Three More Bowls - Revelation 16:10-21

Here we are finishing up Revelation chapter 16, and this is the last three bowls. Other than the summary description of the fall of Babylon, which takes up chapters 17 and 18, this finishes up the tribulation judgments, and the three bowls are the last of the seven. Okay, looking at this passage here, Revelation 16, verses 10 through 21, here is the outline of the book of Revelation we've been looking at, and we're here finishing the seven bold judgments. And so that's where we're at. chapters left to go. We're in the last three months of our time frame. We're going to continue to march week by week through Revelation except for a one-week stop in the book of Matthew centering on chapter 24. That will be one of those fasten your pew belts kind of weeks because that originally was taught in five weeks. We're going to pack it into one in order to make the whole thing. So anyway, it'll be one of those, what was that? Right? Kind of times.

We are this time here on the situation in planet Earth. It's going to continue that way through the end of chapter 18. And then here looking at these sets of judgment, the seven Sealed Judgment, Seven Trumpets and Seven Bowls. We are right here at the last three of the seven bowls in this interlude for Armageddon. That's the picture here.

And then this chart that I'd shown last week and, Stan, I think it was you were asking for where did we get that. Well, I put that on here because you asked and so hopefully that is helpful. This is the list of 10 plagues that were visited upon Egypt during and prior to the time of the Exodus. And what we've made note of here is several of the judgments here at the end of the tribulation period are identical to or very similar to the judgments visited upon Egypt about 3,400 years ago.

Okay, so that's, there is one other thing, there is going to be a similarity as we'll see to number two, the frog invasion. And we'll see how that fits in. I didn't mark it that way because it's not an invasion of frogs. It shows itself up a little differently. And hopefully we'll get there. Okay. Let's look on. We mentioned previously and we've shown this map.

We've also had it as a part of your supplement package. The Campaign of Armageddon. People frequently use the term Battle of Armageddon. In truth, it's a whole campaign. It's a series of battles. Kind of like a war is not the same as a battle. A battle is a part of a war. And so, in this case, there are a number of different attacks that are spelled out.

The locations for those are Babylon and the area around the Valley of Megiddo or Harmegiddo in the Hebrew or Armageddon is the way it's kind of shortened and made in the Greek. Also around Jerusalem and then down at the southern end there at Basra and Petra. Okay. So you got those four areas. Here is the area that's right now the port city of Haifa.

And then inland from that is the Valley of Megiddo. It's at the east end of that where Nazareth was. So one of the pictures that I've kind of verbally conjured up is imagining here's Jesus working around Nazareth and looking down at this valley and knowing full well what's going to take place in this valley.

Here is a herdsman with cattle overlooking the valley there. The view of Haifa, right, let's see if I can point it right up here in the picture, a little bit of the water there. Here is Armageddon viewed from the ancient fortress that was built during the time of Solomon. Solomon had a military post there to kind of look over the valley and keep his political and military situation well surveyed. Here's one, a view of the valley from the mountains. Another view closer down into the valley. This is in looking over Jerusalem toward the east. You see the Mount of Olives there towards the top of the picture. The middle of the picture has the Temple Mount with what is currently the Dome of the Rock.

And we talked about this little line of trees here being the place where Jesus came down during what's called the triumphal entry. And Zechariah and Acts chapter 1 both say that Jesus, when he returns, will come back to the Mount of Olives. Now, here in this area, just east of this wall, is the Valley of Jehoshaphat, or the Kidron Valley. And that is the valley that's described as having a massive slaughter during Christ's second coming and return. And then we also talked previously about Petra and the area around Basra.

Here are some of the dwellings carved into the mountain. Some of them go in fairly deep, which would be kind of a retreat area. And I don't mean retreat like, gee, this is a nice retreat and a resort kind of facility. I'm talking about retreat like let's get away from the attack at Petra. Here are some of the areas inside lit up. and some of the areas where an attacking enemy would get stuck in the deep ravines and creeks with ground troops. Okay, and we'll get to this earthquake magnitudes chart in a minute. Okay, verse 10.

