The God Who Is Very Angry (Rev. 14:6–20)

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Biblical theology from Revelation 14:6-20.

Hello, my name is Don Carson, and this is the thirteenth session of the fourteen-part series The God Who is There. Quite frankly, this talk’s topic can be terrifying.… The God Who is Very Angry … yet the fact remains that the Bible dares to mention the wrath of God more than 600 times. It never does so out of some vicious glee that smirks at mention of hell.

No, the person who talks about hell most frequently in the Bible is the Lord Jesus himself. The same Lord Jesus who weeps over the city. I beg of you not to skip this session. After all, we are not talking about merely abstract ideas of judgment but about the judgment itself that all of us human beings must face.

We’re not evaluating an abstract notion of punishment in hell. We’re talking about something that will be in our own future if we do not embrace the escape that God has graciously provided. The Bible itself will drive us back from the portals of hell to stand in the shadow of Jesus’ cross and in the entrance to his empty tomb. Here, and here alone we will be secure.

As solemn as this topic is (the God who is very angry), there’s a sense in which, for anybody who’s followed the storyline this far, it should not be too surprising. Any residual ideas of God as a kind of slightly sleepy grandfather figure and nothing more simply will not stand up to the way the Bible portrays God’s righteousness, his sense of the most profound offense when his creatures wish to distance themselves from him.

When you stop to think through what the Bible says about judgment, there’s quite a lot there from Genesis 3 on: the judgment of the flood, the sacrificial systems with all those dead animals, the cycles of decay under the judges in Israel when the nation sank down again and faced certain kind of judgment, the judgment that fell on the kings of Israel when they were increasingly perverse and corrupt, and on and on and on all the way through.

Then there’s Jesus himself with blistering language in a chapter like Matthew 23, condemning some of the sins in his own day. There is a sense in which none of this, if we follow the storyline at all, should surprise us. In some ways in our culture it’s harder to think about because anger is often connected in the public mind with intolerance. It’s connected with narrow-mindedness and bigotry. The category of “righteous anger” is not, for us, near the top of our scale of virtues.

One of the most frightening passages in the Bible is found in Revelation 14. We’ve come to the last book of the Bible. There are many, many passages to which we could turn to explore this theme, but I’m going to focus on Revelation 14 beginning at verse 6 to the end of the chapter. I’m simply going to read it, first of all, and note that the section is divided into two: the heralds (three angels) and then the harvest, two metaphors about harvest.

Both sections talk about judgment in frankly horrendous terms. You must understand that this writing is another sort. We often call it apocalyptic literature, full of symbolism and figures that you don’t find in other kinds of writing. I don’t have time to unpack the background of all of the symbolism. If it were another sort of course just on the book of Revelation, then I do take time to try to explain how this sort of symbolism works in detail, but you’ll catch the thrust of it in any case.

“Then I saw another angel flying in midair, and he had the eternal gospel to proclaim to those who live on the earth—to every nation, tribe, language and people. He said in a loud voice, ‘Fear God and give him glory, because the hour of his judgment has come. Worship him who made the heavens, the earth, the sea and the springs of water.’

A second angel followed and said, ‘Fallen! Fallen is Babylon the Great, which made all the nations drink the maddening wine of her adulteries.’ A third angel followed them and said in a loud voice: ‘If anyone worships the beast and its image and receives its mark on their forehead or on their hand, they, too, will drink the wine of God’s fury, which has been poured full strength into the cup of his wrath.

They will be tormented with burning sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment will rise for ever and ever. There will be no rest day or night for those who worship the beast and its image, or for anyone who receives the mark of its name.’ This calls for patient endurance on the part of the people of God who keep his commands and remain faithful to Jesus.

Then I heard a voice from heaven say, ‘Write: Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on.’ ‘Yes,’ says the Spirit, ‘they will rest from their labor, for their deeds will follow them.’ I looked, and there before me was a white cloud, and seated on the cloud was one like a son of man with a crown of gold on his head and a sharp sickle in his hand.

