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CHAPTER FIVE

WHAT'S WRONG WITH BABYLON ?

ROME, THE PARALLEL

In Revelation 18, we find a incisive and somewhat detailed account of the deserved destruction of a great city. It is called Babylon, but this is part of a theme package, a rondo, a recurrent focus which began, in this book of Revelation, in Chapter 13. There the name Babylon is used, but the key to the meaning of it, famed especially during the day of the vastly powerful Roman Empire, is found in this, that it is identified as the city of seven hills. This appears in Revelation 17:9.

Today, if one referred to the city of Big Ben, or the Thames, there would be no doubt as to the meaning:  London. Then, the famous seven hills marked out amid great cities but one, the eminent, and in this world at that time, the pre-eminent power centre, that of Rome, heart of the Roman Empire which for centuries elevated itself and its works, and ruled, imposing on much of Europe,  spreading with mighty earth works and engineering enterprises, some of which remain to this day.

Revelation is a book in which symbols are freely used, with great effect, to enhance the impact of the meanings,  and to draw together various elements of the Bible, themes, into one composite or concentrated pitch. This is no exception.

Thus there is in Revelation 18 a depiction of the drastic devastation, amid just judgments long delayed, to a final and demonstrative overthrow, lush with lavish grounds, in thrall to justice and judgment.

Of what is it the devastation ? It is of Rome, of this city as a religious centre, like the epicentre of an earthquake, one bringing brutality, cruelty and insidious corruption to this world over a long time. Why is it so  treated in particular ? What is wrong with this Babylon,  alias Rome as religious centre ?

The grounds are found liberally in Revelation 17-18. First she is given another symbolic description: that of a harlot. Kings have been her customers (17:1, 2), and not only has she been responsive to their entreaties, but such is her way, that she gains the phrase, 'great harlot.' She stands out amid harlots. As the designation is symbolic, cities not having intercourse, not being people, the meaning is clear that in unfaithfulness to her ostensible commitment to God, she has gobbled up many idols, many customers for her extravaganzas of spirit and mind, of life and has not truncated her wishes, but indulged them to the full. Her religious practices are abominable, her self-assurance detestable, her waywardness extraordinary, and she has infected others with this, alluring them.

That, as in Ezekiel 16 and 23, is the nature of the charge, a spiritual one, with many manifestations. In Ezekiel 16:17 you see the gall of it:

	"You have also taken your beautiful jewelry, from My gold and My silver,
	which I had given you,
	and made for yourself male images and played the harlot with them."

This is the perennial nature of the case in this kind of defilement. The one seized with this sin, takes the name of the Lord, some of His truth, and fashions it anew, and with this, conquers the hearts and minds of many, in what, in the imagery, is compared with serial sexual sin. This sin leaves that behind, however, just as harlots and tax-gatherers would come into the kingdom of heaven before some of the proud religionists in Christ's day on this earth! (Matthew 21:31).

There is commission. The effect of her practices is also brought to light in her day of judgment.

With the Kings of nations, she has (spiritually) consorted, and the nations themselves have suffered for the lust for her ostensible loveliness, glamour. Whole peoples have become intoxicated with her ways and her wares;  and the name of the game is 'blasphemy' (Revelation 17:3). In this also, she was eminent, not among the mere beginners, but an accomplished practitioner; for the beast on which she sits, in evident comfort for long, is "full of the names of blasphemy," 17:3.

In other words, there is a political entity which is made up of different parts, kings and kingdoms, to which she reaches in her seductive power (as spiritual harlot) in the arena and area of religion (as source of notable blasphemy); and this is used to formalise, apply, despatch and dynamise her power. A religious centre, she is a political source for spreading the attraction and applying its blasphemies: political power has been greatly used to mystify and defy whole nations, and it has reached as far as multiple blasphemy.

So far, we have seen quite enough to realise that this is precisely what bestows meaning on that wryly named "Roman Catholicism", the religion which arose as that of the city of Rome, first in pagan style, and then as a centre of imperial power with its bishop, then as imperial-ecclesiastical primate^*1, then through that bishop, who came to be called pope, as a site for the government of nations,  as in the days of the Holy Roman Empire, a matter, this alone, of centuries.