Then the fifth angel poured out his bowl on the throne of the beast, and his kingdom became darkened. And they gnawed their tongues because of pain. And they blasphemed the God of heaven because of their pains and their sores. And they did not repent of their deeds.

John 3.16, the very popular salvation verse, has a passage that follows it. And I'll read it. It goes like this.

For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through him. Let's ask this question. God did not send his Son to judge the world, but he will one day, perhaps soon, send his Son to judge the world. See the distinction there? Sometimes people get that mixed up. The Son came first time to save, not to judge. Second time to judge.

That the world might be saved through Him. He who believes in Him is not judged and he who does not believe has been judged already. What does he mean by that? He who believes is not judged. What does that mean? Yeah? Well, he's been redeemed. Okay. The one who believes has been redeemed. Alright. And did judgment take place in order for the believer not to be judged? Oh, yes.

So what happened is Christ took the judgment, the condemnation for sins, upon himself so that the one who believes takes advantage of that mercy and grace shown. But the one who doesn't believe, because they've not availed themselves, it's judged already.

One of the ways that I've illustrated this in the past is imagine that everyone on planet Earth was put into a huge jail cell. And each one of them is told you have a, just to pick an outlandish number, you have a $4 trillion debt. It's hopeless for you to pay the debt. You're never going to pay $4 trillion off. And so here's all of humanity in this big jail cell with a $4 trillion debt on each head. Somebody walks in with a check for $4 trillion made out to each person.

And they tell them the money is in the account. It's all been paid for. It's good. All you got to do is believe that this check is good. You countersign the check, you hand it to the guy at the door, and you walk out. You're free. It's that simple. Some people will take that check and tear it to pieces and say, bah humbug. Others will take it and just drop it and say, no, it's not for me. It's irrelevant. The price has been paid for everybody on the planet, but those who remain judged, who are judged already, are those who don't believe and take advantage of this Four trillion dollar check. Price already paid, all you got to do is sign it and walk out.

But people won't do it. Isn't that amazing? If you were to give people that scenario, an awful lot of people, they wouldn't get it. But that's really, I think, a good picture. Okay. What we have underlined on the front, very bottom part, This is the judgment that the light has come into the world and men love the darkness rather than the light for their deeds were evil.

Rather than saying, no, you know, if I just sign this check and walk out of here, I'm free. I had a hopeless debt over my head. There was no way I was going to pay this. I was going to be stuck in here. And it's all been paid. And it's by grace, which means I have no chance of even paying it back.

Yeah, it's a funny thing. It's just, here's the check, here's the money, and they come and tell you, here's the bank, the money's there, it's all good to go. I just countersigned this thing and walked out. I mean, it's that simple. You need a pen? You've been given the whole thing. But people instead, yeah, this simple act of faith. I don't believe in that Jesus stuff. Hey guys, look, it's that simple. I've got to just countersign this thing and walk out and you're free.

Yes? The precursor to that is the fact that the jail is not physical, it's not real. You don't see that you're in prison. That's right. You don't see that you're in repress. That's right. People do not have eyes for the jail that they're in. So they might feel like it's meaningless sin. Yeah.

One of the reasons for putting this here is you put your finger right on it. Here are these people and what do they do? Instead of thinking, you know, we need to appeal to the Lord's mercy. We need to appeal to His grace. I mean, they've had a gospel angel going around telling from the sky the gospel. Instead, what do they do? They curse the God of Heaven. What do they do?

They do not repent. It's like, these guys don't get it. And they don't want to get it. Instead of thinking, if we turn to the Lord, maybe we might have a different outcome here. Nah, not happening. Because just deep inside they've already got their switches turned, it's fixed, it's locked in. They're not changing. And so they don't respond.

Now, something else, if you look at this, where is this fifth bowl directed? Does he just pour it out on the earth or what? Verse 10. Where is it directed? Yeah. On the throne of the Antichrist. Isn't that something? On the throne. So this is not just something that sort of vaguely hits people. This is directly challenging his position. Yes.

