Day 254

Today's Reading: Revelation 16

One of the scariest movies I have ever seen was not in a theater but in a church. It was called A Thief in the Night, and it was circulating in the 1970s about the end times. I knew I wanted to be ready for the rapture, the second coming of Jesus. I remember leaving that church service as an elementary student knowing full well in my heart that I needed to be ready for that day. I went on to read Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth. At that time, they had it in a comic book form, and it was the clincher for me that I was going to be ready for Jesus to come back as a thief in the night.

If things could get any worse for earth and humanity, Revelation 16 tells us it does in the great tribulation. As if seven trumpets of disaster were not enough for the planet, God unleashes seven bowls of wrath into the earth, from bodily affliction to polluting rivers and water. What’s interesting is that in the midst of these wrathful bowls of God’s judgment, one theme keeps being shouted by the angels inflicting the punishment: “Righteous art Thou O Holy One.” Their words remind us that God is not doing anything we don’t deserve—this is a day of wrath and judgment after millennia of mercy and patience.

These bowls are terrifying, as is men’s response to the outpouring of God’s wrath. Almost as many times as it says “God is righteous” after one of the bowls is poured out, it says as many times, “They did not repent so as to give Him glory.” How corrupt is man by this time in his history?

The chapter ends with a name many of us are all familiar with. As if things can’t get any worse, we are introduced to Armageddon, the place of the final battle on the planet. All that to say that in the midst of these horrific verses, a parenthetical statement shows up and stands alone in these passages because the verse speaks to the now and not to the future: “(‘Behold, I am coming like a thief. Blessed is the one who stays awake and keeps his clothes, so that he will not walk about naked and men will not see his shame.’)” (Revelation 16:15).

Verse 15 is a parenthetical life preserver for humanity now, right now before this chapter comes upon the planet with the wrath of God. When I say parenthetical, it’s just a large word for parentheses, an insert of another thought, a little path from the original thought. But this is not a little diversion. This is deliverance from the wrath of God. It is as if John breaks from the vision and, in terror of what will happen, says to humanity, This doesn’t have to happen to you. Stay awake and ready for the rapture. The parentheses show us John being overwhelmed and wanting to help us all.

The parentheses bring us to the rapture, the second coming of Jesus. The apostle John says that Jesus will come like a thief in the night, but this is not only John’s description of the second coming of Jesus. Jesus says in Matthew 24 that this is the way it happens. In 1 Thessalonians 5:2, Paul uses the thief-in-the-night image. And in 2 Peter 3:10, Peter also says He will come like a thief. The thief-in-the-night day is the rapture. The rapture is Jesus coming physically a second time to the earth, not to redeem it but to start judging it.

The rapture has two important days attached to it: the wedding day and the judgment day. The wedding day is the celebration of the “born again” dead and living all going to heaven. It’s the final call, our reward of heaven. And the Bible calls it a wedding-day celebration. The second day is judgment day, and it is God making all wrongs right. No one gets away with anything because of this day.

Every person will be judged for what they have done. Hitler and Saddam Hussein will be there. Stalin and Castro. People from your city and my city and every pl