Then another angel came out of the temple and called in a loud voice to him who was sitting on the cloud, ‘Take your sickle and reap, because the time to reap has come, for the harvest of the earth is ripe.’ So he who was seated on the cloud swung his sickle over the earth, and the earth was harvested. Another angel came out of the temple in heaven, and he too had a sharp sickle.

Still another angel, who had charge of the fire, came from the altar and called in a loud voice to him who had the sharp sickle, ‘Take your sharp sickle and gather the clusters of grapes from the earth’s vine, because its grapes are ripe.’ The angel swung his sickle on the earth, gathered its grapes and threw them into the great winepress of God’s wrath. They were trampled in the winepress outside the city, and blood flowed out of the press, rising as high as the horses’ bridles for a distance of 1,600 stadia.”

I want to run through the passage so that we understand it reasonably well, just to see what it’s saying, and then to think through with you (biblically, theologically) what all this language of judgment and hell means. We divide the passage in two. First of all, the heralds, the three angels, verses 6–13.

You often find angels in apocalyptic literature, and the proclamations here that they bring are interrelated and they’re progressive. The first angel summons all humankind to fear God and worship him, verses 6 and 7. “I saw another angel flying in midair.” Mid-heaven is what is meant. “To be seen and heard by all,” and now he issues a proclamation. It’s to those who live on the earth. It’s not for the angelic hordes of heaven; it’s for people living on the earth.

“He had the eternal gospel to proclaim to those who live on the earth.” That’s what he was there for. “To every nation, tribe, language, and people.” So it’s not restricted to merely one subset. Now the question is.… What is this eternal gospel? There are two views.

One group says that the eternal gospel mentioned in verse 6 is given its content in verse 7. So the eternal gospel is what this angel says in verse 7. “He said in a loud voice, ‘Fear God and give him glory, because the hour of his judgment has come. Worship him who made the heavens, the earth, the sea and the springs of water.’ ”

In which case, it sounds as if this eternal gospel is somehow a kind of generic, “You may not have heard of Jesus and you might not know the truth, but worship the God who has manifested himself in nature and you’ll be all right.” That really doesn’t make any sense, for two reasons.

First, the word gospel is already such a fixed word with real meaning by the time John writes this about AD 90. Moreover, earlier on in this book in two spectacular chapters, Revelation 4 and 5, John has a vision that shows us what the gospel really is, what it looks like. It’s spectacular. I wish I had time just to expound those two chapters to you.

In those two chapters, chapter 4 is to chapter 5 what a setting is to a drama. In highly apocalyptic imagery, God is presented in the setting as transcendent, so spectacularly glorious that even the highest order of angels cover their faces before him and cry, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.” There we’re told that he’s the God of creation and the entire created order lives and moves and has its being entirely because of him. That’s Revelation 4.

Then in Revelation 5, the drama begins. In the right hand of this God, we’re told, is a scroll sealed with seven seals. This scroll, it turns out, is the scroll that contains all of God’s purposes for judgment and blessing for the entire universe. That’s what the scroll contains, but it’s sealed with seven seals.

As the drama is set up in this vision, an angel proclaims to the whole universe, “Who is worthy to approach this God and take the scroll from the right hand of God himself and slit the seals?” In the symbolism of the day that meant, “Bring to pass everything that was in the scroll.” What angel could approach this God and be God’s agent for bringing to pass all of God’s purposes?

No one is found who is worthy. No angelic being, no human being, no one in the abodes of the dead, no one. After all, he is the God who is described in such terrifying terms in the previous chapter. If even the highest order of angels dare not look on him, who’s going to come along and say, “Here, I’ll do that. No problem?”

John, the seer, the visionary, he weeps. He weeps not because he’s a nosey parker who can’t see into the future. He weeps because in the symbolism of the vision, it means that unless somebody does come along and slit those seals, God’s purposes for judgment and blessing won’t come to pass. That is, history becomes meaningless. There is no final accounting. There is no righteousness. The sufferings of the church are useless.

Then one of the interpreting figures taps him on the shoulder and says, “Stop your crying, John. Look! The lion of the tribe of Judah, he has prevailed to open the scroll.” “So I looked,” John says, “and I saw a Lamb.” So a lion has been introduced; what he sees is a lion. We are not to think of two animals parked side-by-side.

