Revelation 9:13,14

Revelation 9:13-14. When the trumpet sounded, the Seer heard one voice out of the horns of the golden altar which is before God. This ‘golden altar' is the altar of incense already mentioned in chap. Revelation 8:3 as that the incense of which mingled with the prayers of the oppressed saints. We cannot doubt, therefore, that the plague to be described is presented to us as an answer to these prayers. Not, indeed, we again repeat, that the prayers were for vengeance on the oppressor. They were prayers that God would vindicate His own cause, and the mode in which He does so is by judgment on His adversaries. The voice issues ‘out of the horns' of the altar, that is, out of the horn-shaped projections at its four corners. These horns expressed the idea of the altar in its greatest potency, and they are fitly referred to here when the power of the prayers which had ascended from the altar is to appear in the answer sent. It is probably because they were four in number that the voice is spoken of as ‘one.'

The voice thus heard cried to the angel that bad the sixth trumpet, Loose the four angels which are bound at the great river Euphrates. We have already seen that in the Apocalypse the ‘angel' of anything is the thing itself in activity, in the performance of the service due from it to the Almighty. The angel of the Euphrates is the Euphrates in activity, in the fulfilment to its mission. It is true that ‘four' angels are here mentioned; but this arises from the fact that four is the number of the world, the whole of which is to be affected by the plague. The name of the river is used symbolically, and the thoughts upon which the symbol rests may be traced without difficulty. The Euphrates was the boundary line of Israel on the North-East. When the covenant was first made with Abram, the promise of the Lord to the patriarch was, ‘Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates' (Genesis 15:18). This promise was subsequently repeated (Deuteronomy 1:7; Joshua 1:4), and in the days of David and Solomon it appears to have been fulfilled (2 Samuel 8:3-8; 1 Kings 4:21; 2 Chronicles 9:26). The Euphrates thus formed the natural defence of God's chosen people against the terrible armies of Assyria on the other side. But for the same reason it became also, especially when swollen by those floods to which it is periodically subject, a fit emblem of the judgments inflicted by the Almighty upon Israel by means of Assyria and Babylon. Because Israel at such times ‘refused the waters of Shiloah that go softly,' the great river was brought up as it were in flood to overflow with a deep stream the whole land of Immanuel (Isaiah 8:5-8). To the prophets the Euphrates thus became the symbol of all that was most disastrous in the judgments of the Almighty, and in this sense, therefore, we are here to understand the mention made of it. With the literal river we have no more to do than in so far as it supplies the foundation of the figure. In its essential meaning it has no closer connection with the East than with the West or North or South. The plague may issue from any of these quarters as well as that supposed to be specially referred to. It is interesting to notice the progress from the fifth trumpet plague to that before us. In Judges 6:5 the Midianite invaders of Palestine are compared to locusts, ‘they came as locusts' (not ‘grasshoppers,' as in A. V.) ‘for multitude,' and they ‘left no sustenance for Israel, neither sheep, nor ox, nor ass' (Revelation 9:4), but they left the people in the land. Now we have reached a further stage in the procession of God's judgments. We are at the cruel and murderous invasions of Assyria and Babylon, when not only sustenance was destroyed but men were killed (Lamentations 2:21).