(Revelation - Part 14): Invaders From Other Worlds — A.W. Tozer

The Fifth and Sixth Trumpets in Revelation

Let's look at it and just relax and sort of read it together. I'll read it and you'll follow along and watch me and listen, and we'll see what it says. The Holy Spirit is speaking through John, and he says,.

The fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth, and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit. And he opened the bottomless pit, and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace.

And the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit, and there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth. And unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power.

And it was commanded them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree, but only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads. And to them it was given that they should not kill them, but that they should be tormented five months.

And their torment was as the torment of a scorpion when he striketh a man. And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it, and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them. And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared unto battle, and on their heads were, as it were, crowns like gold, and their faces were as the faces of men.

And they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions. And they had breastplates as it were, breastplates of iron, and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle.

And they had tails like unto scorpions, and there were stings in their tails, and their power was to hurt men five months. And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue his name is Apollyon.

One woe is past, and behold, there comes two woes more hereafter. And the six angels sounded, and I heard a voice from the four horns of the golden altar which is before God, saying to the six angels which had the trumpet, Loose the four angels which are bound in the great river Euphrates.

And the four angels were loosed which were prepared for an hour, and a day, and a month, and a year, for to slay the third part of men. And the number of the army of the horsemen were two hundred thousand thousand, and I heard the number of them.

And thus I saw the horses in the vision, and them that sat on them having breastplates of fire, and of jacinth, and brimstone. And the heads of the horses were as the heads of lions, and out of their mouths issued fire, and smoke, and brimstone.

These three, by these three, was the third part of men killed by the fire, by the smoke, and by the brimstone which issued out of their mouths. For their power is in their mouth, and in their tails. For their tails were like unto serpents, and had a head been with them, they do hurt.

And the rest of the men which were not killed by these plagues, yet repented not of the works of their hands, that they should not worship devils, and idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone, and of wood, which neither can see, nor hear, nor walk.

Neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornications, nor of their thefts. So the method which I have been using in this series, I have not been attempting to interpret all the symbols which are here, nor force every passage to fit a pattern.

If you want to do that, you may do it, but if you do it at the terrible expense of spiritual dishonesty, or narrow your mind down to a place where you can never expand or grow, and the Lord cannot say anything to you any further.

But what I have been trying to do here is to identify the main points, to discover the underlying spiritual lessons, even though we don't know all the details, nor all the symbols and symbolisms which are found here.

Supernatural Invaders From Another World

For instance, the star which came down from heaven. There was a star in ancient times, in the fourteenth of Isaiah, that turned out to be Lucifer, the sun of the morning. Then there was a star in the first chapter of the book of Revelation, which turned out to be the angel of the church.

Seven stars, seven churches. So I don't know who this star is, but I know it came down from heaven unto the earth. There is something supernatural invading our natural world. There is the coming out of another world across the threshold into this world.

A stranger and one from another order of being coming into the world. He holds in his hand the key of the abyss, the bottomless pit. He opens it at the command of God, and there come out locusts upon the earth.

Those locusts, obviously, are not the kind of locusts the world has been used to seeing, because we can identify those locusts. We know how they are. They are about as large as a very large bee, quite large, maybe as large as two or three bees.

Large as a good-sized beagle. They fly and they eat things, but they don't bother people. But these locusts were different. They had power as scorpions, and the earth had power. I was out in California to a place called Alliance Redwoods, and they were starting a new Alliance convention, trying to make another sort of Glen Rock out of it, up in the woods.

They had no natural beauty such as this. It was up among the redwoods, as the name would imply, the sequoia trees. They had me there about the 2nd or 3rd year, and it was as primitive as the Ballym Valley.

I slept in a tent that was so cold at night I slept under four or five army blankets, and so hot in the daytime I couldn't stay in it. And they had other little interesting things around there, poison oak, rattlesnakes, and scorpions.

And they said, Don't ever go to bed at night without looking for a scorpion in your bed. That was comforting and soothing. So I had turned my bed down, and there was a little rat tail light burning dimly there, and I didn't know whether I could see a scorpion.