However, it is not only in religious things that she has had this pseudo-imperial force, that is, by virtue of her illicit relationship with kings; it is also a matter of morals. There has been a moral fall and failure associated with her, for in the shadow of her political-religious power she has become 

	"a dwelling place of demons, a prison for every foul spirit,
	and a cage for every unclean and hated bird,"

Revelation 18:2. In the Hebrew period of the Old Testament, there were in the law things clean and unclean,  ceremonially, and even in the time of the ark, both sorts of birds were entered. The unclean  would  symbolise all that was dangerous to health, wrong-headed to life, corruptive and unacceptable, contrary to divine design.

So the sexual contamination for which Rome is historically prone,  refusing marriage to her priests (the condition predicted for the prophecy of I Timothy 4:3, to become notorious and befouling), and balefully resistant, even in this,  to reform (though extenuations appear to be made for Anglican priests, at  least some, attracted to her and wishing to enter her lists complete with wives no less), is not missing. Indeed, the place given to equivocation in her affairs - that is saying one thing and making internal mental reservations supposedly for the glory of God, so assuming the mantle of deceit and trickery^*1A, as indeed to cruelty, comes into these categories of Revelation 18. The latter is especially shown in the centuries of its brazen inhumanities^*2 in the Inquisitions in England, Italy, Spain and the like, and her indulgence in torture and burning, not least at times with green wood, issuing in England in the famous burning of bishops, in the case of Cranmer, Ridley and Latimer. Foul spirits and the demonic come into view as countless families were broken, smashed, ruined, their wealth often confiscated, torture in aggravating rounds applied, propaganda forced into the aggrieved mess.

Qualities likewise in the same biblical depiction were also shown in gold-grabbing missions against the Incas and Aztecs,  on the part of heavily Romanist  Spain. As in many diseases, some things are common to several of them, but when you add item after item for diagnosis, the time comes when only one culprit fits  all the symptoms, and it is so with Roman, and her exportable Romanism.

Disastrous have been some popes, vying with each other in multiplicity and ambition, morally infamous in the time of the Medici line, through which corruption, obscenity, sexual disease and misuse of church powers to secure wealth all reportedly found time to flourish, as in the day of Leo X. Not only did Rome in the Holy Roman Empire come to connive with kings, dictate to kings, and encourage armies to war for this and that, but as late as 1914, Rome could more directly encourage Austria to make war (cf. SMR pp. 911 - 931 esp. p. 921). Some of the ways of Rome are noted in SMR pp. 1032-1088H, and in particular here one cites from The Open Door, the Closed Mind and the Call of Christ, Ch. 4, the following passage, which also dwells on the Babylon theme, now being surveyed.

 

PRIME EVENTS

i) The Forceful Woman of the World goes - Rev. 18:9-19:6 (cf. 17:15-17,18).

She has provided as the spiritual hostess, mistress and desire of the world, or much of it, just that panache, display, cruelty in power and zest for glory in her own right (cf. SMR pp. 912ff.), which has appeal to the benighted, thrill for the feverish, hope for the this-worldly and expectation of strength in it, for those whose trust is in the visible, in the glory that man can create, or more often, feverishly imagines to be within his power. Often does man visit her.

Always a spiritual harridan, she has deceived kings, slaughtered saints and had a reign on the beast: now that her end has come, her very city, Rome (17:9) is doomed, her power despoiled, and the beast blights her. Divinely deemed "the great harlot" (19:2), "who corrupted the earth with her fornication", so that God "avenged on her the blood of His servants shed by her", picking up from Revelation 17:4, where she is called "the mother of harlots", she is a massive slayer of saints, indeed "drunk with the blood of the saints", and spreader of "the abominations of the earth" (17:5-6).

The mother of harlots in other words, begets more of them, in her own spirit and temper and trade, and such are Ignorance, by which for centuries she sought to REMOVE the knowledge of the Bible (cf. Cook and Martin's Story of the Light that Never Went Out, which details many such things in Britain in particular), the Bishop of London even seeking to quash Tyndale's English translation by burning it in quantities, and in so doing, giving the money which enabled him, indirectly, to pay for and manufacture many more, duly imported. On this, see Psalm 119:13, 20.

