49: World News & Prophecy - The Fall of Babylon

[McNeely] After these things, chapter 18 verse 1, “I saw another angel coming down from heaven having great authority. And the earth was illuminated with His glory. And He cried mightily with a loud voice, saying, ‘Babylon the Great is fallen, is fallen,’” and we’ve already read this earlier, “‘and has become a dwelling place of demons, a prison for every foul spirit and a cage for every unclean and hated bird. For all the nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication. The kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth have become rich through the abundance of her luxury’” (Revelation 18:1–3).

So you see the emphasis here is on the kings and their part in the fornication as the merchants of the earth have worked to create an economic combine and consort with the politics to create a global world of abundance and luxury. You've heard the term globalization. We live in a globalized world. We can travel anywhere we want in the world.

In most cases, all it takes is money. We can be there very quickly. We can order anything from any part of the world, and in a matter of a day or two at the most, it's at our front door. Order a new Apple computer or someone else assembled in Taiwan, and you can watch it be air-freighted over Alaska, down through the United States to your front door—or the opposite direction to Australia—within 24 hours, 48 maybe at the tops. Food.

Why is it that we had blueberries yesterday? Or did we have raspberries on some of the desserts yesterday? Where do you think they came from in some cases? Way down south, air-freighted up here for our luxury, for our convenience. And it's nice, isn't it, to get all of those things. Salmon from Scotland, if that's what you want. Air-freighted over, fresh-caught, served up to you in a restaurant. And this is the global world we live in. And it may be threatened by a tariff or two here or there, but it's still going to flow. It might cost us a little bit more money. You want a German car after tomorrow?

You might pay 25% more now. I'm dating myself on this camera. But you can probably still get it, but it's going to cost you a little bit more if it's not made in America. This is what is being described here.

Now we have this now, but I want you to keep in mind that as we read through Revelation 18, we're getting a picture of this Babylon, this system and the economic part of it on steroids—probably yet to come and even more luxurious, accessible than what we have now and richer. And your boat, my boat if I'm still around, rising with it, and in terms of income, money that we might invest in our 401s or IRAs or invested for us in a retirement account, rising in spite of what headlines might say today.

What is described here will be a system that will collapse, but it is going to be even bigger than what we have. What I'm saying is we haven't seen the full rise of this Babylon. I don't think so. We may be looking at some of the trailing edges of it right now in our world, but we're not living there other than—as I've described—we do live in our own modern Babylon that we, like Daniel, have to overcome. But what Revelation 17 and 18 is describing, what we've been looking at, I don't think is fully grown on the world yet. It will. Maybe in my lifetime, maybe not.

Sometimes I tend to think it's going to be more in your lifetime, for sure. Which is why, because I teach this, I want students to understand what to look for so that you don't get caught up in it to the degree that Revelation says we shouldn't, and that we know enough to have a distance that we don't have to be told “Come out of her, my people, lest you share in her sins and lest you receive of her plagues” (Revelation 18:4).

We've already talked about those in the previous chapters and the impact of all of this. Overlaying all of this discussion in Revelation, the most important thing is that you understand there is a distinction that is being made on the concept of worship. All right? It's really all about worship. You may yet still be confused about the heads and the beasts and the horns and everything else.

That's okay. Here's the one thing you do need to get out of it all. Revelation, Daniel—worship. God's making a distinction between those who worship Him and those who worship Satan through his system, the beast, and everything else you might want to put under that. God promises protection for a portion of the Church. God draws a distinction between those that are sealed and worship Him, and those who worship the beast. All we've been reading hinges upon really this concept of worship and warnings to worship God, not man. Worship the Lamb, not Satan. Satan wants to be worshiped. That's his great goal.

And he has used every mechanism, whether an idol of stone or wood, political power, a spiritually corrupt power, to get humankind to worship him. He said the last temptation he put before Jesus in Matthew 4, “I’ll give you all these nations if you’ll just bow down and worship Me.” That’s his one goal. And that's the one theme to take away from all of this—worship God, not the system, not all of this.

Now, let's continue on. Verse 5: “For her sins have reached to heaven, and God has remembered her iniquities. Render to her just as she rendered to you; repay her double according to her works. In the cup which she has mixed, mix double for her. In the measure that she glorified herself and lived luxuriously, in the same measure give her torment and sorrow. For she says in her heart, ‘I sit as queen, and am no widow, and will not see sorrow.’” (Revelation 18:5–7).