But I looked carefully and nothing looked like a scorpion, so I'd get in. They said, Don't put your shoe on in the morning without shaking it out, because one of our evangelists got up one morning and stuck his foot in and was stung by a scorpion.

They don't kill you, but they just make you whoosh that you were paralyzed for a little while and couldn't feel them. Now, those are scorpions, but I understand they are not as bad as the scorpions of the other side of the world, and particularly here in the area where John was talking, where he was an Asian miner.

These scorpions are few, that is, there are not very many of them. In fact, I didn't see a single scorpion during the time that I was there. I only looked for them. But locusts, when they come, come in thousands and hundreds of thousands, and all they do is eat green stuff.

They don't bother people. But if you were to give to a locust the power of a scorpion, you imagine what sort of thing you have on your hands. You have thousands, hundreds of thousands, multiplied hundreds of thousands of scorpions, every one of them with a sting like a scorpion.

But they were told not to hurt good men or the grass of the earth or any of the people that steal of God in their forage, showing that there were people and will be people who have God's seal in that day.

And to them was given, they shouldn't kill them, but they should be tormented. These wicked people should be tormented. And the torment is so terrible that in those days men shall seek death and shall not find it.

That is, they will try to commit suicide and can't. They want to die and can't die, and death will flee from them. He tells us the shape of the locust, and of course he is using figures of speech here, for the locusts were like horses.

Who ever heard of a locust like a horse? They prepared the battle, and their heads were crowns of gold, and their faces were as the faces of men. And they had hairs of the hair of women, and their teeth were the teeth of lions.

I never saw any creature like this, you never did. They came from somewhere and they came to this world. They are from somewhere and they are here and they will be here in that terrible day. And when they go they make the sound, they have wings and they make the sound like horses running to battle.

And they had tails like unto scorpions, and they hurt men five months. Now there is the first of what happens when the fifth angel sounded, and they had a king over them. The Old Testament says scorpions have no king, I mean locusts have no king.

But here they have a king. And in the Hebrew tongue he is called Abaddon, and in the Greek tongue he is named Apollyon. Now, my friends, I want you to note one thing, and it is that the earth, God is saying to us here, he is saying to us that there is another world that keeps an eye on this world.

He is saying to us that this earth is not self-explanatory nor self-sufficient. He is telling us that this earth in which we ride is here only as a shadow of the real world above. He is saying to us that this earth has a spiritual origin.

He is saying that there is in the earth a rebel race inhabiting a rebel province, that this is a rebel, separatist province pulled loose from the rest of God's world and kingdom, and that it is inhabited by a race that does not own allegiance to God, and that yet this race, this rebel province we call the earth, this Katanga, this that is broken off from the kingdom of God, it will settle with God sometime.

Now, we have here in the book of Revelation how this world is settling with God, how God is visiting and moving in past. The supernatural is moving in, and there are creatures of God from other worlds that are moving in on this world, and the prophets and the seers and the sages and the apostles have foreseen all this.

They have told us about the winding up of the world and the rebellious activities of the world, and they have told us that there will be a bringing back of the earth into the divine orbit again, that this world of ours which has been a rebellious province with all of its people in rebellion against the High King of Heaven, that this is coming back into the divine orbit again, and the unity of God's world is going to be restored and preserved, that there will be a sorting out of the good from the evil, that God will stop the evil infection and he will balance the scales of justice, and there will be, in order to bring this about, the opening of the seals, the sounding of the trumpet, and the pouring out of the vials of God's wrath.

These, as I've said over and over, are what God uses to shake the rebellious world loose from the earth, or the earth from the rebellious world of mankind. These will be from above and from below, these invaders.

Judgment and the Coming Invasion

The supernatural moves into the natural, and I'd like to say to you that when that happens, everybody will know where they came from, or at least that they came from another world. You know, over the last 25 years or 20 years, we've had this flying saucer deal, and it all depends upon your type of mentality, whether you believe in flying saucers or not.

I have too much of my salty mother in me to take flying saucers seriously. I heard a man interviewed on the radio that had seen a flying saucer and talked to the little men in the flying saucer. He didn't explain how they knew English.

