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When the majority is mistaken, when zeal replaces reason, when pride rules the day, there can be only one course and those who do not agree with it must be put down. Control has always been the illusion men deceive themselves into thinking they have. Control over self. Control over others. Control over their surroundings. But control is a myth, for surely if it was not, there would be no death, or pain, or sorrow. At the end of all things, the final seven last plagues that fall upon the earth are a literal demonstration to mankind that control has never, and will never, belong to us. We have always been at the mercy of forces beyond our control. Those who are bound to the slavery of self-service and self-love are completely unable to break their chains. Those who follow Jesus Christ and trust alone in Him for their salvation realize just how fully dependent they must be on Christ, for their salvation will come in no other way. In either case, man has no control; he is subject, a slave to himself, or set free by a power beyond himself. Yet pride gives birth to the idea that control can still be exerted by the majority over the minority, particularly when the scales and the numbers look very attractive. Surely the deaths of a very small subset of the populace are worth the preservation of the whole. This thinking is boosted to near frenzy when combined with the notion that religious purity demands it – in effect that God requires the lives of these un-repentant sinners in order that His righteous anger might be dissuaded.
It is to this state of thinking that our nation is destined to fall. Not only are we prophesied to adopt this line of thinking, but further we are to lead the world in adopting it as well. The lamb-like creature is to speak as the dragon. The third beast raised by the dragon, owes its power and allegiance to the dragon, it is no less guilty, and no less participatory in the plans of the dragon, than was the second beast who preceded it in the dark ages. But knowledge and enlightenment are not insurance against fundamentalism that would seek to compel the conscience of others, and kill those who would continue to dissent. It is all too easy to blame the “dark ages” for the disposition of the Catholic Church during these periods of time, rather than to rightly assess, it is the darkness in the nature of man that is truly responsible. That darkness brought about by self-love and the pursuit of control over others has never abated, it has only grown stronger over time. It was not the darkness of the age that caused the church of Christ to forsake its Lord and become an agent of blasphemy and absolute power. Nor will it be some set of calamities that cause our nation to adopt a policy of “comply or die”. It is the nature of carnal man to indulge himself at the expense of others, and without hope of relief from the full submission to Jesus Christ, this dark nature only expands, grows, and eventually consumes the human soul.
The Catholic church could have been a universal beacon of light from which the gospel reached the entire world. Had it forsaken the ideas of wealth, control, and equality with God, and only focused on charity, love, and service for God – the world would have been a different place. There would have been no need for deaths committed in the name of God. There would have been no corruption that inspired the birth of Islam and the need to purge the infidels from the world. Instead there might have been only the universal message of Christ that we should love each other, sacrifice for each other, and submit only to Jesus Christ to find ourselves made free from the slavery of sin and self-service. But alas, full submission to Christ was not achieved, and the darkness of the nature of man, infected the church, and the organization became the tool of the dragon. A second beast was raised out of an entity that should have been a beacon of light. Would that history did not repeat itself, but it did.
Our nation was birthed in nobility and with the purpose of protecting the woman, of protecting the church and followers of Christ by allowing them sanctuary to worship as they chose in a new land with a new form of government. We were to be the light on the hill. Our ideas of religious freedom were more closely aligned to our God, than any nation had considered since the founding of the world. While we protected those freedoms and guarded the privacy of every man and every citizen, we were the pinnacle of enlightenment. But over time, we have lost our luster, we have corrupted our ideals, we have followed the course of the beast that preceded us, and our darker nature has now replaced freedom with compliance. To achieve security, we have sacrificed liberty. To maintain control, we have sought to force the individual to comply with the majority view, whether it is right or wrong. Babylon was the head of gold in the dreams of worldly kingdoms yet to come, given to Nebuchadnezzar all those years ago. It was the head. It was made of purest gold. It was the greatest kingdom to rule the world where God’s people would reside. The world has not seen it’s like since.
