Jesus Christ says in Revelation 1, “I’ve got the keys of death and hell.”

Usually this is interpreted in the same vein as Rev. 20:14 where it says “death and hell are cast into the lake of fire” at the great white throne judgment.

“Death is taken to mean the grave and hell where the soul is, but there’s more to it than that,” says my pastor, Richard Jordan. “Revelation 6 talks of killing ‘with death’ but how do you that? I mean, when you kill someone they’re dead! It’s kind of overdoing it, isn’t it? You know if you kill me I’m going to die. But in those verses, it’s like death is something…it’s like that thing over in Exodus—‘the angel of death.’ Rev. 6:8 says, ‘And death and hell followed him.’ ”

Death is the place called “the pit,” and Christ has the key to it just as He has the key to the place called hell.

Jordan says, “What this means for a lost person is that when you die some little bony-fingered, gleeful-eyed demon comes and gets you by the collar of the neck and drags you down over there to that place, and the sucking sound you here is you just being drug right down into that pit of death and delivered into hell. When you begin to read about these characters; the slimy little dudes they are in Revelation 20 and what they look like and all. . . Well, they’re not friendly-looking creatures. They make your skin crawl.”

*****

The creatures that come out of the bottomless pit in Revelation 9 are in various stages of decomposition as part of their devolutionary development.

“You see, the people who teach organic evolution have it backwards; sin doesn’t cause you to develop upward, it causes you to devolve backwards,” says Jordan. “The satyrs and dragons you read about in Isaiah 13—people say, ‘Ha-ha, it can’t be real because we all know satyrs are mythological creatures.’ But this isn’t past history; this is future history talking about supernatural creatures to come. It’s sort of like the stuff you find in Revelation 9.

“In Isaiah 13, you’re not in the land of Palestine, you’re in Babylon. And in Babylon, over there where the Euphrates is, is where those four angels were. In Babylon there’s also going to be a place where all these demonic creatures, and all these fallen angels, are gathered together during the Millennium in these degenerated forms to which they have devolved and there’s going to be a zoo for them where people can go and see all these creatures.

“What will happen then is when people come up to worship at Jerusalem from the nations of the earth, afterward they’ll travel down the Kings Highway and be able to look down at the souls in hell ‘where the worm dies not, the fire’s not quenched.’

“One is a memorial to what sin does; one is a memorial to what Satan does. And the scary thing is in Revelation 20, when Satan’s let out of that bottomless pit over there (at the end of the Millennium), you know what the people of the earth do? They don’t say, ‘You sucker, we’ve been seeing what you do to the creatures—humans and angels alike—who follow you, so get out of here!’

“You know what they do—they jump on the pony and say, ‘Let’s go, Clyde! Let’s go again!’ That shows you how depraved human nature is! Now, when that demoniac over there in Luke 8. . . when those devils there said, ‘Don’t throw us into the deep,’ they weren’t just talking about that little pond out there that the swine wound up in. There’s a whole concept of things about where demons and so forth are going to be in the ‘last days.’ ”

*****

Referring specifically to the degenerated condition of the fallen angels in Revelation 9, Jordan explains, “We’re told the shapes of the locusts of these creatures are like unto horses prepared for battle. And then they’ve got the faces of a man, the hair of a woman and the teeth of a lion. I mean, these are some messed up dudes! They look like they’re in a scorpion shape but a scorpion looks like a horse. It’s a composite beast. They’re a combination of a horse, a man, a woman, a lion and a scorpion all combined in one creature! Now, that is a deformed, degenerated looking kind of thing! That’s the same thing we were looking at back in Isaiah with the dragons and satyrs.

“And what the indication is in these passages is these creatures are there in the bottomless pit, suffering the ultimate consequences of sin. Just as humans literally go back to the form of a worm—you just degenerate back into the lowest form of life—it’s as those these creatures are back in that devolving kind of state.

“Now, you know that’s what happens because ‘for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.’ Your physical body dies and it corrupts, falls apart, degenerates back to where it came from, and evidently this is some of the same kind of thing that happens in the spirit world.

“I just want you to see that these creatures take on the appearance of beasts. These are not lovely, sweet, wonderful kind of characters that you want your daughter to bring home to meet dad, or your sons to bring home to eat turkey dinner with your mother. These are not appealing kind of creatures.”

*****

In the Book of Job, the oldest written book in the Bible, God talks to Job about this same future detailed in the Book of Revelation. God asks, “Wilt thou also disannul my judgment? wilt thou condemn me, that thou mayest be righteous?” (Job 40:8)

Jordan explains, “What He’s asking is, ‘Job, are you going to go join Satan and his crowd?’ He asks that because that’s exactly what Satan did—disannulled God’s judgment. Job knows why God created man and God asks, ‘Are you going to think like I created a man to think or are you gonna go join the rebel crowd and condemn me so you can be righteous? Well, if that’s what you’re going to do, let me ask you another question: Hast thou an arm like God? You got a muscle in your arm, Job? The arm of the Lord’s not short, it’s strong.’

“God asks, ‘Canst thou thunder with a voice like him?’, meaning, ‘Can you go whack up your enemies, fight and win a battle? Can you do the things God can do?’ God says, ‘Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty. Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.’

“He’s saying, “When you can do all that, ‘then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.’ In essence, it’s, ‘You know something, Job, you think you can do it on your own without me—well, here’s what it’s going to take to beat the Adversary. You’re going to have to cast abroad the rage of thy wrath and take the proud and abase him. You’re going to have to all these things and if you can’t do it, then you can’t beat the devil. You’re going to have to go out there in hand-to-hand combat, fight Satan and his lie, and if you can do that you can save yourself.’

