Going through Revelation 16 we will find the Bowl Judgments. These are the last series of judgments that God pours out on the earth during the Tribulation Period. We have been in between these judgments for a while. The Seven Bowls are actually the content of seventh Trumpet Judgment.
In Revelation 16:1 it says, “Then I heard a loud voice from the temple, saying to the seven angels, ‘Go and pour out on the earth the seven bowls of the wrath of God.’” First, we saw at the end of Revelation 15 that the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle in heaven to such a degree that nothing could be in that temple because of the powerfulness of God’s glory. So, we find that the voice coming from the temple must be the voice of God himself as there is no other being in the temple. So, the loud voice is the voice of God. He is speaking to the seven angels. He sends forth seven angels now to bring about these final judgments on the earth. One other thing we would observe here is that this is a singular command. He is not commanding each individual angel to go and pour out their bowls, but He is commanding them collectively. That implies to us that these judgments are going to happen very rapidly, one right after the other, and perhaps some of them simultaneously. So, we don’t have a great deal of lag time between these judgments. They could have happened in a matter of hours or days, so it is not with great periods of time between them.
We start with the first bowl judgment in Revelation 16:2 which says, “So the first angel went and poured out his bowl on the earth; and it became a loathsome and malignant sore on the people who had the mark of the beast and who worshiped his image.” We are not exactly sure what these malignant sores are, but this specific word is translated in the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament Bible, as boils, and very similar if not the same thing that Job experienced back in the book of Job. I don’t know how many of you have ever had boils before, but I had a whole series of them when I was about junior high age. They are very painful and very uncomfortable things to have. So, we have a group of people that are just covered with these boils. These are very painful skin conditions . . .
