Torturing those who don't follow Jesus (see Rev. 9:5), indiscriminately killing a third of the population (see 9:18), and wantonly abusing nature (see 8:7-12) does not cause people to repent of their sins (see 9:20-21). Are you surprised?
And yet, the idea of retribution for sin still appeals to us. When we suffer at the hands of others, we naturally wish for them to suffer too. We want them to experience even greater levels of humiliation, powerlessness, and agony than they forced us to endure.
The last thing on our minds is kindness.
Forgiveness.
Reconciliation.
God saving our perpetrator.
This is the reason Jesus' way of the cross is so narrow. He asks us to go against everything inside of us that is screaming for us to hate and punish, in order to love and forgive instead.
Yet some of us end up forgiving others in the here-and-now only because we believe God will violently deal with them later. The gratification of deferred divine retribution makes forgiving easier to stomach, but such convictions cause us to breeze past Revelation's violence without registering any shock or disgust.
It's as if we've accepted God's goal as the eradication of sin and sinners, yet Jesus, Peter, Paul, and John of Patmos all explicitly state God's goal is one of healing.
Jesus describes God’s goal as the renewal of all things (Matt. 19:28).
Peter calls it restoring everything (Acts 3:21).
Paul calls it the reconciling of all things (Col. 1:20).
John calls it making everything new (Rev. 21:5).
In Revelation, John is leading us toward the New Jerusalem and the renewal of the heavens and the earth. When healing is God's goal, it makes no sense for him to be blasting our world with wave after wave of destruction beforehand. Last time we asked, What does divine punishment achieve? Only to discover that it cannot achieve what it sets out to, namely, to bring people to repentance. Violence makes even less sense once we realise this.
As we turn to Revelation 10 and 11, John's visions offer us clues to how he means for us to interpret the violence of the previous six trumpet blasts.