In the book of his revelations of Jesus Christ, John writes now the epilogue, the epitaph of Babylon. Not the original kingdom of Babylon belonging to Nebuchadnezzar all those years ago, but to the kingdom and nation we founded and occupy today. Babylon reborn. The kingdom of enlightenment, of wealth, of power, of origins with purpose and meaning. But we were not to remain in this state. We are to fall, and our descent has already begun. John begins our epilogue in chapter 18 and verse 1 saying … “And after these things I saw another angel come down from heaven, having great power; and the earth was lightened with his glory.” John was recently conversing with an angel who carried one of the plagues in the previous chapter about the fate of the woman or false church, and how God has judged the counterfeit ideas of Satan that have infected all the religions of the world. In this chapter the revelation is now given as to the fate of nations and the union of church and state. The angel comes to earth, likely timed to be prior to the events only recently described, with a message. His countenance lightens the earth.
John continues in verse 2 saying … “And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.” This is a repetition of the message of the third angel described in an earlier sequence of seven. It is a declaration of the state of Babylon. It is a repeat of the lament that Babylon has fallen. The sadness over the fall of Babylon remains. This is not joyful news in the heavenly courts; for our original purpose and ideals have become corrupted, and our state of falling is not welcome news to our loving God. But where earlier the message was not as specific as to how bad we have become, this message continues with an enumeration of exactly what our state is. Our nation, the United States, has become the habitation of devils. Many people unhappy with our nation’s policies or Presidents draw horns on their pictures. They attempt to portray Obama, or Bush, or Cheney, or the latest political figure of the day as a devil. But the reality is that the “devil” is in the hearts of our citizenry. It is in the pulpits of our churches, and at the center of our ideology that would seek to force sinners to comply with our ideas of morality.
We have become the hold over “every” foul spirit. Our sins are limited to only one type, or two, but we have embraced them all. Instead of being a beacon of light and love, we are a “cage” of every unclean and “hateful” bird. We are trapped by our lack of love and charity. We are imprisoned by our slavery to self-service and self-love. We have not embraced the freedom Jesus Christ alone can provide. Instead we have “blended” into our salvation a certainty of self-reliance, and as a result our partnership with God has failed. We remain trapped by our unrelenting sins. We have sought the “balance” of loving self with loving others, and found the scales have only tipped one way. We are now identified as “hateful”. Those placards carried by people borrowing the name of Christ, contain nothing but “hate” speech. They shriek their slogans of hate and reproof at those in the greatest need of love and support. We judge those who are different than us as being of less value to God than us, and therefore seek to blast their unrepentant nature with the shrill hate speech of our own unrepentant and hateful nature.
John continues in verse 3 … “For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies.” What price is your soul worth? The wealth of Babylon is great. Our currency is the strongest and sets the standard around the world. But to become enriched by Babylon, you must abide by the rules of commerce with Babylon. You must do what is expedient, not what is right. You must be willing to be “flexible” with your ideas of morality, so that risks are managed, and wealth is increased. If the needs of the poor are to be sacrificed for those of the wealthy, so be it. The nations of the earth have embraced the ideas of self-reliance propagated by the American Dream. The notion of a full dependence on Christ for salvation, stands opposed to the ideals of hard work to earn the rewards you are entitled to. Our version of Christianity descends from our mother. We are the daughters of harlotry, and taken up the trade of harlotry in our own churches. We seek “financial security” within our churches with those who succeed finding themselves in wealth. In order to safeguard that wealth, we turn to politics to attempt to exert control. For our wealth must be guarded against at all costs. The idea of sharing it, or divesting ourselves entirely from it, is a foreign notion that never enters our hearts.
