The fourth major division of the book of Revelation opens, as each major vision does, with a controlling vision, followed by a teaching segment which is constructed to a pattern of seven components, this time under the figure of seven bowls of judgment poured out on the earth by seven angels.
Our standard chapter and verse divisions don't help us much here. The third major division ended with the Song of Moses and the Lamb at 15:4. This major division opens with its controlling vision, not, as you might assume at 16:1, but at 15:5.
John has already alerted us to the theme of this fourth major division of the book. He anticipated it at 15:1 as he drew the third division to a close:
Then I saw another portent in heaven, great and wonderful, seven angels with seven plagues, which are the last, for with them the wrath of God is ended.
In this major division therefore John is going to describe how God's long conflict with evil comes to its final climax. In a word. he is going to describe the end of the world.
As you might expect, it gets rather complicated. In chapter 16 he gives us a compact overview of the process; then in succeeding chapters he back-tracks as it were, expanding some elements of that overview in greater detail. We shall confine ourselves in this study simply to the overview, which occupies ch. 16.
But first we must give attention with the opening vision 15:5-8.
Seven angels with their bowls of wrath emerge from the Temple in heaven, and pour them out, one by one, on the earth. John is affirming again that events on earth have their origin in Heaven. Our world, however confused and tumultuous its life may appear to be, is a governed world. Neither men nor devils have the last word - God does. He is bringing history to a planned climax. The long night of this world's life is going to end in a new dawn, a dawn in which, not evil and hate will rule, but in which righteousness and love will reign. Bear that in mind through all that follows. John will spell out the death-throes of this world's malignant powers in gruesome detail, but while he does so we must not lose sight of the dawn-light that waits to break over the horizon. The nightmare visions that he will present now are to be followed by a final division in the book wherein God "makes all things new."
The "temple of the tent of witness" out of which the angels proceed is clearly God's dwelling place in heaven. The tent of witness, or the Tabernacle as we know it from the book of Exodus, was the sanctuary Moses was instructed to build so that God "might dwell in their midst." (Ex. 25:9) When the people's wandering in the desert ended and they entered the promised land, the moveable tabernacle was developed into the settled Jerusalem temple. In describing it as a "temple filled with smoke" (v. 8) John clearly has in mind the vision of God the prophet Isaiah was granted in that temple, which is recorded in Isaiah 6. Let me remind you of it:
In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and his train filled the temple. Above him stood the seraphim; each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called to another and said: "Holy, holy, holy is YAHWEH of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory." And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke.
And I said: "Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, YAHWEH of hosts!"
You understand why John says that "the temple was filled with smoke from the glory of God and from His power."
A naked encounter with the living God in all his awesome holiness is the most dangerous and destructive experience to which any unredeemed creature can be exposed. "It is a fearful thing to fall into hands of the living God." (Heb. 10:31) It is to our peril that we lose sight of the awesome destructiveness of God's unshielded presence. Unprotected in the blaze of His holiness we shall simply shrivel and crack like a flea in the fire. That is why John tells os that "no-one could enter the temple until the seven plagues of the seven angels were ended," for while God's face is set against us in judgment, none dare approach Him.
We absolutely must not lose sight of this in what follows. To be sure, God's judgments are not His last word. Bear in mind that these seven plagues are the last, "because with them God's wrath is ended."
God's judgments have an end - His mercies do
not!
His wrath is but for a moment, but His compassion is for
ever.
Isaiah 54:7 For a brief moment I forsook you, but with great compassion I will gather you. In overflowing wrath for a little while I hid my face from you, but with everlasting love I will have compassion on you," says the Lord your Redeemer.
James 2:13: Judgment without mercy will be shown to those who have shown no mercy … but mercy triumphs over judgment!
Judgment is not God's last word - mercy is! But the word of judgment must be spoken nonetheless, for God's righteousness may not be compromised. Evil will not end until it has been destroyed. Its destruction is fearful, and that fearful destruction will inevitably come upon all whose hearts are given up to it, and are not redeemed.