This is apocalyptic literature, and one of the things that happens in apocalyptic literature is that you can mix your metaphors. The lion is the Lamb. The lion of the tribe of Judah means the one who comes from the royal tribes. The tribe of Judah is the tribe of David. The tribe of Judah is the one from whom the King comes, the Messiah, the Promised One. He comes from the tribe of Judah, the royal figure.

He has come and he has prevailed after a struggle to take this scroll and bring God’s purposes to pass. But when John looks up he sees a Lamb because the lion is the Lamb. The one who is the promised King is also the sacrificial, slaughtered Lamb. We’re told that he does not come from the outside and go in. He emerges from the center of the throne. He’s one with God himself. You’re coming back to the complexity of the one God.

As he manifests himself, the lion/Lamb, all around the throne, countless millions around the throne break out in a new song as they address this Christ figure, this lion/Lamb, and say, “You are worthy. You are worthy to take the scroll and break the seals, for you have purchased people for God from every tongue and tribe and people and nation with your own blood and made them to be a kingdom and priests to serve our God.”

In other words, the gospel is the same gospel as you find in Paul. It’s what God has ordained through his Son, this lion/Lamb, to pay the price of sin, to take on the effects of the curse, to release his people, to gather and transform men and women from every tongue and tribe and people and nation. It’s the good news. It’s the gospel, life-changing focus on who Christ is and what he has done. That is the gospel!

In which case here, in Revelation 14:6–7, the connection between these two verses has got to be seen the other way. It’s not that verse 7 gives us the content of the gospel. The content of the gospel is defined by Jesus and the cross and has already been laid out for us in Revelation 4 and Revelation 5. The connection between 6 and 7 is a little different.

Listen. Granted that the gospel is here. Granted that it’s being proclaimed. Granted that it is being announced. Granted that this is the sole means by which God’s purposes for salvation and judgment come to pass. Then, “Fear God and give him glory, because the hour of his judgment has come. Worship him who made the heavens, the earth, the sea, and the springs of water.” You’re tied back to responsibility to the Creator. Eventually, this time of salvation and patience will close. The time comes. Fear him.

Then the second angel announces the impending downfall of paganism. Verse 8: “The second angel says, ‘Fallen! Fallen is Babylon the Great, which made all the nations drink the maddening wine of her adulteries.’ Now historic Babylon, of course, was the capital of the Babylonian empire in the Tigris/Euphrates system. At one point, it was the capital of the regional superpower, the superpower that destroyed the southern part of the land of Israel (the tribes of Judah and Benjamin). They destroyed the temple in 586 BC.

It becomes, in the Bible, a kind of symbol for paganism that runs amok and is finally destroyed. The great king boasts powerfully in the book of Daniel of this Babylon. “Is not this mighty Babylon that I have built?” It becomes almost a symbol for arrogance, for vaunted self-independence. It’s a symbol for the spirit of godlessness, which in every age lives in those who worship anything but the Creator. Society set free from God is its own worst enemy.

Now in New Testament times, Babylon has already been destroyed. It’s a piddling little village at this juncture, but the name of Babylon is picked up and applied in a symbol-laden way to the city of Rome. Rome was, at that time, the capital city of the regional superpower and the mark of paganism, unbelief, arrogance.

Now as the final account is readied, the second angel says, “Fallen! Fallen is Babylon the Great.” There is an announcement of the impending destruction of all society and life and arrogance that sets itself up over against God himself. In the first century, manifested in particular in paganism. “It made all the nations drink the maddening wine of her adulteries.”

These adulteries in biblical language have to do not, first and foremost, with merely sexual adultery, if I may dare put it that way. Adultery becomes a figure for the kind of apostasy in which you’re not, as it were, tied intimately and covenantally with God, but you prostitute yourself to other gods so that adultery becomes a symbol for betrayal of God. This massive, pagan voice has made the nations drunk with the maddening wine of her adultery.