Ignorance allowed much confusion and concoction of evils, religious cocktails and tales, the very stuff of 'harlotry', sin habitually using ignorance, wilful or otherwise, to dash the truth; and what more critical in truth, than the Gospel! (cf. II Cor. 11, Galatians 1). Another child of the mother of harlots is Total Subjection as a condition for spiritual life, like a harlot who demands fealty to herself at all cost; and this has been a major feature of the Jesuits, relative to the papacy, and an implicit feature  of the Unam Sanctam which asserts that "it is altogether necessary to salvation for every creature to be subject to the Roman pontiff."

You CANNOT of course serve two masters (Matthew 5:24), and one being God with the provision of personal satisfaction for sin, and the other but a human creature and sinful, they are disparate to the point of infinity. There is, said Christ, but ONE, and no one else may have a place (Matthew 23:8-10, Proverbs 30:6), and the mastery is written in its Gospel and its revelation, not changeable in the least (Galatians 1, Revelation 22), or subject to any addition.

There being only ONE master and teacher, so that NONE may so much as spiritually be called 'father' (Matthew 23:8-10), this sort of ADDITION is an alternative god, so that it draws like a harlot, those who mix their 'marriage' to the Lamb with a carriage with the papacy, which not being God, constitutes a parallel to the Baals of old, who were 'lords' also. Other such children of harlotry would be elements such as Equivocation, famous Jesuit principle (contra Colossians 3:9),  where truth is not the criterion but the objective is deemed to determine morality; and this begets more like it in other places, such as the Liberals who defiled the Bible and whose slithery tongue misled many churches, having done strong service in a similar cause!

Visions of angels (cf. the prohibition in Colossians 2:18, of such fealty, such trembling religious acceptance) are another way of intruding into the word of God, and the Mormons show an affiliation to this with Moroni, no less than does Rome with her visions. This is another child of the temper of Rome. Other christs, such as that in the Koran, the radicality of Liberalism, Neo-Orthodoxy, constructions imagined by man and not wrought from the historical record, christs without deity, or variable gods, these too are linked.

Such is her motherhood and such are some of her spawn, incorporated in the mystery of Babylon, of which Rome is the centre and 'mother', Babylon itself the ancient exemplar (cf. SMR pp. 946ff., 729, 1032-1088H).

 

ii) The Marriage of the Lamb - Rev. 19:7-10 comes.

By contrast, we observe in 19:10 the spirit of authenticity - the angel who speaks to John is not the Lamb: for it is not functionaries, but the Lord alone who is to be worshipped, and Christ is Lord. His will, word and ways, wisdom are immutable, beautiful, eternal. Do not worship ME, says the exalted angel, for "the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy". Yet as God multiplied visions of truth (Hosea 12:10), so man has multiplied ways of avoiding Him. Wafers, glasses, angels, books, canons of corrupt churches or States, meditations - they vie for a following.

Yet there is no way but Jesus Christ (John 14:6), and there is NO OTHER NAME of access (Acts 4:11-12). The cut-off is simple, eternal and clear. “WORSHIP GOD,” says the angel, forbidding John to worship him, “for the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.” The testimony of truth is all about Jesus, who is the truth, and the very spirit of it focusses Him, and none other. ONLY Christ IN all creation can be worshipped, since He created it! He came into it, as an author into a book (Colossians 1:15ff.) Other names (cf. Acts 4:11-12) are an index of spiritual harlotry, and such pre-occupations are for the children of Babylon.

If you want another name, you must not call it the same, but what it actually is; and if you want another governor, guidance, perspective, spirit, gospel or grace, yes or disgrace, or to add one to the Master, then you must confess it (Matthew 23:8-10, Luke 9:22-26).

Confusion has long been the devil's goad to collapse, and misnaming has been a very tradition of inveiglement, a source of seduction and Te Deum to what is not the Trinity. To worship ANYTHING or give obedience as to GOD to ANYONE not God, but man masquerading his mouth (II Cor. 11) or imposing his ultra-infra-sub or other varieties of word on the faithful, is to have the daring to have public marriage with a seducer, even while ostensibly under the roof of the first husband.

