The term “God’s wrath” describes the nature of the wine that all worshippers of the beast must drink. Scripture repeatedly describes the wrath of God as terrible, even struggling, as it were, to find appropriate words and comparisons to communicate what experiencing this wrath is really like. A clear example comes from the very passage from which the second angel had lifted his announcement that Babylon was fallen: Isaiah 21:9. In the lead-up to the announcement of Babylon’s fall, the prophet Isaiah described the pain that this expression of God’s wrath would engender. He reaches outside of his own field of experiences to find a comparison: “My loins are filled with anguish; pangs have seized me, like the pangs of a woman in labor; I am bowed down so that I cannot hear; I am dismayed so that I cannot see” (Isaiah 21:3). The point is that there is nothing within a man’s own experience that provides a fitting comparison to what God’s wrath feels like. Yet the Lord God will compel worshippers of the beast to drink a cup filled with that indescribable wrath. More, the angel adds that this cup of divine fury will not be diluted in any way; sinners must drink this wine full strength. Those who treasure the gospel of Jesus Christ will recognize that on the cross of Calvary the Son of God drank this cup of divine fury against sin in our place.
10 he also will drink the wine of God’s wrath, poured full strength into the cup of his anger, and he will be tormented with fire and sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb.