“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. 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. 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. 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, their hair like women’s hair, and their teeth like lions’ 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. 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. The first woe has passed; behold, two woes are still to come.”

There was a time when I had a different relationship with Scripture that Revelation read somewhat uniformly to me. We have the introduction, the seven churches, then some bad things start happening, that lasts for basically the whole book, and then at the end, judgment and, for the Christians, heaven. I lacked nuance and appreciation for the gravity and meaning of the book, but it was also a time when Revelation scared me quite a lot, and it would be fair to say that I was reading it at arm’s length. What a careful and more patient look shows us is that, as in all things, the hand of God is perfectly measured. His judgment, and the accompanying wrath does not behave or function like the wrath of men does – as is clarified in James 1:19–20,

“Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.”

The judgment that unfolds is not an all at once sort of thing, but progresses incrementally. We watched during the first four seals as the earth is essentially turned back over to itself, how human civilization shreds itself to pieces in the absence of God. The sixth seal, and the first four trumpets showed brutal and increasingly worse natural disasters, again, beyond anything the world has ever seen, as creation spirals in this destabilizing process of being unmade. The thing is, even though these events occur on an unprecedented scale, and even though in Revelation 6:16 we saw the people of the earth acknowledge in their despair that it was God’s wrath that had brought these events upon them, we can still imagine them through our natural knowledge of the world, especially when people downplay what they’re reading. The world has experienced war and famine, eclipses and meteor showers, volcanic eruptions and spoiled water sources, and so the human mind may take the events we’ve read of and water them down through the filter of what is known. It’s extreme, it’s terrible, but it’s imaginable. That stops being the case at the sounding of the fifth trumpet – as the scale of God’s judgment moves up another notch, and the degree of suffering goes from something that has never been seen before, to something that is beyond imagining within the natural framework of our world. As we look at today’s passage we’ll study the literal and symbolic implications of a nightmare unleashed upon the earth, and see how even through these disastrous circumstances, God remains righteous and true, and that His love and provision for His people remains steadfast.

The Hope of Christ in the Midst of Suffering

1. Opening the Doors of Suffering

Immediately after the trumpet is blown, John writes that he sees a star that has already fallen from heaven, present on the earth. This is something we touched on, but didn’t delve into last week when we saw the star called Wormwood turn a third of the earth’s fresh water into bitter poison. This star has a name, even after its fallen to the earth, it’s addressed in the present tense, and something we sometimes see in Scripture are angels associated or identified with stars, as with today’s passage or even something like Job 38:4–7,

“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements—surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone, when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”

Bearing these things in mind, it seems entirely possible that the “star” called Wormwood is actually an angel, or more likely, being a fallen star, some sort of demonic force. I didn’t want to spend too much time on this with it being mostly speculative, but it’s relevant as we approach today’s passage because we’re explicitly told that this star, later given the name Abaddon or Apollyon (both of which translate as “destruction” or “destroyer”) is an angel. John doesn’t witness this star fall, but notes that it, in the past tense, was already fallen. We discussed the matter with the four horsemen of whether or not these were divine agents of good carrying out judgment, or forces of darkness that were simply no longer restrained, and it makes sense to ask the same question of this angel who comes forward with the fifth trumpet. As with the four horsemen, I believe the context (this figure being specified as a fallen angel) points to him being evil in nature, a force that is not of God, but of the world, unleashed upon the world. This angel, called Destroyer, is given a key – a key that is immediately put to use. This passage deals heavily with the locusts, and with all the disturbing imagery and absolute chaos they bring to bear, it can be easy to breeze past this fallen angel and the pit which he opens, but it’s important that we take a moment and address the bottomless pit of the abyss that has been opened. Outside of Revelation, we see the word used for “bottomless pit,” which translates as “abyss” only two other times in the New Testament, and these two usages give us greater insight and perspective into the terror that is being unsealed. Once is in Luke 8:30–31 as Jesus addresses the Demoniac of the Gerasenes,

“Jesus then asked him, ‘What is your name?’ And he said, ‘Legion,’ for many demons had entered him. And they begged him not to command them to depart into the abyss.”

The other time we see it is when Paul writes in Romans 10:6–9,

“But the righteousness based on faith says, ‘Do not say in your heart, “Who will ascend into heaven?”’ (that is, to bring Christ down) ‘or “Who will descend into the abyss?”’ (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead). But what does it say? ‘The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart’ (that is, the word of faith that we proclaim); because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”

The Luke passage is fairly straightforward, and the Romans passage shows us that Christ is not far away where we have to sort out how we can reach Him – God has given His Son down from heaven, and God has raised Him from the dead – but, the use of “abyss” communicates what we’re trying to understand from today’s passage. This isn’t just a deep pit, it’s literally bottomless in a way that we by our known metrics of space and time can’t comprehend. This is an opening to the door of death, the unsealing of a realm of infinite darkness, the banishing place of demons. Again, what has happened up to this point, while catastrophic beyond anything ever seen, could, in theory, fit inside the box of our perceived reality with a few willfully ignored points – this bucks that. We’ve watched as the world is unmade, but now we’re seeing the veil between worlds, the fabric of reality itself twist and fray. Paul writes in Ephesians 6:12,

“For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”

This remains the case, this is still a battle of cosmic powers, of dark, spiritual forces, but no longer do they remain entirely obscured from human sight. As this bottomless void is thrown open, the first thing we see is that its darkness is not contained. The world, which has had issues with light under the judgments up to this point, is cast into further darkness in the obscuring smoke of the pit. It is as if the doors of Hades have been opened upon the world that we might again, and with greater intensity, suffer under the weight of that which we have sought after in the actions of our flesh. And as the darkness bleeds forth from this pit with no end, as the smoke of its wickedness obscures air and sky, horrors come forth from the darkness and descend upon those who remain on the earth.

2. Standing in the Swarm of Suffering

“Then from the smoke came locusts on the earth, and they were given power like the power of scorpions of the earth. 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.”

An interesting question to consider here is, who remains on the earth right now? I tried to ballpark some numbers, but we’re not told fatality rates with every event, and there are so many variables that it’s impossible to determine, but based on everything that’s unfolded it seems reasonable to estimate that our current global population of 8.2 billion could have been reduced by more than half. We know that the 144,000 who have been sealed remain, and that there are others who are now being tortured by the swarm that has emerged from the unsealed abyss, but who makes up these suffering people? Upon initial consideration, it seemed strange to me to imagine Christians present and suffering under the locusts. I can square up Christians dying in the previous events, largely because even in our pre-tribulation world today Christians suffer – we get into car accidents, we get cancer, we get fired from our jobs, we’re robbed, our houses burn down – there are a multitude of ways in which we are afflicted by worldly troubles. Redemption in Christ does not mean that we get a reprieve from the pain and turmoil that comes with a fallen world, it simply means that we wear our suffering differently – it does not mean the same thing for us to suffer as it does for someone who is estranged from Christ. And so while tragic, I can wrap my mind around us dying in the earlier disasters of the tribulation in a way that is more difficult for me to do with the locusts. There are so many theories around the timing of the second coming of Christ, around the form and function of what is commonly called “the Rapture.” If you hold to a pre-tribulation view, then you don’t believe there are any believers in Christ still present besides the 144,000 and any who have converted since the tribulation started. I’m not personally convinced on the pre-tribulation rapture (I haven’t landed in one particular camp on the matter), and so I wondered if there was another way that we may be spared the torture of the locusts. There are those who hold the view that the 144,000 is a symbolic number that actually represents all of God’s followers, and so we would all be spared the trial by virtue of our seals. I have landed in a camp on this matter, and I’m in firm disagreement with the idea that this number is symbolic of all Christians. Firstly, when a number is beyond counting, Scripture typically identifies it that way – as many as the grains of sand on the seashore, as many as the stars in the sky, or we’re simply told as we were with the multitude in Revelation 7:9, it was a group so large that no one could number them. To give the specific number of 144,000 to represent all of Christianity, and then immediately follow up with, “Oh, but this number of people coming out of the tribulation? We can’t give you anything for that.” Also, and I mentioned this when we were in Revelation 7, the 144,000 are described again and part of this in Revelation 14:4 states,

“It is these who have not defiled themselves with women, for they are virgins…”

So, unless all Christianity is somehow metaphorically represented by 144,000 male virgins, who by all indication, are Jewish, then it seems we have to take the number literally – at the time that the fifth trumpet sounds and the bottomless pit is opened, there are 144,000 sealed followers of Christ on earth who cannot be touched by the locusts, and everyone else is fair game. But as I’ve said, initially I still had a hard time squaring this with God’s treatment of His people. Allowing those who are saved in Him to be tortured by these dark, demonic forces seemed fundamentally different than allowing us to die in the previous events. But after prayerfully considering this and really turning it over in my mind, I found that I actually can square it up with God’s nature, His provision, and our overall condition in Him – but before arriving at this, I did have another theory. We see the 144,000 in Revelation 7, and immediately afterward we see the multitude in white. One of the elders says to John in verse Revelation 7:14,

“… These are the ones coming out of the great tribulation. They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.”

It occurred to me – what if this multitude were all the Christians in the world besides the 144,000, not raptured, but martyred? What if the believers still on earth that we see referenced for the remainder of Revelation were just the 144,000 and anyone who had converted after this mass martyring? I’ll say, I don’t think it’s impossible, but I also don’t think it’s likely. The Scripture (unless I’m missing something) doesn’t dismiss the possibility, but neither does it affirm it, and it seems like too big of a stretch to set too much store in this being the case. Rather than hang everything on a mass martyring that isn’t explicitly stated, it seems far better and more sensible to take what the text says at face value, and look to understand God’s hand in what is unfolding. The question we have to ask ourselves is, are Christians immune to, or spared from suffering? And we’ve already answered this, because no, we most certainly are not. Jesus tells the disciples in John 16:32–33,

“Behold, the hour is coming, indeed it has come, when you will be scattered, each to his own home, and will leave me alone. Yet I am not alone, for the Father is with me. I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.”

And we see Him go on to pray immediately after this during the High Priestly Prayer in John 17:10–17,

“All mine are yours, and yours are mine, and I am glorified in them. And I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, keep them in your name, which you have given me, that they may be one, even as we are one. While I was with them, I kept them in your name, which you have given me. I have guarded them, and not one of them has been lost except the son of destruction, that the Scripture might be fulfilled. But now I am coming to you, and these things I speak in the world, that they may have my joy fulfilled in themselves. I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.”

We are not removed from suffering, but we suffer differently than the world does. Paul writes in Romans 5:1–5,

“Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”

And so we have to take these things all together. Does it seem evident that there will be Christians on earth at the sounding of the fifth trumpet who are not sealed in the manner of the 144,000? Yes. Does it seem that these Christians will be beset by the locust as the other people of the world will? Yes. Do I imagine that the sting of one of these creatures from the abyss has the same effect on a Christian as it does on someone who is in active rebellion against God? No, I do not. Because suffering itself is not the same in the heart and mind of one who is washed in the blood of the Lamb as it is to one who is still mired in their rebellion and sin. It can’t be exactly the same, because the soil that the seeds of suffering are being scattered on isn’t the same. The sting of the locust is compared to a scorpion, and in looking into the Mediterranean region where John would have lived and ministered, I found four fairly common species. For three of them, their stings range from something comparable to a bee sting, feelings of numbness, swelling, itching, burning, intense, localized pain, and, in the case of the Deathstalker scorpion (they did not play around with that name), extreme pain and possibly death in vulnerable individuals. Suffice it to say, none of them tickle. This is a lasting, caustic, burning pain. But it also begs the question, are we talking about physical suffering from the literal presence of this infernal swarm, or are we talking about spiritual suffering under the weight of a demonic horde? Either way, while I don’t foresee it being a particularly enjoyable experience, the Christian is prepared, equipped, armored in a way that the unsaved person is not. Do not forget, at any point the first words of Revelation 1:1,

“The revelation of Jesus Christ…”
This book is about Jesus – the guidance, the wrath, the justice, the hope, the judgment, the eternal security, and glory, and wonder found in the Lamb of God. We stand with Him, and He as our Good Shepherd stands with us. So as you read of the torment and the agony and those begging for and seeking death that will not come to them, do not be afraid. I cannot promise you that, should we be the ones to endure that day, it will be easy, but I can promise that it will be well, as all things in Him are.

3. Maintaining Hope in Suffering

It’s interesting to note that in Exodus, after the seventh plague of hail and fire destroys everything left out in the open – from men and animals, to crops and trees – we see the locusts in the eighth plague descend upon Egypt to devour everything that the hail left behind. There is now a repeat on a grander scale here in Revelation, after the first four trumpets have left a third of the world in desolation, these locusts come to terrorize what remains of the people. But I did wonder as I read this, why does John call these things locusts? I’m not saying he’s wrong, but read the description – Golden crowns, human faces, women’s hair, lion’s teeth, iron breastplates, and their wings making the sound of many chariots. They have tails and stings like scorpions, which are a key part of the pain and suffering they inflict. If someone described that to you and asked you to put a name to it, there’s absolutely no chance that you’d call it something that’s basically just a kind of grasshopper. So why locusts? Well, locusts under normal circumstances are mostly harmless – like I said, they’re part of the same species as grasshoppers. They eat all kinds of plant life, from grass and trees, to crops, but a few here and a few there aren’t going to make much impact. The problem is that they can sometimes swarm – literally billions of insects covering multiple square miles, each eating their own bodyweight in food each day, and they destroy every plant in sight. If the creatures that John sees emerge from the smoke of the abyss are immediately identified as locusts, despite their appearances, we can understand that this applies to their number and their function. There aren’t just a few here and a few there – these things are everywhere, tenaciously and vengefully pursuing the people of the earth and torturing them. We can also learn more about these locusts by breaking down the elements of their appearance.

“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, their hair like women’s hair, and their teeth like lions’ 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.”

To work feature by feature, the imagery of horses prepared for battle, along with the description of a breastplate sets the preparedness of these creatures vastly apart from an ordinary swarm of insects. The golden crown suggests very real authority – this world is truly at the mercy of this onslaught of locusts. The human face implies a knowledge of their prey. Consider this, after the fall, Genesis 3:7 says,

“Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.”

What’s more, when Adam and Eve hear God walking through the garden they hide, and Adam confesses that this is because he was afraid because he was naked. But why did it matter? The sin mattered, the transgression against God mattered, that’s for sure, but there were two people on the planet, and up to this point you’ve had a literal one on one relationship with God – why on earth does it matter if you’re naked? How does having knowledge of good and evil have anything to do with this? To flesh out an idea I learned from Dr. Jordan Peterson – to have this knowledge of good and evil and to be naked, vulnerable, exposed, means that you know the things that can hurt you. If you understand the things that can hurt you, then you have an understanding of what you can do to hurt others. Your knowledge of your own vulnerability can immediately be twisted for evil. Cats kill mice, dogs kill squirrels, mountain lions and wolves kill deer, and polar bears and great white sharks have absolutely zero concern for the cuteness of baby seals – and none of it’s personal. None of it’s sadistic, premeditated, or done for anything beyond the natural functions of these animals. Humans can’t make this claim, and I think this is what we see revealed in the human faces of the locusts. Their terrorizing isn’t an impersonal, detached thing – rather it’s highly personal. They’re not just taking shots in the dark, stinging what they may, be it flesh or spirit, and see what happens, but with a particular, vindictive accuracy they terrorize mankind. The fact that they have hair like a woman’s is frankly the thing I find most disturbing about the locusts, and I know that’s saying something. It seems fair to say that these locusts are ugly, there’s nothing described about them that sounds particularly eye-catching, but a woman’s hair is often seen as a thing of beauty. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 11:14–15

“Does not nature itself teach you that if a man wears long hair it is a disgrace for him, but if a woman has long hair, it is her glory? For her hair is given to her for a covering.”

