Sermon Tone Analysis

Summary

Revelation 15 and 16 deal with the seven bowl judgments meted out against all those who follow the Beast.

The passage contains several images drawn from the Old Testament that telegraph the victory of Jesus and the Father over the Beast and the chaos system of Babylon.

This episode explores those systems and the connections between the bowls and other Old Testament chaos enemies.

The effect of the judgments is to cleanse the earth of chaos, preparing it to once again be sacred space to be re-occupied by its rightful Lord, the returned Christ.

Revelation 15 and 16.

Because there’s a lot of overlap here.

And to some extent, there’s been overlap with parts of both chapters in earlier chapters, so it’s workable to take these two in tandem.

And you know, they cover the seven bowl judgments just generally anyway.

So let’s just jump in here a little bit.

I’m going to go to Revelation 15.

I’m not going to read the whole chapter, but just enough to get us started here.

Revelation 15 is pretty short.

I’ll read that and then talk a little bit about chapter 15 and then we’ll jump into 16.

So reading ESV, Revelation 15 says:

So that’s Revelation 15.

It’s pretty short.

And it opens with these seven angels, who are going to unleash seven plagues (the bowl judgments).

And we see these seven angels later, of course, in chapter 16. (That’s when we’re going to get the actual bowl judgments spelled out.)

We also get a reference to them in 17:1.

Because the last bowl judgment is going to… All the bowl judgments, but especially the last, is going to set up the fall of Babylon.

And so we again get a reference to these seven angels in chapter 17.

Because chapters 17 and 18 really deal with the fall of Babylon.

So we have seven angels.

We’ve seen this number of angels before.

And like I said, we’ll see it again.

What I want to focus on, though, since we’ve covered a lot of the seven-angel territory, is the sea of glass.

Sea of Glass

Let’s just start there.

This is actually an Old Testament allusion.

Even though you would wonder, “Well, where have I seen a sea of glass before, other than maybe the book of Revelation?” Certain language, it lends itself to that.

Beale and McDonough summarize it this way.

They say:

The sight of what appeared to be “like a sea of glass like crystal” could include allusion to the reflection of the laver in Solomon’s temple and the heavenly splendor of God’s holy separateness (see Beale 1999a: 327–28, 789–92).

But uppermost in mind is the heavenly analogue to the Red Sea in connection with the new exodus.

This identification is confirmed beyond doubt by the following mention of the new “song of Moses,” which is the latter-day counterpart of Moses’ song recounted in Exod.

15...

The exodus atmosphere is discernible through the prior mention of “plagues” (15:1), which clearly are modeled after the plagues of Egypt [ and we’re going to see that in chapter 16], and by the subsequent mention of the “tabernacle of testimony” [cf.

v. 5].

The first exodus, out of Egypt and out from under Pharaoh’s tyrannical power, will be recapitulated by divine design in a final, end-time exodus of God’s people out from under the tyrannical oppression and rule of the “beast” over the world.

So that’s a paragraph of summary.

I think it’s a pretty good summary.

Since it’s going to be very clear that you have Exodus plague imagery with the bowls and you’ve got the song of Moses specifically mentioned, what we have here with this “sea” language is analogous to the deliverance at the Red Sea.

So we have the deliverance at the Red Sea back in the Old Testament, where God’s people are delivered from what at the time was the primary chaos agent of the Old Testament: ancient Egypt.

Because ancient Egypt was holding God’s people hostage in Egypt.

Of course, Pharaoh eventually tries to exterminate them.

All that served as an analogy when it comes to the beast.

Now the new beast is bigger and wilder and badder, and all those things.

But again, he sees an analogy to the beast.

And specifically, he’s going to analogize the beast not only to Egypt here, but we’ve already seen him do it, and we’re going to see him do it.

He’s going to analogize it to Babylon.

Babylon becomes, after Egypt, the primary chaos agent, the primary anti-Eden agent, the primary threat to the existence of the people of God and the survival of the covenants and, really, the restoration of Eden.

Babylon is the primary threat as the Old Testament comes to a close, which is why, as John’s looking forward into what awaits the Church (the looming threat and darkness), he’s going to portray that threat (and the beast and his

power) with Babel and with Egypt.

I mean, it makes sense.

This is how you communicate the idea—not only the idea of who they are, but what God is going to do and who’s actually going to win here.

Now there are other Old Testament allusions to the sea and the crystal language, the sea of glass, that kind of thing.

Ezekiel 1:22 is probably the more obvious in terms of the specific language, where you have the firmament in Ezekiel 1:22, which is the crystal platform for God’s throne.

And that’s important because we have to remember what the context for Revelation 15 is.

