Revelation — Chapter 16

Authorship & Background

Map & Geography

• Euphrates (v.12): Major river in Mesopotamia; boundary of the Promised Land.
• Armageddon (v.16): Greek form of Har-Megiddo (Mount Megiddo); site of final battle in Revelation.
• Babylon (v.19): Capital of the Babylonian empire; place of Judah's exile (modern Iraq).

Places on this map

• EuphratesTurkey, Syria, IraqThe longest river in western Asia, running about 1,700 miles from eastern Turkey to the Persian Gulf. It is the northern limit named in the promise to Abraham and the boundary Assyria and Babylon crossed to reach the Levant. Wikipedia
• MegiddoTel Megiddo, IsraelA fortress mound guarding the pass where the main coastal road cuts through the Carmel ridge into the Jezreel Valley. More battles have been fought on this plain than almost anywhere, which is why Revelation borrows its name for the last one. Wikipedia
• Babylonnear Hillah, IraqOn the Euphrates about 55 miles south of modern Baghdad. Judah's exiles were marched roughly 900 miles to get here, the long way round the Arabian desert, which is why the journey took months and the return was a genuine undertaking rather than a short trip home. Wikipedia
• MesopotamiaIraq and eastern SyriaThe land between the Tigris and Euphrates, flat, hot and farmable only by irrigation, which forced early cities into large-scale cooperation. Abraham came from its southern end and Israel's exiles were taken to its middle. Wikipedia
• CanaanIsrael, West Bank, LebanonThe land bridge between Egypt and Mesopotamia, which is why armies crossed it for three thousand years. Within about 60 miles it goes from coastal plain to hill country to rift valley to desert plateau, so control of it was always local and piecemeal. Wikipedia

Towns sit on their excavated or traditional site. Regions, rivers and seas are ringed rather than dotted, because for those a single point is only an anchor. Coastlines from Natural Earth.

Deep Dive

Setting: Chapter 15 prepared the stage. John saw "seven angels with seven plagues, which are the last, for with them the wrath of God is finished" (15:1). The victors over the beast sang the song of Moses and the Lamb beside a sea of glass, and the seven angels came out of the heavenly temple and were handed seven golden bowls "full of the wrath of God" (15:7). The temple filled with smoke, and no one could enter until the plagues were over (15:8). Now the bowls are poured out, one after another, with no pause and no interlude. The seals struck a quarter of the earth (6:8) and the trumpets a third (8:7–12). The bowls hold nothing back. Much of the chapter is modeled on the plagues of Egypt, so the book tells the story of the exodus again, on a world scale: God judges the oppressor and sets his people free.

Readers take the bowls in the four main ways set out in chapter 1, and they differ most on what the bowls hit and on Armageddon:

• Futurists (Guzik) see literal worldwide plagues in the last months before Christ returns, coming after the seals and trumpets. Armageddon is a real battle gathered near Megiddo in northern Israel.
• Historicists like Henry and JFB match the bowls to blows against the papacy and its allies through church history. Henry suggests the drying of the Euphrates may be the fall of the Turkish empire.
• Preterists see God's judgment on the persecuting powers of John's day, the Roman empire or apostate Jerusalem, with Rome's sea trade and eastern frontier in view.
• Idealists see the bowls as pictures of how God's judgment falls on every godless power in every age, building to the final judgment.

Many readers of all kinds also notice that the seventh seal, the seventh trumpet and the seventh bowl each end with lightning, thunder and earthquake (8:5; 11:19; 16:18). Some take that to mean the three series run one after another. Others take it to mean they retell the same end from different angles, each more intense. All agree on the center: God is just, evil does not get the last word, and the end comes with a word from his throne, "It is done!"

The Seven Bowls of God's Wrath (vv1–21)

• "A loud voice from the temple" (v1). No one could enter the temple until the plagues were finished (15:8), so the voice is almost certainly God's own. The Tyndale notes take it that way and compare Isaiah 66:6, "the voice of the LORD, rendering recompense to his enemies!" "Loud" is megas, "great," a word that runs through the chapter: great heat (v9), the great river (v12), the great day (v14), a great earthquake (v18), the great city and Babylon the great (v19), great hailstones (v21).
• "Go and pour out on the earth the seven bowls of the wrath of God" (v1). The bowls (phialē) were wide, shallow dishes used in temple worship for offerings. In 5:8 the same golden bowls held incense, "the prayers of the saints." The prayers of God's people for justice come back as his answer. "Pour out" echoes the prophets: "Pour out your anger on the nations that know you not" (Ps 79:6; Jer 10:25; Zeph 3:8).

