We have been looking at the Bowl Judgments of Revelation 16 and finished last time looking at the response of the people on the earth to the judgments of God. Remember these are the final judgments that God is throwing down on the earth before His return. We have a very good picture of how people have reacted to the Lord Himself and to all He has done. Three different times in the text of this Scripture it says that they blaspheme Him. Twice it says they do not repent. Their attitude is resistance, rebelliousness, defiance, and hatred toward God and toward everything that God stands for. So, that has been the reaction of the unsaved people, the followers of the antichrist during the Tribulation Period.
We left off last time by asking another question. What should be our response to these things that we talk about as end time events? The fancy theological term is eschatology. The eschatological events of the end times that God gives us which is the prophecy of telling us things that are going to happen in the future. How should we be responding to those things? It doesn’t tell us here about that, but we can go back to another passage in 2 Peter 3 which is talking about very similar things. As a matter of fact, it is talking about the judgment of God at His return. We find there in 2 Peter 3:11-14 the response that God would have us have. Let’s back up to 2 Peter 3:10 to start. There it says, “But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, in which the heavens will pass away with a roar and the elements will be destroyed with intense heat, and the earth and its works will be burned up.” This is right at the time, maybe just a little further down the line from what we are reading in the book of Revelation, when the Lord destroys all these things on earth. So, how should we respond? Peter offers two suggestions here, 2 Peter 3:11, “Since all these things are to be destroyed in this way, what sort of people ought you to be in holy conduct and godliness.” Since it is all going to vanish - everything the world has lived for and counted on and loved is going to be burned up and destroyed. What kind of people then ought we to be? He already gives us a clue here. He talks about the kind of people we ought to be “in holy conduct and godliness.” So that lays the foundation, right?