Now, back in the book of Jeremiah, there are a number of passages that allude to and talk about Babylon. At that time—Jeremiah 51 is a very big passage, Jeremiah chapter 50, Jeremiah 16 as well. And we won't take the time to go through all of that. But in chapter 18 of Revelation, there are allusions back to statements made by Jeremiah repeatedly that are now brought to their fulfillment. And so we can go back there and in a sense enlarge upon them and learn more from what we're studying here and see that God eventually poured out His wrath upon Babylon after He used it to punish Judah. There was a day of reckoning for Babylon.

And that is going to be the same at the time of the end. God will use this Babylon for a punishment upon even the nations that do not acknowledge God. But then God's judgment will come upon this end-time Babylon after He has punished the end-time Israel. They too will suffer the hammer that they have put upon the earth. Verse 8 says, “Therefore her plagues will come in one day—death and mourning and famine. And she will be utterly burned with fire, for strong is the Lord God who judges her.” (Revelation 18:8)

Verse 9, “The kings of the earth who committed fornication and lived luxuriously with her will weep and lament for her, when they see the smoke of her burning, standing at a distance for fear of her torment, saying, ‘Alas, alas, that great city Babylon, that mighty city! For in one hour your judgment has come.’” (Revelation 18:9–10)

In other words, in a very, very short time. “And the merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her, for no one buys their merchandise anymore.” (Revelation 18:11)

And verse 12 here begins a listing of merchandise. It's kind of a commodities listing. Look at it: “Merchandise of gold and silver, precious stones and pearls, fine linen and purple, silk and scarlet, every kind of citron wood, every kind of object of ivory,” these are objects of wealth and luxury. You can sub in minerals and finished goods, consumer items that would make up our list for today.

“Every kind of object of most precious wood, bronze, iron, and marble; cinnamon and incense, fragrant oil and frankincense, wine and oil, fine flour and wheat, cattle and sheep, horses and chariots,” and then the most interesting of all, “bodies and souls of men.” (Revelation 18:12–13)

This shopping list of commodities and goods for ships, cargo planes, UPS, FedEx, DHL.

I've been to Singapore many times, and hotels we usually stay in, we look out from our windows down over ships that are about to make the passage through—I can't show it on the map here—but one of the busiest passageways in world shipping. They're in the Straits of Malacca. They're going through the Straits of Singapore, around through the Straits of Malacca, and then they come further to the westward. If they can get through the Suez Canal or they'll go back down around the Cape of Good Hope and come to Europe and America. But shipping is a big, big part of our world economy, carrying everything from cars to electronic goods, other finished goods, minerals and oil, and everything that keeps our world economy going. And when those critical places like the Straits of Malacca or the Gulf of Suez are threatened, Straits of Hormuz being another one coming out of the Persian Gulf with the oil states there of the Gulf States—when those are threatened by war, by terrorism, or other acts—world shipping grinds to a halt or is slowed down. And the shelves of Walmart and Target and Sam’s Club and Costco might suffer for a while.

And we might have to wait a little bit longer for our new phone or auto part or whatever it might be.

We've experienced a bit of that with the shutdown that COVID and the disruption to the supply chains of the world. But Revelation here is describing world commerce. And world commerce is not new to this modern world. It is a part of the history of mankind. And world commerce has flowed through all of these regions coming out of Asia—China—silks, spices. You ever hear of the Spice Road that came through Eurasia, all through the ‘stans of Turkistan, Azerbaijan, and all the others up here north of the Caspian Sea and to Venice, Marco Polo, and the trade of Europe? And then out of Portugal, out of Holland, out of Italy in the 1400s, 1500s, 1600s—these explorers and these ships began to circumnavigate the world looking for spices, pepper, faster routes to India.

You've heard the stories of how Columbus was looking for a faster route to India and he stumbled across the Americas. And Magellan and all these other stories—it's all about trade.

It is all about commerce. And that is at the core of the story of nations and world cultures and civilizations. And what we see here in Revelation 18 is this system now called Babylon at its height in a time yet to come ahead of us. And we live in a pretty good time right now.

