6 The Sounding of the Sixth Trumpet, Ch. 9:13‐21, and 11:14
The sounding of the sixth trumpet is followed by the loosing of four angels from the bed of the Euphrates (which is done at the bidding of a voice from the four horns(427) of the golden altar of incense that is before God, and underneath which are the souls of them that had been slain for the Word of God—evidently a divine command) who had been prepared for an appointed time, even “for the hour and day and month and year, that they should kill the third part of men” from the earth, and by the coming of a vast invading army of horsemen, the double square of a myriad, or two hundred millions in all, the largest number used in the Apocalypse, the type of an innumerable multitude, which apparently act under direction of the four angels, and destroy a third part of men from the earth:(428) the symbol of disaster to men through the world‐forces of heathenism, which are under direction of the world‐rulers of the darkness (Eph. 6:12). The unbinding of the angels is the symbol of evil let loose among men, for the angels are evil as is indicated by their being bound, by their number, and by the place of their imprisonment, i. e. the binding is the symbol of divine restraint until the appointed time; their number is four, the earth number, indicating that they belong to this world which is usually thought of as evil; and the Euphrates, the place where they are bound, is the old seat of the world‐power, and the representative of heathenism with its multitudinous host. The evils inflicted by the heathen nations upon mankind, especially the evils of war with their concomitant results, are here indicated by this forceful figure; yet these, though deep and terrible, entirely fail to turn the rest of men, who escape death, from idol worship and its attendant impurities—a marvelous forecast of the path of history, for the heathen powers have time and again become the agents of woe to mankind, yet the people have not awakened to the true source of their sorrow in idolatry. The description of the horses and of their riders in the vision is purely an ideal one, intended to make them the objects of greatest terror, a true Oriental touch, appealing to the vivid Eastern imagination as such figures do with us to the minds of children. The woes of men at the hands of heathen nations is the evident content of this trumpet, as is clearly indicated in the twentieth verse of the chapter. At this point the second woe is declared to be past, and the third to be about to come quickly (ch. 11:14); but between them intervenes a vision of divine help, and of the value of the church’s witness (ch. 10:1‐11:13).