NOTES for Rev 15:4

“Great and marvelous are Your works, Lord God Almighty!” If we reflect on what God's works are, on what He creates, and on how He acts in the world and in our lives, then these words are probably the best possible conclusion to such reflection. The relationship between a person and God is perhaps built upon this: our worship of His greatness. To fear God and glorify His name. To fear Him does not, of course, mean to be frightened. But if we think about the boundlessness of His greatness, we are unlikely to be able to maintain our composure or feel at ease in His presence. Here lies the mystery of the relationship between a person and God: in the combination of limitless reverence and fear of God with love. For the fear of God, unlike ordinary human fear, urges us not to run away and hide, but to go out to meet Him.

Now, from the Throne of glory and from the heavenly Tabernacle, the meaning of Judgment and of God's wrath is revealed before John not as before, when he saw them as if from within the history of that fallen world to which the spiritual horizon of a fallen person is usually limited. Then Judgment was revealed to the apostle as a series of catastrophes connected with the fact that the world, being unprepared for meeting God, as it changed and was transformed, inevitably collapsed in its former quality.

Now Judgment is connected above all with witness and with the standing before the Throne of glory of those who preserved faithfulness to Christ throughout the entire preceding age, including the last times. The power of God turns into plagues and bowls of God's wrath for the world. This is no wonder: now the apostle sees the situation as it is revealed from the fullness of the Kingdom, which is preparing to enter the world in this fullness. The Kingdom is the space of God's breath and God's love, and from the Throne of glory, from its spiritual center, it is seen precisely this way.

But when seen from the spiritual center of the Kingdom, the whole world appears as the Kingdom, except for that part of it which has been torn away from the Kingdom by evil will opposing God. And this part of the universe, torn away from the Kingdom, is precisely what in the Gospel is usually called the "outer darkness." Having found oneself in this space, one can see an entire world dwelling, if not in complete darkness, then in a half-light like long northern winter twilight; but from the outside it is perceived only as a bottomless dark abyss that can be filled only by the One who created the world.

And He fills it with His presence, with His power, but not with His love; not because His love is insufficient for the dark abyss or His breath does not penetrate there, but because the breath of God, when rejected as love, becomes for those who reject it a destructive force that kills them, though it cannot kill them completely, because God does not want to destroy His creation. So God's love becomes Judgment, and God's breath turns for those dwelling in the "outer darkness" into plagues and bowls of God's wrath.