And I always find it fascinating to look at the ending of verse 13, where it says that this system called Babylon trades in “the bodies and souls of men.” That’s slavery. That’s slavery.

But it's more than slavery. It is also the exploitation of people and cultures and nations for the sake of Babylon—so that Babylon could grow rich. And whatever Babylon was in the 5th century BC or the 15th century AD—whatever world power was wanting to exploit the wealth and the riches of the world—in one sense, it all comes back to this concept that began at Babel of men ruling over other men, that was and was not, that rose and fell, and traded in commodities for the wealth of nations, but also in the bodies and souls of men.

There's one thing you should know about this that pertains to this concept called Europe that we look at for this final revived Babylon system—and the heart of it, in many ways, being in Europe.

A few years ago, I was reading about this topic and the nations of Europe. Europe, because of all the global trade that began to develop in the 1400s out of Portugal, Spain, then England, Holland, France, and other countries, the ships went around the world and began to funnel back to Europe goods and services.

It built the palaces that you will see if you ever go to Europe and you have some big palace of the king—Versailles, for instance, outside Paris. Or if you go to Vienna, you see the great palace of the Habsburg family there in Vienna and others in Germany, in Italy. Those were built with money and the money was obtained through trade. And that trade involved the exploitation of people. There is an element of truth to all of the stories today about exploitation, colonization, that has the downside. There is a downside to it. I read once that to feed Europe, to create the castles that look so quaint and the palaces that cause us to ooh and aah when we pay our tourist dollars to go through them—and I've been through a lot of them—to create that wealth cost the lives of people.

One figure that I heard was more than 80 million people died around the world in Mexico, Central America, India, Africa. More than 80 million people died to feed Europe, to cause it to grow, to have the wealth through all of these dynasties and these kings and queens that we have all the stories about. That money came at a cost.

And Revelation 18 is describing it to a degree. It really is. Now, one could say, well, you know, America and Britain were a part of that too. And yeah, there’s a part of that story to tell as well. I mean, let me tell you just a little part of that and take a minute here. This is a place called Drayton Hall. Drayton Hall is just outside Charleston, South Carolina. I took that picture. I was there a few years ago, Debbie and I. Drayton Hall sits on what was a slave plantation.

Charleston was a major, major slave market at the height of the slave trade in America. Savannah, Georgia was as well. But this is a symbol. I mean, up until the 1950s, a family—the descendants of the original family that built it—still lived in this place. It’s a historic spot now. This is a picture of the slave trade that came out of Africa, crossed the Atlantic into South America with slaves in the ships. You've read stories about that. Slave trade started in Africa where the native chieftains would sell their own people to Muslim traders, slavers, who would take them down to the coast of what is now Ghana, where the ships coming out of Europe would pick them up, pack them in like sardines, and take them across the Atlantic to be sold in the Americas.

And up the coast you'll see there into Charleston, Savannah, dropping them off in the Caribbean Islands as well, picking up sugar, tobacco, cotton, and then going back across to Europe, dropping that off for a profit, going back down to Africa, picking up another load of slaves, and just doing the circle. That's how it worked for a long time until it was finally stopped.

The story of how that was stopped is a fascinating story you should familiarize yourself with sometime and read the story of a guy named William Wilberforce whose story is told in the song—escapes me right now. Amazing Grace, thank you. Yeah, Amazing Grace, which was written by a slaving captain, but there was a movie made off of a book called Amazing Grace, and it tells the story of William Wilberforce, who was a key part—Englishman—who got this slave trade stopped. And so when you look at the “bodies and souls of men” description here in this verse, you have to look at a picture like this and recognize what it meant, what it means. Now, that's a literal application.

When it comes to Revelation, spiritually, the number is far more than 80 million of the bodies and souls of men who have been ground into the dust spiritually by this system called Babylon. So it's an all-encompassing spiritual, religious, political, and economic system that we see coming to a collapse here in Revelation 18. So let’s move on to verse 14 where it says, “The fruit that your soul longed for has gone from you, and all the things which are rich and splendid have gone from you, and you shall find them no more at all.” (Revelation 18:14)

The merchants of these things who became rich by her will stand at a distance for fear of her torment, weeping and wailing and saying, “Alas, alas, that great city that was clothed in fine linen, purple and scarlet, and adorned with gold and precious stones and pearls!” (Revelation 18:15–16)

And so again, it's personifying this city, this system really called Babylon, that I think will be a world system. We look to Europe as the kind of the base or the core of what will arise, and I definitely think that. But I believe what we have described here in the ending story of the Bible is a global system where the kings of the earth and all the nations will have been drunk from the relationship termed as fornication in chapter 17. But they have all taken part in this, and they all want their piece of the economy, the money, the wealth, and all that it is. And so understanding what really does drive this system can help us relate it to the world conditions and a world system that we look for.

