in his own province. Their rule was intolerable.
17 And this is how I saw the horses in my vision and those who rode them: they wore breastplates the color of fire and of sapphire and of sulfur, and the heads of the horses were like lions’ heads, and fire and smoke and sulfur came out of their mouths. 18 By these three plagues a third of mankind was killed, by the fire and smoke and sulfur coming out of their mouths. 19 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 them they wound.
Elliott “Horae Apocalypticae” chap. 7, pg 508 - “From their first appearance the Ottomans have affected to wear warlike apparel of scarlet, blue and yellow: a descriptive trait the more marked from its contrast to the military appearance of Greeks, Franks or Saracens (Arabs) who were contemporary.”
“The myriads of Turkish horse overspread a frontier of six hundred miles from Taurus to Arzeroum, and the blood of one hundred and thirty thousand Christians was a grateful sacrifice to the Arabian prophet.” Decline and Fall, Gibbon, vol. 6, chap. 42, pg 245.
“From their first appearance the Ottomans have affected to wear warlike apparel of scarlet, blue and yellow: a descriptive trait the more marked from its contrast to the military appearance of Greeks, Franks or Saracens (Arabs) who were contemporary.” Elliott “Horae Apocalypticae” chap. 7, pg 508.
“The chemists of China or Europe had found, by casual or elaborate experiments, that a mixture of saltpetre, sulphur, and charcoal produces, with a spark of fire, a tremendous explosion. It was soon observed that, if the expansive force were compressed in a strong tube, a ball of stone or iron might be expelled with irresistible and destructive velocity.” Decline and Fall, vol. 7, chap. 65. pg 85.
The three plagues that killed were fire, smoke and sulfur/brimstone. The third of the empire of Rome (Byzantine) would fall at the hands of the Ottomans. The Byzantines declared themselves as Christian, and the Ottomans, as Muslims, saw it as their religious duty to conquer them. Here the word sulfur is used, and it refers to the use of guns and artillery. Guns were a new invention and the cannons were MASSIVE!! One was 27 feet long, and could hurl a 600 pound missile over a mile (invented in 1464). When they rode their horses while shooting their opponent, it would look as though the fire was coming out of the horse’s head. The horses also pulled the cannons, so this would be the power of the horses in their tails. Barnes offers a very detailed description of Chapter 9 as well, on biblehub.com.
20 The rest of mankind, who were not killed by these plagues, did not repent of the works of their hands nor give up worshiping demons and idols of gold and silver and bronze and stone and wood, which cannot see or hear or walk, 21nor did they repent of their murders or their sorceries or their sexual immorality or their thefts.
The rest of mankind here is Europe in this context, where they were persecuting true Christians under the guise of the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman church did not repent and follow the One True God and his son Jesus. The popes thought they were the vicar of Christ - (pope Innocent III 1198) which means the substitute of Christ. Followers of the Roman Church were to follow the pope, not the word of God. Mass was conducted in Latin so the common people couldn't understand the prayers. They prayed to the saints which is the same as praying to demonic entities. Saints and Mary cannot answer prayer, but demons can. They idolized gold, silver, stone & wood. They created an idea of purgatory so they could charge people money to get their departed loved ones into heaven, called the sale of indulgences. They confiscated the land of those they martyred in the name of God. Their churches are full of pagan symbolism, which is sexual immorality in the eyes of God. Google pagan symbols in the Catholic Church and have your eyes opened. The next two chapters deal directly with their exploits against true Christians.
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