Sixth
Seal; Wrath of the Lamb Rev. 6:12-17
Revelation 6:12 NASB “I looked when He broke the sixth
seal, and there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth
{made} of hair, and the whole moon became like blood;
They now know for sure that the source of these judgments is God. They
are not saying they don’t believe in God, that He doesn’t exist, they have to
figure out some legislative or scientific solution to all these environmental
disasters. They will finally realise that it is God who controls history and
all of these events, and rather than submit to His authority, rather than face
God and trust in Him, they will shake their fists at Him and be buried alive in
the mountains. This is a picture of what the Old Testament depicts under the
category of the hardening of the heart. It can apply to either unbelievers who
are in complete resistance to God or it can apply to believers. Just because
one is a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, and just because an Old Testament
individual was a believer in the promise of coming salvation, and thus
regenerate, does not mean that they cannot rebel, that they cannot resist God
and reject God, because they would rather think in terms of the limited
categories of creatureliness than think in terms of the expanded truth of
divine viewpoint which is revealed in the Word of God. Because to think in
terms of divine viewpoint means that we have to submit our thinking and
everything that we do in life to the authority of God. It is not a matter of
salvation; it is a matter of our spiritual life.
Hardening the heart is the idea of resisting God, strengthening the
resolve to disobey God. What preceded this with Pharaoh was a passage in Romans
chapter one that gives us the pattern that occurs among most of humanity—those
who reject God. Here we have again a reference to that concept of divine wrath
or judgment, and this is a judgment that occurs in history. It has occurred in
history, it is not just a future judgment. Romans
We live so much in the present that we forget about the future. This
affects the destiny of unbelievers but it also impacts the future of believers.
So now we focus on the second example of hardening which relates to believers.
Exodus 17 is a depiction of one of the great key events in the Old Testament.
Whenever we look at the Psalms, the prophets, the teaching of Jesus in the
great discourses of the sermon on the mount, the upper room discourse, the
Olivet discourse, the long speeches that are given by men such as Stephen and
Paul in the book of Acts, and books like Hebrews and even Revelation, we note
that all of these consistently refer back to a set of key historical events
that occurred in the Old Testament. They constantly go back to things like the
creation or the fall or the Noahic flood or the call of Abraham or the Exodus
event or the rebellion in the wilderness. It is from those historical events
that doctrines in the New Testament are developed and built. That is the core
idea of framework thinking really. And it is unique to Christianity that the
doctrines that we have revealed to us in the Scriptures are not just abstract
philosophical thoughts but they have been revealed by the Creator-God of the
universe and thus the creator of history. And they have been revealed in the
context of history in real space-time events involving true, genuine historical
individuals, places and people. So to question the veracity of God’s Word in
relation to its historicity and the existence of these people and the
historical validity of the text is to question the doctrines associated with
it. You can’t come in, if you are logical, and surgically separate the doctrine
from the historical event. So it is in the Old Testament that we see the origin
of these doctrines within history, within relationship within people’s lives.
The New Testament, then, goes back and develops these even further with
application for the spiritual life of the church age believer.
There are basically two concepts going on in Exodus. The first part has
to do with the redemption of an enslaved people; the second part has to do with
the lifestyle, the living of a redeemed people. The Israelites had been
enslaved in Egypt under the various Pharaohs for several generations and there
was no hope for them other than the promise of God given to Abraham in Genesis
that there would be a time when his descendants go out of the land for approximately
400 years and then God would bring them back to the land that He had promised
to give to Abraham. So the first part of Exodus deals with how God redeems them
and the final picture that we see of that judgment is the Passover event where
the angel of death is sent to take the life of the firstborn son of every
family, and the only provision to escape that judgment was to apply the blood
of a sacrificed lamb without spot or blemish, picturing his perfection and
innocence in a legal sense, and that that applied blood on the doorposts would
cause the angel of death to pass over so that there would be no application of
that judgment. It is a perfect picture of the cross of Jesus Christ. Paul said
Christ is our Passover; John the Baptist said: “Behold the Lamb of God who
takes away the sin of the world.” They are the Old Testament pictures fulfilled
in Jesus Christ who as our Passover Lamb was slain on our behalf, and it is the
application of the principles of His death, believing in Him as our saviour,
that the eternal debt, the condemnation of all those who reject Him is taken
from us and we have eternal life.
