Fr. Stephen De Young: So chapter 16, verse one: “Then I heard a loud voice from the temple, saying to the seven angels: Go and pour out the bowls of the wrath of God on the earth.” So they get sent out.

Verse two: “So the first went out and poured out his bowl on the earth, and a foul and loathsome sore came upon the men who had the mark of the beast and those who worshiped his image.” This is a literal plague, the way we tend to use it. This is again a visible sore. But notice, as we were just saying, this is on the people who have received the mark of the beast, the people who were worshiping the beast, the people who were involved in the system. Notice also it doesn’t kill them. So this is a judgment, but this is a judgment that could potentially bring about repentance. They’re bringing this painful, unpleasant image of what they’re doing in the attempt to draw them back. Verse three— And by the way, sores was one of the plagues on Egypt.

Bowl two, verse three: “Then the second angel poured out his bowl on the sea, and it became blood as of a dead man, and every living creature in the sea died.” Water turning to blood, another one of the ten plagues on Egypt.

Verse four:

Then the third angel poured out his bowl on the rivers and springs of water, and they become blood. And I heard the angel of the waters saying, “You are righteous, O Lord, the One who is and who was and who is to be, because you have judged these things, for they have shed the blood of saints and prophets, and you have given them blood to drink, for it is their due.” And I heard another from the altar saying, “Even so, Lord God Almighty, true and righteous are your judgments.”

So there are two pieces here. We get the rest of the water. We had the salt water first, the sea; now we get the fresh water: the rivers and the streams get turned to blood. Notice we have the angel of the waters here. We’ve talked before about how the angels are created by God, and through them he sort of administers his creation. So this is the angel who’s in charge of overseeing the waters. When he sees what God does, he comes out and says, “Well, this is right, because these people shed the blood of the righteous, and so now you again have given them this visual image. You’ve given them blood to drink. You wanted to drink the blood of the saints and the prophets: here’s blood to drink.”

Notice that voice that comes and agrees is from the altar. Do you remember who we saw was at the altar? At the base of the altar in heaven, several chapters ago, that’s where the souls of the martyrs were. And we talked about how the reason they were under the altar is that, when sacrifices were made in the Old Testament, the blood from the sacrifice was poured out at the base of the altar. The idea was their blood had been poured out; they had offered themselves as a sacrifice to God. He mentions the martyrs and the prophets, and this is the martyrs saying yes. Remember last time we saw them, they were saying, “How long?”

Verse eight: “Then the fourth angel poured out his bowl on the sun, and power was given to him”—who’s “him”? the sun—“to scorch men with fire.” This is the angel associated with the sun again.

“And men were scorched with great heat, and they blasphemed the name of God who has power over these plagues, and they did not repent and give him glory.” So that’s important. What are all of these plagues aimed at? Again, they’re not— God’s not just beating these people because he’s angry at them with these plagues. Every one of them, and this one now explicitly, is giving an opportunity to repent. They’re receiving the consequences of their own actions. That’s why you have this sort of poetic justice with the blood. God is no longer protecting them from the consequences of their action; they’re receiving them, and rather than repenting and giving glory to God, they’re just getting angry at God and blaspheming him for this judgment.

Verse ten: “Then the fifth angel poured out his bowl on the throne of the beast, and his kingdom became full of darkness, and they gnawed their tongues because of the pain. They blasphemed the God of heaven because of their pains and their sores, and did not repent of their deeds.” This bowl gets poured on the throne of the beast, the head of the great king of the world, and darkness, another one of the plagues on Egypt. Again, they don’t repent.

Remember also what the refrain was when those plagues were happening in Egypt. Those were all aimed at what? Pharaoh letting the people go, but pharaoh keeps hardening his heart, pharaoh keeps refusing. So this is all of these people who are being given these seven chances to repent. They just get deeper and deeper into their blasphemy and rebellion and hatred of God rather than repenting.

Q1: You had said that this is kind of overlapping with the other ones, so could the scorching also be what was mentioned with the people with the mark of the beasts burning?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, this is all overlapping. This is not sequential.

Verse twelve: “Then the sixth angel poured out his bowl on the great river Euphrates, and its water was dried up so that the way of the kings from the East might be prepared. And I saw three unclean spirits, like frogs”—now we’re getting a little weird, as if this wasn’t weird before, but now we’re getting really weird—“three unclean spirits like frogs coming out of the mouth of the dragon, out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet.” So the dragon, the beast from the earth, the beast from the sea whom we saw before, each one spits out a frog, that is, it’s actually not a frog-frog; it’s an unclean spirit. It’s a demonic spirit that appears like a frog.

“For they are spirits of demons, performing signs, which go out to the kings of the earth and of the whole world, to gather them to the battle of that great day of God Almighty.” Again, we see this sort of escalation. Rather than anyone repenting, they’re not only all just blaspheming God, but now they’re trying to organizing. The dragon, the beasts, sort of all the powers of evil are organizing them all for sort of this archetypal final battle against God, where they’re going to vent their hatred. Now, notice the dragon and the beast from the sea and the beast from the earth know where this is going to go. They know who’s going to win this fight. They don’t care, because what are they doing? They’re sending these humans who have been following them to their doom. God is trying to get them to repent, these humans who are following them, and they’re trying to bring these humans just deeper and deeper into rebellion, to bring them down to destruction.