That's the part I didn't get. How they knew English. But they did, and he talked to them and had a nice chat with them in English. I don't know whether they had an accent, but he spoke to them in English.

I've never been willing to accept this, just as I've not been willing to accept the sea serpent and the leprechauns and a lot of other things. But I believe that there will be an invasion from another world, above and below, but I believe that when that invasion takes place, nobody will be writing articles and asking whether there is such a thing.

God will make it very plain that there is. There will be no questions asked. Nobody will be telling weird stories about seeing little men get out of the saucer. There will be no question, but this is the vision and the judgment of God upon the world, and God will send his strange creatures from hell and from heaven to invade the earth.

And nobody will doubt or question it. They won't surrender, they won't repent, but they will know from whence it all came. Now, let's remember, this is what the holy apostles have taught, and the holy prophets, and the seers and the sages and the men touched with heavenly fire from the altar of God down the years.

And they've said it strangely, and they've woven it as a tapestry, and we see the picture dimly, and we don't understand it all. And men write books to explain what the star is. Another man writes a book to explain that the man who wrote the first book didn't know what he was talking about.

Another man writes a book about the locus, and another man writes a book to show the man who wrote the first book about the locus had never seen the locus, and so it goes. So I am not getting involved in these details, but I know that the great central truth is here, that when God gets enough of the world, when he gets enough of it, he's going to do something about it.

And if you're close enough to God to want him to do something about it, you're a good Christian. Most don't want him to do anything about it. They're praying, O God, hold off thy judgments. But those who are close enough, whose heart beat with the heart of God, they're praying, O God, send thy judgments, and let thy judgments be revealed.

Five Spiritual Truths From Revelation 9

And so there are about five truths here that we can know, and I want you to get a hold of these five truths that we can know. And they're taught here. They're taught here. They're taught because we gather them here.

We go in here and come out. There's a scientist who goes into a laboratory and comes out and says, Now I know this much, and this I don't know yet, but this I know. So we can read this 9th chapter of Revelation and the rest of the book, and we can come out with about at least five things, and I want you to take these five things.

Do you want to put them down? All right, but don't try to remember them in any way. One thing that we have to remember is that the world is essentially spiritual. This is what God is trying to say to the world, and this is what he's been trying to say to the world ever since Adam and Eve sinned.

The World Is Essentially Spiritual

He's been trying to say, I made you in my image, and that all this that we see came out of that which cannot be seen, and that this world didn't jump into being of itself. It isn't an accident. It is created out of spirit, that it came out of spirit by the breath of God's mouth, and man was made in God's image, and the visible world is a manifestation of spirit, and that we see only external things, and so we misunderstand them.

We see only external things, and we don't understand them because they're only external. We don't know what's in there. It's as though a child on the seashore should pick up a seashell, and then somebody would come along and deny that anything living ever was in that seashell, and say, Now, that seashell is there, nothing living is in it.

And then we have the question, How did it get like that, and why is it shaped like that when it was there, obviously for some reason, but there was no life ever lived in it? Like seeing a house someplace, or a building, a building designed for a purpose, and yet somebody come and say, Now, that building was not designed, that building happened there, but now wait a minute, look, there are windows, there are doors, there are entrances here and there, and there are shapes of rooms inside, and they all indicate that an intelligence with a purpose in mind made that building.

Somebody says, No, we don't acknowledge that at all, we have no way of knowing, nobody's in there, let's go through it. So they comb it from top to bottom, and they find nothing, they find no evidence of life at all, no evidence of there being anything in there, and they come back out and triumphantly say, There is nothing there, it happened like that.

Somebody who knows, his right hand from his left says, Now wait, you can't tell me that. There is every evidence here of design, every evidence of purpose, every evidence of intelligence, and if we can't find, nor see, nor feel, nor hear, nor touch the one who made it, somebody made it.

And so God is saying to the world, he's saying the world is essentially spiritual because I made it, and it came out of me, and it came out of spirit, and I breathed life into the world, and that's why you're here.

And men are forgetting that, and the scientists particularly are forgetting that. And the odd thing is, and the bad thing is, the scientist can make good on what he's saying, because the scientist appeals to your five senses, and he can produce to your five senses.

