Revelation 16:3

And the second poured out his bowl into the sea, and it became blood as of a dead man; and every living soul died, even the things that were in the sea.

And the second poured out his bowl into the sea ... This sea was the origin of the sea-beast described earlier, which was nothing other than the teeming populations of the earth. The earth of the first bowl and the sea of this bowl are therefore identical, their mention separately being due to the nature of the figure. The figure is the total physical environment (which necessarily includes the sea) symbolical in this vision of the moral, intellectual, and spiritual environment of mankind.

And it became blood as the blood of a dead man ... It is clearly the whole of earth's people who are meant in all this. "Souls" do not literally live "in the sea." The figure here is an ocean completely turned into rotting, stinking blood; but, "When the entire sea is stinking blood, what about the land which it surrounds?"[17] It is clearly the physical environment that is ruined in the figure; therefore, we look to the spiritual environment for the fulfillment. When man himself as a factor in his environment becomes popularly and generally devoted to selfishness, greed, lust, violence, and every form of evil, when the "in thing" for the vast majority is indulgence in sex, homosexuality, blasphemy, drunkenness, corruption, hatred, and irreligion, the human race itself becomes a "dead sea."

Thus, this bowl is merely another and extended phase of the first. We shall note some of the types of corruptions indicated. The universities and schools have taken up the task of preaching Satan's lies, such as evolution, which leads undeniably to the conclusion that man is merely an animal with no more cosmic value than a worm or a rat. What has this done for the human moral and spiritual environment? Besides this, there are a thousand other evil postulations which are being swallowed, advocated and taught almost universally in our culture today, such as humanism, the self-sufficiency of man, the lie that his favorite sins of adultery, drunkenness, homosexuality, criminality, etc., are in no sense sins at all, but merely diseases which society is obligated to pay for and treat! Another lie is that man is not morally responsible for what he does, that society owes every man a good living with all of the conveniences and luxuries thrown in, that man is essentially good, that he is thoroughly capable of solving all of his problems, etc., etc. The great theological seminaries devoted unreservedly to the destruction of the Bible; the churches that ordain homosexuals, adulterers, and even atheists to their pulpits, and contradict the Scriptures in practically all that they either do or teach; the "love cult" that robs God of any other prerogative except that of loving us wicked sinners (what else is God for?) ... these are just a few of the evidences of man's intellectual environment having been polluted. An angel of God has poured out the bowl of his wrath upon the sea!