Revelation 9:2-12

And this personage, whoever he was, opened the bottomless pit, and there came out dense smoke that darkened the sky, and locusts with the power of scorpions. And they were enjoined not to hurt grass or tree but only the men who had not the seal of God in their foreheads. It will be remembered that we have just seen, in the seventh chapter, that the servants of God were sealed in their foreheads to save them from the judgments; and now their exemption is commanded.

I think two things are evident here. As these servants of God were evidently living on earth in John's time, and this judgment exempted them, therefore these judgments fell in John's time and not thousands of years later. Again it seems reasonable to suppose that this flood of locusts that came out of the bottomless pit were moral and spiritual errors. That was doubtless the reason that the servants of God were not hurt by them. They were taught by the Spirit; they were grounded in the truth; they were sealed to God; they were proof against heresies and moral and spiritual perversion. It would be quite true that moral and spiritual perversion would have physical results. And it is also true that in the siege of Jerusalem social and civil safeguards were thrown to the winds; and as if they had gone insane, as if possessed with devils, father was set against son and son against father, brother against brother till the inside of the city was a seething hell, and its deliverance impossible. When men's senses and reason and conscience are taken away, when mental and moral and spiritual aberration seizes men, their ruin is certain and near. The statement in verses five and ten that these locusts were to hurt men five months, may grow out of the fact that the life of a locust is about five months; and from the other fact that this terrible condition was short. It could not last long. Doom was near.

The locusts are further described as being like horses prepared for battle, with faces of men, hair of women, teeth of lions, wings that sounded like chariots, tails like scorpions, and stings in their tails, the very agglomeration of heterogeneous features making the picture more terrible.

And they had a king over them, the angel of the bottomless pit, called in the Hebrew, Abaddon; and in Greek, Apollyon. This is Satan; and so it appears that the Devil himself was the tormentor of those who followed him. But that is his business and such are his methods. The wages of sin is death.