Catholic Commentary
Transitional Woe Formula
12The first woe is past. Behold, there are still two woes coming after this.
Revelation 9:12 announces that the first of three catastrophic divine judgments has concluded and warns that two more woes remain to come. The passage serves as a structural transition marking the end of the plague of demonic locusts (the fifth trumpet) and signaling the approach of the sixth and seventh trumpets in the Apocalypse's judgment sequence.
God pauses between judgments not to spare you, but to give you one more chance to repent.
The transitional verse thus functions as a mercy interval hidden within judgment: a pause, a warning, an implicit summons to conversion before the next visitation. The Catholic tradition, following Augustine's City of God (Book XX), reads the sequence of woes not as a simple chronological prediction but as a spiritual map of the soul's response to tribulation — hardening or opening — under God's permissive and just governance of history.
Catholic theology uniquely illuminates Revelation 9:12 through its integrated understanding of divine justice, mercy, and the pedagogy of suffering.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§1033–1037) teaches that God's judgment is never arbitrary: it flows from His holiness and His respect for human freedom. The three woes of Revelation embody what the tradition calls iustitia punitiva — punitive justice — but always ordered toward a redemptive end. Pope Benedict XVI, in Spe Salvi (§44), reflects on judgment as "a setting right of the balance," insisting that divine justice is inseparable from mercy, not opposed to it. Revelation 9:12's pause between woes incarnates precisely this dynamic: judgment announced is judgment that can still be fled through repentance.
The Church Fathers read this verse through the lens of prophetic typology. Primasius of Hadrumetum (6th c.), in his Commentary on the Apocalypse, argued that the formal announcement between woes mirrors the prophetic pattern of Ezekiel and Jeremiah: God does not strike in silence, but always names what He is doing, preserving the dignity of human moral agency. The Destroyer (Apollyon, 9:11) operates only within divinely established limits — a point that connects to the Catholic teaching on the permissive will of God and the bound power of Satan (CCC §395).
St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae I, Q. 49) insists that evil — including the demonic evil represented by the locusts — has no power except what God permits for the ordering of a greater good. The transition verse thus becomes a statement of divine sovereignty: even the passage of woe is proclaimed by God's own voice, through His angel, on His timetable. Nothing in history, however terrifying, lies outside His governance.
For contemporary Catholics, Revelation 9:12 offers a bracing but deeply consoling spiritual discipline: learning to read the "transitions" of your own life as moments of divine summons.
Most people, when one crisis ends, exhale with relief and return immediately to ordinary life. This verse refuses that option. The announcement "two woes are still coming" is not pessimism — it is the prophetic realism that the Church has always insisted on over against a shallow optimism. Catholics are called to use periods of relative peace — between personal sufferings, between societal upheavals — not for spiritual complacency but for deeper conversion.
Practically: when a period of illness, financial hardship, relational rupture, or societal crisis passes, the Catholic response modeled here is not simply "thank God that's over," but examination of conscience. Did I repent? Did I draw closer to God during that trial, or did I harden, like those who "did not repent" in 9:20? The pause between woes is a grace window — brief, emphatic, and not guaranteed to last. Use it for confession, renewed prayer, and the sober spiritual preparation that the Church calls vigilance (CCC §2849).
Commentary
Revelation 9:12 — Literal Sense and Narrative Function
Revelation 9:12 occupies a unique structural position in the Book of Revelation. It does not describe a new vision, nor does it narrate angelic action. Rather, it performs a formal announcement of transition — a literary device John employs three times in the Apocalypse (cf. 9:12; 11:14), bookending what the text calls the "woes" (οὐαί, ouai) — a Greek term carrying the full weight of prophetic lamentation and divine judgment inherited from the Hebrew hōy tradition of the Old Testament prophets.
The phrase "The first woe is past" (Ἡ οὐαὶ ἡ μία ἀπῆλθεν) is structurally decisive. The Greek apēlthen — "has gone," "has passed away" — is the same verb used elsewhere in Revelation for the passing away of heaven and earth (21:1). Its use here lends cosmic gravity: a chapter of divine judgment has been formally closed by divine decree. The first woe corresponds to the fifth trumpet (9:1–11), in which a star fallen from heaven opens the Abyss, releasing a plague of scorpion-tailed locusts empowered to torment — but not kill — those who lack the seal of God for five months. John deliberately uses the language of Exodus plagues and Joel's locust army, but with a demonic inversion: these are not natural locusts but spiritual tormentors, their king named Abaddon/Apollyon, "the Destroyer."
"Behold, there are still two woes coming after this" — the Greek ἰδού (idou, "Behold!") is an imperative of prophetic attention, commanding the hearer to sit up and take notice. This is not reassurance. The announcement that two woes remain — corresponding to the sixth trumpet (9:13–21, the demonic cavalry) and the seventh trumpet (11:15–19, the final consummation) — functions as a rhetorical intensification. What has been witnessed was merely the first of three graduated catastrophes. The repetition of "still" (eti) underlines the inexorable advance of divine justice.
Typological and Spiritual Senses
Patristically, the three woes were read as a descending schema of increasingly intimate divine judgment: the first woe strikes the body (demonic torment), the second woe ravages human society through war and death, and the third woe penetrates to the very heart of history with the sounding of the Kingdom. Origen and, more systematically, Victorinus of Pettau (the first Christian commentator on Revelation) understood the graduated woes as pedagogical — each judgment intended to provoke repentance before the next arrives. This reading is confirmed by 9:20–21, where John notes with sorrow that those not killed by the plagues "did not repent."