The Locusts in My Primary Class

This is a continuation of an exploration into the book of Revelation. Part 1 is here, while part 2 is here.

When Revelation Sounds Like Rotor Blades

When I was ten, my dad was asked to teach a Primary inservice on “Helping Children Understand Revelation.”

He walked in with crayons, paper, and a goal to draw the locusts from Revelation chapter 9.

He read a verse. The kids shouted ideas. He drew exactly what we said—while (I now realize) gently steering us toward something he already had in mind.

• “Power like scorpions” → stingers in the tail.
• “Don’t hurt the grass, only people who don’t have God’s seal” → they can tell who’s who.
• “Faces like men” → pilots inside.
• “Hair like women” → long, whipping in the wind floating above the faces.
• “Teeth like lions” → shark mouths painted on the nose.
• “Breastplates of iron” → armored underside.
• “Sound of their wings like many horses and chariots” → whump-whump-whump-whump.
• “Tails like serpents with heads” → belt-fed machine guns that spit fire from the mouth but get their bullets from the tail.

By the end of the lesson the chalkboard held a crude, kid-described, scripture-faithful sketch of a Vietnam-era Huey gunship.

Dad hadn’t invented it; he’d heard the comparison at a conference in South Africa while the war was still on. But to a room full of 1980s Primary kids who watched MAS*H reruns with their parents, Revelation suddenly sounded like the evening news.

I carried that image for decades. Every time someone insisted John’s visions could only be literal demons or future microchips, I kept thinking, “Or… they could be technology so terrifying that to a first-century fisherman it looked exactly like monsters rising from the abyss.”

A few details from that childhood lesson still stick with me as perfect illustrations of how symbolic prophecy can map onto real-world things without forcing the text:

• The locusts aren’t allowed to kill, only torment for five months (9:5). After World War II, military planners openly admitted that wounding an enemy is more efficient than killing him—one wounded soldier ties up two or three healthy ones. Recovery from gunshot wounds is pure torment and takes… roughly five months.
• They avoid those “who have the seal of God on their foreheads” (9:4). In every modern war, medics and chaplains sometimes wear a large red (or white) cross right on the front of their helmets—literally a cross on the forehead—marking them as set apart for mercy under a higher cause.
• Their king is Abaddon/Apollyon—“Destroyer.” The abyss he comes from isn’t just a hole in the ground. It’s the same bottomless pit we carry inside when no amount of status, victory, or moral justification ever convinces us we are enough. That inner void is what keeps inventing newer, cleverer ways to hurt people while telling ourselves we’re the good guys. It's what drives spiritual separation from others (spiritual death) which people cannot find (9:6).

I’m not claiming the fifth trumpet was fulfilled in Vietnam (or Iraq, or anywhere else).

I’m saying the vision was so accurate that a room full of ten-year-olds, with a little nudging from my dad, could draw modern warfare straight from the text.

And that childhood experience taught me one thing I’ll need for the next post: When Revelation talks about a seal on the forehead or a mark on the forehead (or on the right hand), don’t automatically jump to science fiction.

Sometimes it really is as simple as the badges, logos, and symbols we voluntarily place on our heads and hands because, for a moment, they silence the abyss and tell us—and everyone around us—that we finally belong.

In my next, and final post in this series, I'll reveal my candidate for the mark of the beast and why I think it might be accurate.

(NOTE: As with all my posts, the ideas in this post are all mine, but I did leverage AI to help structure and refine it)