Commentators on the Second Woe

John MacArthur

I don't see this as a human army.  If this was a human army of men and women marching across the land, it would be pretty big.  If it were just a mile wide, it would be a hundred miles deep. That's a lot of people.  And how could they march and kill a third of the world?  I mean, how could they move across mountains and oceans and all of that?  Those who see it as a human army when they get into the description that we read in verse 17 and following see those descriptions as descriptions of guns and helicopters and jet aircraft and tanks and rockets.  The problem is, he describes all of them like that, so it would have to be two hundred million of those things, those human weapons, human machines. The language, I think, is better understood of a demon force, particularly when it's connected to four demons who are being held back.  So the cosmic war, a war of hell is hitting the earth with all its force. And it's certainly going to appear as if hell is all over the world.