Now, not to delve too deeply into the 1 Corinthians passage, which deals with head coverings (a subject I’m not trying to veer off into), but this clearly shows that a woman’s hair has an attractive quality to it. It’s strange, and more than a little off-putting that in the midst of everything that they’ve got going on, they have a feature that could be considered alluring or appealing, and this only adds to their disturbing and ultimately horrifying description. Lastly there’s this mention of their wings sounding like chariots in battle, which underpins the qualities and nature described by the being called locusts to begin with. We see the association, particularly in the Old Testament where chariots are equated with fearful military power. Deuteronomy 20:1 says,

“When you go out to war against your enemies, and see horses and chariots and an army larger than your own, you shall not be afraid of them, for the LORD your God is with you, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.”

In Isaiah 37:23–24, Isaiah prophesies against Sennacherib, the king of Assyria, saying,

“‘Whom have you mocked and reviled? Against whom have you raised your voice and lifted your eyes to the heights? Against the Holy One of Israel! By your servants you have mocked the Lord, and you have said, With my many chariots I have gone up the heights of the mountains, to the far recesses of Lebanon, to cut down its tallest cedars, its choicest cypresses, to come to its remotest height, its most fruitful forest.”

As these passages show, chariots were seen as mighty vehicles of war – and yet they were nothing to those who were held by the Living God. God is the only source of strength, the only hope, but we see a world that has hated and rebelled against God, and this swarm of locusts, these demons from the bottomless pit have been unleashed upon a world that has courted disaster. This sound that comes from the wings of the locusts puts a bow on everything that has been pieced together so far – these are creatures of complete domination, they’re powerful, prepared for battle, and to wage an incredibly one-sided war against mankind. And there’s nothing that those who remain upon the earth can do, their only recourse under the crushing weight of this swarm is to suffer – suffer and not die. The seals and the first four trumpets all have a place where they can be discerned within the natural order – their destruction is unprecedented, but we can still see how they fit within some degree of worldly understanding. The locusts, unsealed from the abyss, do not abide by the same standard. This is a swarm like nothing the world has ever seen, like nothing that they’ve ever even imagined as true, and they are enveloped by it as God’s wrath and judgment begins to come to bear against them in the first woe.

“They have tails and stings like scorpions, and their power to hurt people for five months is in their tails.”

We’ve covered a number of subjects in this outline – we’ve talked about locusts (the regular kind), we’ve talked about scorpions – it seems only fitting that while we’re covering these varied topics, we talk about helicopters. See, there are people who, like we talked about last week, will try to reduce down and humanize what John is describing, and one way this is done with this particular passage, and the locusts is with helicopters. They’ll take these descriptors and piece them together and say, “See, John was seeing helicopters, this was a first century man, witnessing the vessels of modern warfare and he was interpreting them based around what he knew, and so – helicopters.” Now, if you ascribe to what I’ll call the “helicopter theory,” please know that what I say is in no way meant to offend you, but this is a profoundly stupid idea. Again, just to rehash the list – golden crowns, human faces, women’s hair, lion’s teeth, iron breastplates, and their wings making the sound of many chariots – and some genius really read that and said, “helicopters”? I have an appreciation for natural observation where it occurs in Scripture, but these locusts aren’t natural. Also, just to shoot another logistical hole in that theory, how does a helicopter’s power to harm lie in its tail? No, these locusts are not something that we can force into the bounds of conventional understanding, and it belittles the severity of God’s condemnation upon the world to water this supernatural event down to fit as something within the natural order. An Apache helicopter can carry up to sixteen Hellfire missiles, and has an undermounted, 30mm chain gun that can fire north of six hundred rounds per minute and none of that comes from the tail. I don’t know exactly how physically versus spiritually present these locusts are, I don’t know how much they war on the body versus the mind and spirit, but what I do know, without doubt or hesitation, is that John is not talking about helicopters.