The angels into whose hands the judgments are given are described as being "robed in pure, bright linen" and "their breasts girded with golden girdles" because, to quote Psalm 19, "The law of the LORD is perfect; the testimony of the LORD is sure; the precepts of the LORD are right; the commandment of the LORD is pure; the fear of the LORD is clean, enduring for ever; and the ordinances of the LORD are true, and righteous altogether. More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold."
We shall be hopelessly out of tune with what John goes on to tell us if we have lost all sense that evil is ugly, repulsive, disgusting and altogether to be abhorred. This crucial conviction is spelled out in vs. 5b-7:
"Just art thou in these thy judgments, thou who art and wast, O Holy One. For men have shed the blood of saints and prophets, and thou hast given them blood to drink. It is their due! And I heard the altar cry, "Yea, Lord God the Almighty, true and just are thy judgments!"
Our generation has been grievously corrupted by a virulent philosophy that declares all values to be relative. Standards of right and wrong are not absolute; they are a matter of individual choice; so homosexuality and heterosexuality, for example, are equally valid, to be endorsed without reference to any standard beyond our individual preference. But when discrimination is thrown away, so are standards. Good and evil are robbed of any definition.
And what these false prophets fail to perceive is the sheer stupidity of their argument, for when they declare that there are no absolutes, what they mean is "except my affirmation that there are no absolutes" - that is the one absolute they insist on. How we could have let ourselves be taken in by such arrant nonsense is beyond comprehension. In a far more sinister sense than Adam and Eve themselves realised at the time, we have yielded to the temptation to be ourselves as God, determining good and evil. In the process we embrace evil as our good and corrupt ourselves with horrible perversities. In a created world good and evil are determined by the character of the Creator. Good corresponds to what God is, and if the knowledge of God is lost all knowledge of the good is lost. It absolutely cannot be invented. Standards of good are absolute and stand outside ourselves altogether. We do not judge them; they judge us.
That fearful truth, John will now spell out.
The seven bowls are as follows:
Judgments affecting ...
1. Foul Sores
Earth
2. Blood of Death
Sea
3. Rivers of blood ("their due")
Rivers, fountains
4. Men scorched but do not repent
Sun
5. The "world" in darkness
Anguish
6. Armageddon - the Demonic Swan-song
Euphrates
7. The end of the earth and man's life
Voice "It is done."
The bowls are represented as being given to the angels by one of the four living creatures (v. 7). As we have observed already the four living creatures represent creation: John is telling us that God will use the powers of creation to bring His judgments upon unrepentant humanity. Wisdom 5:17, 20: "God will arm all creation to repel His enemies ... creation will join with Him to fight against the insensate." Wisdom 11:16, "By what things a man sinneth, by these he is punished." That "one of the four living creatures" gave the bowls to the angels suggestst that a component of nature willingly offers itself to serve God's purposes of judgment, despite the hurt to which it will itself be put in doing so.
We should observe the parallel between these Bowl judgments and the Trumpet judgments earlier (8:6 to 11:18), indicated by the right-hand column above. There John indicated the general nature of God's judgments in all times; here he indicates the nature of God's judgments in the end time. There is no substantial difference in their nature - only in their intensity. In the Trumpet Judgments John was careful to note that they affected only a third of earth sea and sky ... they were restrained in their impact; for they constituted a call to repentance. Here there is no restraint; no possibility of repentance now remains. Through all ages, God has given fair warning of what the end will be (indeed, the plagues inflicted on Egypt were a precursor, even that long ago, to both series of judgments), but the time must come when stubbornly resisted warnings issue in final judgments.
Note that in both series, Trumpets and Bowls:
1. Hail, fire, blood
Earth
Vegetation
2. Fiery Mountain
Sea
Food and ...
3. Blazing Star
Rivers & fountains
Drink
4. Sun, moon, stars
Sun, moon, stars
Light and Warmth
(All the above one third only(
(Judgment is here under restraint)
5. Woe I
Smoke, locusts from Pit
Peace of mind
6. Woe II
Cavalry from Euphrates
Safety of life
7. Woe III
Loud voices
Announcement of the End (I Cor. 15:24-25)
Judgments 1-4 affect the conditions of men's life;
Judgments 5-6 affect men's persons.