The third angel vividly portrays the torments awaiting those who worship the beast. Now the reference to the beast is from the previous two chapters. Chapter 12 pictures the Devil himself, referred to as “that old serpent,” hauling you back to chapter 3 of Genesis again. That old serpent who then calls for some beasts, as it were, as his functionaries.

There’s one beast that is particularly strong and powerful. There’s another beast that is deceptive, sometimes called a false prophet. In John’s language, the Devil and the first beast and the second beast function together and are pretending to be God. Trying to act like Father, Son, and Spirit, but only evil, only destructive, never-able-to-be God.

The beast wants everybody to be stamped by his image and come under his sway and control. That’s part of the language of the previous chapter that we don’t have time to press. Now with that presupposed, “The third angel says in a loud voice, anyone worships the beast [that is, Satan’s own emissary] and its image and receives its mark on their forehead or on their hand, they, too, will drink the wine of God’s fury, which has been poured full strength into the cup of his wrath.

They will be tormented with burning sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment will rise for ever and ever. There will be no rest day or night for those who worship the beast and its image.” God’s wrath poured out in full strength? The image is drawn from wine-drinking practices in the ancient world.

When you produce wine, it comes out about 30 proof, about 15 percent alcohol. It can go up or down a bit, but it’s not a distilled product where you can control the amount of alcohol. It’s a fermented process. It depends on the sugar and the temperature and the kind of berry, but it’s about 30 proof, 15 percent alcohol.

In the ancient world, it was very common to cut the wine with water. Somewhere between one part in ten (one part of wine to ten parts of water) and three and one. So most table wine that people drank in the ancient world was cut. This image is saying, “This is now the wine of God’s wrath poured out full strength.”

Any manifestation of God’s wrath that you’ve seen so far, the exile, for example, plagues in the Old Testament, disease, war, any of these things that you have seen as horrible manifestations of God’s wrath. “Let me tell you,” the author is saying, “that was the dilute form.” Now God’s wrath is poured out full strength.

Different images are used: Burning sulfur. “In the presence of the holy angels and the lamb” does not mean the angels are sitting there laughing and saying, “I told you so!” It means there is enough awareness in these people of the angels and the Lamb to whom they no longer ever can have access. That is part of the torment. There is no way out. “The smoke of their torment will rise forever and ever.”

Now the harvest, verses 14–20. Here the arrival of God’s judgment is depicted in two agricultural portraits. First, the grain harvest, verses 14–16. The whole point of these three verses is very simple. It is saying that a time is coming, a set time, when the harvest takes place and there is no escaping it.

“The Son of Man is Christ himself with a sharp sickle in his hand. The voice through the angel from the temple …” That’s a way of saying “from his heavenly Father.” “… says, ‘Take your sickle and reap, because the time to reap has come for the harvest of the earth is ripe.’ So he who was seated on the cloud swung his sickle over the earth, and the earth was harvested.”

In other words, life does not go on and on and on endlessly. This is not Hinduism where there are cycles and recycles and recycles of incarnation where you sort of rise and fall. History in the Bible is teleological. It goes somewhere. It begins somewhere and it ends somewhere. It heads toward an end. When the time comes and the Lord himself swings his sickle, time as we know it will be no more.

Finally, the treading of the winepress in the last verses, 17–20, emphasizes the violent thoroughness of God’s wrath when it is finally poured out. You need to understand how these things worked in the ancient world. They would take the grapes and put them into a great stone vat in a large vineyard. At the bottom of the vat were little holes and the juice could come out of those holes and run through stone channels into collecting pots.

So you put in the grapes into this vat and the servant girls would kick off their sandals, pick up their skirts, and go in and stamp down the grapes. The juice would flow, and then the juice would be collected, and from it would come the fermentation and the wine and the drink. But now this imagery is used to portray people being thrown in to the great winepress of God’s wrath. People who are being trampled underfoot so thoroughly that the blood flows out from the channels to a height of a horse’s bridle for a distance of almost 200 miles.

Now I know it’s imagery. The sulfur is imagery, too, and elsewhere darkness and chains no doubt are imagery, but they’re not imagery of nothing. In each case they are meant to tell us something important. Here what is being conveyed is the violent thoroughness of God’s wrath when it is finally poured out.

