15:5 "After these things I looked"(Gr. meta tauta eidon) indicates a transition to a new vision and a new subject: the bowl judgments. These are in a category of their own. John saw the heavenly temple opened. This gave the seven angels who carried the bowl judgments egress from God's presence. He is the one who sends them. The "tabernacle of testimony"refers to the temple as the building that housed God's law, which the earth-dwellers disregard. God was now going to hold them to it and judge them by it.
15:6 The seven angels now came out from God's presence (cf. v. 1). Each of them had received a plague (judgment) from God. Their clean linen garments represent holiness and righteousness (cf. 19:8, 14), and their golden sashes mark them as on a punitive mission (cf. 1:18). Their clothing befits their purpose, which is to purify the earth.504
15:7 One of the living creatures (4:6) gave each angel a bowl full of God's wrath. It is interesting that God described the prayers of the saints as being held in bowls in 5:8. These prayers thus connect with the outpouring of these judgments in a suggestive cause and effect relationship. The two sets of bowls in chapters five and here are different, however, and they contain different things. The priests in Israel's earthly temple also used bowls in their worship (1 Kings. 7:50; 2 Kings 12:13; 25:15). The reference to the living God "who lives forever and ever"adds more solemnity to an already solemn scene (cf. 10:6; Deut. 32:40; Heb. 10:31).
15:8 The smoke probably symbolizes the presence of God (cf. Exod. 19:18; 40:34; 1 Kings 8:10-11; 2 Chron. 5:11-14; 7:1-3; Isa. 6:4; Ezek. 11:23; 44:4). No one could enter God's presence until He had finished judging the earth-dwellers. This indicates the climactic nature of these judgments.
This chapter is really more of a prelude to chapter 16 than a conclusion to chapters 12-14. Chapters 12-14 record prophetically historical information about the Great Tribulation but not in the chronological sequence of the three sets of seven judgments (seals, trumpets, and bowls). Chapter 15 is similar to 8:1 in that it prepares for the next set of judgments. It prepares for the resumption of the chronological progression of events on earth that ended temporarily in 11:19.
