Recent generations of interpreters have fixated on Revelation’s wars and beasts, which are fascinating because they’re frightening. Readers have legitimate fears about how such severe judgment might apply during their own lifetime. Indeed, some have dismissed Revelation’s judgments as too grotesque and scandalous, and even irreconcilable with the idea of a merciful God.

Yet God’s justice, like His mercy, appears everywhere in the Bible. It is an integral part of His self-revelation. To deny the force of divine judgment, then, is to make God less than God, and to make us less than His children. For every father must discipline His children, and paternal discipline is itself a mercy, a fatherly expression of love. In order to understand the judgment of Revelation—and its application to our own lives—we need first to understand the covenant bond that unites us to God the Father.

A covenant is a sacred family bond. We can see that God—by His covenants with Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, and Jesus—gradually extended that family relationship to more and more people. With each covenant came a law; but these were not arbitrary acts of power; they were expressions of fatherly wisdom and love. Every healthy home, after all, has clear guidelines for acceptable and unacceptable behavior. Yet, even more than this, God’s law enabled us to love as He Himself loves, to grow in our imitation of the “divine family” of the Blessed Trinity. For Father, Son, and Holy Spirit live eternally in perfect peace and communion.

If God’s covenant makes us His family, then sin means more than a broken law. It means broken lives and a broken home. Sin comes from our refusal to keep the covenant, our refusal to love God as much as He loves us. Through sin, we abandon our status as children of God. Sin kills the divine life in us.

Judgment, then, is not an impersonal, legalistic process. It is a matter of love, and it is something we choose for ourselves. Nor is punishment a vindictive act. God’s “curses” are not expressions of hatred, but of fatherly love and discipline. Like medicinal ointment, they hurt in order to heal. They impose suffering that is remedial, restorative, and redemptive. God’s wrath is an expression of His love for His wayward children.

God is love (1 Jn 4:8), but His love is a consuming fire (Heb 12:29), which stubborn sinners find unbearable. God’s fatherhood does not lessen the severity of His wrath or lower the standard of His justice. On the contrary, a loving father requires more from his children than judges demand from defendants. Yet a good father also shows greater mercy.

CAN I HAVE A WITNESS?

We need that understanding of covenant if we’re to understand the judgments of the Book of Revelation. And there’s no mistaking the situation. John’s vision is not merely liturgical, or merely royal, or merely military. It is all these, but it is also juridical. It’s a courtroom scene. To citizens of modern democracies, this combination might seem like chaos; but we should remember that, in ancient Israel, the king was commander in chief of the army, chief justice of the courts, and, ideally, high priest as well. As divine king, Jesus fulfilled all these roles par excellence. So, when John sees heaven, he has simultaneously entered the Temple, the throne room, the battlefield, and the courtroom. As in any courtroom, Revelation presents the testimony of sworn witnesses. “And the angel . . . lifted up his right hand to heaven and swore by Him Who lives forever” (Rev 10:5–6). Later, in chapter 11, the court summons Moses and Elijah. Though John does not mention them by name, he suggests their identity by speaking of the powers these men displayed in the Old Testament: in Elijah’s case, the power to close up the sky and call down fire; in Moses’ case, the ability to turn water to blood and call down plagues. These two witnesses (Rev 11:3) represent the whole of the Law (Moses) and all of the prophets (Elijah). By their presence, they testify that the people of Israel knew full well the obligations of their covenant with God, and the consequences of their infidelity.

Other witnesses testify by giving up their lives. In Greek, the word for “witness” is martus, whence we get the word “martyr.” Thus, in chapter 6, we encounter “the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the witness they had borne” (v. 9). These witnesses call to the judge for a swift execution of sentence: “O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before You will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell upon the earth” (6:9–10). Since they cry out from the altar, we know their testimony is true and that it will be heard. But against whom are they testifying? To answer that question, we must consider which city was the source and center of persecution in the Church’s first generation—and that was Jerusalem.

PLAGUED BY DOUBT

Jerusalem, it seems, is on trial. God appears as judge (20:11), assisted by angels who sit on twenty thrones (20:4). Throughout the Apocalypse, angels execute the sentence, too, precipitating the destruction of Jerusalem, along with its inhabitants and its Temple. John portrays this event in terms of a terrible Passover. Seven angels pour out the chalices of God’s wrath, which issue in seven plagues. The emptying of the chalices (sometimes rendered “cups” or “bowls”) is a liturgical action, a libation poured out upon the earth, as wine was poured upon ancient Israel’s altar.

In light of the Passover’s fulfillment in the Eucharist, this imagery becomes all the more striking. The plagues take place in chapters 15–17 within a liturgical setting: the angels appear with harps, vested as priests in the heavenly Temple, singing the song of Moses and the song of the Lamb (ch. 15). This liturgy means death to God’s enemies, yet salvation to His Church. Thus, the angels cry: “For men have shed the blood of saints and prophets, and You have given them blood to drink. It is their due!” (Rev 16:6).

