Mesa Hills Bible Church

Pastor Tim Dane: We're in Revelation 16 in the seventh bowl verses 17 to 21 where we see the culmination of God's wrath coming down upon the world with the seventh bowl. When we look at God's judgment on evil, one of the things that we need to apply to ourselves is the reminder that even though God's judgment on evil is a harsh truth, there's a comfort that comes out of it.

Even back in the Old Testament, if you remember the book of Psalms and Psalm 73, this is the Psalm where Asaph, the prophet, was having a hard time because of all of the bad things that were going on in Israel at that time. In Psalm 73 we see Asaph talking about how it was really getting him down. He says in verse two, Psalm 73, "As for me, my feet came close to stumbling. My steps had almost slipped for I was envious of the arrogant. I saw the prosperity of the wicked. There's no pains in their death. Their body is fat. They're not in trouble as other men, nor are they plagued like other mankind."

"Pride is their necklace, the garment of violence covers them, their eye bulges from fatness, the imaginations of their heart run riot, they mock and wickedly speak of oppression, they speak from on high, they've set their mouth against the heavens, and their tongue parades through the earth." So Asaph is telling us here that I was looking at all of the way that wicked people prosper, and it was really starting to get me down.

In verse 12 he says, "Behold, these are the wicked, always at ease, they increase in their wealth. Surely in vain I've kept my heart pure and washed my hands in innocence." In other words, I've tried to follow You, Lord, and I've tried to live for You. Is this a wasted time? I mean, it seems like I don't see the reward that's coming to those that love You, I see the evil world prospering. This was really getting to Asaph.

But then what happens in verses 15 to 20? He said now if I had really gone down that path and thought that way, he goes, "I would have betrayed You." Verse 15, "I would have betrayed the generation of Your children. When I pondered to understand this, it was troublesome in my sight, until I came into the sanctuary of God, and then I perceived their end. You are going to set them in slippery places. You're going to cast them down to destruction. Oh, they will be destroyed in a moment and utterly swept away by sudden terrors."

So what Asaph did is that when this wicked world was getting him down—and guess what? They had wicked people back then, too. It's not just today. It's just that we get it in our face much more because you can turn on the TV or look at your phone or your computer and you can see all of the bad stuff going on. But Asaph saw all that stuff even without electronics and it really was getting him down. And then what he did is he went back and he says, "Okay, I need to remember that God is going to judge evil." And this is what gave him comfort is to remember that God is going to deal finally with evil.

This is what you have in the bowl judgments of the book of Revelation, especially as you come to the last bowl judgment. The seventh bowl is going to show us the culmination of how God is going to deal with evil. So this is not just something that tells us, "Oh yeah, look at all these tragedies and calamities that God is going to cause," but there's a purpose for God showing us the future. It's because He wants His people to find comfort in the truth that He's sovereign, He's good, He's righteous, and He is going to punish evil one day.

It would be a terrible thing to see evil go unpunished. It really would. It would not be a comforting thing. The seventh bowl brings us to this climax of how this is going to unfold. One writer says here, "The seventh bowl is the final outpouring of God's wrath on sinners in this present earth. After it, Jesus will come and set up His Millennial Kingdom. At the end of that thousand-year period there will be one final act of rebellion in Revelation chapter 20, which will be quickly crushed."

"Then He's going to create a new heavens and a new earth and there's not going to be any more sin, curse, or death. God is going to fix this broken world and this is supposed to be something that gives us peace and comfort." Chapter 16, verse 17, where you come to the seventh bowl is really where it begins to unfold. But that seventh bowl, we look here and we've got verses 17 to 21. Is this seventh bowl really what exhausts the seventh bowl, just these verses, verses 17 to 21?

There's good reason to say that the seventh bowl really embraces everything that is going to be part of the unfolding of God's restoration of this universe. It doesn't just end in verse 21. It starts in verse 17. What's going to include in verses 17 to 21 are the initial descriptions of what's going to happen. Then as you look at the entrance of this word "Babylon," it starts talking about Babylon down here in these verses.

Chapters 17 and 18 are going to give a lengthy discussion about this concept called Babylon, and we're going to be talking about that in the weeks to come. What exactly is Babylon? In ancient times it was a city on the Euphrates River that was started way back after the Tower of Babel, or after the flood and then the beginning of the Tower of Babel, it goes way, way back. But chapters 17 and 18 give a very lengthy description about how that ancient evil is going to rise up again, and it's going to be something that becomes global, universal.

Chapter 19 we see the rejoicing over this destruction of Babylon. Then chapter 19, verse 11, begins to introduce the second coming of Christ. With the second coming of Christ, as you follow this, there are eight different times where John says, "And I saw something," and "I saw this." There are eight prophetic scenes where God shows John what's going to happen with the second coming of Jesus Christ.