Do you feel that's Babylon? I think that Babylon is something separate. And we'll take a look at that when we look at chapter 17 and 18. Where do you think the throne is? Do you think it's in Jerusalem at that point? At this point in time it's probably not in Jerusalem because that's the place where he's going to attack the Jews. And so you're probably still looking at a European location at this point in time. So it'd be the location of the one horn that took down the other Two horns, right? The other horns, yeah. Some would say it's Rome.

I'm not convinced that that absolutely has to be the case. But the key thing here is that it's not telling us specifically the location geographically, but it's the person. It's this false authority system that's there. And one of the things that's really clear is this light and dark theme. John talks about that in the Gospels. In his Gospel of John, he talks about it here. Many of the other writers of Scripture talk about light and darkness.

1 John 1.5 says, God is light and in Him there is no darkness at all. Sounds absolute to me. God is absolute truth. He is absolute light.

And that John 3.19, this is the judgment that light has come into the world. Men love the darkness rather than the light, for their deeds were evil. Yeah.

Is that the same light that was the first of creation? In Hebrew that's Or, isn't it? Or, the light that was in creation on the first day. Is that more of a righteousness than it is a physical light? Well, I think on the first day, what was created was light. Physical light. What you see described there in Genesis 1 is substantially physical. It doesn't mean that spiritual things are not addressed. They are, but substantially it's a physical description.

But from then on, what you see through scripture is this contrast between spiritual light and spiritual darkness. And I think that's very apparent as we step into these verses. So, obviously, if he had to create light, then there had to be absolute darkness prior to the creation of that light. Because if there's no light, then there has to be absolute darkness. When we talk about spiritual light, notice what it says there. This is the second bullet on page 2.

In 1 John 1.5, it says God is light. So God didn't have to create that essential spiritual light. That is who He is. The creation then is physical light. But in terms of spiritual light, He is the definition of spiritual light. Spirit. Two things, right? It's kind of like prophecy. You can have devil prophecy, so this is kind of like it means two things.

One, it means physical light, but it also represents the righteousness of God. The basis of physical light is spiritual light. One of the definitions we've given for glory, glory is the radiant essence of who God is. The radiant essence of who God is. And it's because God is light.

And we've seen that in a lot of John's heavenly descriptions. This intense, immense light. Even the angels who are created beings, what do the human beings often respond to when they see this angel? It's like, you know, this intense light. In Revelation, John twice begins worshipping angels by mistake, and the angels do correct him. Twice. Because with this intense light, imagine, here's this earthly being having a hard time discerning what is a created light coming from these angels and what is the light that is essential to God himself. His earthly eyes don't know how to discern that yet. Which is kind of a phenomenal thing to ponder. Yeah?

Not this idea of those that were accepted through Christ. You know, and I think as John says, as many as were called, believed. So that always seems like kind of a quandary, the predestination that those that were called, why didn't they accept the check that they were called? What's interesting is this, who was called and who was the elect. From one standpoint, we look at that and we'll say, well, Heavens, how do I reconcile that with this open invitation, whosoever believes?

And as I look at it, and I've wrestled with it, as I look at it, Scripture does not offer a logically, a humanly satisfying logical explanation as to how do you resolve those two. Well, yeah, and that's where you look at it. But there are passages that are tough to reconcile. I will say one thing about predestination, and that is the predestining is that we be conformed to a son rather than a predestining of this one will believe and this one won't. So for that particular word, the predestination is to conformity. So it doesn't help resolve the question. The question is still there.

And any attempt that I have seen to try to resolve that is, I'll use the term reductionism, that is it's attempting to reduce something that in fact I don't believe we can understand to something we can understand and it ends up being something not quite correct.

The ultimate logic from that is the position that some hardline Calvinists take, and that is God chooses some for hell and some for heaven. That was a position, by the way, that the Essenes, one of the groups that was present around the time of Christ, held to. God chooses some for heaven and some for hell. That was one of their teachings. And the only place that I can find, which is in Matthew chapter 5, where Jesus mentions that group, so He wasn't one of them, is to repeat what they said.

