Catholic Commentary
The Fourth Bowl: Scorching Fire and Human Impenitence
8The fourth poured out his bowl on the sun, and it was given to him to scorch men with fire.9People were scorched with great heat, and people blasphemed the name of God who has the power over these plagues. They didn’t repent and give him glory.
Revelation 16:8–9 describes the fourth bowl of God's judgment, in which the sun is intensified to scorch people with heat, yet those afflicted blaspheme God despite recognizing His power over the plagues and refuse to repent or give Him glory. This passage illustrates the hardening of human hearts against divine judgment, echoing the Pharaoh's resistance during the Exodus plagues and revealing that refusal to repent is a sustained choice rather than mere ignorance.
In the face of unmistakable divine power, the hardened heart does not repent—it blasphemes, choosing curse over adoration.
Revelation 16:8 — "The fourth poured out his bowl on the sun, and it was given to him to scorch men with fire."
The fourth bowl follows a structural logic within the septet of bowls (Rev 16:1–21): the first four target the natural cosmos in an escalating sequence — earth (v. 2), sea (v. 3), rivers and springs (v. 4), and now the sun itself. The movement from below to above, from ground to sky, suggests a systematic unraveling of the created order. Where the fourth trumpet (Rev 8:12) darkened the sun, the fourth bowl does the opposite: the sun is not extinguished but amplified, weaponized. These are not contradictory visions but complementary ones — divine judgment can manifest as absence of light or as overwhelming, consuming light, depending on the spiritual condition of those who encounter it.
The phrase "it was given to him" (Greek: edothē autō) is a characteristic Johannine divine passive, signaling that even this catastrophic intensification occurs within God's sovereign permission. Nothing in the Apocalypse is outside providential governance, not even the destructive force of scorching heat. The sun, in biblical cosmology, is a great gift of creation (Gen 1:16; Ps 19:4–6), ordinarily emblematic of God's providential care. Its transformation into an instrument of torment therefore carries a theological point: the same created realities that were given for human flourishing can become instruments of chastisement when humanity disorders its relationship with the Creator.
Revelation 16:9 — "People were scorched with great heat, and people blasphemed the name of God who has the power over these plagues. They didn't repent and give him glory."
The response of those afflicted is stunning in its perversity: they know the source of the plagues. The text does not describe confusion or ignorance — they recognize "the God who has the power over these plagues." This is not atheism but something more spiritually dire: a lucid awareness of God's sovereignty coupled with an active refusal to honor it. The Greek verb eblasphēmēsan ("they blasphemed") is the same used for the Beast's blasphemies in Rev 13:6. In this moment, the victims of judgment have become spiritually identified with the Beast they follow.
The double refrain — "they did not repent" (ou metanoeō) and "did not give him glory" (ou dōkan autō dōkan) — appears in variant forms across the bowl and trumpet sequences (cf. Rev 9:20–21; 16:11), forming one of the great refrains of the Apocalypse. Repentance (metanoia) in biblical thought is not merely an emotional state but a turning of the whole self — mind, will, and action — toward God. To "give glory" (dounai doxan) is the fundamental act of creature before Creator: acknowledging the truth of who God is and who we are (cf. Rev 4:11; 14:7). The refusal to do so, even in the face of overwhelming evidence of divine power, reveals that hardness of heart is not merely a deficit of knowledge but a choice, sustained and compounded.
The typological resonance with the plagues of Egypt (Exodus 7–12) is unmistakable and deliberate. As Pharaoh's heart was hardened through successive plagues — plagues he witnessed and acknowledged as divine acts — so the inhabitants of the beast-world harden themselves progressively through the bowl-plagues. The Exodus typology signals that Revelation is not merely predicting future events but describing the structure of human resistance to divine self-revelation across all history. The bowls are simultaneously historical, eschatological, and eternally present as a pattern.
Catholic tradition brings several distinct lenses to this passage that enrich its meaning beyond what a purely historical-critical reading yields.
On divine judgment and human freedom: The Catechism of the Catholic Church affirms that God "predestines no one to go to hell; for this, a willful turning away from God (a mortal sin) is necessary, and persistence in it until the end" (CCC 1037). Revelation 16:9 is among the most vivid scriptural illustrations of this teaching. The damned are not those on whom God arbitrarily vents wrath; they are those who, confronted with the full weight of divine reality, freely choose to curse rather than adore. The bowl-plagues do not cause this refusal — they reveal what was already present in the will.
On blasphemy and the inversion of worship: St. Thomas Aquinas teaches that blasphemy is "a sin against faith" (ST II-II, q. 13, a. 1) because it attributes to God what does not belong to Him, or denies what does. Here, the blasphemers know God's power but refuse to attribute to Him glory and sovereignty — they curse the truth rather than bow before it. This is the antithesis of the Gloria in Excelsis and the Liturgy of the Hours, in which the Church on earth enacts moment by moment what the heavenly assembly performs perpetually (Rev 4:8–11).
The typology of Pharaoh: St. Augustine in City of God (Book XX) and Origen in his Commentary on Romans both wrestle with the hardening of Pharaoh's heart, arriving at the Catholic insight later articulated in the Catechism (CCC 1859): hardness of heart is not imposed from without but grows from the repeated exercise of a will that prefers itself to God. The bowl-plague sequence in Revelation enacts this dynamic at eschatological scale.
On the sun as theophanic symbol: Pope Benedict XVI (Jesus of Nazareth, Part II) observes that light and fire in apocalyptic literature function as modes of God's self-disclosure — purifying to those who receive them, consuming to those who resist. The scorching sun of the fourth bowl is, in this reading, less about meteorological catastrophe than about the unbearable nature of divine glory encountered by an unrepentant soul.
The specific scandal of Revelation 16:9 — people who know God is behind their suffering and still refuse repentance — is not ancient history. A contemporary Catholic can recognize this pattern in their own interior life: the moments after a setback, illness, or loss when, rather than saying "Lord, what are you teaching me?", the instinct is to grow bitter, to blame, to turn away. The Catechism describes the examination of conscience as an act of "truthful self-assessment before God" (CCC 1454); the bowl-plague victims perform the anti-examination — a truthful assessment of God's power followed by its explicit rejection.
Practically, this passage invites the Catholic reader to cultivate what the tradition calls promptitudo — readiness and willingness to receive correction from God's hand. When life grows "scorching" — in relationships, vocation, health, or faith itself — the question these verses press is concrete: Am I giving God glory in this, or is my heart hardening? The sacrament of Reconciliation exists precisely as the Church's provision for those who, recognizing their drift toward impenitence, choose the narrow path of metanoia. Do not wait for the heat to increase. Turn now.