The first four bowls fall on the four parts of creation that the first four trumpets struck: earth, sea, fresh water and sky (8:7–12). This time nothing is spared by fractions.

• "Harmful and painful sores came upon the people who bore the mark of the beast and worshiped its image" (v2). This is the sixth plague of Egypt, the boils on man and beast (Exod 9:9–11). The magicians of Egypt "could not stand before Moses because of the boils" (Exod 9:11). The target is exact: those who took the beast's mark (13:16–17; 14:9–11). They chose a mark on the body. Now God marks them with sores. God's people, sealed on the forehead (7:3), are not in view.
• "The sea… became like the blood of a corpse, and every living thing died" (v3). This recalls the first Egyptian plague, the Nile turned to blood (Exod 7:17–21). At the second trumpet a third of the sea became blood (8:8–9). Now it is all of it, and not fresh blood but the thick, dark blood of a dead body. The Tyndale notes point out how much Rome depended on the sea for food, grain and trade. Losing the sea would mean economic collapse, which chapter 18 later mourns.
• "Into the rivers and the springs of water, and they became blood" (v4). The Egyptians had to dig for water because they "could not drink the water of the Nile" (Exod 7:24). In 8:10–11 a third of the fresh water turned bitter. Here drinking water itself is gone.
• "The angel in charge of the waters" (v5). Jewish writings of the period describe angels set over parts of creation, and Revelation has angels over the winds (7:1) and over fire (14:18). The point is that even the angel whose waters are ruined agrees the judgment is right.
• "Just are you, O Holy One, who is and who was" (v5). "Holy One" here is hosios, a word for God's goodness and faithfulness, used for him in the song of 15:4, "you alone are holy." As in 11:17, the title "who is to come" has dropped out. He has come.
• "They have shed the blood of saints and prophets, and you have given them blood to drink. It is what they deserve!" (v6). The punishment fits the crime: those who poured out blood are made to drink it (Isa 49:26). This is the law of "eye for eye" (Exod 21:23–25), here carried out by the only one who judges perfectly. "What they deserve" is literally "they are worthy" (axioi eisin). It is the same word the heavenly choirs used of God and the Lamb, "Worthy are you" (4:11; 5:9, 12). The Lamb is worthy of praise. These persecutors are worthy of judgment. The martyrs under the altar had asked, "How long… before you will judge and avenge our blood?" (6:10). This is the answer.
• "I heard the altar saying, 'Yes, Lord God the Almighty, true and just are your judgments!'" (v7). The altar itself speaks. It is the altar under which the martyrs cried out (6:9) and on which the saints' prayers were offered (8:3–5). Now it answers "Yes." Heaven does not apologize for God's justice. It praises him for it (Ps 19:9; Rev 19:2).
• "The fourth angel poured out his bowl on the sun, and it was allowed to scorch people with fire" (v8). This plague has no match among the Egyptian plagues. At the fourth trumpet the sun was darkened (8:12). Here it burns. It is the reverse of the promise to the redeemed: "the sun shall not strike them, nor any scorching heat" (7:16; Isa 49:10). "Was allowed" (literally "it was given") is Revelation's way of saying that every power at work, even the sun's, is under God's permission.
• "They cursed the name of God who had power over these plagues. They did not repent and give him glory" (v9). "Cursed" is blasphēmeō, to blaspheme, to speak against God's name. The beast was given "a mouth uttering… blasphemies" (13:5–6), and his followers now sound like him. They know exactly who is behind the plagues and still will not turn. "Give him glory" is what the angel of 14:7 called the whole world to do, and what the survivors in 11:13 did. Pharaoh is the pattern: plague after plague, he hardened his heart (Exod 8:15; 9:34–35).

The fifth and sixth bowls strike the beast's power base and gather his allies for war.