First John 2.2 is he died as the perpetuation for the sins not only of ourselves but for the whole world. So here is, and some folks then take the logic and then impose the word the whole world of the elect. That's the idea of limited atonement. If you've heard this, you know, acrostic acronym, you know, TULIP. the idea that Christ only died for the elect, but that's not what the passage itself says. The passage itself says he died for the sins of the whole world.

Right, and if God is righteous and just, I'm definitely not a Calvinist. I have a hard time with that, even though I can see the passages like Romans 9, but if God's fair and if he's just and impartial, not partial, but impartial, I personally cannot understand Yeah, and I think it is inconsistent with an objective view of scripture.

The reality is that there is a paradox within the realm of human logic. In every attempt I have seen, whether it's Calvinism, Arminianism, or Open Theism, any attempt that I have seen to try to resolve that in some supposedly humanly satisfying way, in my mind ends up violating scripture in some respect.

And that the better thing to do is to take what God reveals at its face value and recognize he has said himself, his ways are higher than our ways. That there are some things that we're not going to be able to reconcile. It's kind of like, you can't do that with algebra, you need calculus. Only the Lord has got a mathematical approach that's outside of anything that we've learned and understand. Going down here, another passage that I think is relevant here. Romans 1 18 through 21, for the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth. What do they do with the truth?

Suppress it. I think that's an important thing to keep in mind. Those who do not believe, it's not that they lack the information or the ability, they have an intentional suppression. That's the pattern of those who do not believe. They have an intentional suppression of the truth. They push it down. We were studying Romans.

It doesn't necessarily mean that the people are out there and they say, oh, there's a truth, I'm going to suppress it. It's not that their intention is to go out there and just suppress the truth, but it's a fact through their beliefs, their actions, follow what this God who created the world helped him, they refuse to follow him. So in that process of not following him, they're suppressing the truth. They may not even know it. They're not just going out there to do it. Yeah, it is not a conscious, I think I'm going to suppress the truth today. No, it's not that. It is a covert action.

Basically because of, you know, I mean, I've talked to people, it's like, yeah, this Christianity stuff sounds interesting, but I really don't want to drop my booze bottle. You know, this Christianity stuff is interesting, but I really want to keep sleeping with my girlfriend, you know, whatever it is. So people have lifestyles, they love the darkness, and they cling to that, and so therefore embracing the truth is something that they push away. They don't want it.

So now what you see described here is this oppressive physical darkness. It's a physical representation of the suppressive spiritual darkness. Slightly different words there. So we have an oppressive spiritual darkness that's visible. It matches, at this point, the suppressive spiritual darkness that's in their hearts. Back in Exodus 10, here's where this darkness showed up in the plagues. Then the Lord said to Moses, stretch out your hand toward the sky that there may be darkness over the land of Egypt, even a darkness which may be felt.

Wow! That's dark. Somebody turn on the light. I did. Have you got a flashlight? Yeah. Is the battery any good? I can't tell. What's the matter with this thing? You know? It'll be one of these situations where you can't do anything with it. See, ordinarily, what do we do? We come up with something to deal with the darkness, right? We flip a light on or light a match or something.

This is one of those instances where it's a really intense darkness and it's a kind of, well, I'm not even going outside. This is heavy. See, that's why I was saying earlier, I think this is the darkness with no light. The darkness that existed before the first day where light was created. Absolute darkness. Absolute darkness is when you're in a cave and you turn out all the lights.

You can feel your hand in front of your face, but you can't see it. It's absolute. Yeah, we are accustomed to a darkness in which we can resolve it, but we turn a light on and we light a match or something. The impression you get from this is that this is so intense that, what's the matter with this flashlight? Nothing seems to work. It's just dark. I turned on my laptop and the screen just never comes on. This thing's supposed to be under warranty, right? Okay.

It says, when we look at the responses to the plague of darkness upon the globe, notice how intense a response to read about. There are three responses described. One is they nod their tongues because of the pain. Then they blaspheme the God of heaven. They nod. Oh boy, you know, we've been sinful and we need to turn to the Lord, but nope. I'm just really mad, God. And they did not repent of their deeds. They said, nope, I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing, and I'm just mad at God.