That's going to include the Millennial Kingdom in chapter 20. That's going to include a new heavens and a new earth in chapters 21 and 22. There's good reason to say that the seventh bowl that starts here in verse 17 really does not get exhausted until the time when God has finished His work of restoration. He's going to bring in that final restoration, and in that final restoration that's also going to include the fact that the unsaved are not going to be in that New Jerusalem. They're going to consciously know what they have rejected by refusing to trust in Christ.

In the end, evil is going to be purged, the curse is going to be removed, all of His people that have trusted Him are going to be in resurrected glory, and He's going to take away this sin and curse and death. So that's kind of the beginning of it here in verse 17. Let's go ahead and read our passage. What we're going to look at today are six immediate impacts of the seventh bowl when it starts off.

Picking it up in verse 17, John writes, "And the seventh bowl, the seventh angel poured out his bowl upon the air, and a loud voice came out of the temple from the throne saying, 'It's done.' And there were flashes of lightning and sounds and peals of thunder, and 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 the great city was split into three parts, and the cities of the nations fell, and Babylon the Great was remembered before God to give her the cup of the wine of His fierce wrath."

"And every island fled away, the mountains were not found, and huge hailstones about 100 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." Not pretty stuff. Father, we thank You for Your word that You have spoken by Your prophet John, that Your Spirit has told us that You are going to deal with evil and one day You're going to completely judge it and remove it.

You've shown us not everything in the future, but You've shown us what You want us to know so that we can trust You. Use these things to help us know You and love You and trust You better, and we ask it in Jesus' name, amen. We pick it up here with verse 17 and we look at the first of these six impacts that come from the seventh bowl.

The first one here says that the bowl was poured out upon the air as a target, and we've seen that each of these bowl judgments had a target. The air is targeted right here, something that's universal. There's this declaration that in this seventh bowl it's the final stage of God's judgment on evil. Notice what He says down here in verse 17 when He poured out His bowl, this voice comes from the temple, from the throne saying, "It is done." This is God speaking from His throne in heaven, and God declares, "It is done."

There's a sense of finality that comes about in this statement, just even in the verbal tense right here what we call the perfect stem of the Greek verb. It says the culmination of all things has come and there's going to be a permanent result out of all of this. Now, interestingly when you go to chapter 21, just glance over to chapter 21 very quickly. When you come to the time when He has brought in the new heavens and the new earth, notice what it says in chapter 21, verse 6. He said to me, "It is done." It actually uses the same verb as what you have in verse 17, a perfect tense verb.

The minor difference between this verse, 21:6, and the one that we have there in verse 17 is that it's a singular form of verb in chapter 16. In other words, the seventh bowl has now come, there's going to be this finality in the judgment. But it uses a plural form of verb when you get to 21:6, meaning like everything that had to be accomplished now has been accomplished. The seventh bowl is introducing that final culmination of God's work, but then in chapter 21, verse 6, it says, "Okay, everything has been taken care of because in 21:6 He has now introduced the new creation, no more curse, everything has been finally taken care of."

When we look at this right here and we see that there is this final judgment that is yet to come, we can even ask a question, "Are we in the end times right now?" I've been asked that question many times, "Do you think that we're in the end times?" The answer would be, well, it depends upon how you define that statement and that question. From the Old Testament perspective, they were waiting for a coming restoration, so there was from the Old Testament perspective, you'd say that there was the present age, in other words, the age of sin and curse that we still live in, and then there's the coming age that's going to happen when God invades the world by sending the Messiah to bring the Kingdom.

There was the present age and the coming age. As we think about this from the perspective of the incarnation of Christ 2,000 years ago, the coming age really invaded the world 2,000 years ago. So from that perspective we could say that the end times have begun, the last days have begun. But usually when people ask that question, I think there's a different angle that they have on that. The perspective would be this, "Are we living in that final stage of world history before everything is changed with the return of Christ?"

The answer to that would be no, we're not living in the end times. Those end times, that final stage of world history, that's going to crash down upon the world immediately after the rapture of the Church. After the rapture of the Church, you're going to have that seven-year tribulation period that comes crashing down on the world. It starts when the Antichrist makes a seven-year peace covenant that Daniel chapter 9, verse 27 tells us about. That seven-year peace covenant is what launches that seven-year tribulation period.

That seven-year tribulation period is what you see unfolding starting in Revelation chapter 6. There's seven seal judgments on a scroll, followed by seven trumpet judgments, followed by seven bowl judgments. As I just explained to you, that seventh bowl really takes you all the way into eternity future with the new creation. So the seal judgments are what really is the beginning of end times, so to speak. We're not living in the middle of those seal judgments.