Verse 15: “Behold, I am coming as a thief. Blessed is he who watches and keeps his garments, lest he walk naked and they see his shame.” This is pulling together a couple of sayings of Jesus from the gospels. Remember he says he’s going to come like a thief in the night. He says if the householder, the owner of the house, knew when the thief was going to show up, he wouldn’t get robbed, because he’d be prepared. But he says that’s sort of not how thieves work for that reason. When a thief comes, he comes when you’re not suspecting, and Christ means that to say: You need to continuously always be ready for the end to come.

And then the second piece that’s kind of brought together here is this imagery of the garment, like the wedding-garment for the wedding-feast, the parable that Christ tells about the people who show up without the proper garment. So this is drawing together Christ’s teaching about his own second coming. But why is it important that this is inserted here? This should once again be correcting our reading, that this isn’t—we’re not in chapter 16 of a whole series of events that are going to unfold in the future, because if that’s what this was, we wouldn’t have to always be ready! We wouldn’t have to worry about him coming like a thief in the night, because we’d have a lot of warning. We could sit and wait it out. “Hey, the Euphrates just dried up! Okay, time to repent. Time to get our stuff together.” This should put the lie.

So if these aren’t future events, what are these plagues? We talked about this with the four horsemen. These plagues are things that have happened throughout human history. We can’t take them super literally. So, yes, the seas—the oceans have not all turned to blood and everything in them died, literally, but there have been times when the water has become undrinkable. Or our water sources have dried up, where there’s blistering heat and famine in a place, where people are stricken with disease. When the darkness plague is poured out on the throne on the beast: when the empire collapses and everything goes wrong. So all of these things, all of these natural disasters, plagues, all of these things that happen in the world— St. John is not giving us new information: “Hey, this stuff happens”; he’s giving us the information that when these things happen, when these things happen in the world, when they affect us, when they affect others, these are God calling on us to repent.

There are two different ways we can receive these kind of things when they come into our lives. If you’re a fisherman who makes his living fishing, and you have a fish die-off in the place where you fish, you’re in a bad spot. You can react to that by becoming bitter and angry. Remember Job’s friends coming up to Job and telling him to curse God and die. That can harden you in your rebellion against God, in your bitterness, in your anger, in your hatred. Or it could become a chance for you to repent, to try to do better, to give glory to God. And so these are sort of extreme examples, but they’re extreme examples of the suffering, the difficulties, that comes into our lives, all of our lives, in different ways at different times. And how are we going to receive it? Are we going to receive it like the people who have the mark of the beast here who just get hardened, the enemy of God; or are we going to receive it as another opportunity to repent and to prepare to stand before Christ on the day of judgment when it comes?

Verse 16: “And they gathered them together to the place called in Hebrew Armageddon.” Okay. There are a lot of folks who want to identify this as a particular place in Palestine near Megiddo. That’s how they interpret this. We have something: he says, “the place called in Hebrew,” and then we get “Armageddon.” Obviously, Armageddon is in Greek, just like the rest of the book. [Laughter] So something is being transliterated from Hebrew or Aramaic into Greek. So a lot of people… The “Ar-,” most people agree, is from the Hebrew word har, which means mountain. And then folks will want to say, “Well, this is Mount Megiddo.” Now, Megiddo is actually kind of a valley or a plain, not a mountain, per se. But people will argue for this connection based on the fact that there were a lot of historical battles there at Megiddo, in the plain, in the valley. People don’t fight a lot of wars in the ancient world on mountains, because that’s kind of difficult. Once Obi-Wan gets the high ground, it’s over, but still you’re not going to try and get up onto the mountain to do that.

Aside from those geographical problems, there’s a better understanding of this in terms of how Hebrew is typically transliterated into Greek. That’s that this is actually a transliteration of the Hebrew Har Moed, and you may say, “Well, Moed… There’s no ‘g’ sound in Moed, so how do you get to Armageddon from Har Moed?” Well, moed in Hebrew has a letter in it— Moed is the modern Hebrew pronunciation. It has a letter in it that is an ayin. That letter in modern Hebrew is sort of not pronounced, so you just have whatever vowel is next to it; that’s how you end up with Har Moed in the modern pronunciation.

But in ancient times, ayin was pronounced, and it was pronounced like: [Glottal stop]. I know that’s weird, because we don’t do that in English. We don’t go: [Glottal stop] in the middle of a word. It’s usually at the beginning of a word. For example, this is the first letter in the city of Gomorrah, from Sodom and Gomorrah. Technically it’s Sodom and G‘morrah. [Laughter] That would have been more like Moged, the original pronunciation, rather than Moed. So you have Har Moged, roughly, and that’s where you’re getting Armageddon.