• "On the throne of the beast, and its kingdom was plunged into darkness" (v10). The dragon gave the beast "his power and his throne" (13:2). JFB calls it a throne "set up in arrogant mimicry of God's throne." The darkness echoes the ninth Egyptian plague, "a darkness to be felt" over all Egypt while "all the people of Israel had light where they lived" (Exod 10:21–23). The fifth trumpet also brought darkness (9:2). The Tyndale notes suggest John's first readers would have thought of Rome as the beast's capital. A kingdom that claimed to bring light and order is now plunged into the dark.
• "People gnawed their tongues in anguish and cursed the God of heaven for their pain and sores. They did not repent of their deeds" (vv10–11). The sores of the first bowl are still there, which suggests the plagues pile up rather than replace one another. Biting the tongue is a picture of agony and rage together, close to Jesus' "weeping and gnashing of teeth" (Matt 8:12). For the third time the text says they would not repent (vv9, 11; 9:20–21). Suffering by itself does not change a heart.
• "The great river Euphrates, and its water was dried up, to prepare the way for the kings from the east" (v12). The Euphrates ran between Israel and Babylon. In John's day it was roughly the eastern edge of the Roman empire, and beyond it lay Rome's feared enemy, the Parthians, famous horsemen who had beaten Roman armies. A dried-up river meant an open road for invaders. The sixth trumpet also centered on the Euphrates (9:14). There are older echoes too: - God dried up the Red Sea and the Jordan so his people could cross (Exod 14:21; Josh 3:16), and the prophets promised he would dry up the waters again (Isa 11:15; 44:27; Jer 50:38). - Ancient historians said Cyrus the Persian, a king "from the east" (Isa 41:2), took Babylon by diverting the Euphrates and marching in along the riverbed. Here a river dries up before Babylon falls in v19.

Readers identify the kings differently. Futurists like Guzik see literal armies from Asia gathering against Israel. The Tyndale notes say John's readers would have thought of Mesopotamia and Parthia, not lands as far off as China or India. JFB reads the river as a symbol of the apostate church's power drying up, and the "kings from the east" as Christ's saints. Idealists see the world's powers turned loose on one another for a final showdown.

• "Three unclean spirits like frogs" (v13). Frogs were the second plague of Egypt, and Pharaoh's magicians could copy that one (Exod 8:1–7). They come from the mouths of the dragon (Satan, 12:9), the beast (13:1) and "the false prophet," who appears by that name here for the first time. He is the second beast of 13:11–17, who works signs and leads the world to worship the first. Together they are an unholy counterfeit of the Trinity. Jesus' word goes out of his mouth like a sword (1:16). Theirs is croaking deceit. In Jewish law frogs were unclean (Lev 11:10–12), and Egypt honored a frog-headed goddess, Heqet.
• "Demonic spirits, performing signs, who go abroad to the kings of the whole world, to assemble them for battle" (v14). The pattern goes back to the lying spirit sent to lure King Ahab to his death at Ramoth-gilead (1 Kings 22:19–23). Jesus warned that false prophets would perform "great signs and wonders" (Matt 24:24; 2 Thess 2:9–11). The kings think they are gathering for their own purposes. In fact they are gathered for "the great day of God the Almighty", the day of the Lord the prophets foretold (Joel 2:11; 3:2; Zeph 1:14–16). Psalm 2 hangs in the background: "The kings of the earth set themselves… against the LORD and against his Anointed."
• "Behold, I am coming like a thief! Blessed is the one who stays awake, keeping his garments on" (v15). Jesus himself breaks in. The ESV puts the verse in parentheses because it interrupts the scene. This is the third of the book's seven blessings (see 1:3). "Like a thief" is Jesus' own picture (Matt 24:43–44), taken up by Paul and Peter (1 Thess 5:2; 2 Pet 3:10). He had used it to warn sleepy Sardis (3:3), and the shame of nakedness to warn self-satisfied Laodicea (3:17–18). Some explain the image from the temple: a guard found asleep on night watch could be beaten and have his clothes burned, so he went home exposed. That custom is recorded in the Mishnah. The warning is not for the beast's followers but for the churches. In the middle of the end-time battle, the call is to stay awake and stay clothed in Christ's righteousness.
• "The place that in Hebrew is called Armageddon" (v16). The Greek is Harmagedōn, which the lexicon takes as Hebrew har Megiddo, "mountain of Megiddo." This is the only place the word appears. Megiddo was a fortress city on a hill guarding the main pass through the Carmel ridge into the Jezreel Valley, on the great road between Egypt and Mesopotamia. Solomon fortified it (1 Kings 9:15). Armies fought there for thousands of years: - Deborah and Barak defeated Sisera "by the waters of Megiddo" (Judg 5:19). - King Josiah was killed there by Pharaoh Neco (2 Kings 23:29; 2 Chr 35:22), and Zechariah remembered the "mourning… in the plain of Megiddo" (Zech 12:11), in the same passage John quoted in 1:7.

