Bible students have long seen a link between the call in Revelation 14:7, to “worship Him who made heaven and earth, the sea and the fountains of water” (RSV), and the fourth commandment, in Exodus 20:11, when the Sabbath points back to the fact that “in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them” (NKJV). However closely related the language, there is a change in which the text in Revelation points to the Lord as the One who made “the fountains of water”.
Author John Baldwin argues: “Assuming divine intentionality behind the phrase ‘fountains of water’, why does Jesus have the messenger break the parallel listing of things mentioned in Exodus 20:11? Why does the angel mention ‘fountains of water’ and not some other class of created thing, such as trees, birds, fish, or mountains?
“Perhaps the reference to ‘fountains of water’ in the context of a divine announcement of the arrival of a unique time of divine judgment seeks to direct the reader’s attention to a previous period of divine judgment. . . Perhaps God intends that the possible allusion to the flood by the words ‘fountains of water’ should underscore the truth that He is indeed a God of judgment, as well as a God of everlasting faithfulness and graciousness (both evidenced in the narrative of the Genesis flood). If so, the personal and spiritual implications of the flood connotation triggered by the phrase ‘fountains of water’ might be to encourage the reader to take seriously the momentous arrival of a new end-time process of individual divine judgment now announced by the first messenger of Revelation 14”. — John Baldwin, ed., Creation, Catastrophe, and Calvary: Why a Global Flood Is Vital to the Doctrine of Atonement (Hagerstown, Md.: Review and Herald® Publishing Association, 2000), p. 27.
Discussion Questions:
Isaiah 53:6 reads: “All we like sheep have gone astray”. The word in Hebrew for “all of us” is cullanu . In the same text, Isaiah says that the Lord laid upon Jesus “the iniquity of us all”. The word for “us all” here, too, is cullanu. How does this show us that no matter how great the sin problem is, the solution to it is more than sufficient to solve it?
What other lessons can we learn from the story of the thief on the cross? Suppose the thief got a pardon and was brought down from the cross and survived. How different a life do you think he would have lived? What does that answer tell us about the power of Christ to change our lives?
