Revelation 16:4

And the third poured out his bowl into the rivers and the fountains of waters; and it became blood.

And the third poured out his bowl ... The figurative nature of this is evident in the truth that with both the sea and the land already ruined, there would have been no need to bother with the rivers and fountains. What can be meant? A vast number of earth's great cities are located upon the rivers; and just as the rivers move downward to the sea, so the influences of earth's great cities flow downward from them into all mankind. We interpret the blight upon the rivers and fountains as the ultimate blight upon the urban civilizations of the world which will change the influences descending from those great cities into blood. People cannot worship self and sensuality without degrading, at last, their joys, recreations, and all creative activity and reducing them to lower and lower levels. "When the public taste grows corrupt, the literature, for example, will become so."[18]

Are not all of earth's great cities today in trouble as never before? The proliferation in many of them of a vast army of the incompetent, idle, non-productive dependents upon the public charity, the erosion of authority by the rapacious greed of godless labor unions controlled by thieving, looting bosses in league with the underworld, the spread of lawlessness, official corruption, fiscal irresponsibility, and the encroaching malignant godlessness that has spread terror like a fog over every one of them ... such things appear to have crossed a boundary between what can be contained, corrected, and reduced, and to have become a demonic engine running away. As to which it is now, we do not pretend to know; but this prophecy reveals what it will be like when the angel of the wrath of god pours his bowl upon the rivers and fountains. There are today coming out of earth's cities influences which spiritually are the blood of dead men. See comment on Revelation 11:13, above, in which the fall of urban civilization is a forerunner of the final judgment. In this context, Lenski spoke of the contamination of "such things as marriage, political science, public morals, and good taste being rivers and springs turned into blood."[19] These are only a few examples of many that could be cited.

[18] W. Boyd Carpenter, Ellicott's Bible Commentary, Vol. VIII (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House, 1959), p. 607.

[19] R. C. H. Lenski, op. cit., p. 469.