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6/14 Reading Portions: Deuteronomy 19; Psalm 106; Isaiah 46; Revelation 16
Revelation 16:1
“Go and pour out on the earth the seven bowls of the wrath of God.”
JUSTICE
Our flesh desires, even craves, to see God’s justice as severe, even cruel or ruthless. Even as those who are recipients of God’s mercy will have this tendency in the corruptions of our flesh— we want to shun God’s wrath as brutal or unnecessary. Christian believers, however, need to place God’s wrath into the proper perspective. We must see God’s eternal justice through God’s precious Son. When jealous, greedy religious leaders encountered God’s only Begotten Son, they counseled together to catch Him at His words and finally conspired to kill Him. Yet they didn’t merely murder the Christ, they succeeded in having Him mutilated beyond human recognition through Herod’s guard and Pilates soldiers (Isa 52:14; Rev 16:2). They twisted Christ’s words and perverted His gospel, mocking Him, spitting upon Him, and shaming Him (Psa 22:8; Rev 16:3). Through blood loss from beatings and scourging, as well as sleep deprivation, Jesus was so dehydrated that if His heart didn’t burst when He cried, “It is finished!” (John 19:30), Jesus would have died of dehydration (John 19:28; Rev 16:4). He who knew the deepest and closest intimacy with the heavenly Father, suffered God’s eternal and unrelenting wrath for sins He did not commit, paying a debt He did not owe for a debt we owe and cannot pay (Psa 75:8; Rev 16:8-9). Christ was forsaken of God when He hung upon Calvary’s tree (Psa 22:1, 15; Rev 16:10-11), and too often, we dismiss the wrath Christ suffered as just a bad day.
Yet this wrath is what each one of us deserves. This justice should have been poured out upon us; yet we are recipients of God’s love, grace, and mercy. The earth, which inflicted such torment upon heaven’s Treasure, is getting off easy with only seven bowls after their unrepentant rejection of Jesus Christ.
The wrath that Jesus suffer’d when
He hung upon the tree—
The hell that you and I deserve,
Yet, Christ has set us free.