We're not living in the trumpets. We're not living in the bowls. The last times, the end times are going to happen, I believe, and I believe fairly firmly, that it's going to happen with the rapture of the Church introducing that final time period. Now, you will hear people say, "Well, I don't believe in the rapture." I think it's really unfortunate—I could speak about it with harsher words—I think it's really wrong and unbiblical and if somebody knows what the Bible says and they still don't believe it, I think it's dishonest, to tell you the truth, for some theological reason that they won't believe in what God really does say very directly in the Bible.

Christ is going to return, He is going to resurrect His Church in a moment of time, He's going to take His Church directly into the presence of Christ, and that tribulation period is going to launch immediately after that with the Antichrist making that seven-year covenant. It says that in 1 Thessalonians 4:13 to 18. It says that in 1 Thessalonians 5:1 to 9. It says that in 2 Thessalonians 2, verses 1 to 8. That's what the New Testament tells us.

It is not good when people say, "Well, I don't believe that," and then they try to give some kind of other explanation to the things that are distinctly and quite clearly explained. But I'm not looking for the Antichrist. I'm waiting for Christ to return and rapture His Church. Is the Antichrist out there? Yeah, he very well could be out there right now. Maybe he's in Washington, D.C. We got some bad characters in charge of our country.

But we're not looking for the Antichrist. We don't spend our time worrying about the Antichrist. You should not worry about the Antichrist. We could probably make a list of names. I think this guy's a good qualifier, but that's okay. What is the application? We just think about this first of six points in terms of the impact of that seventh bowl. What is some application out of that? Let me give you just five basic points of application and we're going to come back to these points of application.

Number one, it means that we need to be ready to stand before the Lord. Going very much along with that would be the second point which would be this, it means that you need to believe in God's Son. You need to be ready to stand before God, which means that you need to trust in Christ. Now, when we look at a large gathering—this is a large gathering—this is not Grace Community Church with 3,500 people in a sanctuary, but we've got a large gathering here right now.

When you look at a large gathering, there's always the possibility that there's somebody in there that has never really repented by turning to Christ and trusting in Jesus Christ. So if that's you and you in your heart say, "I know I've never really turned to Christ and asked for forgiveness," you need to do that and do it now because you don't know how long you're going to have. Here today, gone tomorrow, man. Walk out, get hit by a Mack truck. It happens.

I remember when Timothy my son was born, I had just sold some life insurance to this Japanese businessman just a couple days earlier. We got a phone call when I was there, Timothy had just been born, and they said that this guy had gotten in a car wreck and was killed, instantly killed in a car wreck. It's like wow, that was fast. The guy just gave me a check two days ago. You don't know how long you're going to be around.

Here's a third point of application out of this. It means that not only do you need to trust in Christ, but we should be living for Him as well. God doesn't want people just to say, "Well, yeah, I believe, but I really don't want anything to do with going to church. I'll just stay home." That doesn't work. Going to church doesn't make you a Christian, but if you're a Christian, you should be coming to church, you should be reading the word of God, letting God encourage you, letting other people encourage you.

The fellowship of the saints. Hebrews chapter 10, "Do not forsake the assembling of the brethren." So you need to be living for Him, growing in your knowledge of Christ. And that means also a fourth point would be this, you should be sharing the gospel with the world around you. We've got all kinds of people that need to hear the gospel and it doesn't matter what they look like. They may look like a big mean ogre, big bad biker kind of look, doesn't matter.

They might be a nice sweet old lady, and that nice sweet old lady might be as mean and antagonistic as you could imagine. It doesn't matter whether they're young, old, share Jesus Christ with the people around you. If you say, "I'm not sure I really know what to say," start coming and sitting in on more studies and you're going to learn it. But even the woman at the well, she'd only been saved for about one minute and then she ran back to her village and brought a whole village to faith in Christ because she introduced her village to Jesus.

She'd just gotten saved. Brand new believer. Here's a last point of application, don't live in fear. There's a lot of stuff. Again, we have all of this barrage of information that comes to us, and I'm quite guilty of looking at what's happening in the world all the time. I think it's good for me to know what's going on because I talk to people about life. But sometimes Karen says, "Stop looking at the news." She's got a point. You see all this stuff going on.

Last week, for example, we had the FBI come on, and the director of FBI, and two different things. On one day he said we're facing imminent massive terrorist attacks here in the United States. We know that from our data, we know that there's a lot of stuff that is about to start breaking out. Then on another day the same guy, Christopher Wray, FBI, he said we are being massively attacked by China with cyberattacks and they're trying to infiltrate all of the cyber systems of America. This was headline article last week.

