What is the abyss or bottomless pit?

Question 8033.

The bottomless pit turns up at some of the most dramatic moments in Scripture, and it is easy to read past it as atmosphere. It is not atmosphere. The abyss is presented as a real location in the unseen world, a place of restraint for spirit beings, and the demons who met Jesus were frightened of it.

Understanding what the bottomless pit is does more than tidy up a detail in Revelation. It tells us something important about the limits placed on the enemy and about who holds the key.

The word behind it

The Greek term is abussos, from which we get abyss, and it means without depth or bottomless. The ESV renders it bottomless pit in Revelation and abyss elsewhere, which can obscure the fact that the same word is in view throughout.

In the Greek Old Testament the word is used of the deep, the primeval waters of Genesis 1 and the depths of the sea. By the time of the New Testament it had come to carry the sense of a prison for spirits, and that is consistently how the New Testament uses it.

So the bottomless pit is not a poetic way of describing hell in general. It is a specific holding place, distinct from the lake of fire, and it is temporary rather than final.

Paul uses the same word once, in Romans 10:7, where he asks who will descend into the abyss, that is, to bring Christ up from the dead. There the sense is the realm of the dead rather than a prison for spirits, which is a useful reminder that biblical vocabulary flexes with context and that we should read each occurrence on its own terms rather than importing a single fixed meaning.

The demons who begged to avoid it

Luke 8 gives us the most revealing detail. When Jesus confronts the man in the country of the Gerasenes, the demons beg Him not to command them to depart into the abyss. Mark’s account has them begging not to be sent out of the country, and both record the strange request to enter the pigs instead.

Sit with that for a moment. Beings powerful enough to break chains and shackles, who had terrorised a region for years, are pleading with a Galilean carpenter not to send them to the bottomless pit. They knew He could do it. They knew He had the authority to do it on the spot.

That single scene tells you almost everything about the balance of power in the unseen world. The demons were not negotiating from strength. They were asking a favour, and the fact that Jesus granted a version of it says nothing about His limits and everything about His purposes.

The pit opened in Revelation 9

Revelation 9:1-2 describes a star fallen from heaven to earth who is given the key to the shaft of the bottomless pit. He opens it, and smoke rises like the smoke of a great furnace, darkening the sun and the air. Out of the smoke come locusts with power like scorpions.

The description that follows is one of the most disturbing passages in the Bible. These creatures are told not to harm vegetation but only people who lack the seal of God, and they torment rather than kill for five months. Their king is named as the angel of the bottomless pit, Abaddon in Hebrew and Apollyon in Greek, which means Destroyer.

I read this literally, as I read the rest of the prophetic material, and I place it within the Tribulation period after the church has been removed. Whatever the precise nature of these creatures, the passage assumes the bottomless pit contains beings currently restrained who will be released for a limited period under permission.

Who holds the key to the bottomless pit

This is the detail I would not want anyone to miss. In Revelation 9 the key is given to the fallen star. In Revelation 20:1 an angel comes down from heaven holding the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand, and binds Satan for a thousand years.

The key is always given. It is never seized. Whatever the enemy is permitted to do, permission is the operative word, and the one who grants it is not in any difficulty. Jesus says in Revelation 1:18 that He has the keys of Death and Hades, and the whole book is written to a persecuted church that badly needed to hear it.

The binding of Satan

Revelation 20 places Satan in the bottomless pit for a thousand years, shut and sealed over him so that he might not deceive the nations any longer until the thousand years were ended. After that he is released for a little while, gathers a final rebellion, and is thrown into the lake of fire for ever.

I hold to a literal Millennium with Jesus reigning from Jerusalem, and I take the thousand years as a thousand years. The passage is not describing the present age. It cannot be, because the one thing said about the imprisonment is that the deception of the nations stops, and any honest look at the world will tell you it has not.

So the bottomless pit serves as a prison during the Millennium, and then even that confinement gives way to a final and permanent judgement. The lake of fire is the destination. The abyss is the remand cell.

The detail about the seal is worth noticing. The angel shuts it and seals it over him, which is the language of official custody rather than of a struggle. Nobody wrestles Satan into the pit. He is put there, and the door is closed and stamped.

Not the same as hell

Several words get flattened into hell in English and it causes real confusion. Hades is the intermediate state of the unrighteous dead. Gehenna, the word Jesus most often used, points to final judgement. The lake of fire in Revelation 20 is the eternal destination. And the bottomless pit is a prison for spirit beings.

Keeping them distinct matters because it clarifies the timeline. Nobody is in the lake of fire yet. Satan is not in the abyss yet. The unrighteous dead are not yet at the great white throne. Judgement is coming, and its stages are laid out with more care than most popular preaching allows.

It also matters because eternal conscious punishment is a doctrine we should hold soberly rather than casually. Revelation 20:10 says the devil, the beast and the false prophet will be tormented day and night for ever and ever, and I do not know how to soften that without changing the words.

Are some fallen angels already there?

2 Peter 2:4 says God cast the angels who sinned into hell, using a rare verb formed from Tartarus, and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgement. Jude 6 describes angels who did not stay within their own position of authority as kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness.

Whether that place is identical with the bottomless pit is not stated. What is clear is that a category of fallen angels is already under restraint while others remain active, which is why the demonic activity of the Gospels and of our own day is real without being unlimited. I have written more on this in whether demons are the same as fallen angels.

Why any of this is good news

It sounds like a grim subject and in one sense it is. But consider what it establishes. There is a prison. There is a key. There is a schedule. There is a final judgement in which evil is not tolerated, negotiated with, or absorbed into some larger harmony, but dealt with.

People who have suffered at the hands of evil do not usually want a God who overlooks it. They want a God who will do something about it, and the bottomless pit is part of the evidence that He will. For related material see who Abaddon or Apollyon is.

It also puts our present troubles in proportion. Whatever the enemy is doing in your life or your church at the moment, he is doing it on borrowed time, within set limits, and under a sentence already passed. The prison is prepared and the key is in safe hands.

So, now what?

Stop thinking of the enemy as a free agent. Every account we have of the bottomless pit shows spirit beings dreading it, being confined to it, and being released from it only by permission. That is not a picture of a rival kingdom. It is a picture of a rebellion under management.

And if you find the subject frightening, notice who is holding the keys in Revelation 1. The hands that hold them have nail marks in them. Does that change how the rest of it reads?

“Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the key to the bottomless pit and a great chain.”

Revelation 20:1, ESV