The First Woe - Locusts - The Locust Plague Today

Reasonably, we could expect Joel's prophecy to have a final fuflillment in the time of the end.  How true this has prove to be!  At the Bible Students'  convention at Cedar Point, Ohio, U.S.A., September 1-8,  1919, a  notable  outpouring of Jehovah's spirit activated his people to organize a global campaign of preaching. Of all professed Christians, they alone, recognizing that Jesus had been enthroned  as heavenly King, spare no effort in publishing abroad that good news.   Their relentless witnessing, in fulfillment of prophecy, became as a tormenting plague to apostate Christendom. - MATTHEW 24:3-8, 14; ACTS 1:8.

Revelaton, written some 26 years after Jerusalem's  destruction, also describes that plague.  What does it add to Joel's  description?  Let us take up the record, as reported by John: "And the fifth angel blew his trumpet.  And I saw that a star had fallen from heaven to the earth, and the key of the pit of the abyss was given him.(Revelation 9:1)   This "star" is different fromthat at Revelation 8:10 that John saw in the act of falling.  He sees "a star that had fallen from the heaven" and that now an assignmet with respect to this earth.  In this a spirit or a fleshly person?  The holder of this "key to the pit of the abyss" is later described as hurling Satan into "the abyss." (Revelation 20:1-3) So he must be a mighty spirit person.  At Revelation 9:11, John tells us that locusts have "a king, the angel of the abyss."  Both verses must refer to the same individual, since the angel holding the keey of the abyss would logically be the angel of the abyss.  and the star must symbolize Jehovah's appointed King, Jesus Christ. -  COLOSSIANS 1:13; 1 CORINTHIANS  15:25. 

The account continues:  "And he opened the pit of the abyss, and smoke ascended out of the pit as the smoke of a great furnace, and the sun was darkened, also the air, by the smoke of the pit. And out of the smoke locusts came forth upon the earth; and authority was given them, the same authority  as the scorpions of the earth have." (Revelation 9:2, 3) Scripturally,  "the abyss' is a place of inactivity, even of death.  (Compare Romans 10:7; Revelation 17:8; 20:1, 3.)   The small band of Jesus' brothers spent a short time in such an "abyss" of relative inactivity at the end of world war (1918 to 1919).  But when Jehovah poured his spirit upon his repentant servants in 1919,  They swarmed forth to meet the challenge of the work that lay ahead. 

As John observes, the release of the locusts is accompanied by much smoke, like "the smoke of a great furnace."  That is how  it proved to be in 1919.   The situation darkened for Christendom and for the world in general.  (Compare Joel2:30, 31.)  The release of those locusts, the John class, was actually  a defeat for Christendom's clergy, who had schemed and plotted to kill the Kingdom work for good and who now rejected God's Kingdom.  Evidence of  a smokelike pall started  to spread over apostate Christendom as  that locust badn  was given divine authority and began to exercise it  in proclaiming powerful judgment messages.  Christendom's "sun" - her appearance of enlightenment - suffered an eclipse, and "the air" became thick with declarations of divine judgment as "the ruler of the authority of the air"  of this world was shown to Christendom's  god. - EPHEIANS 2:2; JOHN 12:31; 1 JOHN 5:19. 

 Next time: The First Woe - Locusts - Those Tormenting Locusts! 

From the jw.org publications