He can produce a microphone, and amplify a voice, he can produce a light, and make it shine, and he can do things that there is evidence of. But we who believe in God and purpose and design, we have no proof of anything.

We have to say, I believe, I believe in God the Father Almighty, I believe in Jesus Christ his only Son, I believe in the Holy Ghost, I believe in the Holy Catholic Church, I believe, I believe, and they smile and say, well we don't believe, we produce.

And so the world is producing. They're producing their great instruments of death, and their great instruments of life, producing them. But God is trying to say to the world, now don't take this, don't get too serious about all this.

Remember that all this I made, all this I created, and the world is essentially spiritual. And the springs of human conduct are spiritual too. And even fleshly sins, however gross they may be, and vile and violent, out of the heart are the issues of life.

Nevertheless, and Jesus said, out of the heart proceedeth, and then he named these vicious sins. So that's one thing God is saying to the world in his book of Revelation, in his 9th chapter here, when he tells us about these strange creatures that John could describe only by calling them, saying they look like something else.

This is what God is saying to us. And the second thing God is saying to us is that the world hasn't seen anything yet. This has been a harsh, violent, bloody, sinful, tear-stained, and terror-filled world in which we live.

The World Has Not Seen Anything Yet

Every newspaper comes out with it, and every radio broadcast, every broadcast tells us about how terrible and harsh and violent and bloody and sinful it all is. That is the price we're paying for the monstrous inversion.

That is the price we're paying for the reckless rebellion against the High King of Heaven. That's the price we're paying. That's the price we pay for forgetting that we're spiritual. It's the price we pay for going down to the beasts that perish and living such lives that were no longer true when we say a man is beastly.

No longer true because there isn't a beast that can act as vicious as a man when the man is bad and goes bad. That's the price we're paying for all this. That's the marking, the spirit to be a servant of the flesh.

This terrible thing. I saw a man one time take a candle and hold it up with a light, and the light was at the top. He said, Now this candle is like a man. Here is the candle, that's the body. There is the thread, the wick that goes up in the middle, that's the soul.

There at the top burns the flame, there's the spirit. And he said that candle will give light as long as it holds its right relative position, as long as the body's below and the soul inside and the spirit at the top, it'll burn.

Then he turned it over, and as soon as he turned it over there was a sputter and a fluff of smoke and it went out. He said that comes from inverting it and putting the spirit down and the body up. And that's exactly what's happened to the world.

That's exactly what's happened to the world. We are living that kind of life today. We're body conscious and flesh conscious and world conscious to a point where we forget that there should burn at the apex of our lives an everlasting flame that can never go out, the spirit of a man in touch with the spirit of God.

But we turn it over and the body puts out the spirit and men die. Ah, the vain hope is that someday we'll find a way. Someday we'll find a way. I saw an article in the magazine, I didn't read it and I don't suppose I shall because I know what they're saying.

The article said that there's one thing man hasn't learned to do and that is to create life. And I thought, well now that's good, there's good sense. And then he added the word yet to it. Yet, he said, we haven't learned it yet.

In other words, we're at it, we're going to do it. Edison said before he died that he felt that, naturally before he died, but I mean to say, Edison when he was at his peak and you know before he finally got so he couldn't talk, he said that he thought that he could make an instrument so fine, an electrical instrument so fine that it could reach God.

You imagine it, can you imagine it turning the button and have a whirr and a whee and a whirr and a whit and a bit of static and finally we get God. How foolish men can be. The old Greek said when the gods would destroy a man they first make him mad.

And I believe that the world we're living in today is a mad world. The world hasn't seen anything yet, God says. God says that this world you have turned the spirit upside down, you've turned yourself upside down and you're living with the spirit down and the body up instead of with the body down and the spirit up.

You've forgotten you're made in the image of God and you've forgotten there's another world and this says to the world and so there'll be a day when I'll invade the world and you will not think it's a flying saucer and you'll not wonder if it's a ration.