It is an unqualified corruption and an unthinkable double-image, invented without ocular defect, by the mind that has appetite for it. If you want to add to the word of God (Proverbs 30:6, Galatians 1, Revelation 22), then you subtract from fealty to Him; for anyone can change a testimony by his own desire, even in one word, and much more in hundreds of thousands given power to contain the original!

This is the very spirit of Babylon (cf. *2 below), vastly impudent, wholly impious, rancorously rebellious, with open face performing what the Lord by His own record, detests; and it is found in ALL religions which dare to present some christ of their own choosing, whether that of Islam, Mormonism, Romanism, or of any leader whose word constitutes the final authority along with the Bible, some other authority, book, canon, law, counsel, not wholly derivable from the Bible and but fancy beyond it, below it, like a companion, fulfilling the intent not the Spirit of God, but the spirit of rebellion.

Moreover, this harridan is deemed "drunk with the blood of the martyrs," as indeed the above references fully verify. That is, for merely one point, she became so lost in the killings of tens of thousands, torturing, maiming, divesting of funds, appropriation of property, that she resembled one drunk, lost to normal perspicuity, restraint and even awareness of the folly of her actions, seething with a mixture of ambition,  as exemplified so well in the case of the Borgias, and in principle shown by the uncelestial abuse of Matthew 23:8-10, when the very spirit and nature of reality in the kingdom of heaven is ingloriously made lowly below the foot of the pope.   In the Bible, however, in the words of Jesus Christ,ALL must be brethren and none masters but Christ, and this is an exclusive, the only way out of which is to cease to be human. Instead each is to relate in some way as a saved sinner to Him as one Lord in commonality with others saved; and yet the pope is illicitly elevated by clamorous claim to the post of master, teacher. As if this were not enough, NONE in the spiritual sense, biblically is to be called Father,  and it is because BECAUSE all are brothers; and yet this is the very specialty in address for priests as one whole!

With such credentials, then, one can understand the speech of Revelation in 17:2 as in 18:6, where she is found to be "drunk with the blood of the saints and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus." Small wonder indeed that John on seeing such a religiously oriented body, indicates just this: "When I saw her, I marvelled with great amazement." It IS surprising to see one guilty of religious fornication, that is, one DEDICATED and CONSECRATED to one, the Lord, who despite this, nevertheless allies herself with worldly powers and executes crushings of the very bodies of the saints of the one ostensibly her Lord.  THAT leads to amazement. For all that, equally amazing, ISRAEL of such solemn protestations and of unique and blessed celestial commission, did not fail to crucify her LORD as foretold (Isaiah 49:7, Zechariah 12:10ff., Micah 5:1-3).

When we realise that for Romanism there are many steps  on the way for hoped for salvation, such as symbolised by Martin Luther going up one kissed step at a time, on the entry to Rome's cathedral, so that it is allegedly in the hands of the Church, hands that have broken fingers, then GREAT amazement at this unholy presumption and alliance with kings might indeed astound! (cf. How Great is the God We Adore, Ch. 2, News 88), In fact, to gain access to God is not a matter of many steps, in its cardinal reality, for concerning Jesus the Christ we read in Ephesians 2:18, "we both have access  by one Spirit to the Father." Indeed, "with boldness" we must come, having received the eternal and assured gift of spiritual life from God (Romans 6:23, Hebrews 9:12, 25ff., 10:10-14); for the Spirit of God proclaims in His own that they are indeed the children of God (Romans 8:16). To be sure, this comes when the connection is faith, and the object of faith is Jesus Christ the Redeemer, and the ground of faith is the sent mission from the Father, and the opening of faith is by the work of the Holy Spirit (John 16:8ff.); but there are no works in it, except those of one, God Himself (Galatians 3, Ephesians 2, Romans 10).

