Catholic Commentary
The Impenitence of Surviving Humanity
20The rest of mankind, who were not killed with these plagues, didn’t repent of the works of their hands, that they wouldn’t worship demons, and the idols of gold, and of silver, and of brass, and of stone, and of wood, which can’t see, hear, or walk.21They didn’t repent of their murders, their sorceries, their sexual immorality, or their thefts.
Revelation 9:20–21 describes how surviving humans refuse to repent of idolatry and immorality despite God's judgment plagues. The passage condemns worship of false gods and lists sins including murder, sorcery, and theft, emphasizing humanity's deliberate rejection of divine correction and continued spiritual rebellion.
Even catastrophic divine judgment cannot soften a heart that has chosen idolatry over God—and the only antidote is the willingness to see what hardness refuses to see.
The four sins listed — murders (phonoi), sorceries (pharmakeia), sexual immorality (porneia), and thefts (klemmatōn) — are not random. They correspond closely to the prohibitions of the Noahic covenant and the Decalogue, and more specifically to the Apostolic Decree of Acts 15:20, 29. They represent a comprehensive moral breakdown across the four primary relationships: with human life (murder), with the spiritual order (sorcery), with the body and family (sexual immorality), and with property and neighbor (theft).
The word pharmakeia (sorcery) is particularly notable. Derived from pharmakon (drug/potion), it encompassed in the ancient world the use of drugs, incantations, and occult practices, especially in the context of controlling others or contacting spirits. The Didache (2:2) and the Epistle of Barnabas (20:1) both explicitly condemn pharmakeia alongside murder, indicating its gravity in early Christian moral consciousness. The term is used again in Revelation 18:23 and 21:8, forming a thread of moral indictment through the book's judgment oracles.
The structural parallel between v. 20 and v. 21 is deliberate: each begins with "they did not repent." This repetition functions as a rhetorical lament — John is not triumphalist about these judgments. He mourns the hardness of human hearts. The two-verse unit forms a kind of negative doxology: a catalog of what humanity refuses to render to God (worship) and what it continues to inflict on one another (moral violence).
Catholic tradition illuminates this passage with particular depth through its understanding of hardness of heart (sclerosis kardias) as a theological concept. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that grave sin progressively diminishes the freedom of the will and disorders the intellect, making conversion increasingly difficult (CCC 1735, 1859–1860). What Revelation 9:20–21 depicts is not simply bad behavior, but the eschatological culmination of this process: a humanity that has so habituated itself to sin that divine judgment itself cannot penetrate the will.
St. Augustine (City of God XX.8–9) interprets the trumpets and their aftermath as warnings given precisely so that the elect might repent and be distinguished from those whose hearts are irretrievably hardened. He draws the direct analogy to Pharaoh in Exodus, whose heart was hardened through his own repeated free choices, so that even the plagues served only to confirm him in pride.
The specific sin of idolatry receives profound treatment in Catholic moral theology. The Catechism states clearly: "Idolatry not only refers to false pagan worship. Man commits idolatry whenever he honours and reveres a creature in place of God... Idolatry rejects the unique Lordship of God; it is therefore incompatible with communion with God" (CCC 2113). The list in verse 20 thus represents not an ancient curiosity but a permanent temptation — any created good (wealth, pleasure, technology, power) can become an idol when it displaces God.
Pope Benedict XVI, in Verbum Domini (§109), notes that the prophetic and apocalyptic texts of Scripture are not primarily predictions of chronology but urgent pastoral calls: they exist to awaken conscience. Revelation 9:20–21 is perhaps one of the most sobering such calls, for it warns that the greatest danger is not God's judgment but our capacity to withstand it unchanged.
These two verses confront the contemporary Catholic with an unsettling mirror. The idols of gold, silver, and wood have not disappeared — they have been recast. Screen time, financial anxiety, pornography, celebrity culture, and political tribalism all function as modern systems of idol worship: they promise life, demand sacrifice, and deliver diminishment. The pharmakeia of verse 21, rooted in the Greek word for drugs, speaks uncomfortably to a culture awash in both pharmaceutical dependency and occult resurgence.
The deeper challenge is the phenomenon of unfelt urgency. John's vision depicts people who have survived catastrophe and still will not turn. The Catholic examination of conscience, practiced faithfully, is precisely the antidote — it is the spiritual habit of choosing to see what the hardened heart refuses to see. The Sacrament of Reconciliation exists as the concrete means by which God offers what these survivors refused: not just forgiveness, but the grace of a softened, converted heart. The pastoral question this passage poses is direct: In what areas of your life have you received repeated warnings — through relationships, health, prayer, or circumstance — and chosen not to repent? The danger Revelation names is not that God stops warning us. It is that we stop hearing.
Commentary
Revelation 9:20 — The Persistence of Idolatry
The phrase "the rest of mankind, who were not killed" is strikingly deliberate. John emphasizes that these plagues are not merely punitive but medicinal — they are divine warnings intended to provoke conversion. The Greek word for "repent" here is metanoēsan (aorist of metanoeō), meaning a decisive, transformative turning of the mind and will. The absence of this repentance is presented not as passive indifference but as active, culpable resistance.
The catalog of idols — gold, silver, brass, stone, and wood — is a direct literary echo of Daniel 5:4, 23, where Belshazzar's court drunkenly praises gods made of precisely these same five materials on the very night of Babylon's fall. John's use of this list is typological: the Rome of his day (veiled as "Babylon" throughout Revelation) is a new Belshazzar, reveling in idol worship on the eve of judgment. The descending order of materials (gold to wood) may intentionally mirror the degradation of the statue in Nebuchadnezzar's dream (Daniel 2), suggesting that idolatry itself is a form of devolution — the worship of what is lesser in place of what is supreme.
The parenthetical description of idols — "which can't see, hear, or walk" — is not merely rhetorical flourish. It is a direct quotation of the biblical idol-polemic tradition, most fully expressed in Psalm 115:4–7 and Isaiah 44:9–20. The three incapacities (sight, hearing, movement) form an ironic inversion of the three capacities that define the living God, who sees all, hears prayer, and acts in history. To worship an idol is thus to choose a god deliberately inferior to humanity itself. The Church Fathers, particularly Tertullian (De Idololatria) and Origen (Contra Celsum VIII), developed this logic forcefully: idolatry is not merely an error of the intellect but a moral disorder of the will, a deliberate preference for the creature over the Creator.
The addition of "demons" behind the idols is theologically crucial and connects to 1 Corinthians 10:20, where Paul teaches that pagan sacrifices are offered to demons, not to God. Idol worship is therefore not spiritually neutral — it is an active, if unwitting, alliance with malevolent spiritual powers. This is consistent with the Revelation narrative, in which the demonic plagues of the trumpets are connected to an underworld of malicious spiritual beings (9:1–11). The survivors who refuse to repent of idolatry remain, in effect, still worshipping the very beings that tormented them.
Revelation 9:21 — The Catalog of Moral Collapse