You'll know it's God and there will be creatures, strange creatures, creatures from heaven above and creatures from earth beneath and creatures from other worlds and at the bidding of God they will race faster than the speed of light and they will go to God's earth and there they will do their terrible, wonderful, awful judgment work.

And the sixth angel which had the trumpet loosed, saying to the sixth angel, Loose the four angels which are bound in the great river Euphrates and the four angels were loosed which were prepared for an hour and a day and a month and a year for to slay the third part of men.

I don't know who those creatures are but I know the scripture says here something to the effect they were bound out there by the river Euphrates and God's going to loose them and when they come everybody will know we've been visited.

Death Is Not the Worst Thing That Can Happen

And then the third thing that we know is that death is not the worst thing that can happen to a man. I remember once talking to Dr. H .M. Schumann, now President Emeritus of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, that quiet philosopher and man of God, and we were talking about life and death and he had a way of lowering his voice and lowering his head and looking out under his shaggy brows and he said to me, then a young man, he said, Remember Tozer, death is not the worst thing that can happen to a man.

There are worse things than death. We don't know that in this terrible day but it's true. It says here, Men desire to die and cannot and death shall flee from them. It's a journey, death for a Christian, it's a journey to the eternal world.

And so a triumph and a victory and a rest and delight. Paul wanted to go. I understand how Paul felt a little bit, I understand. I'd have never suffered as Paul has suffered. I suppose the more he has suffered, the more he'll want to go to heaven.

No Christian commits suicide unless his mind goes bad and then of course that's something else and God doesn't take that into account and doesn't judge him for losing his mind any more than he would judge him for losing a leg if he had it cut off by a surgeon.

So apart from that, no Christian will commit suicide but Christians, the more he suffers, the more he'll want to go home. One of the most telling of the modern Christian ages that we're so well satisfied with everything here below.

We like it so well. Oh God, please don't take me yet for a while, I like it. I like it here, we say. We don't pray like that because we know it wouldn't be pious to do it but we'll live like that. And there's many a person that would be deeply disappointed if he thought that God was going to take him to heaven today, tomorrow, or the next day, or next week.

He'd say, Lord please hold it off a while, there are too many things that I want here in the world. But for the Christian it's a journey to the eternal world. It is the fulfilling and the reaching of that for which he was created.

It is the sudden fulfillment. Did you ever do this thing? Did you ever go out in the fall of the year and find a cocoon hanging on the little tree or branch somewhere and bring that little thing in and hang it up carefully maybe on the curtain above a radiator and just let it hang there and forget all about it.

And when you dust it around and you saw it and when you changed curtains you changed it and let it hang there. There it was and not a very nice thing and it sort of got brown and it gathered dust and it didn't amount to too much apparently.

Nobody said isn't that an artistic thing. No it wasn't artistic and isn't artistic it's just hanging there. And if anybody saw it they thought it was a cobweb and were too polite to mention it. There it hung.

And then when the sun came back from the south and the people came back from Florida and the spring came and the birds began to chirp and chatter something happened there. Maybe you were fortunate enough to watch it happen maybe you didn't see it till afterward.

One day you looked up where this ugly little brown oblong thing had hung all during the long winter and now you saw not an ugly little shell but you saw there maybe four inches across wider than the whole span of my hand you saw one of the beautiful fragile fairy like little creatures that ever lived and it was slowly moving back and forth that's the way they breathe you know they breathe by by moving their wings and that that artificial respiration and there he was breathing away and learning to get strong and pretty soon he began to move and then maybe suddenly fluttered across and landed on something about the room and you called the family this beautiful thing there it had hung all winter long now it had reached its fulfillment.

Nobody would have believed that that had anything in it but now it's there beautiful spots exactly the same on both sides borders exactly like on both wings and everything just done as though god almighty in a happy mood had seized his paintbrush and painted a fairy and sent it to your house.

There it is it had reached its fulfillment. So there death is for the christian we read in the word of god a fulfillment. The tired old man with his weary old body and his old dentures and his old eyeglasses and his old spotted brown hands forgetful and tired.

And people are forgetting that once he was one of the pillars of the church. Now he's too old and weary to go much. And he goes occasionally when somebody will take him there he said the tired old man still able to read his bible and hum the hymns a little.