With all the evidence that, you know, the Antichrist isn't doing what we're wanting. I mean, this is our golden boy, you know. He's supposed to make things better. What's the matter? Notice they blaspheme the God of Heaven. It's not like they don't believe in Him. They don't believe in His existence. They'll even blaspheme God. God's to blame. But instead of saying, oh, there is a God. I wonder what consequence and implications that has for my life. Instead it's, I'm mad at Him. But I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing. They prefer the darkness. They love the darkness rather than the light.

The sixth angel poured out his bowl on the great river of the Euphrates and its water was dried up so that the way would be prepared for the kings of the east. So the Euphrates River is mentioned about 30 times in the Bible. Twice in the New Testament and those two are in Revelation. This is the last one. The river is dried up. just to allow troop movements.

One of the reasons for allowing these troop movements is that right now over half the Earth's population is in Asia. Take all the other continents together, add them all up, they're still not as populous as Asia. That that percentage is getting bigger. Asia's population is growing faster than the rest of the world combined. So not only is it large, it's getting larger proportionately. Assuming the Lord were to allow things to go this far, by 2050 Asia would have something on the order of practically two-thirds of the world's population.

Who knows whether such projections will pan out, but we're talking about a massive army coming and the term there means the rising sun. The rising of the sun. So here is this preparation for a massive army coming from the center of the world's population, Asia.

Verse 13, And I saw coming out of the mouth of the dragon, and out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet, three unclean spirits like frogs. The mouth of the dragon, mouth of the beast, and mouth of the false prophet. What have we got? The satanic trinity. Remember we mentioned those before. And it's very explicit about all three of them right there in the same verse. The mouth of each.

Three unclean spirits like frogs. for they are spirits of demons performing signs which go out to the kings of the whole world to gather them together for the war of the great day of God the Almighty." Now it's an interesting thing culturally. How many of you have ever had a frog in your mouth? Parts of a frog. I have. Frog legs, you know. but I won't describe what I did.

Anyway, the Jews considered frogs to be horrid creatures. They were just detestable. The Egyptians and the Parthians, those are the people to the east of Israel, had a hatred for frogs as well, which is likely why the Lord sent a plague of frogs upon Egypt when the Pharaoh would not let Israel go. You're going to get detestable creatures just jumping all over the place. And the people considered putting a frog in your mouth to be horrible or worse. It's just an awful thought. I guess I didn't. Anyway, the thought of a frog coming out of one's mouth was detestable in the extreme.

But we read in verse 14 the explanation of these. They are demons performing enticing miracles to draw these hordes of troops into Israel. In other words, it's like, here is this miracle, and you are going to be impressed. You are going to be, by this miracle, compelled, by this demonic miracle, compelled to send thousands, oh, millions of troops to wipe out Israel.

Verse 15 is a parenthesis. Behold, I am coming like a thief. Blessed is the one who stays awake and keeps his clothes so that he will not walk about naked and men will not see his shame. So real interesting here. This coming like a thief was a phrase that was used several times.

We have passages in Matthew, Luke, Thessalonians 5, should be 1 Thessalonians, 2 Peter 3.10, Revelation 3.3. and 16.5, which is of course our current passage. The idea in these warning passages is that of avoiding surprise and unexpected loss of reward, because it's the Lord's desire to reward us fully. Why use this phrase, coming like a thief?

Here's the cultural background. In the Roman Empire, theft was not a crime. Yeah, theft was not a crime. Theft was more of a tort or civil action. In other words, if somebody stole something from you that was in some degree your fault because you allowed it. That's the way they looked at it. Doris is chuckling here. Yeah, that was the way they looked at it.

You're supposed to be diligent and vigilant. and to avoid this thief and not be surprised by the thief because it's not a criminal action. You can't just dial 911 and expect the police to come running to the scene. The thieves would often work like this. The front doors were typically barred and really in most cases not the best option for a thief.