I had a weird deal happen on my computer last week, I think it's Wednesday, and my computer just started freaking out here in the church office. I think it was Wednesday morning and things were opening and closing just by itself, and I shut it off and turned it off and turned it on. I did this probably six or seven times and it kept doing it. Like weird stuff. I tried calling a couple guys and couldn't get anybody. So I went up to Best Buy to the Geek Squad.

I was going to just buy a new computer, it's like I don't know, something happened. So I go to the Geek Squad, and I said, "Hey, here's what's going on." The guy turns it on, he goes, "I don't know, everything's perfect, it's working fine." It's kind of like when your wife says, "The car is making a weird noise," and then you get into it and you say, "There's no noise here." She goes, "No there was, there really was." Yeah, there probably is something.

But anyhow, as I heard that, I thought about this couple days later. I wonder, and I don't know, I wonder if that stuff that was going on—and somebody else this morning told me about some weird stuff in their computer last week—I just thought huh, I wonder if this maybe is something with these cyberattacks that are coming from China, because it was the next day when that FBI director made these comments. Now I don't know. I can't fix those things and I can't stop terror attacks and I can't stop godless people from destroying our country.

We have some really, really wicked people in power and I don't need to go into specifics with you, but we have some real ungodly people that are just forcing terrible policies and laws on our country. And you hate it like I hate it. We can vote, but some of this stuff, brothers and sisters, we just can't stop it. We just need to keep trusting the Lord. Amen. Here's the second impact, the immediate impact that's going to come from this bowl judgment, and it would be this.

John sees what looks like a great storm. Look at verse 18. There were flashes of lightning and sounds and peals of thunders. Theologians call this a storm theophany. Theophany is a Greek word that means a manifestation of God. You see these storm theophanies at various times in the Bible when God appears on the scene in a direct kind of manifestation. You see it in chapter 4, verse 5, chapter 8, verse 3, chapter 11, verse 19. This is what when God manifests Himself in the middle of a fallen world, it causes this kind of impact.

You can see that in the Old Testament, for example, in Exodus 19, when Moses was on Mount Sinai to meet with God, and God came and met with Moses on Mount Sinai. Here's what it says in Exodus 19, "It came about on the third day when it was morning that there were thunder and lightning and flashes and a thick cloud upon the mountain, and a very loud trumpet sound so that all the people who were in the camp trembled." Why is this going on? Because God is holy and God is now manifesting Himself in some kind of local manifestation.

Heavens and earth cannot contain God, but He can manifest Himself. When this happened here, it says in verse 21, the Lord spoke to Moses and he said, "Moses, go down and warn the people so that they don't break through to the Lord and to gaze at the Lord and many of them perish." If anybody comes up here other than you, if they come up and try to get a glimpse of what's going on, they're going to die. Why? Because God is holy and you and I are not holy.

Moses was a sinner too, but God allowed Moses into His presence to communicate His will to him. God is holy and He must judge sin. So this is what you see going on here in verse 18, is that when God comes into this world and invades it for the purpose of judging sin, you're going to have this storm theophany as what John sees happening right here. The point would be this. We need to be ready by trusting in Christ.

I realize that when I give you the gospel—I've already done that and said you need to repent and believe—I'm preaching for the most part to the choir, because I believe that a large chunk of everybody that's in this room is a born again believer because people don't stick around much when you preach the Bible if they're not saved. You can make them feel good and they'll stick around, but if you preach the Bible, people don't want to stick around.

That brings us here to a third immediate impact of what's going to come. This also is in verse 18. It's what Californians like to call "the big one." Yeah, big earthquake, okay. We experienced a pretty good earthquake down there on January 17th, 1994, at 4:31 a.m. We're sitting in bed asleep and all of a sudden the whole building just starts shaking. My first thought was is this something demonic? It was nasty and the sound of everything slamming around within our condo and all the electricity is out.

We go walking into the living room and there's cases that are tipped over and glass broken everywhere. I don't know how we didn't cut our feet in the middle of all that. It was nasty. That was a bad earthquake. It toppled freeways, it toppled buildings, it toppled hospitals, the Kaiser Hospital. All day long people were just out there in our condominium complex, they were just like hanging out on the grass, nobody wanted to go back inside.

By the time it became nighttime, we said, "We're not going to go back in. We're just going to sleep in the back of the truck, Old Blue." So there was at that time five of us in the back of Old Blue and it got to be about like two in the morning and we said, "Okay this is really hard. Let's go back in and if we die we die." If there's another big one that hits—and there were all kinds of aftershocks.

The only good thing that happened that day was this. About like 10 o'clock that night we got a phone call from Taco Bell up the street and they said, "Do you guys own a white Toyota van?" and I go, "Yeah, we did, but it got stolen two weeks ago," and they said, "It's been in our parking lot for two weeks." So we got a ride and went up to Taco Bell and we got our van back. Praise the Lord.