What is Har Moed? What does Har Moed mean? Har Moed is the mount of assembly, which is one of the names for the mountain of God. It’s the place where God presides with his angels; that’s the assembly, or the angels and the saints. So Mount Sinai is sometimes referred to as Har Moed; Mt. Zion—which mountain is the mountain of God depends on where God is. Wherever God is, that becomes the mountain of God. The idea here is not that “Hey, let’s all gather at this particular place.” Now, that works better if you’re going to say that the kings of the East are, like, armies from Communist China or something who are coming to invade Israel. If that’s your whole view and your whole reading of the book of Revelation, then that kind of works better.

But, through this whole chapter— This is what I think kind of clinches it. Through this whole chapter, what have we been seeing? We’ve been seeing— We’ve been using this Moses imagery. We’ve had this imagery of the Song of Moses, the Song of the Sea. We’ve had this imagery of the tablets of the covenant, the testimony in heaven, once received. So we’ve had these plagues from the bowls, that we’re seeing mostly line up pretty well with plagues from Egypt; we’ve seen that connection. So is there something connected to this in the story of Israel? And, yes, there is.

When the Israelites were at Mt. Sinai, they were attacked by the Amalekites. And the Amalekites there at that point attempted to wipe them out, to completely destroy Israel. They were there for genocide; they were there to kill them all. This, then, produced the battle story where, remember, Moses has to hold his arms out, and when he’s holding his arms up, Israel wins; if he starts to lower them… So then they get Joshua and [Hur] out there holding his arms up, sort of propping him up during the battle. This event is also referred to sometimes in that verse from the first ode of the canon that we sing, Moses making the sign of the cross with his arms and Amalek, because these events are sort of connected.

After the Amalekites are driven off, God puts this curse upon Amalek, the Amalekites. Amalek was already a bad dude. If you read his genealogy, his mother is referred to as the sister of Leviathan. That’s not a good thing! [Laughter] Amalek’s already a bad dude, but God says, “Look, they’re going to be— Because they came and tried to wipe out Israel, they’re going to be wiped out instead.” And he says there that they even dared to lay a hand upon the throne of Yahweh the God of Israel. So contained within the story of Moses is sort of the servants, these humans who are serving these evil powers, like the ones here, coming and trying to wipe out the people of God, coming and attacking the mountain of God. St. John is building on that imagery here, that this is going to be a final thing.

What’s the overall picture we’re getting here is that the folks at the final judgment who would end up under eternal condemnation are not people who just, like, weren’t quite good enough. They weren’t people who were doing their best but just, you know, one too many sins, one too few good deeds, didn’t make it into heaven, didn’t make the cut. That’s not who these folks are. These are folks who, again and again and again, were given chances to repent, and, again and again and again, blasphemed God and attacked his people and chose to follow and become like these demonic powers. I don’t remember who it was who said it—it might have been C.S. Lewis—who said that the gates of hell are locked from the inside, that the people who are excluded from God’s kingdom are the people who exclude themselves from God’s kingdom. That’s this image that we’re being given, that there’s sort of nothing that will apparently kill their hostility toward God and their hatred of God.

Verse 17:

Then the seventh angel poured out his bowl into the air, and a loud voice came out of the temple of heaven, from the throne, saying, “It is done.” And there were noises and thunderings and lightnings, and there was a great earthquake, such a mighty earthquake as had not occurred since men were on the earth. Now the great city was divided into three parts, and the cities of the nations fell. And great Babylon was remembered before God, to give her the cup of the wine of the fierceness of his wrath.

This is that remember imagery. God doesn’t forget the righteous who are suffering; he also doesn’t forget the people who are making them suffer. He remembers both. But so we get this last bowl, and now the judgment is going to be complete. “The great city is divided into three parts”: that’s referring to Jerusalem spiritually, and he’s going to develop— I know you’re like: “Well, what does that mean?” We’re going to come back around to it. [Laughter] We’re going to come back around to it, but the cities of the nations fall. They’re done. Pre-eminent among them is Babylon, and we’re going to come back to Babylon, too, in the next chapter. That’s what’s now going to get expanded out.

Verse 20: “Then every island fled away, and the mountains were not found.” What’s that? All the mountains disappear? [Laughter] The islands disappear? The idea here is that everything’s getting flattened out, and that’s an image, again, as we’ve talked about before, of justice. Justice is everything being in the proper place, everything functioning together properly, and so everything being restored to balance, everything being put back right. An image of judgment is everything being flattened out. You see this in— This is very prominent in Isaiah, especially starting in chapter 40, when it talks about all the valleys being raised up and the mountains being laid low, this same kind of image, of everything being put right.

Verse 21: “And great hail from heaven fell upon men, each hailstone about the weight of a talent.” That’s something like 40 pounds, so that’s— I’ve been in some Texas hailstorms, but not that bad.

“Men blasphemed God because of the plague of the hail, since that plague was exceedingly great.” Remember there was hail mixed with fire; that was one of the ten plagues on Egypt. Once again, rather than repenting, they blaspheme God because of the hail.

Since we had a special request, even though it’s a little early, and because there’s a lot in the next chapter, and I don’t think we can get through it in a super timely fashion, we’ll go ahead and end here for tonight. We’ll pick up here in chapter 17. Thank you, everybody.