Verse 17, “For in one hour”— meaning a very short time—“such great riches came to nothing.” “Every shipmaster, all who travel by ship, sailors, and as many as trade on the sea, stood at a distance and cried out when they saw the smoke of her burning, saying, ‘What is like this great city?’” (Revelation 18:17–18)

Now, I mentioned earlier that some people, interpreters, often look at this description in Revelation 18 and 17 and they come up with other scenarios. And I did mention that we look at Rome—obviously Babylon to begin with, Rome—but a larger world system. Sometimes people, I've heard people say that this could be one of the great world financial capitals, trading capitals of the current world. And sometimes I've heard people say New York City is the heart of this Babylon. Well, that would put it in America.

And the scriptures that we interpret to show that at this point in time, Jacob's trouble has occurred and the wealth and the power and a world system, let's say, dominated by America and the English-speaking peoples, has gone. And this Babylon has supplanted that. And I believe that to be a correct interpretation of those scriptures. That doesn't preclude that, let's say, America—New York City—world financial capital—would still not be some type of a part of a world or a global system. To think that everything is going to collapse in America may be a bit of a misunderstanding of certain things as to how things work. But I don't think that we should be looking at America or New York City as the heart and core of this. In fact, if you look at Jeremiah 51, at verse 13, the same language is used to describe ancient Babylon as Jeremiah foretells its collapse at that time. And it talks about “the waters” of that Babylon. Well, what would those waters be? Well, two rivers: the Tigris and the Euphrates. Babylon did not sit as a port city on any great ocean. It sat on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers region. And so yet, Jeremiah calls that “the waters”—great waters—from which this is taken. So to just say that it has to be a city or a place where there's a great port, world port, would be reading something into it that I don't think is there in the final interpretation.

Verse 19, “They threw dust on their heads and cried out, weeping and wailing, and saying, ‘Alas, alas, that great city, in which all who had ships on the sea became rich by her wealth!’” (Revelation 18:19)

For in one hour she is made desolate. All who had ships on the sea—again, we would be talking about a global concern and a very dominating system of globalization. And then in verse 20, he says, “Rejoice over her, O heaven, and you holy apostles and prophets, for God has avenged you on her.” (Revelation 18:20)

By the time that when John actually wrote this, thinking about the holy apostles, that would include but not be exclusive to, by this time—the mid-90s—Peter and Paul, who had already met their death. So if you’re looking at prophets, you could project that into the future setting. We have two prophets called the two witnesses in chapter 11 of Revelation. And so there’s an all-encompassing, I think, application and meaning here for verse 20—that God will take vengeance on Babylon for the martyrdom of all of His servants, apostles, prophets, members, and saints for all time.

In verse 21, “Then a mighty angel took up a stone like a great millstone and threw it into the sea, saying, ‘Thus with violence the great city Babylon shall be thrown down, and shall not be found anymore.’” (Revelation 18:21)

Now again, if you were to go to Jeremiah 51:63–64, you will see that God had Jeremiah actually do this with his scroll and his prophecy in Babylon—that there was a stone tied to it and it was thrown into the Euphrates. That’s Jeremiah 51:63–64. And so that is carried forward here to then show a final fulfillment applying to this global system of Babylon that will be thrown down and not be found anymore. In other words, it will just have its last gasp and effort in history at the hands of Satan to thwart the plan and purpose of God, and it will come to nothing.

Verse 22, “The sound of harpists, musicians, flutists, and trumpeters shall not be heard in you anymore. No craftsman of any craft shall be found in you anymore, and the sound of a millstone shall not be heard in you anymore.” (Revelation 18:22)

Industry—just a mill, a factory, turning out goods and services.

