Babylon Revisited

5 min read

1 One of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and said to me, “Come, I will show you the punishment of the great prostitute, who sits by many waters. 2 With her the kings of the earth committed adultery, and the inhabitants of the earth were intoxicated with the wine of her adulteries.”

Revelation 17:1-2

The seven plagues of God’s wrath have now been poured out (Revelation 16), and the wrath of God upon all the sin of the world has now been fulfilled.

The image of a prostitute is used to describe the recipient of God’s wrath. A prostitute makes money by selling her body for sexual favors. It is a transaction that has no value other than to satisfy the lust of the flesh.

Children born of prostitution are considered a hindrance and detriment to the business. The children don’t know their fathers and are ashamed of their “heritage.” Legacy and inheritance, family and community mean nothing; in fact, those concepts are just concepts, and they are a joke.

In the industry of prostitution, there is no room for love—because, again, love is a hindrance and detriment to the business. Profit is all that matters!

Sound familiar?

Prostitution is the industry of human trafficking and child pornography. And it was common as the industry of temple idolatry.

Prostitution symbolizes everything that opposes the will and purpose of God. And that is why the “great prostitute” is called “Babylon the Great the Mother of Prostitutes and of the Abominations of the Earth” (verse 5).

In the Bible, Babylon represents human ambition and human will that opposes the ways and purpose of God. And so, “the great prostitute, who sits by many waters” represents every human civilization that has sprung up throughout history, including our own.

There are those in our society who work hard to try to normalize prostitution, pornography (even child pornography), and human trafficking. If it’s commonplace enough, then it must be normal, right? That is the trajectory and the fulfillment of the “sexual revolution.”

And so advocates of the “sexual revolution” cringe and balk at values and pursuits that they consider to be “antiquated” and “patriarchal” and “oppressive”, like monogamy, motherhood, family, community, church, God. They think prostitution, human trafficking, child pornography, etc., represent expressions of human freedom, unshackled from the chains of Judeo-Christian moralism.

It’s not easy to read about and talk about the wrath of God. But we need to. We need to see the wrath of God as God’s punishment against sin. We can also think of the wrath of God as God’s course correction against stupidity and ignorance.

Seriously! The flesh has no brain.

Father, You have told us that the end of all the evil in this world is coming. Let me not be found clinging to any of it. In Jesus’s name. Amen.