Salvation itself, the gift, has ZERO to do by man to make it work, for

"this is the work of God that you should believe in Him whom He has sent," (John 6:29),

so that it is not even a work of your own sinful and fallen will (John 1:12). Faith itself is the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5), for God has foreknown His own, seeking all, and finding whom He would.  This being so, such Church effort to control the procedure, when the Church is appointed not to make it work, which God has paid for and applies (cf. II Timothy 1:8ff.), but to display it (Galatians 3), becomes so readily a sordid spiritual work of supererogation. It grows thus into an airy bastion, a transgression that minimises what God maximises: His own sovereign intervention and power,  giving to man the way to show it, the information to know it and the need to bow to it.

NOT given however is the inventive domination to dispose of it like some asset, manage and manipulate, own and arrogate as if it were some property. WE are HIS property, and it is HE only who is head of the Church (I Corinthians 6:17-20, Ephesians 5:15-16); nor is it a two-headed monster. ALL grow up INTO the head, and the head is one eternal, sinless, God who became incarnate, not capable of confusion with a sinner; for there is ONE mediator and two becomes merely a flat contradiction, one between God, on the one hand, and man on the other (I Timothy 2). There is ONE master and Lord and Father; YOU ALL are brethren. What would make it otherwise belongs to a different family.

Explosion into bits does not retain one.

'MYSTERY BABYLON'

However, there is no explosion, though the judgment bears a resemblance! (Revelation 18:10).

In the interim, there has been drinking that intoxicates (Revelation 17:2).

Great has been the drinking on the part of the nations, through her means. It is Revelation, now not surprisingly calls this an act of drinking, and all nations have so imbibed,  for at one stage, Rome essayed to rule the world, even  appointing a dividing line in the earth, one side in the designated regard, the case was for Spain, on the other for Portugal, in these greatly expansive nations! Her threat indeed to ALL is that it is altogether necessary to salvation to be subject to the Roman Pontiff, and until this is exposed as gross error, on the books it remains, like an inoperable cancer. That is part of what even recent utterances have declared to be the whole entirety of Rome's operative law, which even includes Canon Law! (cf. SMR pp. 1056ff., p. 1088A, at *14, The Bible..., Ch. 7), not only thus adding to the word of God (Proverbs 30:6), but seeking to bind this flying buttress which is never needed, on all! Indeed that buttress is so filled with varied ideas that to bind it is to bind a ship to dock with gossamer, that floats in the wind (cf. Holocaust of Morality Ch. 5, *1).

Aided in endless political alliances, Rome found traction in the Holy Roman Empire circa 800 A.D. till1806 when Francis I abolished it,  as Napoleonic forces threatened. That gave it just over 1000 years, a fair time, for a forbidden alliance of power and push with Christian profession, allied to enormous weight that even England just managed to escape, if by no means only for the right reasons, in the day of Henry VIII. Positive desire was amiss in his personal affairs, yet negative grounds were aplenty,  so that a new arena of liberty (relative) could come in the heydays of Elizabeth I, in whose time art and literature flourished. While politics still played a sometimes gross part, it was no longer enforced idolatry (cf. SMR pp. 1086ff.), and indeed, the KJV of the Bible was forthcoming with its magnificence of co-operation between intimately learned scholars bringing forth a product of translation which even George Bernard Shaw praised for its art and beauty.

The "mystery Babylon" of Revelation 17:5, as to its site in the day described, is anything but mystery, being the city of 7 hills, as forthrightly announced. In its basis, background and horror, however, it is indeed a mystery, which like others in the kingdom of heaven and its notations, needs solving.  It appears that since "in her was found the blood of prophets and saints and of all who were slain on the earth," Revelation 18:24, her history is long.  The era of last days, at the noted time in Revelation 17-18, is pellucid. It is as centre of Romanism that Babylon then exists (cf. SMR pp. 946ff.). Here is laid, but not to rest, the ecclesiastical and idolatrous corpse, this thing John found astounding (17:9), her imprimatur geographically in Rome, her history recognisable as centred in Rome, her religious ways conveyed in the same and by the same emblem and name. Thus her special failings, faults and declivities are all embraced in this way, at that time in ONE, one city, the mother of harlots, with a long anti-pedigree of power and corruption.

