Daily Thought

The seven vial (bowl) judgements predicted here are the consummation of God’s wrath inflicted on unrepentant mankind. Like the trumpet judgements, they are divided into four which affect the earth, sea, rivers, and sun, followed by three different ones, but end with a third great earthquake. God is a God of order, even in judgement. The first angel, then, poured out his bowl on the earth; it became a grievous, possibly cancerous, sore on all who worshipped the beast and bore his mark. When the second angel poured out his bowl on the sea, it became blood. These and others of the plagues are similar to those with which God through Moses afflicted the Egyptians at the Exodus. The third plague turned all the watercourses to blood. This is said, even by the altar, to be a just retribution for all the innocent blood of saints and prophets which men will have shed. The fourth bowl was poured on the sun, so that it became hotter and scorched men to death. The Old Testament predicts this judgement, Isa. 24. 6; Mal. 4. 1. But even this will not result in mankind’s repentance, only further defiance and blasphemy.

From the fifth bowl the focus of the judgements is mainly on the kingdom of the Beast, which by this will be plunged into darkness. The sixth angel poured out his bowl on the river Euphrates, and dried it up to allow the kings of the east to invade across it. Then three demonic spirits issuing from the trinity of evil will by counterfeit miracles lure the kings of the whole world to engage in the campaign of Armageddon, unknown to them, by God’s own sovereign will. The seventh bowl will result in the greatest earthquake of all time, devastating all the cities of the nations, causing all islands and mountains to disappear, splitting ‘the great city’, that is, Jerusalem, 11. 8, into three parts, and destroying Babylon the great, as recorded also in chapter 18. How foolish we would be to lay up our treasure on earth, rather than in heaven! An accompanying terrible hailstorm will again fail to produce man’s repentance. How incorrigible and ungrateful our natural hearts are! If God’s grace in the gospel does not melt them now, even the severest judgements will not do so then. Reader, what is your response?