Passover, the Eucharist, and the heavenly liturgy, then, are two-edged swords. While the chalices of the covenant bring life to the faithful, they mean certain death to those who reject the covenant. In the new covenant, as in the old, God gives man the choice between life and death, blessing and curse (see Dt 30:19). To choose the covenant is to choose eternal life in God’s family. To reject the new covenant in Christ’s blood is to choose one’s own death. Jerusalem made that choice, on Passover in A.D. 30. At the time of that Passover, Jesus predicted the end of the world in frightful terms and said, “Truly, this generation shall not pass away till all these things take place” (Mt 24:34). A generation to the ancients (in Greek, genea) was forty years. And forty years later, in A.D. 70, a world ended as Jerusalem fell.

FORBIDDEN FRUITS: GRAPES OF WRATH

Why would a merciful God punish in this way? How could we attribute such wrath to the divine Lamb, the very image of mildness? Because God’s wrath is a mercy. But to understand this paradox, we first need to explore the psychology of sin, with some help from St. Paul.

Paul’s use of the word “wrath” in his Letter to the Romans is illuminating: “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of men who by their wickedness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. . . . So they are without excuse; for although they knew God they did not honor Him as God or give thanks to Him, but they became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened” (Rom 1:18–21).

This could well summarize the “case” against Jerusalem presented in heaven’s court: God gave Israel His revelation, indeed the fullness of His revelation in Jesus Christ; yet the people did not honor Him or give thanks to Him; indeed, they suppressed the truth by killing Jesus and persecuting His Church. Thus, “the wrath of God is revealed” (“apocalypsed”) against Jerusalem.

What happened then? We read on in Romans: “Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves” (Rom 1:24). Wait a minute: God gives them up to their vices? He lets them continue sinning?

HOOKED ON A FAILING

Well, yes, and that is a dreadful manifestation of the wrath of God. We might think that the pleasures of sin are preferable to suffering and calamity, but they’re not.

We have to recognize sin as the action that destroys our family bond with God and keeps us from life and freedom. How does that happen?

We have an obligation, first, to resist temptation. If we fail then and we sin, we have an obligation to repent immediately. If we do not repent, then God lets us have our way: He allows us to experience the natural consequences of our sins, the illicit pleasures. If we still fail to repent—through self-denial and acts of penance—God allows us to continue in sin, thereby forming a habit, a vice, which darkens our intellect and weakens our will.

Once we’re hooked on a sin, our values are turned upside down. Evil becomes our most urgent “good,” our deepest longing; good stands as an “evil” because it threatens to keep us from satisfying our illicit desires. At that point, repentance becomes almost impossible, because repentance is, by definition, a turning away from evil and toward the good; but, by now, the sinner has thoroughly redefined both good and evil. Isaiah said of such sinners: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil” (Is 5:20).

Once we have embraced sin in this way and rejected our covenant with God, only a calamity can save us. Sometimes, the most merciful thing that God can do to a drunk, for example, may be to allow him to wreck his car or be abandoned by his wife—whatever will force him to accept responsibility for his actions.

What happens, though, when an entire nation has fallen into serious and habitual sin? The same principle is at work. God intervenes by allowing economic depression, foreign conquest, or natural catastrophe. Often enough, a nation brings on these disasters by its sins. But, in any case, they are the most merciful of wake-up calls. Sometimes, disaster means that the world the sinners knew must fade away. But, as Jesus said, “What does it profit a man, to gain the whole world and forfeit his life?” (Mk 8:36). It’s better to bid farewell to a world of sin than to be lost without hope of repentance.

When people read the Apocalypse, they get frightened by the earthquakes and locusts and famines and scorpions. But the only reason God would allow these things is because He loves us. The world is good—make no mistake about that—but the world is not God. If we’ve allowed the world and its pleasures to rule us as a god, the best thing the real God can do is to start taking away the stones that make up the foundation of our world.

ORDER IN THE COURT

Yet a better world awaits the righteous and the sincerely repentant. To live a good life is not to live free of troubles, but to live free of needless worry. Catastrophes happen to Christians, just as good things seem to happen to wicked people. Yet, for a practicing Christian, even the disasters are good; because they serve to purify us of our attachments to this world. Only when we go bankrupt, perhaps, will we cease to worry about money. Only when we’re abandoned by our friends, will we stop trying to impress them. When the money’s gone, we can fall back on the one thing that nobody can take away: our God. When our friends don’t return our calls, we can, at last, turn to the changeless Friend—Whom we cannot impress, because He knows us thoroughly.

For, as Revelation reveals, the Judge has the goods on us. Judgment isn’t just for Jerusalem. “Also another book was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were judged by what was written in the books, by what they had done” (20:12). One day, you and I will be numbered among “the dead,” and we will be judged by what we have done. Elsewhere in Revelation, we see that the saints enter heaven and “their deeds follow them” (14:13). Our works are integral to our salvation; indeed, they’ll be the stuff of our judgment.

What’s more, we don’t have to wait till we’re dead to be judged. We stand before the judgment seat whenever we approach heaven, as we do at every Mass. Then, too, do we beg perfect mercy, which is perfect justice, from our heavenly Father. Then, too, do we bind ourselves by covenant with God. Then, too, do we receive the chalice—for our salvation, or for our judgment.

We should recall the judgment of the Apocalypse whenever we hear the words of institution, which are the words of Jesus: “This is the chalice of My blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant.”