The Revelation 16:8-9 | Episode # 1122

February 3, 2026

Hope Alive: Applying God’s Word to Your Daily Life

The Revelation 16:8-9

I am Chad Harrison, and I am the teaching pastor of Lake Community Church and had been serving as a pastor for 25 years. I'm also a practicing attorney. This podcast is designed to help you study God's word and find God's will for your life. The purpose of studying scripture is that you might know the character of Jesus Christ, and that you might see the world from the Father's perspective. That you gain wisdom that changes your life. I pray in the name of Jesus right now that God would open His word to you and allow you to see Him and to know Him. To know His will, that you might glorify Him and that you might walk in faith and power each day, especially today. In Jesus name.

If you would like to revisit today’s Bible study, please visit our website at https://hopealive.buzzsprout.com/ to download the transcript. 

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Transcript

This is Chad Harrison, and you're listening to Hope Applying God's word to your daily life.

Hi, this is Chad Harrison, and I am the teaching pastor of Lake Community Church and have been serving as a pastor for 25 years.

I'm also a practicing attorney. This podcast is designed to help you study God's word and find God's will for your life.

I pray in the name of Jesus right now that God would open up.

His word to you and allow you.

To see him and to know him and to know his will, that you might glorify him and that you might walk in faith and power each and every day, especially today in Jesus name.

All right, we're in chapter 16 and dealing with verse. We're going to see how far we get. We do need to.

You know, we're actually dealing with judgment, and we're having our largest crowds here in August. Okay. I just. I find that so strange. All right. But our largest crowds are in August, and we're dealing with the seven bold judgments of God.

This is a. This is a great passage, though, that leads into 17, and 17 is going to be.

Well, I don't even know how to say it to you. 17 is going to be an adventure in understanding what I will call the false religions of the world,

which ultimately all come from the same pagan religion that began not long after the flood. Okay.

And so that pagan religion started in a town called Babel,

and it was begun by a man named Nimrod, who is one of the children of.

Of Noah, one of the great, great,

great. I think maybe just great grandsons of Noah. And he was a. The Bible says that he was a hunter before the Lord.

He was. He was a.

But, but if you. If you read it in the Hebrew,

in its depth,

it's. It's. It's saying that he was a hunter of men in antagonistic antagonism of the Lord, meaning he was the first major world leader that killed a bunch of people.

That really. He was the beginning of war, and he was the beginning of what we would call pagan religion today.

And most of the pagan religions of the world are tied directly to that. And by the way,

if you do a lot of study into Roman religion,

Greek mythology,

Egyptian religion,

the Arabian Peninsula, and the religious religions of those African religions on up into the Asian steppe, across Asia, you realize that they have a lot of the same gods on all the way up into Norway and the Norwegians and the Viking gods.

Their gods are very similar. Very, very, very similar. And the reason they are, is.

Cause they come from this religion. And you go, why are you bringing that up? Well,

the next judgment,

the next bowl that gets poured out is the bow against the. The sun, it says in verse 8.

Then the fourth angel poured out his bowl on the sun and power was given to him,

meaning he was given power over the sun to scorch men with fire. Notice. Not to burn them up,

but to scorch them with fire,

okay?

And the men would. And, and, and men were scorched with great heat,

and they blasphemed the name of God who has power over these plagues,

and they did not repent and give him glory,

okay? And so what you have here.

What you have here is.

The God judging men through the mechanism by which we're going to see in chapter 17,

man began to worship other gods.

Okay? Now remember, I'm going to say this, and it's just something passing. I want it to be in your head. And I realize I have to say things over and over and over again for, for.

For everybody to get a chance to hear it, because you may be thinking about something else as I'm talking. And if you don't. If you don't hear it. Men worship.

Human beings worship three things, and all human beings worship those three things, okay? One of those three things, they either worship God,

they worship something God made,

or they worship the most important thing and the usual thing that every human being worships is themselves.

So understanding that is. And there's nothing else. If you think about it. There's nothing else, okay? And I covered nothing else with the second one,

God made everything, so there's nothing else that they could worship, okay? But they worship something that he made that's beyond them, or they worship themselves, or they actually worship the God who made all things.