As we know, earthquakes have been around for a long time and we had a 6.9 earthquake and it was very shallow. The Northridge quake was quite shallow. So it was pretty radical. But, 6.9, that's not as big as some, right? One of the biggest recorded ones was the one that hit Alaska in 1964. Kathy, 64. Were you up in Alaska at that time? Oh, you were down here. So that was a nasty one and that was, I think 8.5 or 8.9. It was big, and you see some of the videos of that, Anchorage was just—and there's been a number of others that are really large.

But just think if you want to think about big earthquakes, try going back even here to the beginning of God's shaping of the earth back in Genesis chapter 1. If you look at the day three of the creation account, when God created the earth, the earth was completely covered by the ocean waters. Then what happened on day three is that God separated the land from the waters. God created dry land by raising up the plates of the earth to create a landmass.

It probably in the beginning was a single landmass that they call Pangea. Pan, Greek word means everything, Ge means earth, so everything was just one big mass of land, that's Pangea. On day three what happened is that God raised up the dry land out of the ocean waters. Can you imagine what that must have looked like when you had a mass of land that would include what we call North America, Europe, South America, Africa, rising up out of the ocean?

Nobody was there to experience it, but can you imagine how big that would have been? Or if you want to fast-forward it a little bit, come to the time of Noah's flood. God caused all of the waters of the earth to come and cover the mass of the continent of that big block of land. He brought waters from underneath the surface of the earth, He brought waters down that were suspended above the earth, and after 40 days and 40 nights of flood rains, you had this entire earth covered in water.

Is there evidence that this world has been covered by water? It's everywhere. Not just here in our backyard, but you see it on the other side of the world. The evidence is everywhere. As you look at here in Colorado where we have the Rockies, we have some really unique geology that allows us to see some very interesting kinds of things that are part of this. But when those waters covered the earth, you got to understand something. We didn't have the Rocky Mountains in the beginning of that flood.

That entire stretch of land that is about 200 miles wide going into Utah, that would have all been basically the same elevation as what you have here in the Springs. The waters covered the earth. Then what happened in the final stages of the Noahic flood is that God began to shake this world up and He caused the plates, the tectonic plates, to begin shifting. Several things happened with this. Number one, when you have the shifting of the earth's tectonic plates, this created massive ocean canyons because the continents began to break apart and so God began to create ocean canyons.

If you go off of the coast of Japan there in the Pacific, you have something called the Mariana Trench. Mariana Trench is 1,600 miles long, about 43 miles wide, and it's over 35,000 feet deep. Mount Everest is 29,000 feet high, the Mariana Trench is 6,000 feet deeper than Mount Everest is high. 1,600 miles long. It's like going from here to LA is only 1,200 miles. So you had these massive canyons that are opening up.

That's not the only one, that's just the deepest one that they know of. There's this really interesting place down in the Caribbean called Grand Turk. Show me your hand if you've ever been down there. That's a pretty cool place. You're on this little sandy island in the middle of the Caribbean and it's this nice sandy beach. You can go out about 100 feet or so on the sand in the water, and the water's not very deep, maybe 5, 10 feet deep.

Then all of a sudden you come to a place about 100 feet, 100 yards, but it drops off and it goes down 8,000 feet. It's just dark. I don't know what's down there. Well, guess what. When God created these massive ocean canyons, at the same time on the continents you had the shifting of the plates pushing up these mountain ranges. This Rocky Mountain range was created at the end stages of Noah's flood, and it came pushing up out of the earth.

When that happened, there was massive quantities of water crashing off of every continent. That massive quantity of water and mud created things like the Grand Canyon and the Black Canyon of the Gunnison. That was not a little bit of water over millions and millions of years. It was massive quantities of waters in a very short time period as in days and weeks that carved out the Grand Canyon. The evolutionist got it completely wrong.

We all have the same facts to look at when we talk about geology, but their interpretation of the facts is completely wrong. It was massive quantities of water. Can you imagine though what that earthquake was like when God raised up these plates here on the continents, creating the Rocky Mountains, the Andes, the Himalayas? The earthquakes would have been just unimaginable, how big those things were. There's tremendous evidence that that's exactly how these things went.

As you start going up Manitou, I'm always talking about it and looking at it, I just think it's fascinating to see these things because you can see all of the mud and water layers. They're at an angle like this. You start driving up from Manitou, as soon as you start going up into the hill, you see all of these mud and water layers, sedimentary layers. Once you get down to a certain point, you can walk right up to it, you come to the place where it's all solid granite.

Geologists call that the great unconformity, because that granite is the foundation of the earth. They call it the Precambrian layer, and then the Cambrian layer would be where the sedimentary layers of the flood start. We live in one of the few places in the world where you can see it. But when you look at these sedimentary layers that are right there, you can also see that there're times when all of this sandstone does this. Now, if you were to take solid sandstone that was dried and then you started moving it up and down like this, guess what? It's going to crack and break.