So these events depict the redemption of the people. Then they passed
through the
In the latter part of Exodus 15 God provides water for them at a place
called Meribah (bitterness). God tells Moses to take a tree and put it in the water,
and when he does the bitter waters there at the spring are sweetened and made
drinkable. Water is provided for the Israelites. So we would think that they
would learn once again that God is able to sustain us in any situation. There
is no set of circumstances, no problem, no difficulty in life that is too great
for the grace of God. But the problem is we want it done our way. That is
hardening our heart; that is negative volition. We want God to dance to our
tune, we don’t want to submit our will to His will. In Exodus 16 they come to a
set of springs at a place called Elim, and again God provides water for them
but they find something else to complain about. God provides food for them in
the form of manna, which means “what it is.” They didn’t know what it was but
God provided special food for them in a special form, and because they go bored
with it day after day after day they began to complain about that. Then in
Exodus 17 we have another water problem.
Exodus 17:1 NASB “Then all the congregation of the sons of
So Moses cries to the Lord. He is the one who has a divine viewpoint
orientation. Exodus 17:4 NASB “So Moses cried out to the LORD, saying, ‘What
shall I do to this people? A little more and they will stone me.’ [5] Then the LORD said to Moses,
‘Pass before the people and take with you some of the elders of
This event is picked up by the psalmist in Psalm 95, a psalm of worship
as well as a psalm of warning. The first seven verses focus on God, praise to
God. Psalm 95:1 NASB “O come, let us sing for joy to the LORD, Let us shout
joyfully to the rock of our salvation.
The warning is then given. Psalm 95:8 NASB “Do not harden
your hearts, as at Meribah, As in the day of Massah in the wilderness.” Here we
have the same word used to describe the hardening as back in Exodus. [6] “When
your fathers tested Me, They tried Me, though they had seen My work.” Empirical
evidence isn’t the issue, the issue is what is your volitional response to God,
your responsibility, and are you one who responds to God’s Word in submission
or are you one who responds in antagonism and resistance? [7] “For forty years
I loathed {that} generation, And said they are a people who err in their heart,
And they do not know My ways.” Here is another example of how the word “heart”
is used in reference to both thought and volition. They have constructed their
own view of reality that is divorced from reality. It is a fantasy because they
are suppressing the truth in unrighteousness. They “do not know my ways,” they
have rejected doctrine, the teaching of God’s Word. All they are wanting to
follow is a construct of their own emotion, their own imagination. The result
is that God makes a judicial decision, [11] “Therefore I swore in My anger,
Truly they shall not enter into My rest.” That generation would be prohibited
from entering into the promised land; they would all die in the wilderness. Day
after day after day there would be thousands of funerals as a commemoration to
the rebellion that occurred at Kadesh-barnea because the people rejected God’s
grace, power and provision.
But this is not restricted to an Old Testament event. In Psalm 95 the
word “harden” is translated into the Septuagint with the verb sklhruno [sklhrunw] which means to be
hard, to become harder, stubborn, to be fixed in negative volition toward God,
to be stiff-necked or obstinate. This word is used in Hebrews chapter three
where the writer is addressing Jewish believers who have come out of Judaism
and who now are thinking of going back, rejecting what they have learned of
God’s Word. So the writer of Hebrews warns them. Hebrews
In the book of Hebrews on three different occasions in chapters 3 &
4 the writer quotes this verse verbatim. He is making a very strong point his
readers, and that is that church age believers have an even greater revelation
of God’s Word. We have this revelation in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ
and we have a revelation of God’s Word in the completed canon of Scripture. So
the warning to us is to not harden our hearts in resistance to the truth of
God’s Word. Psalm 95 is quoted in Hebrews 3:15; 4:3, 7, 8. Again and again
there is this emphasis for the believer to not harden his heart. There is not
one of us that cannot get into a place of arrogance in our spiritual life, a
time when we put our focus on the finite details of life and get distracted
from the real issues of our spiritual life, living in light of our future
destiny. Scripture makes it clear that the church age believer is unique among
all believers in history. The church has a significant role, not only today,
but in the future because we are called the bride of Christ and the book of
Revelation constantly reinforces the truth that we are living today in light of
the future reality of ruling and reigning with the Lord Jesus Christ. And this
is our training time now, and if we don’t learn to align our thinking to the
truth of God’s Word, and if we don’t learn to be responsive to His authority in
our lives, submitting our wills to His will, then there are consequences. For
the believer they are not consequences of eternal judgment but they are
consequences of loss of reward and loss of inheritance in the same way that
those Jews in terms of history, in that first generation of the Exodus, lost
their inheritance and were not allowed to enter into the rest of the promised
land. This is a strong warning to every individual to take their spiritual life
very seriously to make sure that they do not succumb to the same form of
arrogance.