All right? Now one of the things that one,

the primary religion of paganism that goes out from the world, and like I said, I'm going to get into that in some depth, a whole lot of depth when we get to chapter 17, and that should be by the end of the year or sometime like that, okay?

All right, but we're definitely going to get to that.

But all of those pagan religions begin with a worship of a primary God. And most of the time they associate that God with the sun,

okay? And so you've got Zeus,

you've got Osiris, you've got. If you just start beginning to look through ancient religions and study them, you realize that the primary, number one God is a male sun God.

Really,

he's the God of the sun. Okay? And so what God says is,

what he's doing here is he's taking what man has chosen to worship rather than him and use that to judge humanity.

Okay? And this is if you'll look back and think through the first three plagues. The first three bold judgments are judgments against aspects of creation that are plagued with brokenness and sin.

This is the first personal judgment that we see in what we call the great Great Tribulation, which is chapter 16 and 17.

Okay? This is the. This is the first judgment that God has that is personal to human beings. It's. I mean, it comes at human beings. And I want you to notice a couple of things about it.

First of all,

he uses the sun to scorch them,

to scorch their skin,

to burn them. Okay? Now look,

we now know that there's all kinds of ways God could do that today.

I mean, there's innumerable ways God can make that happen.

He could move the earth 10 miles closer to the sun.

Okay? I mean, he could just do that and you go, well, what are you talking about? Move the earth 10 miles closer to the sun? Well, I mean, if in relative terms, that's like me moving closer to you, Ed.

I just moved closer to you. Did you see me move closer to you?

Okay. It's nothing.

Did y' all see me move closer to Ed? I did. I moved closer to Ed.

Nobody really noticed it unless you were watching my feet. I picked my foot up and just moved it just a little bit closer to Ed.

That's. That's how much God could move the sun.

Move,

Ted.

Move, move,

move,

move the sun.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Ted.

He. He could move. He could move the sun just. Just minutely, fractionally closer.

Move the Earth closer to the sun and burn us.

Burn.

It would burn. Burn everything.

And so that's not very difficult.

What is. What is unimaginable and un understandable, especially by our friend Dean in the back, is why people don't just give in to God.

I mean, it don't make any sense. And then go,

this don't make any sense.

Why don't they. You know, they burn. He's moved them close. They're scorching them. They know what's going on. Now, listen to me. If they were ignorant and they're going, what's going on?

It's hot out here, which is what we do in Alabama in August, usually, right? I.

We walk outside in August, and it's so scorching hot. Here we go. Oh, my goodness. I can't believe it's so hot. What's going on? Like you ain't done it for 60 years.

Okay? Like it ain't been that way for 60 years. I remember. I remember. I remember being a teenager playing practicing football in August and they didn't pick nice times. Now they pick to practice at six o' clock in the morning and like four in the afternoon.

My coaches picked at ten in the morning. Then you got like two hour break and two in the afternoon. Okay,

that was just cruel and unusual punishment. Anyway,

the son, they notice, notice what he says the fourth angel poured out his bowl on the sun and the power was given to him to scorch men with fire.

And the men were scorched with great heat.

And what did they do that blasphemed the name of God?

Okay, now I want you to hear me,

this is important because this is one of those things that when I come across it, I need to teach it to you because you will miss it and you don't understand.

Okay?

All right.

What you're taught about blaspheming God is not, is not biblical.

Okay?

What y' all use the phrase also to take the Lord's name in vain,

Okay?

I. And what, what y' all understand that to mean is, is that you use the word God which is tied to the word Theos, which is a Greek,

the Greek name of God.

If you, if you were, if you were Jewish and you were to say Yahweh, you would not say Yahweh, you would say ya way.

And the reason they say Yakwe is because they use it. And I may not be doing it right with my. I might not be. And right, you know, am I doing that right?

But, but if you were to. The reason they do that is the Q or the, the K is not there.

But the reason they do that, do that is so that they actually don't pronounce his name.

Okay?

They pronounce it. They, they go Yahweh.

So it's Yahweh,

but they say Yahweh so that they're not actually even pronouncing his name. His name is so holy that they're not even pronouncing it. They're pronouncing a pseudonym of his name.

Did y' all know that?

