I love this passage of Revelation -- I can’t read it without laughing outloud at one of the best memories of my ministry. Let us now hear the word of God from Revelation 16, beginning with verse 1.
(Read Revelation 16:1-21)
I suppose I should explain why I find this so uplifting.
It all started several years ago when I moved to a church in Miami. At about the same time the church called me, they also hired a new youth director. The women of the church had a special Tea to welcome our wives.
During the Tea, the Youth Director called the church and said he had an emergency and that his wife had to come home right away.
Very distressed, she left right away, leaving a room full of ladies worried about what had happened. After all, they had a new baby who was just a few weeks old. Had something happened to little Grady?
A half hour later the wife of the Youth Director returned with a smile on her face and a great story.
By the way, this is the difference between being the wife of a Youth Director and the wife of a Senior Pastor.
MY wife would never have told what had happened, but would have simply reassured everyone that all had been taken care of.
So this is what happened to our new Youth Director, James Smith.
James was at home in his new apartment. Gradye was asleep in his room and James was taking a shower.
The doorbell rang, or so James thought.
He was expecting a delivery, so he got out of the shower, soaking wet and with a towel wrapped around his waist, he went to the door. Looking out of the peep hole, he didn’t see anyone.
Afraid the delivery truck was about to drive away, he opened the door, stepped out, and looked around the corner.
Sure enough, there was no delivery and the doorbell had been in his imagination.
But the closing of the door was real.
James reached for the door knob only to find the door was locked!
So, what to do?
I would have found a loose brick or rock and found a way to open a window or door, but not James.
He walked next door and when a little old lady opened the door and saw this stranger standing at her door, wearing nothing but a smile and a towel.
He asked if he could come in and use the telephone to call his wife, and believe it or not, she let him in. He called his wife at the church and told her that there was an emergency at home.
As James told the story, as he was leaving his neighbor’s house he thanked her and she said, "Son, you just come back any time."
The next day I gathered the staff together for an emergency staff meeting. I told the staff that sometimes things happen in the church and we just have to look to the Lord in prayer, but that before I explain what happened, and before we had prayer, we needed to hear the Word of the Lord.
I turned to the new Youth Director and said, "James, would you help us focus our hearts and souls by reading Revelation 16:15?
James opened his Bible and read these words:
"Behold, I come like a thief! Blessed is he who stays awake and keeps his clothes with him, so that he may not go naked and be shamefully exposed."
The light bulb suddenly came on and James knew he had been had.
We would much rather read Revelation 16 and get a laugh, than to concentrate on the real message of this chapter, which is the very real and depressing topic of the WRATH OF GOD.
Wrath of God? How backward. How yesterday. How embarrasing.
We would much rather think about the more enduring themes of the Christian faith: a God who is merciful and gracious, abounding in steadfast love; a Christ in whom all the promises of God’s love are fulfilled, and a Holy Spirit who is the true Comforter of humanity.
There may have been times in the past when people, fearful and guilt-ridden, felt that they had to join the Church of God’s Wrath, but fortunately our understanding of God’s grace has grown and matured, and we spend our Sundays in happy thoughts.
The Wrath of God? We find it out of style and embarrassing.
How then can we make sense of the 16th chapter of Revelation?
Tom Long of Candler Theological Seminary here in Atlanta says of these two chapters of Revelation, “It is an account of the wrath of God in all of its sea-boiling, thunder-rolling, earthquake-rattling fury. Here we see the very kitchens of heaven serving up brimming bowlfuls of God’s wrath to be poured by angels upon the face of the earth. And what we read is not just a description of the wrath of God; it is a hand-clapping, hallelujah-shouting celebration of its coming.”
So what do we make of this business of the wrath of God?
What we make of it is that the God of Love we worship, is capable of great wrath and anger.
We’re not talking about a little anger – Revelation speaks of 7 bowls of symbolic wrath. Seven is the full and complete and perfect number in the Bible. And the bowls are full, running over. And so is God’s wrath.
This is not the mild anger of a parent who is trying to discipline a child for breaking curfew by 5 minutes – this is full and complete wrath.