You're going to have breaks in it. But when you look at these layers, you can see that they do this, but they're not broken. It's called a soft fold. Soft folds tell you that when those things pushed up and those folds took place, all of it was still wet and muddy. These mountains came at the end of Noah's flood, just like the Bible says. Shouldn't surprise us, right? What we're looking at right here is that we see that there has been massive earthquake activity in the past, but Jesus tells us that when the Day of the Lord comes, there's going to be massive earthquake activity again.

Not just the normal stuff that we have happening, because we have earthquakes all the time. There's going to be earthquake activity like we've never seen before. In Matthew 24, verse 7, Jesus said, "Nation will rise against nation, kingdom against kingdom," and there's going to be wars break out. Are we sitting on the edge of that? Maybe. The reality is that things might kind of settle down for the moment and we'd see another 100 years of just ongoing back and forth, we don't know.

We could be sitting on the edge of massive world war breakout. That's very realistic. Jesus said, "Nation will rise against nation, kingdom against kingdom, and in various places there will be famines and earthquakes." This is right in the beginning of the tribulation period, right in the seal judgments of the book of Revelation. But then Jesus said, "But all these things are merely the beginning of birth pangs." Now we could make some nice illustrations about birth pangs, huh, honey?

Many of you know what that's like. Well, Jesus said in the beginning of the tribulation period, "Yeah, you got labor starting, but you're not in hard labor yet." In Revelation chapter 6, verse 12, we see some of those earthquakes, which is in the beginning of that seal judgments. He says He broke the sixth seal and there was a great earthquake. Again, in chapter 8, verse 5, when you come to the trumpet judgments, the angel took the censer and filled it with fire from the altar of incense and threw it to the earth and there followed peals of thunder and sounds and flashes of lightning and an earthquake.

In chapter 11, verse 13, it says, "In that hour there was another great earthquake and a tenth of the city of Jerusalem fell, 7,000 people were killed in the earthquake." But the worst, look down here to verse 18, comes at the end in the bowl judgments. "There was a great earthquake," verse 18, "such had not been since man came upon the earth, so great an earthquake was it and so mighty." The Bible says here that it's going to be one like the world has never seen.

Men have never seen something like this, but some of the things that happened, like the shifting like I told you in Genesis and during the flood, some of those things were way up there. The point is this is going to be really, really big and bad. The big one. Look at verse 19, we come to a fourth immediate impact of the seventh bowl. God's wrath in these mighty earthquakes shook the whole world to pieces. There are three targets that are identified right here in verse 19. First of all, he says, "The great city was split into three parts."

What is the great city? Now when you go through the book of Revelation, we can see that there are times when Babylon is referred to as Babylon the Great or Babylon the great city, and that would be possible that Babylon is being spoken of here. But there's also several times in the book of Revelation where Jerusalem is called the great city. For example, in Revelation chapter 11, verse 8, it says that when the two prophets were killed, their dead bodies will lie in the street of the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also their Lord was crucified.

What city is that? That's Jerusalem. Jerusalem is also called the great city, and I believe that that's exactly what you have happening here in chapter 16, verse 19. The great city, Jerusalem, was split into three parts. I don't think that's referring to some kind of metaphorical idea that there was separation of politics or any kind of political thing. This is talking about Jerusalem being struck by massive earthquake and shaken to the ground.

That should not surprise us because this seventh bowl right here really has its fulfilling with the second coming of Jesus Christ. So when you go to Revelation chapter 19 in verse 11, where you really see the outworking of what's being introduced right here, you see Jesus Christ returning to this earth. In Revelation 19, verse 11, there's going to be a whole lot of shaking going on. Zechariah chapter 14, listen to what's going to happen.

Zechariah 14 is exactly parallel in terms of when these events unfold. In Zechariah 14 it says there's going to be a massive invasion from all of the armies of the world coming against Israel and God says He's not going to let them win. Chapter 14, verse 3, "The Lord will go forth and fight against those nations as when He fights on a day of battle. In that day His feet will stand on the Mount of Olives which is in front of Jerusalem on the east, and the Mount of Olives will be split in its middle from the east to the west by a very large valley so that half the mountain moves north and half moves south."

Massive splitting of the Mount of Olives. I heard that one reform commentator said, "Well, this was fulfilled when Jesus took the disciples over to the Mount of Olives right before he got arrested and he was on the Mount of Olives and teaching them about end times and he got arrested. That's what it meant when Mount of Olives was split in two." No, no, no, no. They just refuse to believe what God says. And that's what is troublesome to me, because God's word has meaning.