What a thief would typically do is wait until the family is asleep And that wouldn't be evidenced by a lamp going out or anything like that because it was considered absolutely unthinkable that you would let a lamp go out. You always had to have a lamp burning. But once he'd heard no more noises or anything of that sort, he would assume that everybody's asleep and he would begin undermining the wall from the outside. Then once he had undermined the wall sufficiently, the wall would collapse. He would run in, grab whatever he's going to grab, and run out through the same collapsed wall that he had created.

That would be the typical scenario with a thief. And, of course, the person in the house is supposed to be, you know, able to wake up and watch for that sort of thing and chase this thief down and grab his stuff back. And if you weren't able to catch this thief and you could find out who it was, you actually had to sue them to get your stuff back. So a whole different scenario. So that's why using this analogy here, that of a thief, a thief in the night, you also find it's all in the New Testament when the Romans were in power and not in the Old Testament. when the Jews had their own kingdoms, or kingdom, because under the law of Moses, theft was a crime.

So that's why it all fits. But you see, under the Romans, from the words of Christ on into the apostles, this warning, like a thief in the night, is there because you had to be diligent and it was your responsibility to keep your stuff. That's the way the Roman Empire had it.

The Lord's intent for us as believers in these kinds of verses is that we be diligent. The Lord's desire is to reward us fully. And a key thing here is just as believers, we have a position in Christ. So our position in our eternally, for example, being seated in the heavenlies, that is untouchable. But what does vary among believers is reward.

And that's what these passages are talking about. Okay, on page 5, let's look at verse 16 at the top there. and they gathered them together to the place which in Hebrew is called Harmageddon or this is the Armageddon in the way it's been somewhat carried over into English. And so we showed you some of the pictures and maps that are related to this big battle scene.

So who are they going after with this battle or campaign of this war of Armageddon? They're going after the Jews. Why the Jews? They're just anti-semitic for no apparent reason or what's the deal? Here is God choosing Abraham and making promises to Abraham. These are God's chosen people. As Moses writes in the Law, he says, I didn't choose you because you were a great nation or this or that. But it says, but because the Lord loves you. The Lord loves those people. And here's the church gone. So Satan's only serious target. Go after the Jews. Go after them in the land. That's the place to do it, right?

So we find these four geographical areas that we showed on the map there, Babylon, the Euphrates River, Megiddo or the Valley of Megiddo in the northern part of Israel with Haifa on one end and what was Nazareth on the other end of the valley there up in the mountains. Jerusalem there in the middle of Israel and the wilderness of Basra and Petra in the southern Israel and Jordan. This valley of Megiddo, that is the place where Barak fought and won a battle recorded in Judges. It's the place where Gideon defeated the Midianites. Remember that? How did that battle go? Gideon defeated the Midianites. Remember how that took place? Gideon won with hordes of people, right?

Lots of people? No. About 300. No one was given a sword, whether he liked it or lumped it. Pitcher and a trumpet was it. Break the pitcher, blow the trumpet, that's all you got. That's all the Lord needs. That place. That's it. It's where both Saul and Josiah lost their lives. Two kings. Because of time, I'm going to move on to page 6 and read verse 17 there.

Then the seventh angel poured out his bowl upon the air, and a loud voice came out of the temple from the throne saying, It is done. Where did he pour the bowl? In the air. Why did he pour it in the air? Satan is the prince of the power of the air. So notice one of the earlier bowls, an attack upon the Antichrist and the false prophet and Satan himself and here upon the air, the place of his domain here.

It is done. It's not quite the same as it is finished. It's not the same word as it is finished. That's a different word. The word Jesus used when he said it is finished was actually an accounting term. It's all paid for. This one means it's completed, which has a slightly different nuance there. This series of judgments, they're all done. But it is in the perfect tense. In other words, this completed past action will have ongoing results in the future. We're done with these. No more judgments. That's it.

