Come and study the Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast,

The Whole Council of God. Father Stephen holds a Ph.D. in biblical studies, and it's an Orthodox

priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana.

So we'll go to get started.

When we get started in just a moment, we'll be picking up at the beginning of

Chapter 17 of the Revelation of St. John.

So when last we met, which was a little bit ago, we went through the seven bowls.

We went through another cycle of seven.

And in that cycle of seven, we saw how the seven bowls sort of roughly corresponded to at least some of the plagues on Egypt, how there was this connection being drawn, right?

This cycle was sort of being presented as this sort of cosmic

Passover, right, where the righteous are being delivered from, right, the kingdoms of this

world.

But we also saw that those plagues that were coming out of the bowls of the wrath of God were

explicitly aimed at trying to get the kingdoms of the

world to repent.

Again and again, we saw these horrible plagues befalling, right, the people, and it said,

but they did not repent.

Instead, they blasphemed God.

Instead they, right? So these things that were

aimed at bringing about their repentance instead just caused them to be hardened, right, in their

rebellion against God and their hatred for God. That too is sort of parallel to the Exodus,

wherever as the plagues are going on, Pharaoh hardens his heart and then has his heart hardened, sort of back and forth, right?

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