“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. The first woe has passed; behold, two woes are still to come.”

The word “Apollyon,” only appears this once in the Greek of the New Testament, however “Abaddon,” is seen several times in the Old Testament in a context that adds to what we see here. In Job 26:5–6, Job states,

“The dead tremble under the waters and their inhabitants. Sheol is naked before God, and Abaddon has no covering.”

Psalm 88:10–12 laments and asks of God,

“Do you work wonders for the dead? Do the departed rise up to praise you? Is your steadfast love declared in the grave, or your faithfulness in Abaddon? Are your wonders known in the darkness, or your righteousness in the land of forgetfulness?”

Proverbs 15:11 tells us,

“Sheol and Abaddon lie open before the LORD; how much more the hearts of the children of man!”

Similarly to the qualities we saw from the abyss itself, Abaddon describes a place of complete darkness and mystery, a shrouded place of death. While the same word isn’t used, we could think of this comparably to the valley of deep darkness, the valley of the shadow of death that is referenced in Psalm 23. When God stands with us, when He carries us, when He is by our side as our Shepherd and His Light fills us, we have no fear in this place. But this is not the condition of the world at large – we see humanity in a state where the caustic, broken nature of sin rages across the world which sits in disarray. These things are no mystery before God – death, Sheol, Hades, the abyss, there is no gloom or darkness that can hide anything from His eye. But for the world? For those who have mocked, and raged, and hated the Light? There is no hope for them in the darkness, no hope for them in their suffering and torment without repentance. What we see for the fallen is a glimpse of hell – but you don’t have to wait for the fifth trumpet to witness that. Look into the heart of anyone who hates God, look into the eyes of someone who is proud and flagrant in their rebellion and you can see it – the downward trajectory of the one who is fallen, and without repentance, will be eternally falling. The thing is, there’s still time – today there’s still time, and where we see the world, crushed under the fifth trumpet, there’s still time. But it’s waning, it’s dwindling, it is without question drawing to a close. And for the one who hates the Light, for those who covet and lust after darkness, the despair, the stinging, aching, deadly suffering – the suffering where death becomes a sweet and desirable alternative – stretches out endlessly.

“The first woe has passed; behold, two woes are still to come.”

The Israelites had a rough time in the wilderness, entirely because of their own stiff necks, but still. The whole golden calf thing is kind of a permanent black eye, Korah’s rebellion didn’t end so well for Korah, and when the people faithlessly and fearfully balked at entering the Promised Land, an entire generation, save for Joshua and Caleb, were cursed to die in the wilderness. After the death of Moses, God speaks to Joshua and tasks him to lead the people courageously into the Promised Land, making promises to His servant. In Joshua 1:9 God ends His commission by saying,

“Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be frightened, and do not be dismayed, for the LORD your God is with you wherever you go.”

Our God does not abandon His children, our God does not forsake those He has called His own. And this is the knowledge that we have to hold as we read about the coming days of suffering and destruction. If the pre-tribulation rapture turns out to be the way things go then, congratulations, no locusts for you. But don’t think for a moment that you’re unaffected, or that the whole thing can be disregarded. Firstly every act of the hand of God deserves acknowledgement and reverence. But also consider that there are people who come to Christ during the tribulation – there are brothers and sisters added to our family, whether we remain here or not. And so the calamity poured out on the world needs to be seen and understood, and the hope that we know in Christ alone needs to shine like a beacon, knowing that whenever our Lord may return for His people, He is coming back for us, we are not abandoned or forsaken, and in Him there is no peril that cannot be withstood.

Pastor Chris’ sermon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1AzSUn_xNw