Revelation 16:21

“It is done” is a single word in Greek, gegonen, a form of gínomai, which means “to become” or “to come into being”. It is in the perfect tense, which speaks of something that has come about and now stands. In this setting it declares that the bowls of wrath have reached their appointed end and the series God decreed is complete.

The earthquake, the splitting of the city and the fall of Babylon still follow, in the next verses and in the chapters after, so this cry closes one great stage of judgment while more of God’s plan is still to unfold. The same words are heard near the end of the book, when he who sits on the throne says, “It is done. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end” (Revelation 21:6). Daniel, too, was told of a time when “all these things shall be finished” (Daniel 12:7). What God has purposed, including his judgment on sin, he brings fully to pass, and his people can rest on that.

The earlier bowls fell on the earth, the sea, the rivers, the sun and the throne of the beast. The seventh is poured into the air, aḗr, the air or atmosphere around the earth. The air surrounds every living thing and is the breath of life itself, so this last bowl reaches everywhere and leaves no place to escape it.

The air may carry a second meaning as well. Paul calls Satan “the prince of the power of the air” (Ephesians 2:2), and the air was often thought of as the realm of spiritual powers. If that is in view here, the seventh bowl strikes the unseen forces of evil that work in the world as well as the world itself, and the judgment is complete in every sense.

The word for earthquake, seismós, means a shaking, and it can be used of a storm as well as an earthquake. John describes this one in the strongest terms he has: “a great earthquake, such as was not since men were upon the earth, so mighty an earthquake, and so great.” The word great (mégas) appears twice, and the closing words repeat the point with “so mighty”, tēlikoûtos, so that the reader cannot miss its size. This is the greatest earthquake in all of human history. Revelation has already described an earthquake at the opening of the sixth seal (Revelation 6:12) and another when the two witnesses were taken up (Revelation 11:13), and this one surpasses both.

The letter to the Hebrews looks back to the shaking of Sinai and forward to a final one: “now he hath promised, saying, Yet once more I shake not the earth only, but also heaven” (Hebrews 12:26–27). That last shaking removes what can be shaken so that what cannot be shaken remains, and the passage goes on to speak of the kingdom we receive, which cannot be moved (Hebrews 12:26–28). God is bringing history to the end he has appointed, and every human system raised against him will come down.

Revelation goes on to name the great city as Babylon. The angel tells John, “the woman which thou sawest is that great city, which reigneth over the kings of the earth” (Revelation 17:18), and the next two chapters describe her and her fall (Revelation 17, Revelation 18). The historical Babylon was the capital of the empire that destroyed Jerusalem and carried Judah into exile, a city famous for its wealth and its idols, so the name already stood for pride and cruelty against God’s people.

Believers differ on what Babylon stands for in Revelation. Some take it as a literal city that will stand at the end of the age. Many take it as a name for Rome, the great power of John’s own day that persecuted the church, and many hold that it also stands for every human system, in any age, that sets itself against God with arrogance, exploitation of the weak, false worship and persecution of the saints. On every reading, Babylon is the world organised in rebellion against God, and her end is certain.

When “great Babylon came in remembrance before God”, the time had come for God to act on what he had always known. The verb is mnáomai, to bear in mind or recall, and in Scripture God’s remembering means that he acts on what he remembers, whether in mercy or in judgment. Babylon’s sins, her idolatry and her persecution of God’s people, have reached their full measure, and the day of reckoning has come. The phrase speaks of God in human terms, and he has never lost sight of anything she did.

This is a comfort to everyone who has suffered wrong. “He hath prepared his throne for judgment. And he shall judge the world in righteousness” (Psalm 9:7–8). Because of this, Paul can tell believers to leave vengeance to God, “for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord” (Romans 12:19), and he assures a persecuted church that “it is a righteous thing with God to recompense tribulation to them that trouble you” (2 Thessalonians 1:6–8).

God gives Babylon “the cup of the wine of the fierceness of his wrath”. The prophets used this picture often. Isaiah speaks to Jerusalem, “which hast drunk at the hand of the LORD the cup of his fury” (Isaiah 51:17), and the LORD tells Jeremiah, “Take the wine cup of this fury at my hand, and cause all the nations, to whom I send thee, to drink it” (Jeremiah 25:15–16). The cup is the full portion of judgment God has appointed, and the wine pictures its overwhelming, staggering effect on the one who must drink it.

“Fierceness” is thymós, which means passion, hot anger or wrath. Scripture uses it of sinful human anger, and it uses it here, as elsewhere in Revelation, of the wrath of God. It is joined to orgē, “wrath”, so that the phrase speaks of the burning heat of God’s settled anger against sin. His anger is holy and just, and Babylon receives exactly what her rebellion has earned.

Believers differ on how literally to take the earthquake, the vanishing islands and the hailstones. Some take them as events that will happen as written, sent by God and far beyond any natural disaster. Others take them as the vivid language of prophecy, using world-shaking pictures to show that the whole order of this world and every security in it will be overturned. Many hold the two together and expect real upheaval, described in words that also carry this deeper meaning. All agree that God will judge the world, that his judgment will be complete, and that the old creation will give way to the new.

The men struck by the hail answer by blaspheming God, which shows how hard their hearts have become. The verb is blasphēméō, to revile or speak impiously, and here it means cursing God and dishonouring his name. They blaspheme “because of the plague of the hail”, and the word plague, plēgḗ, means a stroke or wound and so a calamity. It is Revelation’s word for the judgments God sends, and it comes twice in the verse: “for the plague thereof was exceeding great.”

This is the end of a long pattern. After the trumpet judgments the survivors “repented not” of their idols and their evil deeds (Revelation 9:20–21). Under the fourth bowl, men “blasphemed the name of God, which hath power over these plagues: and they repented not to give him glory” (Revelation 16:9). The greatest plague of all brings the same answer. These men know who is striking them and they curse him for it, and so suffering, however great, shows what is already in the heart.

God sends these plagues as the just reward of long rebellion and as a display of his righteous wrath and his rule over creation. By this point men have refused one call to repent after another. The hail shows the full extent of their hardness and proves that God’s final condemnation is right.

It also shows how long his patience has been. Peter explains the delay of judgment: the Lord is “longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9). The time to turn to him is while his patience still waits.