Okay, yeah. And so, and so that is,

that is an effort to not use God's name wrongly.

Okay?

But, but that is, that is, that is,

that is so superficial to the level of what that really means.

Because what it means to take God's name in vain or. Or to blaspheme God's name is to. First you gotta start with the name of God, okay? And there are a couple of hundred names for God,

okay? And the reason there are a couple hundred names for God is because God's names speak to his character,

okay? And human language is not sufficient enough to give us one word that could ever begin to explain any aspect of God's character,

okay? In fact,

the names we have for God are just a rudimentary starting point to understand some aspect of his character nature. They're not the fullness of it.

You have to explore that forever and ever and ever to really know the fullness of even one of the names of God. The Lord God, Jehovah, Adonai, if he'd start going through those names.

And as you start studying them, you realize that's just the beginning point to understand some aspect of his character which I'm going to have to walk in for a long, long time before I ever even really get an.

A rudimentary understanding of it.

Okay,

so why am I telling you that?

Well,

if you blaspheme God or you take God's name in vain,

which we use those two ideas interchangeably, even though they are in some ways very different,

okay? If you do that, at the fundamental level, what you're doing is you're saying that some aspect of God's character or nature is this rather than the way he's presented it.

Does that make sense?

All right.

What it means is if I take God's name in vain or really if I blaspheme God,

I say God is this. When God clearly says he's that.

Are you following me?

So I attribute to God a not God aspect of who he is.

I know this is deep, okay?

But it's important that you get this.

And how do I know the character nature and the aspects of God?

Well, the way I know that is it's revealed to me by his Word. His Word reveals to me him.

Okay? So the truth is, if I blaspheme God, what I am doing is I'm taking what God has said about himself, how God has presented himself,

how God has revealed himself, and I am attributing something to him that is not how he has presented himself to me. I'm a tr. I'm attributing some aspect to God's character nature that is not in Scripture.

Yeah, that's not that. I mean. I mean,

at a very.

At. At a very.

When I say surface Level. I'm talking about, like when you scratch your skin and you see the dry.

The dry skin right there, that's. That's the level of that. That. That is. Okay? That is.

That. That. That is. That.

I know might.

But. But I want you to hear me. If, if. If I say that God is something that he's not, that he's clearly revealed to me, that is far worse.

Are you following me?

That is far worse.

That is a denial of the revelation of God and His Word and his character. That is far worse than getting in a car accident. And,

and,

you know,

using God's name in vain when you hit somebody. Kathleen's not going to use God's name in vain. She has another word she likes to use. Okay? All right. So, I mean,

you know, this didn't have anything to do with God's name, All right?

You know, when that happens, you know, when it happens to me,

I have my own word, right? And we all do, okay? And I'm making fun of it because I want you. I want you to hear this.

I want you to hear this.

It's. It is almost superficial, childish to treat one of the Ten Commandments as if casually misusing his name is the problem.

Are you following me?

Casually misusing his name is not the problem.

The problem is denying his character and his revealed nature.

Okay? That's the problem. That's what God says. You shall not do this.

Why? Because what you're saying is I am not who I've clearly said I am.

That don't work.

That does not work.

You need to get that.

That doesn't work.

All right?

So when these men blaspheme God,

they are saying of God, they are attributing something to God, and we don't know what it is,

but they're attributing something to God that clearly not a part of his nature,

okay?

And they're intentionally doing it. They're not just doing it because they got in a car accident.

They're not just doing it because it was.

Okay.

They're not going to. That's not what happens.

Okay? They are feeling the judgment of God and they are reacting to that judgment in such a way that they are denying an aspect of God's character nature. Now, one of the things that I think that they're denying is they have denied his grace, They've rejected his grace, and now they're attributing some aspect of his judgment and as if he's not a God of grace.

Okay?

Now you say, are you for sure about that, Pastor? No, I don't know that for sure.

I don't know what their blasphemy of God is. I can read it to you. It says, and the men were scorched with great heat and they blasphemed the name of God, who has the power over these plagues and did not repent or give him glory.

As you go today, I pray that the Lord will bless you and keep.

You, that he'll make his face to shine upon you and that he will give you hope and peace today in Jesus name.