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The Terror of the Fifth

¹ Then the fifth angel blew his bugle. I saw a star that had crashed to the earth. It had the key to the well of the bottomless sinkhole. ² The star unlocked the sinkhole and smoke billowed forth as if from the fire of a blacksmith's forge. The smoke blotted out what was left of the light of the sun and clogged most of the air over the entire earth. ³ Locusts appeared out of the smoke with tails like scorpions. ⁴ They only targeted and tormented those without the brand of Christ on the foreheads. ⁵ The terrible locusts were not allowed to kill the unbranded, but only to inflict tremendous torture on them for five months. ⁶ During those five months, people will look for death to ease the pain, but be unable to find it.

⁷ The locusts were like battle-ready horses lined up across the fields. They had crowns on their heads with faces of men. ⁸ Their hair was long like a woman's, but their teeth were those of lions. ⁹ They had iron breastplates of armor and their wings sounded like chariots racing across the battlefield in pursuit of another victim. ¹⁰ Their tails were like scorpions with needles like swords, ready to inflict pain and suffering as quickly as a rattlesnake's strike. For five months they will ravage the lives of the unbranded. ¹¹ They have a ruler—the angel in charge of the abyss. His Hebrew name is Abaddon, or in Greek they call him, Apollyon (meaning "The Destroyer").

¹² After this first horror is complete, there are still two more to come.

¹³ The sixth angel blew his bugle. I heard a loud voice coming from the four corners of the altar of God. ¹⁴ The voice said to the angel, "Release the four angels bound at the Euphrates Creek!" ¹⁵ These four angel's shackles were cut loose. It is their day. It is their hour. It is the minute they were made for. Their mission, their only mission, is to kill a third of the human race. ¹⁶ These four angels took the form of two hundred million horses and their riders. Their breastplates shone like hot iron, blue as sapphire and yellow like glowing sulfur.

¹⁷ The horses had heads like lions. Fire, smoke, and sulfur poured out of their mouths like deadly exhaust. ¹⁸ One out of every three people on earth were killed by these three plagues—fire, smoke, and sulfur which came out of the horse's mouths. ¹⁹ The horse's strength wasn't confined to their mouth. They had tails like venomous vipers that struck and killed with deadly quickness and precision.

²⁰ But still, even those who weren't killed did not turn away from their lust after materialistic idols. They didn't stop worshiping demons, idols of gold, stone, wood, and bronze. ²¹ They didn't repent of evil ways such as murder, witchcraft, sexual immorality, or thieving.