Word of Encouragement (12/16/2021)
The third angel poured out his bowl into the rivers and the springs of water, and they became blood. 5 And I heard the angel in charge of the waters say, “Just are you, O Holy One, who is and who was, for you brought these judgments. 6 For they have shed the blood of saints and prophets, and you have given them blood to drink. It is what they deserve!” And I heard the altar saying, “Yes, Lord God the Almighty, true and just are your judgments” (Rev. 16:4-7)!
The justice of God’s judgment is shown in the way the sins of the wicked are punished. This praise focuses on their sin of shedding the blood of saints and prophets. So, God will punish them by giving them blood to drink.
We saw how this judgment is patterned after the first plague in Egypt. In that plague, the water of the Nile, as well as the rivers and streams and springs of Egypt was turned into actual blood. We also saw how this was a type of God’s judgment in the last days—that is, it was a symbolic representation, not the actual sample, of God’s judgment on the world. What was the symbolic message of the first plague? The ten plagues all had an apologetic purpose—that is, to demonstrate that YHWH was the one and only true God of heaven and earth, that it was YHWH who controlled all the realms and elements of nature, not the Egyptian gods and goddesses. By turning the water of the Nile into blood, God demonstrated that the Egyptian god of Hapi, who was known as the god of the Nile (among other things), was not the one in charge but YHWH was.
But the judgment of the third bowl has another purpose—that of displaying justice of God. The wicked are described as blood-thirsty people, especially for the blood of saints and prophets. So, God will make them drink blood. When we say that they are “blood-thirsty,” it doesn’t mean that they want to drink blood; it means that they want to see saints and prophets shed blood under their persecution. But God in His judgment will make them drink it, too.
You can see the symbolic significance of this as a judgment: they will not be allowed just to sin; they will have to taste the bitter consequences of their sin in kind. So, the angel says, “It is what they deserve!” Dante has some imaginative ways of showing this in his Inferno (Hell). For example, the lustful are blown about in a never-ending storm. Why? Because they surrendered themselves to the whirlwind of lust, their punishment will be getting dizzily whirled around by a perpetual storm!
In the ancient world, drinking blood was done most often in cultic rituals. If people didn’t mind doing that, it was because they had water to quench their daily thirst. But in the third-bowl judgment, water is replaced with blood. Blood is not something they drink on some occasions; it becomes their only drink. This provides the spiritual perspective on the life of the unrepentant sinner: his life is nothing but drinking the bitter dregs of his sinful actions and this is so even when he thinks his life is going well. He is essentially living in hell because he is separated from God. Whatever he happens to enjoy in this life is only heaping God’s judgment on his head since he does not acknowledge God nor gives thanks to Him for the Granter of these blessings.
How grateful we should be that God does not deal with us according to what we deserve because of what Christ has done for us! Instead of drinking from the cup of divine wrath, we can now drink from the river of His delights. Because God is with us, we live in foretaste of heaven, even when we find ourselves in suffering and pain. Let us drink more deeply from the river of His delights and taste more fully the realities of heavenly glory by faith.