7 Bowls of God’s Wrath

EP 44 | 7 Bowls of God’s Wrath

 

Revelation 15-16 is the biblical horror story describing how the world ends. The question is if this passage is literal like Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye do with their Left Behind series, or if this literature is more symbolic. My hermeneutical journey compels me to choose the latter because that’s how the apocalypse works, and most of Revelation has been a series of visions and sounds. 

Chapter 15 is a prelude to the following chapter. It starts with a sign in heaven. The last time we saw a sign in heaven was in chapter 12, as we were reintroduced to the celestial woman, Israel. Signs act as omens as they hint at what’s coming. This time, it is the destruction of the created order. 

The big question that Revelation (especially these two chapters) bid us to ask is about God’s morality. Is God evil? Is it evil for God to wipe out evildoers, and remove their wicked governments, and their wicked cultures? 

God is praised for being holy and right. You cannot ask God if he’s evil without asking if God would still be right if he never did anything about the evil in the world. No matter what interpretation you hold regarding the Millennium of Revelation 20, this book of the Bible is clear that the church will be persecuted and Christians will be killed by the agents of the beast, the dragon, and the false prophet. God’s martyrs cry out to him for justice 

People have been stumped by the problem of evil for thousands of years. I believe the answer to the question is not hard to understand but difficult to accept. If God punished evil, nobody would survive. Evil exists because people are evil and inflict evil on others. There is certainly evil in the world and that evil dwells in seed-form within the heart of every human. This is why we need Jesus so we can be holy, and thus be spared from the wrath of God. 

At this point in the book of Revelation, the 7 bowls contain God’s wrath, and once they are poured out on the earth, cosmic justice will be met for the killing of God’s people. These bowls are similar to the trumpets, but instead of one-third destruction to various things on earth, the bowls are destruction. It’s a horror story about the end!