Rewrite: Revelation 18

As I’m working through my study in Revelation, I realized I left out an awful lot. Here is a sample of the revised material. My whole idea is that you climb out of moral distraction and find the peace God offers to you as His unique child; this is written into John’s message.

Revelation 18

We saw in the last chapter how Babylon is identified with human lusts as expressed through the market place. Don’t get lost here; Babylon is a consistent symbol taking on different meanings on different levels, with a common thread in the market for human souls. The first Babylon sold primitive astrology and human pride as the means to capturing the human race under one evil rule seeking to smother divine revelation. It aimed to replace the ineffable spiritual pull with something hedonistic and material. Here it is more specifically the market place of cosmopolitan religious ideas — choose your beliefs to fit your lifestyle. The real god here is Mammon (AKA Materialism), a guise for Satan. Babylon is always identified with the urban setting, cultural sophistication and highly specialized labor and goods. Not necessarily harmful in themselves, these things always leads to moral slavery. Instead of serving human need, humans serve the deity of commerce, where everything has a price and nothing else matters. This Harlot builds commerce through the marketing of every human desire, regardless how abominable, seeking to capture the church. This is a long way from the simple pastoral lifestyle of trust in God.

There is so much of this in our world today that it is hard to know where to begin. Even selecting the more egregious moral degradations leaves us with a very wide selection. The sex trade, from every angle, is an obvious element. The related pornography business is equally obvious, especially the various perversions that are so popular. Gambling, chemical substances, acts of violence and just about everything we call “entertainment” today falls under this heading. Most of these tend to be blatant in their appeal to human weakness. But we could say the same for the brisk trade in loans, speculations, most forms of stock and other securities, all of which lend themselves to a form of slavery. These pretend to be responsible professionals handling “your” wealth. Most mainstream religion treats these as degrading in one sense or another. However, John points out that the underlying theme is spiritual adultery, also known as idolatry. For each of these vices, along with many other commercial activities that typically avoid the label using some squeaky clean veneer, the underlying error is serving and worshiping something — anything — rather than God. How many churches are trapped in the false vision of building bigger and drawing larger crowds? How many seek huge budgets to buy stuff and great visual and sound systems? How about that vigorous search for staff with just the right talents, as opposed to developing staff from the folks God sends locally?

In a thousand ways, we all find something so important to us that we have to sacrifice some piece of our spirituality, some element of holiness, in order to keep that thing. Any element in our lives tying us to this fallen realm is inherently evil. It is less the activity itself and more the net result within our souls. Each of these idolatries is an expression of human appetite that can be righteously fulfilled, but mankind insists on flavoring it up by dodging the requirements God put forth so clearly in His Word. Babylon the Harlot feeds on human addiction and the misery of false guilt. As we saw in the previous chapter, the Beast (human government) teams up with her to feed on the power it gives. Frankly, both would be powerless if no one was buying. But there is always a buyer and a seller, and these bear the Mark of the Beast.

Therefore, we hear the refrain already echoing across the text since we began this study: “Babylon is fallen, is fallen!” This is true in one sense from the very beginning, for it requires a fallen soul to be trapped by her seductions. Thus, the angel coming aglow from the presence of God Almighty announces yet again that Babylon has fallen. By no means are we surprised to see she is the haunt of evil beings, for thus has it ever been. The point made here: This is both her life and her doom. In the end, there will be nothing left, for she will consume all her customers. She is not content as symbiotic parasite, but must consume it all. Thus, we note she will crumble not merely under the hand of the rapine taxation of her beau, the Beast, as we saw in the previous chapter. She will fall eventually because the market in sin carries the seeds of its own destruction. Sated lust only grows a bigger appetite and at some point, there is nothing left offering a new thrill. In the end, the market for her flesh will collapse under its own weight.

Take a moment here to notice the gender characterizations. The worst of fallen masculinity is oppressive control and brutal power. It calls up fear in every form. The worst of fallen femininity is the siren song of provoking lust, seeking to control through the fleshly appetites for comfort. Wherever and whenever the merchant cult has taken control through materialism, feminine demonic power is always in the lead, a perversion of the nest-building instinct of motherhood. The quintessence of human failure is a man too self-absorbed and inhumane to serve as shepherd of souls, paired with a woman willing to take control and ride his back to gain power against her divine call to trust. She refuses to rest in God for provision of what she needs for her redemption through motherhood, but must have total control by any means necessary. In both images, love is totally absent. The gender imagery here is no accident.

The believers who carry the Mark of God are called to get away from Babylon; she is the perversion of good motherhood and good church fellowship. This call echoes down through the ages in the Old Testament. In Jeremiah 51, Babylon is the target of prophetic warnings. The prophet repeatedly calls God’s people to come out (vv. 6, 9, 45 & 50). It is echoed by Isaiah (48:20; 52:11), and similar sentiments are scattered throughout the prophets. The warning is clear not to give oneself over to such commerce, to become independent of the fallen economy of the world. Use it as a tool but don’t serve it. Not that we should cease all buying and selling, but to cease being enslaved by it. Of all people on this earth, Christians should be the first to resist advertising. Instead, we incorporate it into our church management.

The angel calls for a full cup of vengeance against the Harlot Church. We note that the merchants who depended on her for their livelihood will join the governments of the world, weeping from a safe distance as she is destroyed. At some point, all economic activity will suffer a catastrophic failure. As it reaches the peak of power, it will last but a short time even by human standards. All the luxuries of human existence will be forgotten and bare survival will be the order of the day. This affects a worldly church as it does the rest of the world of human institutions.

John provides one last stark image to jolt his readers awake: “The blood of the saints and prophets was found in her, along with the blood of all those who had been killed on the earth” (v. 24). Allowing yourself to become wrapped up in worldly materialistic concerns will kill you, spiritually and literally. You cannot afford to ever come to the place you regard human commerce as essential to your religious life. If you can’t simply walk away from the provisions of the market place on short notice, you serve the Harlot — Babylon is your goddess. Christians must maintain but a light grip on all the things of this world. That includes how we do church.