Read Revelation 15:1–8
If you are a Bible reader, especially of the Old Testament, today’s and tomorrow’s passages will probably sound very familiar to you. They are very similar to the story of Israel’s exodus from Egypt, and intentionally so. John says that the song here is the song of Moses. The song of Moses is a callback to Exodus 15 After Israel passes through the Red Sea and the army of Egypt is destroyed, Moses and the Israelites sing a song of praise to God. The lyrics of the song exalt God’s glory in salvation through judgment. In other words, God should be praised because He has saved His people, and that salvation came through His just judgment. In the example of the exodus, God’s judgment of the Egyptian army was the way in which God saved the nation of Israel. The parallel John makes here is that, in the same way God delivered Moses and Israel through their escape from Egypt, God will deliver the Church through these final plagues. We will look more at the plagues tomorrow, but we should not be surprised when the plagues in Revelation start to remind us a lot of the plagues in Exodus.
Part of what we learn from this passage is that God has a pattern of saving His people. He is gracious and merciful to deliver and save, but He is simultaneously just and justified in punishing evil. You cannot separate these attributes from one another. You cannot have perfect love and mercy without perfect justice and wrath. While this might offend our modern sensibilities—we wonder why it is not enough to simply forgive and forget—the problem is not with God but with us. To have a proper perspective on who God is and what He does, we must begin with how He has revealed Himself, then conform ourselves to that image rather than refashioning God into our own image.