This is still part of that Divine Council meeting that we were launched into in Revelation 4 and 5, where the judgments of God and the Lamb are going to be described and meted out.

All of this is taking place in the Divine Council context.

And so, of course we would get this image associated with the throne of God.

Because in Ezekiel 1, we have the same image with God’s throne—the wheels and the fire, and then you get the firmament, again with the cherubim and all this.

And we’ve seen all of these elements from Ezekiel 1 elsewhere in the book of Revelation (Revelation 4 and 5 being most prominent).

And we shouldn’t be surprised to see it picked up again here sort of as a cue for readers to reorient ourselves back into the actual scene where this is taking place.

So Beale observes that, but he also loops in Daniel 7 along with Ezekiel 1 and Exodus 15, in his comments about the sea of glass mentioned in Revelation 4:6.

So if we go back and look at what he said there, he’s going to describe the relationship of this scene and this language to the Divine Council decision of Daniel 7, specifically 7:10, and that involves the judgment of the fourth beast, whose body was given to be burnt with fire (that’s Daniel 7:11).

So Beale writes:

The “sea” is also associated with the idea of evil [ that’s familiar to us].

Caird [ who was a well-known New Testament scholar] has argued that here it connotes cosmic evil, since it often has such a nuance in the OT and sometimes elsewhere in Revelation (see Rev. 13:1; 21:1; and especially 15:2, as well as “abyss” in 11:7).

This speculation receives support from the modeling of these chapters on Daniel 7, since the sea as a picture of the beasts’ origin is a significant feature in Daniel 7, and the scenes of Daniel 7 and Ezekiel 1 have integral literary links, the former usually seen as dependent on the latter.

The portrayal of the Red Sea in the OT as the abode of the evil sea monster [ this is Leviathan imagery] confirms that this setting is also included in John’s thought (cf.

Isa.

51:9–11; Ps. 74:12–15; Ezek.

32:2) [ Psalm 74 is one that we’ve referenced here on the podcast a number of times, about Leviathan imagery that’s tied to the crossing of the Red Sea].

In view of the Daniel and Exodus imagery, there is then a hint that John sees the chaotic powers of the sea as calmed by divine sovereignty.

Rev.

5:5ff.

reveals that Christ’s overcoming through his death and resurrection is what

defeated the power of evil and so calmed Satan’s watery, tumultuous abode [ the abyss].

[ Revelation] 4:6 gives a picture of the stilling of the hellish waters from the heavenly perspective, though the devil displays his wrath even more furiously on earth because he has been decisively defeated in heaven [ that’s

Revelation 12 he gives a side nod to] (see further on 5:6b; 12:12; 13:3)...

When John later says that “there is no longer any sea” [ Revelation] (21:1), he means that all evil on the earth will be not only defeated but also eradicated when Christ’s kingdom is established consummately on earth.

In fact, the “sea of glass like crystal before the throne” in 4:6 may be an intentional contrast with “a river of the water of life, clear as crystal, coming from the throne” in [ Revelation] 22:1.

So what Beale is suggesting here is that the “sea” here might be both a metaphor or a symbol of satanic evil—the power of the beast—because he comes from the sea and all these other allusions here, but also it’s still the throne of God,

because God is the victor over chaos.

So he’s saying it’s a symbol or an image

that can do double-duty, both the thing that’s the symbol of the threat (and the origin of the beast), but also, just like back in the Old Testament, the Red Sea was… When they’re standing there at the Red Sea, they’re thinking, “We’re going to die.”

And the sea is a metaphor for chaos.

But God subdues, divides, parts the waters.

He is in control.

He dominates chaos at the Exodus event.

And so that would be what John is trying to convey here—that despite all the stuff that he said about the beast up to this point and the terribleness of what’s going on on earth, it’s the Lord that’s going to dominate the beast.

The Lord is going to win the day.

So again, he’s using this imagery to convey these thoughts.

So the point for Revelation 15 in these observations from Beale and others is that you have God’s throne resting atop the sea of glass.

Again, if it is tied to Ezekiel 1 (and it’s pretty hard to see how it couldn’t be), just like Ezekiel 1 was a declaration of God’s sovereignty: “Yeah, we’re sitting here in Babylon, but you get the cherubim with the four faces—the four cardinal points of the zodiac—and God is still king over time an history, the movement of time, the epochs of time.”

He knows where history is going.

He’s in control of it.

All these things are brought to bear in Revelation 15 as we lead up to the final set of seven judgments (the bowl judgments) and the collapse—the defeat—of the beast and his empire.

So let’s move to verses 5-8 in Revelation 15.