There's going to be a massive earthquake when Christ returns. He's going to return, His feet are going to stand on the Mount of Olives, and I've stood on the top of the Mount of Olives. That thing is going to be split in two. Now, in Zechariah, when it talks about this in another place in chapter 4, it says that Jerusalem is going to be turned into a plain. Right now you've got these canyons and valleys and mountains. Jerusalem is going to be flattened out.

This also is parallel to what we read in Ezekiel, because Ezekiel says there's going to be massive earthquake. In Ezekiel 38, verse 18, it'll come about in that day when the invasion comes against Israel, it says there's going to be a great earthquake, Ezekiel 38:19, in the land of Israel. "The fish of the sea, the birds of the heavens, the beasts of the field and all creeping things that creep on the earth, and all the men who are there on the face of the earth will shake at My presence and the mountains will be thrown down, steep pathways will collapse."

In Ezekiel chapter 40, it says that when Christ establishes His Kingdom on this earth, that He is going to establish a temple in the Millennium. But when you look at the temple that is described in Ezekiel chapters 40 and following, its dimensions are larger than anything that ever existed in the past. Matter of fact, the dimensions of the Millennial temple won't even fit in Jerusalem because of the hills and the fact that it wouldn't fit. But what's going to happen is there's going to be a flattening, geographical flattening of Jerusalem.

That's why it's going to fit. It also says in Ezekiel chapter 47 that a river is going to flow from the temple mount. From underneath a rebuilt temple a river is going to flow. It's going to split in two. Half of the river is going to go into the Mediterranean to the west and the other half is going to flow eastward into the Dead Sea. No river could flow into the Mediterranean, into the Dead Sea right now because of the topography.

It says that this river is going to flow into the Dead Sea and everything in the Dead Sea is going to come to life. Hasn't happened yet, is going to happen. This is going to be what happens when Christ returns, brings His Kingdom to this earth. Those things are going to happen. God says so in His word. You should believe what He says He's going to do. If you have a theological system that says none of those things are going to happen, I think that's just all metaphorical, no, no, no, no, no. Believe what God says.

We look at all of this stuff here, this is Jerusalem being struck, the great city, not Babylon. Notice also, it says there's a second target of this bowl, and it says here that "and the cities of the nations fell." These judgments are not simply going to be within the land of Israel, it's going to be the whole world being shaken to pieces by God at every level. There is going to be political upheavals, there are going to be wars, all these things are going to be happening as well, but you also have physical destruction like has never been seen.

God is going to judge a fallen world. You better make sure that you're saved. Then look at verse 19, here's a third target. He's mentioned Jerusalem, the great city, then he mentions "and the cities of the nations," then he brings Babylon in. "And Babylon the Great was remembered before God to give her the cup of His fierce wrath." The Bible has a lot to say about Babylon, and as I mentioned, in chapter 17 and 18 there's going to be a lot of discussion about it.

To be quite honest, this is a very challenging topic. I'm not sure I know all the interpretations and ways of putting it together. I'm not quite sure I would die on any one of those hills, that's how challenging some of this is. But Babylon, now we first see Babylon rise up back in Genesis chapter 10. You remember that Noah had three sons: Ham, Shem, and Japheth. Ham, the youngest, had a son named Cush, and Cush had a son whose name was Nimrod.

Don't ever name your kid Nimrod. It means rebellion. It means rebellious, literally, from the verb *marad*. Nimrod went out and he was a very ambitious guy after the flood. It says that he first built Babel, Babylon. He built a city called Erech, Accad, Calneh, Nineveh, Rehoboth-Ir, and Calah, and Resen between Nineveh and Calah, that is the great city. Here's another city called the great city. Babylon had a really rough beginning because the guy that started it was a bad guy, and it was a place of a lot of evil.

How many of you have ever heard of Fontana, California? Maybe some of you came from that area. I haven't spent much time in Fontana, but I saw this article about some guy that was a Hell's Angel. Fontana was the birthplace of the Hell's Angels, and I guess you might say that Babylon, back in the beginning, that's kind of like the birthplace of some of these really bad guys. We see Babylon come on the scene in Genesis chapter 11, when God confused their languages because they would not obey Him.

Most significantly when we look at Babylon is the fact that this is the empire that invaded Jerusalem and overthrew the Kingdom of Judah in 605 B.C. That's why a lot of stuff is said about Babylon. God has a score to settle with Babylon. As I look at how this fits together, I think that evil is going to rise up out of that part of the world, that geographical part of the world. Chapters 17 and 18 of Revelation show us that it's something bigger and it goes really global because it says that Babylon is found in all the places, all nations, tribes, tongues, and peoples.