"Earth, sea, rivers and sky are stricken in turn; then comes torment, then destruction, and finally the world is no more." (Michael Wilcock, "I Saw Heaven Opened" IVP p. 144)
John further indicates the link between the Trumpet judgments and the Bowl judgments by a feature of the sixth in each - the assembly of armies from the Euphrates. And John underlines the demonic sway over human life when men do not repent when in the sixth bowl he describes the three foul spirits - from the dragon (Satan), the Beast (the spirit of fallen humanity) and the False Prophet (godless ideology) - who inspire humanity's rebellion against God.
1. Earth - Foul Sores
"The consequence of false worship is the festering of the soul." (D. T. Niles, "As Seeing the Invisible" SCM, p. 84)2. Sea - Blood
3. Rivers and Fountains - Blood
Verse 6 is the definitive comment on these two judgments: "Men have shed the blood of saints and prophets, and Thou hast given them blood to drink. It is their due." The purpose of water is to give life; instead it now brings death.4. Sun - Scorching by Fire
A contrast with the followers of the Lamb (7:16): "The sun shall not strike them, nor any scorching heat." As the life-giving waters brought death, so now does the life-giving light.5. Throne of the Beast - Darkness and Anguish
The Satanic world system, energetically structured to bring its own utopia in scorn of God's, is plunged into confusion and disarray (the way Communism was toward the end of the 20th century).6. River Euphrates Dried - Armageddon; Foul Spirits. Mankind perishes in final battle
With the failure of antichrist's "system" in its bid to bring a satanically inspired peace, it emerges in its true colours to unleash a frenzy of destruction.John inserts here a reference to Christ's 2nd Coming - Satan must confront the Christ, as he did in the desert temptation, stripped of all disguise, and suffer final defeat.
7. Earthquake, Islands and Mountains are no more, Hailstone - The End
With the seventh bowl, there is no doubt John is describing the end, for he says that Babylon (the City of Man whose life is organised in defiance of God) drains the cup of the fury of His wrath as it disintegrates and that every island fled away and no mountains were to be found. "Bowl 6 brought wholesale destruction; Bowl 7 brings total erasure." (Michael Wilcock, "I Saw Heaven Opened" IVP p. 150) But he has not finished yet, for one of the Bowl angels will now show him in greater detail the collapse of Babylon. That will take us into chapter 17.
But he rounds out this overview of the end under the figure of seven bowls with a nightmare vision of the entire world disintegrating under a hail of stones which conjures up the picture cosmologists have warned us could happen if earth were to be bombarded by an endless storm of asteroids.
Two features of this chapter call for final emphasis.
One is the note, half way through in v. 11,
that despite their sufferings men refused to repent.
The other is the statement at the end that men cursed God for the
final plague that fell upon them.
John is fronting op squarely to a fact of life so appalling that we almost universally insist on living in denial of it: that mankind is profoundly evil.
Almost all political philosophies that have ever swayed the nations of the world, whether they be democracies or dictatorships, proceed on the assumption that humanity is essentially good, and that all that is needed to rid the world of strife and oppression is better education and better social management. Christianity has been reviled in every age because it insists that humanity's life is poisoned at the spring, so the heart of man is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.
The one root conviction that divides all panaceas for the world's misery is whether humanity is essentially evil or essentially good. Alone among them all, the Christian religion insists that humanity is essentially evil and the only remedy for its condition therefore lies outside its own power altogether, and lies in the hand of God alone. And the insistence by all other philosophies that the power to remedy our ills lies in our own hand alone is testimony to the rebellion against God that lies at its very heart. In their very promise of salvation they betray the sickness unto death that will for ever betray it. True, the lineaments of God's image remain on the face of mankind, but they are corrupted.
As Christians we shall be scorned for our conviction and reviled on account of it without remedy; but painful as it is, it is the beginning of the only truth that will ever set us free.
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