A puzzle remains: Megiddo sits on a low mound beside a plain, not a mountain, and the Old Testament never speaks of a "mountain of Megiddo." So readers differ: - Futurists (Guzik) expect a literal gathering of armies in the Jezreel Valley, though the battle itself comes in 19:11–21. - Others read it symbolically, a name for the place where God's enemies always meet their end. Some suggest a link with Mount Carmel nearby, where Elijah defeated the prophets of Baal (1 Kings 18), or with Hebrew har mô'ēd, "mount of assembly," the mountain the king of Babylon boasted he would take (Isa 14:13). - Historicists like Henry call it "the field of the last battle in which the church shall be engaged," and expect the church to win.

Notice that no battle is described here. The armies gather, and then the seventh bowl falls. When the fight does come in chapter 19, it is over in a word from Christ's mouth.

The seventh bowl finishes God's wrath.

• "Poured out his bowl into the air" (v17). The air was where storms come from, and the source of the lightning, thunder and hail that follow. Paul calls Satan "the prince of the power of the air" (Eph 2:2), and Henry and Guzik both suggest the bowl strikes the devil's own sphere. The text itself does not say so.
• "A loud voice came out of the temple, from the throne, saying, 'It is done!'" (v17). This is one word in Greek, gegonen, "it has happened, it has come to pass." The Tyndale notes compare Jesus' cry from the cross, "It is finished" (John 19:30). The Greek words are different (tetelestai there), but the thought is close. At the cross the work of salvation was finished. Here the work of judgment is finished, as 15:1 promised. The same word comes once more, from the throne, at the new creation: "It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega" (21:6).
• "Flashes of lightning, rumblings, peals of thunder, and a great earthquake such as there had never been since man was on the earth" (v18). These are the Sinai signs (Exod 19:16–18) that closed the seals (8:5) and the trumpets (11:19), now at their strongest. The language of "such as there had never been" echoes Daniel 12:1 and Jesus in Matthew 24:21.
• "The great city was split into three parts, and the cities of the nations fell" (v19). In 11:13 a tenth of the city fell. Now the whole of it breaks apart. The "great city" in Revelation is Babylon (17:18; 18:10), which John's first readers would have linked with Rome, though 11:8 complicates the picture by placing "the great city" where the Lord was crucified. Some read the city here as Jerusalem, which a futurist reading connects with the splitting of the Mount of Olives (Zech 14:4). Most see Babylon, the world's capital of pride, as the next phrase says. Henry reads the three parts as Babylon's blend of Jewish, pagan and Christian error, "as three cities in one."
• "God remembered Babylon the great, to make her drain the cup of the wine of the fury of his wrath" (v19). "Remembered" does not mean God had forgotten. In Scripture it means he now acts on what he has always known (Gen 8:1; Ps 137:7). Babylon made the nations drink "the wine of the passion of her sexual immorality" (14:8). Now she must drink God's cup, a familiar prophetic picture of judgment (Ps 75:8; Isa 51:17; Jer 25:15–16). "Fury of his wrath" joins two words, thymos (burning passion) and orgē (settled anger), for emphasis. Chapters 17–18 tell her fall in full.
• "Every island fled away, and no mountains were to be found" (v20). This repeats the sixth seal (6:14) and points ahead to 20:11, where earth and sky flee from God's face. Creation itself is being taken apart to make way for a new one (21:1).
• "Great hailstones, about one hundred pounds each" (v21). The Greek says each weighed about a "talent" (talantiaios), a weight that varied but was roughly 75 to 100 pounds. Hail was the seventh plague of Egypt (Exod 9:23–25). God threw hailstones on the Amorites at Gibeon (Josh 10:11) and promised hail against Gog (Ezek 38:22). Under the Law, stoning was the penalty for blasphemy (Lev 24:16). Here the blasphemers are stoned from heaven.
• "They cursed God for the plague of the hail, because the plague was so severe" (v21). The chapter ends where the fourth and fifth bowls did. Not one person in the chapter repents. JFB notes these are "not those struck who died, but the rest." The final bowl does not soften the beast's followers. It shows what they already are.
• Commentators: All three see the Egyptian plagues behind the bowls. JFB sets the bowls against the trumpets. The trumpets shook the world "in a longer process," while the bowls "destroy with a swift and sudden overthrow the kingdom of 'the beast.'" Henry, a historicist, says they fall "upon the whole antichristian empire." He reads the sores as marking the beast's followers, "They had marked themselves by their sin; now God marks them out by his judgments," and the sea and rivers as the papacy's teaching and its agents. Guzik, a futurist, takes the plagues as literal and worldwide, coming just before Christ returns. He stresses, as the Tyndale notes do, that God's justice here is pure, with none of the spite of human revenge. On the frogs, Henry and JFB both read the three spirits as three kinds of deceit, roughly malice, worldly politics and religious lies. Guzik takes them as real demonic agents working real signs. On v15, Henry says "Christians should be clothed, and armed, and ready," and JFB speaks of "the garments of justification and sanctification." Guzik makes the same point about Christ's righteousness. On Armageddon, JFB derives "Megiddo" from a Hebrew root gadad, "to cut off," and says it "means slaughter." That is an old guess and not certain. The lexicon treats the name simply as "Har-Magedon," "mountain of Megiddo." Guzik notes, fairly, that Megiddo is really beside a valley, the plain of Esdraelon, and keeps the battle there. On the hard hearts, Henry warns that those not softened by God's judgments are hardened by them, and Guzik makes the same point with Pharaoh: suffering alone has never produced true repentance.