There's going to be something universal that the book of Revelation calls Babylon. This is the challenging part. But there's very good reason for saying that evil is going to rise up from that part of the world. It's called the Plain of Shinar, is that area between the Euphrates and the Tigris. It says that evil is going to rise up out of the Plain of Shinar. That evil in Zechariah chapter 5, verses 5 to 11, that evil is symbolized as an evil woman.

The angel says, "This is wickedness, a woman that rises up from Babylon." I think that's exactly what you see happening in Revelation. God is going to settle the score for a lot of evil that was done against His people. You want to know how harsh some of this sounds like? When you look at Psalm 137, speaking about God's judging of evil Babylon, listen to these words. Psalm 137, "Oh daughter of Babylon, you devastated one." This is talking about God dealing with ancient Babylon, but these things connect to eschatology.

"Oh daughter of Babylon, you devastated one, how blessed will be the one who repays you with the recompense with which you have repaid us. How blessed be the one who seizes and dashes your little ones against the rock." The Spirit-inspired psalmist says, "How blessed is the one that smashes your babies' heads on the rocks just like you did to us." Wow. That's harsh stuff. It's really harsh language. But this is something that reminds us that sin is really harsh, evil is very harsh, God must judge evil.

Be ready, be saved. Come down here to verse 20, got to move quickly on this. The fifth impact of the bowl reshapes the physical earth. Look at verse 20. "Every island fled away and the mountains were not found." Once again, we have looked at some of these verses that talk about these things. John Walvoord, commentator from the 20th century, says these verses, if taken literally, indicate topographical changes in the earth which eventually will also include great changes to the Holy Land.

Henry Morris, in his commentary—now Henry Morris is the one who started the Institute of Creation Research—and he's got commentaries on Genesis and Revelation. Henry Morris says the gentle rolling topography of the world as originally created will be restored in these things. No more will there be great inaccessible, uninhabitable mountain ranges or deserts or ice caps. The physical environment of the Millennium will be in large measure a restoration of the antediluvian, which means pre-flood, environment.

I think he's exactly right because this is what it says is going to happen. Then that brings us to a sixth and final impact of that seventh bowl, terrible storms. Look at this. Huge hailstones about 100 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. We live in a place where we know how damaging hail can be, right?

We got caught in a hail storm last summer at an Air Force Academy soccer tournament with Damian, and both Karen's car and my car got hammered and did a lot of damage. This is going to be really nasty. It says here about 100 pounds each. Now the Greek word is a *talant*. We gotta clarify some details here. The word *talant* in ancient times really didn't mean exactly 100 pounds, maybe 75 to 90 pounds. But can you imagine getting hit with a 90-pound hailstone that's come down from like 10,000 feet in the sky?

That would ruin your day. Make your homeowner's insurance rates go through the roof, too. Well, this is deadly to the nth degree. So, guess what. If the earthquakes didn't get you, the hail will. Now, you can look throughout Old Testament history and we can see God using hailstones in the Old Testament. When He struck Egypt, He brought great hailstones upon them, smashed them to pieces. In Joshua chapter 10, when they were fighting the Canaanites, it says that more of the Canaanite armies died from the hailstones than from the Jews that were fighting them.

You're going to see something happen again in the tribulation period. This is not symbolic, it's not metaphorical, this is literal storms that bring massive kinds of devastation and God used it to judge a wicked world. When all this happens, they're going to repent and believe now, right? No. What does it say? They blasphemed God. They know that this is God, but they blaspheme Him.

Is all of this harsh? It really is. We can't escape it. But what we have to do is remind ourselves that evil is harsh and that God's judgment on evil is going to be harsh as well. Where does it leave us? Bring it back to this. Just remember that you and I deserve that kind of judgment as well. We really do. There is a way to escape this judgment and it is by trusting in the shed blood of Jesus Christ and asking His forgiveness.

God says if you will believe in what I have done to save you, I will forgive your sin. What a message, right? So, let's take these things right here, let's remember that we can trust God no matter what this world brings. I don't believe at all we're going to be in the tribulation period. I'm pretty confident on that one. But we don't know what's going to unfold in our own day and age.

We don't know, we may see our country plunging into a lot of terrible stuff. People who know what they're talking about, even if they're not Christians, people who know what they're talking about in economics and in terrorist activity and in cyber activity and in all kinds of things are saying, "We're headed for some really bad times." Hey, what it's going to be is going to be, but no matter what we can trust God. Amen.

Father, we thank You for this time to go to Your word and to be encouraged by the truth that Your Son Jesus Christ is the Savior of the world and that if He is our Lord and Savior, He would say to us, "Peace be with you. Be of good cheer, I've overcome the world." If you have come to understand your need for Christ this morning, call upon Him right now, ask Him to forgive your sins. Please share that with me, I'd love to encourage you. We thank You in Christ's name, amen.