What shall we, as Christians, make of this? There are a lot of Christians today who want to say that surely it’s better to think of hell as a place where there’ll be some temporary punishments until eventually you simply lose all consciousness. Annihilation. Others think that it is manipulative and cruel to speak of hell at all. Just talk about the love of God. There are several things that really have to be said. This is not an easy topic, but they have to be said.

First, the person in the Bible who talks most of hell is Jesus. He is the one who introduces almost all of the horrendous and colorful images. He can openly say to followers of his who are at risk of being crucified and beaten and sawn asunder and all the rest. He says, “Do not fear those who can only kill your body. Fear him, rather, who after killing your body can consign both body and spirit to hell.”

He talks about dungeons and chains, outer darkness. People sometimes say, “I’d like to go to hell; all my friends will be there.” There are no friends in hell. He can speak of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. Not surprising, he weeps over the city. As for manipulating you, you see, it’s only manipulating you if it’s not true. If it’s true, and I rest first and foremost on Jesus’ authority, it’s warning you. It would be unkind and uncharitable for me not to warn you, as I must warn myself.

Moreover, there are some small hints that this place goes on. Did you notice the line in 14:11? “The smoke of their torment will rise forever and ever.” This does not sound like a place where it comes to an end. Or again, a few chapters on in Revelation 20:10. “Fire came down from heaven and devoured them. And the Devil, who deceived them, was thrown into the lake of burning sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be tormented day and night for ever and ever.”

Let me hasten to say that any Christian who teaches on these things with anger and without tears is betraying Jesus. We don’t need Elmer Gantrys who take a kind of vicious glee over the tragic ends of others. We don’t need that. We will be the first to say (as Paul calls the Christians in Ephesians 2, the passage we saw in the last section) that, “We are by nature all children of wrath.” It is only by the grace of the gospel that we know anything different.

But there’s more. I cannot quite prove this, but I think that there are enough biblical hints to hold that it is true. Hell is not going to be filled with people who say, “All right, all right, you win. I am so sorry. I do repent. I really would like another chance. I really would like now to trust Jesus. I really now would like to go to heaven.” It’s not going to be filled with people like that.

The last book of the Bible says, “Let him who is filthy be filthy still. Let him who is unjust be unjust still. Let him who is righteous be righteous still.” You move into the new heaven and the new earth, you move into hell itself, and you remain in principle what you are already. If as a Christian you are already seen as righteous in Christ, if you have already been increasingly conformed to the likeness of Christ, you move into a new heaven and a new earth.

Righteousness becomes yours without footnotes or exceptions or tendencies away or the influences of the old nature. “Let him who is righteous be righteous still.” There is the culmination of this righteousness, or you move into hell and you don’t suddenly turn over a new leaf and become spotless. “Let him who is filthy be filthy still.” Hell is full of people who don’t want to be there but still do not want to bend the knee.

For all eternity, they still hate God. They still despise the cross. They still sin and hate each other in this endless cycle of self-chosen sin and iniquity and rebellion and anarchy and idolatry and its consequences. It’s horrendous. So much is that part of their stamp and their makeup that if they went, suddenly, transported to heaven, they’d hate it.

It’s in exactly the same way as we saw in John, chapter 3, in the passage on God’s love. “When the light comes, people love darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil.” That is the horrible awfulness of it: ongoing punishment and still, God help us, no repentance, not ever, not ever. That’s why the Bible dare say, “Flee, flee from the wrath to come.”

Biblically faithful Christianity does not present itself as a nice religious structure that makes happier parents and well-ordered children and good tax-paying citizens. It may produce better parents and better tax-paying citizens, but the issues at stake in biblical Christianity have to do with eternity and heaven and hell, matters of the utmost significance: your relationship to your maker, what God has provided in Christ, what the cross is about, the resurrection.

For at the end of the day, what hell measures is how much Christ paid for those who escape hell. The measure of his torment, in ways I don’t pretend even to begin to understand, the measure of his torment as the God-man is the measure of torment that we deserve and he bore. If you see that and believe it, you will find it difficult to contemplate the cross for very long without tears.