The commentary for this Sabbath focuses on Rev. 8:6-9:12 and 16:1-21, which forms part of a complete and full re-enactment of the plagues of Exodus, culminating in the death of the entire first born of Egypt, human and animal. As God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, the severity of the plagues increased until the death of all the first born in the land. Up until this point, Pharaoh’s pride had remained unwavering. Now, however, with this mortal stroke his pride gave way to grief and remorse, though not repentance. Judas experienced this same kind of grief and remorse after he had betrayed the Lord. The grief in the land of Egypt must have been overwhelming, yet God did not allow Pharaoh to soften his heart, for as soon as the shock of what happened had worn off, Pharaoh gathered his army and pursued to his doom the fleeing Hebrew slaves. This act not only allowed the Hebrews to escape, but also brought glory to God among the nations.
Now in the passage from the New Covenant, the book of Revelation, we have a kind of re-enactment of what God did to Egypt, but on an immensely bigger and consequential scale and which fully accomplished God’s purpose in that it affects the entire created order.
The narrative of the apocalyptic plagues—the seven trumpets and the seven bowls—describes the punishment that resides in the mind of God and which will come to fruition in our future, but which of course, as we’ve discussed in a previous commentary, is in God’s eternal present. It is “already, but not yet.” The similarity of the plagues of Revelation to those of Exodus is obvious to even the casual observer who may not however understand that the Egyptian plagues were nothing more than a kind of foretaste—firstfruits if you will—of the plagues yet to come.
The Egyptian plagues are a picture of the consequence of rebellion against God and His people. The final appearance of the consequence of stubborn pride is going to be fully realized, as the prophet John informs us in his vision of the approach of the end time.
We see that with the experience of each of the bowls of God’s wrath, the response by those “who bore the mark of the beast and worshipped its image” is essentially the same as that of Pharaoh who literally bore the mark of the beast on his forehead. That was the Cobra or Asp—the serpent which formed part of Pharaoh’s crown. It was originally a symbol of the goddess Wadjet but also from God’s perspective, it stood for the mark of the beast, Satan’s servant, the epitome of rebellion and evil. By wearing this odious crown, Pharaoh was actually proclaiming his allegiance to sinfulness and pride, to rebellion against God himself.
And like Pharaoh, the people described in our portion from Revelation remained insolent and resentful and full of self-importance. They were so far gone along that road that they were unable to turn back, even as Pharaoh was unable to turn back from pursuing the Hebrews in the desert. The plagues of Egypt are the prototypes for the plagues of the end time. In reading these two accounts side by side, we are able to understand in more depth the description of God as the beginning and the end. What has come before will come again. The purpose of God is not linear but circular, its beginning meets with its end; they are merely two instances of the same cosmic event. The only difference is that in the latter expression, time will cease to exist at the conclusion of the event described in Revelation. From the throne in the Heavenly temple a voice cries out “It is done” echoing the words of Christ upon the cross, “It is finished” (John 19:30). The English words “It is done” represent the single Greek word gegonen (ginomai) and means “it has become”, “it has happened”, and so on. It is used for God’s actions as emerging from eternity and manifesting in time and space.
With the pouring out of the third bowl of wrath we are told that an angel of God—His messenger, therefore His representative—declares that the punishment so far meted out is nothing less than what the people deserve. This is an announcement that the time for mercy and grace is now past, that the opportunity for repentance has come and gone. Now there is nothing but the inexorable working out of God’s eternal will for justice. He was not exaggerating when the preacher Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) declared that “sinners in the hands of an angry God” would find no mercy and goes on to explain that “the reason why they are not fallen already and do not fall now is only that God's appointed time is not come. For it is said, that when that due time, or appointed time comes, their foot shall slide. Then they shall be left to fall, as they are inclined by their own weight. God will not hold them up in these slippery places any longer, but will let them go; and then, at that very instant, they shall fall into destruction; as he that stands on such slippery declining ground, on the edge of a pit, he cannot stand alone, when he is let go he immediately falls and is lost.” However, Edwards did not have this cataclysmic end time in view. In his sermon, he was referring to individuals, not whole nations, not millions upon millions of people who in their rebellion would be the recipients of God’s final and never-changing judgment. Sinners foolishly comfort themselves with the notion that this race of humanity will somehow escape the wrath we are reading about, even if some individuals—the truly terrible—will not. Nevertheless, both Exodus and Revelation make it plain that God did not reserve these catastrophic events for some special class of evil doers. We read in Exodus, “Pharaoh rose up in the night, he and all his servants and all the Egyptians. And there was a great cry in Egypt, for there was not a house where someone was not dead” (10:30). These were ordinary Egyptians, fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters. They were not the perpetrators of horrible acts of cruelty. The same is true for the people of Revelation. They were just so-called ordinary folk. But all of them—both individually and nationally, were rebelling against God, his commandments and most especially, His very Son, the messiah, who came to earth to pay for the sins of all who would come to Him in contrition and humility.
For pride will avail of nothing greater than increased torment, as intractable sinners drain “the cup of the wine of the fury of His wrath”. Let each one pray therefore for hearts of flesh, rather than hearts of stone and let each one come before the Creator and Sustainer of all things with reverence, awe and fear, for our God is indeed a consuming fire (Heb. 12:29).
AMEN
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