Now to fully appreciate what this text from Revelation is all about, you have to consider the original readers of Revelation.
We don’t know a lot about the first people to read Revelation, but we do know a few things for certain.
They were Christian.
They were undergoing terrible distress, which was probably in the form of a persecution by civil government.
They were believers in the God and accepted His Son as Lord and Savior – and they were paying a heavy price.
They were a people without power. They had no resources. They had no First Amendment rights. No friends in Congress, city hall or the American Civil Liberties Union.
They had no friends at all.
They had nothing at all to sustain them.
Except for one thing.
The promise of God.
And so they repeated over and over the promises: "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To him who is thirsty I will give to drink without cost from the spring of the water of life. He who overcomes will inherit all this, and I will be his God and he will be my son. (Rev 21:6-7)
They sang their hymns over and over: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God.”
They pray the prayer that one hears in the last verses of Revelation – “Come quickly, Lord Jesus.”
Come to think of it – that has been our prayer.
When September 11th came and planes began crashing into buildings, we prayed for the wrath of God to fall upon the terrorists – “Come quickly, Lord Jesus.”
When we read in the newspaper about a drunk driver running over and killing a good Samaritan who has stopped to help a stranded motorist change a flat tire, we pray for the wrath of God to run over and extinguish the life of the drunk driver – “Come quickly, Lord Jesus.”
When we read about sexual predators exploiting children, or children taking guns to school and killing classmates, or suicide bombers killing innocent people, or … the list goes on, and on and on – “Come quickly, Lord Jesus.”
“Where is God?”
“Why doesn’t God do something?”
“Why did God allow this?”
It is in response to these cries that Revelation speaks a word of hope. It is a promise to the victims.
The problem with our understanding of the wrath of God is not that we have made too much of it, but that we have made too little of it.
Or, to be more exact, we have conceived of God’s wrath in ways that are too small, too insignificant, too ineffective.
We always picture God with the flawed impression of understanding God as a flawed human. In this case, we understand the wrath of God in terms of the wrath of a typical person.
For a typical person, our wrath comes when we are the least loving, and we assume the same is true of God. Human wrath is destructive and angry and bitter.
But that is not true with the wrath of God. It does not come when He is least loving, nor is it destructive and angry and bitter.
God’s wrath is that of a loving Father who speaks up for the victims and says “enough.”
There is a limit of the suffering God will allow.
The forces on our world that make for poverty, crime, rape, abuse, sexual predators, wars, dictatorships, terrorists – these will not be allowed to continue forever.
God’s wrath will be poured out – seven complete bowls of it, filled to the brim and running over – all about to be poured out so that the wrath flows upon humanity.
Not like human wrath that seeks bitter destruction, but rather divine wrath, that seeks loving restoration of a broken relationship.
In the brief New Testament book of Jude, we read, “See, the Lord is coming with thousands upon thousands of his holy ones to judge everyone, and to convict all the ungodly of all the ungodly acts they have done in the ungodly way.” (Jude 1:14-15)
The purpose of convicting is not to punish, but to convince and restore.
The writer of Psalm 30 said it eloquently:
“Sing to the LORD, you saints of his; praise his holy name. For his anger lasts only a moment, but his favor lasts a lifetime; weeping may remain for a night, but rejoicing comes in the morning.”
The wrath of God is meant to bring people back to God – but not everyone will be brought back. Not everyone will be convicted or convinced to return to God.
And those who continue to reject God, to reject his ways, to reject his love, to reject his mercy, to reject his presence, will eventually get exactly what they desire.
They will have a total absence of God’s presence, mercy and love.
Revelation can be a depressing book.
And the wrath of God is itself a depressing thought.
But the writer of Revelation does not mean for this to be depressing. John means for it to be a message of hope that will go to the victims of the world who have seen injustice and misery and pain. These are the people who long for evil to end, who want desperately for crime and violence and wars and cruelty to come to forever cease. Who pray over and over and over, “Come quickly Lord Jesus…”
Copyright 2006, The Rev. Dr. Maynard Pittendreigh
All rights reserved.
Sermons are available online and can be found by visiting www.Pittendreigh.com