“Now, what’s the obvious answer to that? ‘Forget it, I can’t do it!’ and Job got the point. God’s point is, ‘I got a plan to take care of this guy. You can’t do it, I can. You better trust me.’ So Job says, ‘I think that’s a pretty good idea.’

“But there are some fascinating details in Job 38-42 about how God, from the outset—I mean, this is first book written—lays out how He’s going to take care of this character in the end over there in the Book of Revelation.

“Now, the two characters He’s going to take care of are identified in Job 40:15-18: ‘Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee; he eateth grass as an ox. Lo now, his strength is in his loins, and his force is in the navel of his belly. He moveth his tail like a cedar: the sinews of his stones are wrapped together. His bones are as strong pieces of brass; his bones are like bars of iron.’

“You ever seen an ox with a tail that can move things like that? It says the tail’s going around like a cedar. That’s like if you took a telephone pole and had a tail—he just knocks everything down. You ever seen an ox tail; it’s a little-bitty twisted up thing. So this is a funny-looking ox. Now the word ‘behemoth’—what is a behemoth? Well, if you’ve got a Scofield Reference Bible the little note by that verse in the center-column says, ‘Or, the elephant, as some think.’

“ ‘Behemoth’ is an untranslated word; it’s a word the translators didn’t know how to translate but it’s certainly not an elephant! An elephant doesn’t have a tail like a cedar either. It says, ‘the sinews of his stones are wrapped together.’ The guy’s a supernatural creature!

“The passage goes on, ‘He is the chief of the ways of God: he that made him can make his sword to approach unto him. Surely the mountains bring him forth food, where all the beasts of the field play. He lieth under the shady trees, in the covert of the reed, and fens. The shady trees cover him with their shadow; the willows of the brook compass him about. Behold, he drinketh up a river, and hasteth not: he trusteth that he can draw up Jordan into his mouth. He taketh it with his eyes: his nose pierceth through snares.’

“When you read that you say, ‘Gee whiz, how in the world was Job supposed to understand what God told Jeremiah hundreds and hundreds of years later?’ Well, Job wasn’t supposed to. He didn’t have the Book of Jeremiah yet. But we do. You see, this is being written for the people in the ‘last days’ that’ve got the whole Book.

“Job 41 starts out, ‘Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook?’ and you find out leviathan’s a seven-headed dragon. A behemoth is a beast made up of a lot of other beasts and that’s the Antichrist.

“If you turn to Revelation 13:1 you’ll see there’s a bear, a lion and a leopard. He looks like a leopard, but he’s got the feet of a bear and the mouth of a lion, and this dragon gives him his power. So the Antichrist is presented as a composite of a leopard, a bear, and a lion.

“In Job 40 (with the behemoth) we’re talking about the Antichrist, and then when you get to 41 we’re talking about the dragon, leviathan, and that’s Satan.

“Now, if you go down to Job 41:9, as he describes Satan through here and asks Job questions about what Satan’s doing, he says, ‘Behold, the hope of him is in vain: shall not one be cast down even at the sight of him? None is so fierce that dare stir him up: who then is able to stand before me?’

“That’s saying if Satan stood here tonight in front of us, and you could see into the spirit world and literally see him, it would scare you so bad you’d pass out from the fright.

“The reality is if you could see into the spirit world and see these creatures they would so petrify you, and unnerve you, that you’d just wilt. Now, I say that in relation to those guys over there in Revelation 9. That’s a bunch of mean-looking dudes over there too! These creatures are suffering a natural degenerative process of sin and its effects on them, just as you and I do.

*****

Among the prophetic visions laid out in Daniel 7, Daniel has a dream in which he sees a leopard, a lion and a bear in one. “Daniel looks out there into the future and he’s now looking at the ‘end time’,” says Jordan.

As Daniel testifies, “After this I saw in the night visions, and behold a fourth beast, dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly; and it had great iron teeth: it devoured and brake in pieces, and stamped the residue with the feet of it: and it was diverse from all the beasts that were before it; and it had ten horns.
[8] I considered the horns, and, behold, there came up among them another little horn, before whom there were three of the first horns plucked up by the roots: and, behold, in this horn were eyes like the eyes of man, and a mouth speaking great things.”

Jordan explains, “That little horn turns out to be the Antichrist so these four beasts represent kingdoms in the earth. You’ve got three—the leopard, the lion and the bear—and then you’ve got one you can’t even describe it’s so bad-looking. And that’s the one the Antichrist comes from.

“What I’m trying to do is make a connection between these creatures in the bottomless pit—the creatures in the underworld—and the degenerative nature and beast-like activity they have.

“Now, when God begins to describe the kingdoms in the earth that will wind up under the control of the Antichrist, He uses that same descriptive terminology to describe them. The reason He does that is in Daniel 10.

“Gabriel comes to answer the prayer of Daniel and explains to him that ‘the prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me one and twenty days: but, lo, Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me; and I remained there with the kings of Persia.’

“Michael is the archangel, so when it says ‘Michael, one of the chief princes,’ he’s talking about one of the chief rulers of the angelic world. Well, this prince of Persia is another angel who rules over a territory in the heavens called Persia. But there was there also a territory on the earth called Persia. In fact, there’s where Daniel was!

“You see, there’s a correspondence between these demonic creatures and satanic angels and what goes on on Planet Earth in that day. Because Satan, just like he was in Christ’s day, has gathered his armies of cohorts together to hold the land of Palestine. . .

“They’re called beasts because when God looks at them that’s their appearance in reality. That’s the truth about who they are. Rather than them being benign creatures, the implication is that if you could see beyond the veil of human flesh into that spirit world at that time, you would pass out for the fright of it.”