John continues in verse 4 writing … “And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.” Again the timing is set, the seven last plagues are about to fall. The message is one of warning. Come out of her my people. We are to leave the ideas of self-reliance behind and embrace only our salvation from Jesus Christ alone. We are to leave our sins behind us, as His redemptive love re-creates who we are from the inside out. He remakes what we want, how we think, and most importantly how we love others. No more should a hateful placard tarnish our hands, or poison our lips. No more should we see those unrepentant sinners as deserving of death, but rather as they truly are, in immense pain and in great need of relief that only a loving Savior can offer. We do not need to remind them of their pain, but instead to point them to the only source of relief from it. We must allow our Lord Jesus Christ, to expel the devil from within our hearts, remove the hold over every foul spirit, and change our hateful shrieking nature into one of quiet humility and unrestricted love without conditions or limits for those we encounter. In this way, we will leave behind the Babylon that has fallen. In this way we will avoid the plagues that are to be poured out upon the evil in this world.
A physical exodus from the U.S. to other countries is not a recipe to avoid the wrath of God. Taking an unchanged heart up to Canada, down to Mexico, or across the sea to Europe does nothing to alter who we are. We arrive on foreign shores, the same corrupt person we were in the U.S.. The leaving of Babylon is not about relocation to a better country. It is about a relocation of the heart, from a state of sin and self-reliance, to a state of full submission to Jesus Christ. Simply to emigrate out of the country does nothing to change the sin that will travel in our hearts as we go. It is akin to refusing to own a television, because so much of the programming on television is not morally acceptable. Not having a TV, does not change the heart or nature of men. If we are still filled with pride, or lust, or arrogance, the fact that we do not witness these traits in our media does not mean our hearts are absent of them. Life is not about reducing our opportunities to sin. Salvation is about a fundamental change in how we think, and what we want, so that we are freed from our sins entirely. After that, what we watch on TV reflects what we are interested in. We do not avoid bad programming by putting the TV on the curb, we avoid bad programming by changing the channel to something uplifting, or because we are too busy with loving others to have time to watch at all. The desire is what must be changed, not the venue for its expression.
John continues in verse 5 saying … “For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities. [verse 6] Reward her even as she rewarded you, and double unto her double according to her works: in the cup which she hath filled fill to her double.” And here is the heart of the matter, without a full submission to Jesus Christ, our sins stack up all the way to heaven. What is about to be unleashed by our God, is a removal of His protective hand. The consequences of the sins we commit are often shielded from us, by a loving God, who is still hoping and working for us to come to Him and be made free from them. But alas, the time is coming when our continual refusal to submit and be made free is going to be honored for all time. Our choice to remain in bondage to self, allowed. The consequences of the pain we inflict on ourselves and on others is about to have the shields taken off. And the effects of our sins are about to be put upon us in full effect. We will see a doubling of the pain our sins cause, not because we are punished by God, but because we have refused to allow God to shield us from our choices.
John continues in verse 7 … “How much she hath glorified herself, and lived deliciously, so much torment and sorrow give her: for she saith in her heart, I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow. [verse 8] Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and mourning, and famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire: for strong is the Lord God who judgeth her.” Here is the fate of the counterfeit. Here is the fate of those bound in slavery to self. Self-deception is the first hallmark of the kingdom of Satan. Lives lived in the pursuit of wealth that can be lavished on self. Lives modeled after royalty where all are destined to serve me, and I am destined to serve no one. “She”, the false churches who bear the name of Christ but have abandoned His transforming love, states openly “I sit a queen”. She further states “I am no widow”. The blending of self-reliance into Christianity in the process of our salvation has so corrupted the heart, that we are blind to who we remain, and the sin we cling to. But self-assessments of our grandeur, do nothing to deter the destruction God is about to permit to come upon us. Our consequences are no more to be shielded, but instead to be revealed. And the further judgments of God upon evil are about to be poured out. Death, mourning, famine, and destruction from fire are on the horizon. Wealth, ease, and a royal lifestyle are about to come crumbling down. The kingdoms built upon the misery of the poor are about to be exploded.
And the lamentations over the fall of Babylon are about to begin …
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