But the old weary body's bell. Somebody says that an old saint you wake brother you wake. God almighty one of these days will put him away. And when the spring comes and the glorious sun of righteousness rises with healing in his wings.

That that shell that old cracked shell that that old weather beaten hide the hills will break open and out of it. There will come as out of the cocoon comes the moth or the butterfly. There will come that new thing made in the image of god like unto jesus christ the lord.

And they shall see. He shall see him and be like him. And all three worlds heaven above and earth beneath and hell below will be forced to confess that here was a saint in him was the seed of god in him will cross eternal possibilities.

Then he'll know the chief end of man. He'll know why he was created in the first place. He'll walk out not looking like a moth. Certainly god knows. Don't care the illustration too far. But looking like jesus looking like a man.

Looking like a man that god has created. So god's telling us that death isn't the worst thing can happen to us. Too bad isn't it. When people get old and tired i said to my wife today talking about somebody.

And it'll speak to him. Be very courteous today and forget tomorrow. That you ever visited them i said i hope that never happens to me. I don't want it to happen. I'd rather die in possession of my faculty.

But i don't know. You know the lord said to peter when i was young i'll disgird thyself and go where you please. But when you get old another will gird thee and take thee where you didn't want to go. And maybe there'll be a day when i'll limp downhill and slowly on leaning on one of my big stalwart grandsons.

And he'd be kind of weary and wish. Maybe that nature would take its course. But he'll be leading me across the street you know to sit in the park in the sun and wait for the day when the son of righteousness rises.

Maybe that may be the last final humiliation the last final humiliation that god will bring to show me that i don't mount anything. I don't know about that. That's at least tomorrow before it happens.

So we leave it with god. But death isn't the worst thing can happen to you man. Failing god's the worst thing can happen to you. So here they were. They were crying for death. Shall men shall seek death and shall not find it and shall desire to die.

And death shall flee from them. And by these three were the parts three parts third part of men killed the fire the smoke and the brimstone. God is saying to the world you haven't seen anything yet. You've seen wars and pogroms and tidal waves and volcanoes and plagues and epidemics and wars.

You've seen it all but you haven't seen anything yet. And remember that death isn't the worst thing can happen to a man because death is only the snuffing off of the body. But we live on. He's saying the fourth thing that god holds our lives in his hands.

God Holds Human Life in His Hands

And i like that god holds our lives in his hand. Hurt not them that have the seal of god on their forehead. Men shall not find death and it shall flee from them. Men have a certain freedom. I believe in that all right.

I believe in the freedom of the will. I can't go along with some of my ultra-calvinistic friends who do not believe the human will is free. I can pick up that book if i want to and i can lay it down if i want to.

And if i can do that much i can do more. Man's will is free. Men have a certain amount of freedom. But there will be times when god withholds his permission. And when he withholds his permission the murderer can't kill and the suicide can't die.

God holds our lives in his hand. Oh if we could only make the world sit if we could go to we could have a summit conference and we could say to khrushchev and mcmillan and kennedy and stephen baker and the rest of them death isn't the worst thing can happen to you.

And god holds our lives in his hand. You've got god to deal with. And this world that you see is a rebellious world. Believe on god and on his son jesus christ. If they'd listen to us the solution to the world's problems would be right there.

But they wouldn't listen. Khrushchev sneers at god and the others don't do too well by him either. I don't want to be unkind. I don't want to be insulting. And i hope i've been neither. But i say the great men and the mighty men and the generals and leaders and industrial tycoons and all the rest of the world.

They mention god sometimes. But they don't live as if god existed. Mostly few few are different. I understand the prime minister went to church and read the scripture yesterday in the church somewhere here in canada.

And i understand that some of the others are religious men. I hope they are. I hope they are. Politics is politics. May god help us. And the fifth and last thing that i want to mention is that rebellious men cannot be forced to repent.

Judgment Does Not Force Repentance

Notice rebellious men cannot be forced to repent. The rest of the men which were not killed by these plagues yet repented not of the works of their hands that they should not worship devils and idols.