“The light of a lamp shall not shine in you anymore, and the voice of bridegroom and bride shall not be heard in you anymore.” (Revelation 18:23)

Life comes to an end, and this system passes from the scene.

“For your merchants were the great men of the earth, for by your sorcery all the nations were deceived.” (Revelation 18:23)

“And in her was found the blood of prophets and saints, and of all who were slain on the earth.” (Revelation 18:24)

It seems ultimately God will lay at the feet of Babylon and all world systems—and as we’ll see in chapter 20—even Satan himself will have the sins and the evils of the world placed on his head, where it all begins.

And it will come to an end. And so through the end of chapter 18 here, God is showing that what Satan has used in all of the nations and the governments that he has spawned in his system and his time of rulership on the earth as “the god of this world”—as 2 Corinthians 4:4 shows us—it will come to pass, and it will come to an end, and that will pass from the scene.

We’ve kind of come with the end of chapter 18 here to a point where we have—really beginning in chapter 2 of Daniel with Nebuchadnezzar’s dream and this image that he had, Daniel’s vision in chapter 7—we come to the final conclusion of this entire system called Babylon that begins with that interpretation of that dream back in the time of Daniel, and brings it forward and showing God’s ultimate goal of putting it, letting it run its course. Human systems and philosophies, human-inspired religion, traditions, ideas, will have had every opportunity to show—and to show, in essence—that they don’t work, or they do not produce peace. They do not produce prosperity and true joy.

This system itself will grind, even as it has the glitz and the glamour of its wealth. There will be those that are not served by it because, as I showed earlier in my comments—looking at the progression of everything from Babel in the book of Genesis, Nimrod and that tower, to Babylon as it is portrayed in the prophets and the time of Jeremiah and Daniel, its captivity of the nation of Judah, and all that God says about it—all the way here into the book of Revelation… every system that man has designed to replace God’s way and God’s Kingdom will have had its full maximum opportunity to prove itself. But it will always be doing it on the backs of people.

And I go back to verse 13, at the end of verse 13 here in chapter 18, where it says that all of this trades upon “the bodies and souls of men.” (Revelation 18:13)

I commented about how many people it took, in essence, to build the Europe of the modern age and the houses of royalty and merchants and systems that we see—kind of the shell of today—when you go to Europe and you do the grand tour and you visit the palaces and look at everything from whether it’s Russia to Germany to Austria to France to Belgium and see the relics of a system going back several hundred years, but now no longer… you know, it's changed.

And the modern world has produced more republican or democratic forms of governing. Capitalism or wealth and money and system and trade are still there. False religion is still there, and there are different names, and socialism is probably one of the dominating systems that controls so much of—especially—in Europe today, to perpetuate life as it is. But it is dependent upon people. And there will always be—and have been throughout the history of man—a class of people in Africa, in Asia, in Europe, and even in America, that produce this, and sometimes produce it to their detriment, to where their standard of living is not what others have. And they may not share in many of the benefits. So that could be money, that could be education, that could be healthcare.

And under certain dictatorial and autocratic governments in parts of the world through modern history and even into the present world, people still labor to produce minerals under conditions that are grinding poverty.

I mean, you will still see—if you watch the news today—places in Africa, I think of the Congo, one I just recently saw of people sitting in dirt and mud and water-filled mining pits to extract rare earth minerals that drive the developed world and the technologies that you and I will have in our smartphones, in our automobiles, and depend upon to keep us safe as we fly around the world. And those things are produced sometimes even today with the hands of people who are working in grinding poverty to produce something for the rest of the world. It still goes on, is what I’m saying. And we need to understand that.

We are not going to change that system through some type of protest, revolt, or world-changing human ideas. But we certainly understand God’s Kingdom here is the answer for that. And that’s what I think is maybe the final point to leave us on as we exit the study of Babylon here and begin to look at what transpires now in the remaining chapters of the book of Revelation.

We have kind of gone through a tour of this entire world’s best effort as God looks at it. And He shows us that it’s all going to come down to an end. And so as we will open up chapter 19 and look at that, we will see the answer.

And in the meantime, we carry on with our work of the gospel and the preaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ and the Kingdom of God, and offering hope for a world that in many ways still is a part of this Babylon of the present—and an even larger Babylon that is to come.