“The Lord is patient and great in mercy, pardoning unrighteousness and transgression, although He certainly does not let them go unpunished, but visits the unrighteousness of the fathers upon the children, to the third and fourth generation.”1 “For My own name’s sake I delay My wrath; for the sake of My praise I hold it back from you, so as not to destroy you completely.”2 The final purpose of history is to establish the total and sole dominion of God in peace, prosperity and justice. He waits a long time, warning, urging lovingly towards repentance and conversion, but if centuries of love and patience lead to no other result than that of ‘beast-people’, who voluntarily surrender to all the ‘powers of darkness’, God’s love takes on another form: wrath. For evil must disappear. “All nations will come and worship before You.”3 That is the final goal. That is why the judgments must be public, unveiled. Everything that goes against the love and the holiness of God will disappear—through His wrath, and the wrath of the Lamb.4 And we now have come thus far in world history. The end of the end times, the very last days, have dawned upon us. The ‘bowls’ are going to be poured out. Whereas under the ‘trumpets’ only ‘a third’ was repeatedly spoken of, and there still appears to be time, because the ‘trumpets’ are blown in sequence, one after another, and there is thus time between and during each consecutive ‘trumpet’, there is no question about that now. All the ‘bowls’ are poured out at only one command. In chapters 8 and 9 each judgment-angel receives a separate command for his part. Not here; the plagues will succeed each other very quickly. This is a ‘package’ that reaches earth in quick, successive waves—‘earth’ in the sense of corrupt earth whose inhabitants are consumed with lusts, occult and violence, devoid of love, as hard as stone—and now they will be struck as hard as stone. When one judgment, one ‘bowl’, has hardly passed, another one is already been poured out. You don’t know where to look. It is all around you. There is no more escape. A loud voice calls. That word ‘loud’ or ‘great’ seems to characterise the judgments. There will soon be ‘intense’ heat (v.9), the ‘great’ river (v.12), the ‘great’ Day of God Almighty (v.14), a ‘severe’ (2x) earthquake (v.18), the ‘great’ city (v.19), the ‘huge’ hailstones (v.21), and the ‘terrible’ plague (v.21).
The ‘loud’ voice calls to angels to appear. This is the voice of God Himself. No one can enter the Temple any longer because of the fire and the ‘Glory of God’.5 He Himself gives the last command, the final order: “Go!” Pour out the bowls—on earth, the sea, the rivers, the water sources, the sun, the ‘beast’s’ institutions of power, the people, ‘Babylon’, the ‘city of Man’. The new time must come! Now! And that will be ‘Jerusalem’, the ‘City of God’!
The coming of the Kingdom and of the King of the Kingdom can wait no longer. Oh, what a joy to be a child of God and to know that you are on the way, through it all, to that Kingdom that is coming!
• Over and against Greek philosophy and humanism/Hellenism and Church Fathers like Origen, as well as many philosophers and modern theologians who consider the ‘wrath of God’ as portrayed in the Book of Revelation to be ‘unworthy’ of Him, stands the faith of Israel and the prophets of Israel who spoke on behalf of God. Israel received the Word of God. Not cleverly invented stories or religious myths.
• Therefore they knew: God’s purposes as far as His world is concerned cannot be accomplished without the revelation of His wrath.
• Jesus and the Apostles said the same. And they gave a warning as well. “But, dear friends, remember what the Apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ foretold. They said to you, “In the last times there will be scoffers who will follow their own ungodly desires.”6 People’s ‘mockery’ does not change God’s plans and purposes that at all!
Bible References:
1.Numbers 14:18 2.Isaiah 48:9 3.Revelation 15:4 4.Revelation 6:16 5.Revelation 15:8 6.2 Peter 2 and 3:3; Jude 17-18; Galatians 6:7
