The First Vial of Revelation
Revelation’s chronological order helps us correctly identify the historical events corresponding to the book’s end-times prophecies. John saw the first warning signs as a scroll with seven seals. Historicists believe the first six seals targeted ancient Rome at its height, from the end of the first century until the legalization of Christianity in the Roman Empire. The seventh seal brought about the next series of seven signs, defined in Revelation as seven trumpets. The first six trumpets occurred from 395 AD until the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453. After the first six trumpets, Revelation 10’s prophecy of the little book represents the first printed Bible in 1455. In Revelation 11, early Protestants measured God’s temple and found Catholicism did not meet God’s standards. The two witnesses—the Old and New Testaments—were killed at the Fifth Lateran Council and resurrected with the Ninety-Five Theses. When the seventh trumpet sounded, it brought the Protestant Reformation.
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The Vatican convened the Council of Trent across twenty-five sessions from 1545 to 1563 to devise the Catholic Church’s response to the Protestant Reformation. While a few minor internal reforms were made to address some of the Reformers’ grievances, Catholic leadership turned to persecution and violence—including a dramatic escalation in the Inquisitions—to force the Protestants to submit to the Vatican’s self-perceived religious authority. The Counter-Reformation officially continued until the end of the Great Turkish War in 1699, although some elements, including the notorious Jesuit Order, are still active today.[i]
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While the seal and trumpet signs impacted Rome’s political empire, the seven vials would instead target Rome’s religious authority, as the idolatrous Catholic Church continued to sin. The seventh trumpet triggered the power shift between Catholicism and Christianity as described in the message to the Philadelphian church and Revelation 11-14. In the next two chapters, John describes seeing seven angels holding vials containing the last seven plagues.[1] An analysis of the sequence of Revelation’s prophecies and the events that fulfilled them proves that the final seven plagues must follow the beginning of the Protestant Reformation on October 31, 1517.
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The command given to these seven angels comes from the same temple in Heaven that was opened during the seventh trumpet,[2] indicating the voice belongs to God. The Catholic Church had failed to heed the warnings of the seals and trumpets and repent of its sins. Its doctrine continued to corrupt Christianity, leading many to idol worship and polytheism. The seven vials shift the target of God’s wrath away from the Roman and Byzantine Empires and onto the Roman Catholic Church and its interests.
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Most Historicists support the belief that the first three vials represent a series of events leading up to and including the French Revolution. Many respected nineteenth-century Biblical expositors—including Edward Bishop Elliott, Albert Barnes, George Stanley Faber, and William Cunningham—took this view in their respective commentaries.[ii] In fact, in his 1701 work Apocalyptical Key, the Scottish Presbyterian minister Robert Fleming predicted the first vial would be poured out upon Catholic France and its monarchy nearly ninety years before the French Revolution began.[iii], [iv]
Revelation 16:1-2
1 And I heard a great voice out of the temple saying to the seven angels, Go your ways, and pour out the vials of the wrath of God upon the earth.
2 And the first went, and poured out his vial upon the earth; and there fell a noisome and grievous sore upon the men which had the mark of the beast, and upon them which worshipped his image.
In Horae Apocalypticae, Edward Bishop Elliott adopted this interpretation for the first vial. To Elliott, the “noisome and grievous sore upon the men which had the mark of the beast” was an indication of atheism’s spread across France in the years preceding the French Revolution. Historians traditionally date the beginning of the Enlightenment to the death of King Louis XIV in 1715. Also known as the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment elevated science and reason over faith. This inverted the paradigm from what Catholic France had previously known and allowed atheism to spread swiftly throughout the country. By the 1780s, the adoption of atheism had escalated dramatically, culminating in the French Revolution. In the early 1790s, the Revolutionaries systematically attacked religion on all fronts and even seized all property that belonged to the Catholic Church.
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Elliott detailed an event on November 7, 1793, when the bishop of Paris, Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Gobet, and other clergymen from his diocese attended the National Convention held by the French Revolutionaries. He agreed to openly declare that no religion was necessary other than “liberty, equality, and morality.” Afterward, the “Goddess of Reason,” played by the provocatively-dressed wife of politician Antoine-François Momoro, was paraded to the Notre-Dame de Paris by members of the National Convention, clergy, and others, where she was set upon an altar and worshipped. The Revolutionaries renamed the Notre-Dame the “Temple of Reason” and held the “Festival of Reason” in the cathedral on November 10. The radicals then burned Bibles and crucifixes, participated in orgies, abolished all religious emblems, masses, ceremonies, and worship, and had a donkey drink sacramental wine from a Catholic Eucharist chalice.[v]
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The spread of atheism in France, the nation dubbed the “oldest daughter of the church,” allowed the rage of the French Revolutionaries to be poured out upon Catholicism.[vi] The atheists harassed and persecuted the “men which had the mark of the beast” and “worshipped his image,” and France’s greatest Catholic monument, the Notre-Dame, was desecrated.
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[1] Revelation 15:1 And I saw another sign in heaven, great and marvellous, seven angels having the seven last plagues; for in them is filled up the wrath of God.
[2] Revelation 11:19 And the temple of God was opened in heaven, and there was seen in his temple the ark of his testament: and there were lightnings, and voices, and thunderings, and an earthquake, and great hail.
[i] Mark, Joshua J. 2022. Counter-Reformation. May 31. Accessed March 5, 2023. https://www.worldhistory.org/Counter-Reformation/.
[ii] Barnes, Albert. 1860. “Chapter XVI.” In Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Book of Revelation, by Albert Barnes, 393-418. New York: Harper & Brothers.
[iii] Fleming, Robert. 1701/1843. Apocalyptical Key: An Extraordinary Discourse on the Rise and Fall of Papacy. Philadelphia: James M. Campbell & Co.
[iv] Guinness, Henry Grattan. 1905. “Chapter VI.” In History Unveiling Prophecy, by Henry Grattan Guinness, 343-350. New York: F.H. Revell.
[v] Elliott, Edward Bishop. 1847. “The First Vial.” In Horae Apocalypticae, Vol. III, by Edward Bishop Elliott, 306-326. London: Seeley, Burnside, and Seeley.
[vi] Ensemble en France. n.d. Why is France nicknamed the “eldest daughter” of the Church? Accessed March 6, 2023. https://www.ensemble-en-france.org/en/why-is-france-nicknamed-the-eldest-daughter-of-the-church/.