Today’s reading: Deuteronomy 14; Revelation 15-16
The response of the people of the earth to the plagues of Revelation 16 is interesting to me, and it reminds me a lot of the Pharaoh’s response to the plagues in Egypt.
Why I find the people’s response interesting is that John tells us they cursed God for the plagues. Them cursing God for the plagues means they recognize Him as the one with the power to make these plagues happen, and yet, they still reject Him. I tend to assume that people generally reject God because they don’t really believe He is there. For a lot of people today, the reality (or non-reality) of the spiritual world is kind of a background question that they don’t feel too much need to actually sort out. Many think that if God is there, He will probably just let them into Heaven, and if He’s not, they will just cease to exist when they die, so what’s it really matter? While I personally think this apathy is foolish, I can somewhat understand it, but this isn’t the situation of the people in Revelation 16.
In Revelation 16 we see plagues targeted at God’s enemies; the outpouring of His wrath upon those deserving of wrath. And the people clearly have at least some sense of this fact, maybe not that they are deserving, but that they are currently opposed to God, and that is why they are facing these plagues. What this means is that they are not agnostic or apathetic about the existence of God, but recognize the reality of both His presence and His power, and yet, rather than responding to that recognition, they harden their hearts to Him and curse Him.
And while this makes me think of Pharaoh, it’s not quite the same either. For Pharaoh, he is supposed to be a god himself, so bowing to Yahweh wouldn’t just be an indictment against the Egyptian pantheon, but against himself as well. For Pharaoh to bend to the plagues would be an admission that he was not able to maintain ma’at (divine order), and this could create massive instability in his kingdom and potentially cost him his rule. So there is a lot of both practical consideration and personal pride wrapped up in Pharaoh’s unwillingness to let Israel go from Egypt despite the continued devastation from the plagues. And actually, while Pharaoh was the one making the decisions, we see in Exodus that many of the Egyptians, including Pharaoh’s direct advisors, recognized the superiority of Yahweh and were urging Pharaoh to give in and let the Israelites leave.
So the fact that the people in Revelation 16 are experiencing these global plagues that they recognize as the work of God and are cursing Him for it, but then they also don’t have some other god or power they are relying on who can stop the plagues, is incredibly telling. This is nothing more than hardness of heart. These people have already decided that they will not submit to God, and so even when it is clear He is there and that He is powerful beyond all else, there is no changing their minds and submitting, there is only cursing God for His judgement of them.
There are those who reject God out of apathy, and there are those who reject Him in favor of another god or gods. There are those who are deceived into thinking they are following God based on some new prophetic revelation that teaches salvation by something other than faith in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. But there are also those who reject God out of their own selfish pride and hardness of heart; who want to be their own god and decide for themself how life is or isn’t supposed to work, and so they refuse to see their need for a savior because they refuse to recognize their creator as having authority to declare morality.
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