Pointing to Christ

This is one of the hardest chapters in the Bible to read, and it is not meant to be read lightly. Yet it is also the exodus story told on the scale of the world. The same God who struck Egypt to free a nation of slaves now ends the long reign of every power that has shed his people's blood. Heaven's response is not embarrassment but worship: "true and just are your judgments." The only shelter in the chapter is the one Jesus gives in the middle of it: stay awake, stay clothed, "I am coming." The wrath poured out here is the cup Jesus himself drank in Gethsemane and on the cross (Matt 26:39) for everyone who trusts him. And the cry from the throne, "It is done!", sounds like the cry from the cross, because the judgment of evil and the saving of sinners are both God's finished work in Christ.

Commentary

• Enduring Word (David Guzik): enduringword.com Guzik covers each bowl judgment, the justice declarations, Armageddon, and the "It is done" pronouncement.
• Jamieson-Fausset-Brown (1871): blueletterbible.org A critical and explanatory commentary on the whole Bible, more concise than Matthew Henry and closer to the Hebrew and Greek, with attention to historical and geographical detail. Public domain.
• Matthew Henry's Exposition (1710): blueletterbible.org A devotional verse-by-verse commentary in the Puritan tradition, still among the most widely read three centuries on. Public domain.

Videos

Articles

• GotQuestions.org: gotquestions.org On the whole book: an overview of the book of Revelation -- who wrote it, when, why, and how it fits the rest of Scripture.

Links open on the publisher's own site. Nothing here is reproduced on this page.

Reflection

• Justice Even in Wrath (v.7) — Even as the bowls pour out unprecedented suffering, heaven declares God's judgments true and just. Can you trust His justice even when it feels severe?
• Refusing to Repent (v.9) — Struck by scorching heat, and again by darkness and pain later in the chapter, people curse God instead of turning to Him. What does it actually take for you to repent — do you wait for hardship, or come to Him now through grace?
• Ready for the Thief (v.15) — Even amid the final judgments, Christ interrupts to warn His people to stay alert and ready. Are you watching, or would His coming catch you off guard?
• It Is Done (v.17) — God's plan reaches its complete fulfillment; nothing is left unfinished. Are you on the right side of that final word?