In verse 18, And there were flashes of lightning, and sounds and peals of thunder. There was a great earthquake, such as there had not been since man came to be upon the earth. So great an earthquake was it, and so mighty. And that's where we have this earthquake magnitudes chart. I don't have a copy of it, but what you see here is here are the Richter magnitudes and the TNT for seismic energy yield. And how many of you have been through some magnitude of an earthquake noticeable? Been through that? Yeah.

Nancy and I living in California and Nevada, they both have earthquakes up until moving away from there not quite a decade ago. went through various earthquakes and some of them would be of a significant magnitude but would be at a distance. They had one in the San Francisco Bay Area and we were in Nevada and could feel it. We're swaying in Nevada. I've also been through one that was a lot closer and woke me up in the middle of the night. Other experiences I won't take the time to tell.

But the kind we're talking about here is a San Andreas type fault circling the earth. That's a magnitude 10 Richter scale earthquake. Huge, huge earthquake. The earth has never seen anything recorded that's of that magnitude. But that's, I think, what you're talking about.

So in verse 19, the great city was split into three parts and the cities of the nations fell. Babylon the great was remembered before God and to give her the cup of the wine of his fierce wrath and every island fled away and the mountains were not found. Wow. Intense. The great city I believe here refers to Jerusalem. We give some reasons on top of page 7 as to why it's the great city like the first of Jerusalem.

And then verse 21, in huge hailstones about a hundred pounds each came down from heaven upon men and men blasphemed God because of the plague of the hail, because its plague was extremely severe. If I had a balloon that was, and previously I did, I don't have one this morning, that was about a foot and a half in diameter, that would give you an idea what a hundred pound hailstone is like. A foot and a half, this isn't just a foot, that's little. A foot and a half in diameter is about the size of a hundred pound hailstone. So that is big.

I think if the insurance companies didn't completely fold, and I think they would, Yes, you would probably get a roof replacement. Yes, the only thing is it would probably be a whole house replacement because that's not going to come out so good. That could be one of those things where you get in the car to try to get some kind of coverage and then you get it under the garage and it all comes down anyway.

That's pretty intense. rest of this period of time. Here's what's interesting is a lot of these things people have people have asked some of these questions is do we have evidence that some of these things overlap. What's interesting is while people have proposed that there's actually only a few instances where we can find the evidence that these judgments specifically overlap and one of those is where remember we talked about the boils And what we find is the boils are described early in the chapter and then in verse 11 it talks again about the sores from these boils. So there's some continuance and overlapping. The rest of it, it's not real clear that there is an overlap and in fact I would imagine it being almost tough if everything survived, if everything were to overlap.

Yeah, what I suspect based on that, and this is not certainty but I think speculation, and so we'll leave it at that, that likely that what you see is there's some limitation in most if not almost all cases to the duration of some of these. Yes, like in Egypt where a certain area, a certain time and you know one came and the next one came upon them. In most cases that's the case. The one plague that we have a duration for that I can find in Revelation out of these three sevens, three sets of seven, is five months of the scorpion-like creatures stinging. That's the only one where I can look at it in a specified duration. I suspect that almost all the rest have limited duration as well.

But that's from kind of reasoning it out, not from a statement. And I know we have to go, but then this last bowl of judgment basically is God entering in to save His people. Because the war happens after the previous bullet. And now the war is going on.

So God enters in to actually save His people. And that's what that Bible tells us. And so what we're going to see is chapter 17 and chapter 18 describing the fall of Babylon. And then when we get to chapter 19, we see the Lord coming back. And that's actually when the Lord does the counter-attack against these various armies that are attacking.

And so when he returns, that's when we see, here these various armies are coming, and you imagine the Jews, they're thinking, only God can save us. And most of them right now don't believe in one. So what you're going to have is a great number of them coming to recognize, only God can save us, and in fact, that's exactly what happens.

Yeah? Oh, okay. All right, we are way, way out of time. I'm going to pray quickly and then we're out of here. Thank you, Lord, for just our time together. Thank you for what you've revealed. Thank you that, as we can see, though these judgments are severe, the time has indeed been cut short so that some would survive. And we just thank you for your faithfulness, for your promises to us. In Jesus' name, amen.