‘Do I hear right?’ John may have thought when he heard the number. Yes, I did hear that: two times ten thousand times ten thousand. So that means: 2 X 10.000 X
10.000 = 200.000.000 or two hundred million! Expositors have said that these must refer to ‘demons’, because of the enormous number and the logistical problems that provisions for such an army would cause. However in our day we know that several countries, such as China, boast that they are able to call up such numbers of soldiers. Psalm 68:17 says about the enormous armies of Heavenly hosts: “The chariots of God are tens of thousands and thousands of thousands…”
Revelation 9:16-18 (NLV) “The army had 200 million soldiers on horses. I heard them say how many there were. I saw, as God wanted to show me, the horses and the men on them. The men had pieces of iron over their chests. These were red like fire and blue like the sky and yellow like sulphur. The heads of the horses looked like the heads of lions. Fire and smoke and sulphur came out of their mouths. One-third part of all men was killed by the fire and smoke and sulphur that came out of their mouths.” Again ‘horses’ as the ultimate war-machine in the times that John lived.
The River Euphrates is the border across from which enemy armies could come— like the Iron Curtain and the Bamboo Curtain were/are in our day. China lies behind it as well as India and Japan. Therefore, these nations—possibly together with Russia and its allies—are easily able to call up a hundreds of divisions of twenty thousand men each. The United Nations are also capable of calling up large international forces of troops that could consist of army units of different nationalities. Are these ‘four groups of armies’, each consisting of five hundred thousand men that meet up with each other in the Middle East for the final battle? Are they the armies of the kings of the rising sun, coming from the East, on their way to Armageddon?
“The sixth angel poured out his jar of God’s anger onto the great Euphrates River. The water dried up. In this way, the kings of the countries of the east could cross over. Then I saw three demons that looked like frogs. They came out of the mouths of the dragon, out of the mouth of the beast and out of the mouth of the false prophet. These are spirits of demons that do powerful works / performing miraculous signs. And they go out to the kings of the earth. They bring them together for the battle on the great day of God Almighty…Then they gathered the kings together in the place that in Hebrew is called Armageddon.”2
The enemies are countless and yet John hears their number. The demonic, supernatural reality and the material, earthly reality merge into one another, flowing together once again to create Wars on world-scale. We experienced two World Wars in the twentieth century, with tens of millions of people killed and the use of all kinds of ‘conventional ‘weapons. At the climax of the ‘end times’, the statistics of the number of victims and weapons used will shoot up quickly. After the rockets (or the extra-terrestrial comets coming from space along with showers of meteorites with tails of poisonous gas that strike the earth) and the air forces that are deployed in battle in the earlier seal and trumpet judgments, the arena of this war is now on land. If there is any situation in which sin and demons seem to have free rein, it is when nations wage wars. War is gruesome business, in spite of all the Geneva conventions, international treaties and agreements. When nations fight against one another in combat, battles and wars, massive civilian populations become victims. For soldiers there is no way out, no way to escape. Will there ever be peace? Yes, when the Prince of peace has come and has established His Kingdom for all ages to come. How good to know that this will be final outcome of human history. Jesus will come in Glory! Behold, He comes!
• The combined number of military and civilian victims of the First and Second World Wars is estimated at between fifty and a hundred million dead. This is certainly the case when the victims of ‘local’ wars fought in the twentieth century are included. This means that more dead fell in the last century than in all the previous centuries even combined.
• The first nuclear bomb was exploded by the USA in July 1943. It is incomprehensible why the name of that bomb was “Trinity”. Greater demonic mockery is almost impossible. Little Boy and Fat Man bombs were respectively used a month later in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
• The Manhattan Project was a research and development undertaking during World War II that produced the first nuclear weapons. It was led by the United States with the support of the United Kingdom and Canada. From 1942 to 1946, the project was under the direction of Major General Leslie Groves of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Nuclear physicist Robert Oppenheimer was the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory that designed the actual bombs.
Bible References:
1.NIV 2.Revelation 16:12-14 and 16
