Locusts’ heads do look a little like the heads of horses, and horses were the pre-eminent machines of war in ancient times. The differences are that these locusts are steel-armoured and have tails with stingers. Modern fighter-helicopters look like large insects and the cabin at the front looks somewhat like the head of a scorpion, or of a horse, or an ugly human face. The roar of the propellers, the rotors, the turbine engines resembles the rattle of many chariots. Their on-board fire-power spreads death and destruction. They keep in contact with one another and with the supreme command via their antennae. Helicopters, fighter-jets, big aircraft carriers can be drawing stripes of white steam condensation high up in the sky by their exhaustion pipes – like four-engined passenger airliners do too–that look like streaming women’s white hair, or like wreaths, or halos.
As we saw, Joel 1 and 2 uses similar imagery when describing the ‘Day of the Lord’. Light metal alloys and sun-screening coated glass gleam like gold. The conventional air- forces take over after the initial wave of rockets—for five whole months, with their many types of jet-fighters. The demonic background and physical earthly reality ‘merge’. The aerial battles in the skies continue for five months beating the earth and mankind without mercy, like a continuous torturing. Heavy bombardments with powerful conventional explosions, but also neutron grenades, bacteriological and chemical weapons, and radioactive radiation from small atomic grenades.
Is the prophetic picture that John sees the Third World War? The development of the various stages of war is executed according to pre-planned scenarios. War unfolds in stages. Phase two follows phase one. Cool, rational controlled, but demonically inevitable. Leading to all-out war. There appears to be no way back and no room for negotiations. One thing follows and leads to another. Rational reasoning, cool calculations can also be totally demonic. The gas chambers and the whole set-up of the death camps in the Second World War, of Auschwitz and Treblinka and so on, were designed by clever architects and rational technicians and engineers in Berlin. Yet the development of the trumpet plagues that the godless people undergo, is only adding more oil on the fire of their hatred. It is like Lamech avenging himself sevenfold. “Adah and Zillah, listen to me; wives of Lamech, hear my words. I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for injuring me. If Cain is avenged seven times, then Lamech seventy-seven times.”2 One thing evokes and brings forth the other.
The ‘earth-dwellers’ are tortured by invisible hellish beings whom they themselves have called up by their lawlessness, godlessness and wickedness. Torment is brought upon them and they bring it upon each other. The plagues have their terrible effects on people but Creation suffers too. It is hit and poisoned as well; today already, as a small ‘foretaste’ the environment is already groaning and suffering from man’s actions led by his egoism and avarice. How much worse will the catastrophe be when complete insanity is going to reign.
• “Let horses move up like a swarm of locusts,” Jeremiah 51:27 says. How else could prophets like him and apostles like John have described the things that have only been developed by science in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries?
• It is said by John time and again: it looked like, it seemed like, its form was like, wreaths, halos like (?), faces like, hair like, breastplates like, tails like, etc. These are images to describe things that were as yet unknown to him but are oppressing and frighteningly very well known to us.
Bible References:
1.NIV 2.Genesis 4:23–24