How many have been twisted, deluded and shrunk in spirit by her  'sorceries' (Rev. 18:23), by which the spread of the nations had been deceived! How sad the plight of the 'Luthers'  who did NOT escape and the exasperated spirits who never knew the Gospel, just as, as priest Luther did not, despite all the blandishments of what the Bible calls the mother of harlots, a spiritual seductress in the grand manner! How imperative it is to warn and to show the way of liberty (as in Galatians 3 and 5), and to aid them to avoid such doctrines (cf. I Timothy 4:4-6)!

Alas and is it not sorcery which would at one time insist that it was a cause of death if one should say that Christ, having become man, and found in lot as man, in the form of man, though the eternal God, the Word so sent, does not have a duplicable format while on earth. As man He has but one body, or the word of God itself would be  astray (Hebrews 2). In that case, what determines otherwise is merely an innovative religion, one which misuses the name of Christ and abuses His authority. If this is not done, and the word of God is followed, however, then there is no possibility of the body in heaven (Acts 3:19-21), which has there a period of welcomed acceptance in His triumph,  being at the same time in earth. There is a time limit on this: He is there UNTIL the restoration of all things. Most assuredly this is NOW increasingly the destitution of all things, the deprivation, progressively, the saints becoming more and more like islands, or groups of them, in an invasive sea. It is not yet. It awaits the will of God, and it WILL  be unexpected (I Thessalonians 5:1-3, Matthew 24:36-50).

God can do what He wills; but when what He does in fact will is that Christ have such a body, glorified to be sure, but that of man (Hebrews 2, Romans 8:1-3), and that He should be in heaven, signified as Himself, then in heaven He is. Not only so, but is is FITTING before God that the captain of our salvation should thus have this format, being like us and for us, and suffering in the stead of all who take the ransom so available.

Therefore, His appearing by transmogrification on earth as a piece of bread is mere romancing, intrusion of ideas into the word of God both contrary to it and without warrant; for God does not contradict Himself, however much Rome does so with its canon law (Proverbs 8:8, Matthew 5:17-20). It is not till death itself is destroyed that the Messiah hands back His saving commission, that God as God, the trinity, should be all in all. At that, He retains His accomplishment and place s Lamb in the very throne of God, the heart of praise for ever and ever and is so worshipped. Indeed He IS with the Father,  the very temple in the Holy City to come! (I Corinthians 15, Revelation 21:22).

Indeed, there is but one Lord Jesus Christ (Ephesians 4:4), though His Spirit goes far and near, and ministers to many on the basis of His magnificent mercy and sacrificial act (Hebrews 9:12-10:14, 10:29, John 16:5ff., Ephesians 1:13-14), though some tarry in the hinterland of uncertainty and variability to their own doom. These are merely tasting, but never swallowing what God has to offer, always drawing near, but never coming - (Hebrews 6:6), like wine tasters. Many may have vision of Him (cf. Acts 2:18), but of Him there is but one (Ephesians 4:4). To have Him, at the will of some priest, vacate heaven, contrary to orders, and come to earth in the form of a worshippable piece of bread, allegedly Himself, but not so by any test correlative to bread, to differentiate, can only be one of the instances of sorcery noted in Revelation, concerning the wiles and ways and unwisdom of Babylon, here wearing the death-mask of Rome (Revelation 18).

Moreover, this would make the Last Supper a suicide when Christ broke the bread, disenabling His ever coming to the cross as likewise the relevance of that which is His central act, with all that it entails (Galatians 6:14) and re-writing history. It is insufferable so to manipulate the word of God, and to do so with allegations of an actual Jesus Christ, in an actual format to be worshipped, one appearing as bread, contrary to the Last Supper, one on illicit recall from heaven, just as it appears as the height of such sorcery. As bad as the rest, it is a sorcery which does not produce in the visible, the claims from the invisible; iti s an act not of God, but of Rome. It is like feeding the 5000 with food that was not visible or edible or sustaining to the body at all.

SO does Rome deserve, in biblical text, the doom which comes, the burning and destruction in one hour (Revelation 18:19), that is declared as were destructions for Babylon (not so fast but just as sure), Nineveh and Tyre.

Mystery Babylon has had a long time for her mothering harlots, to use the biblical language, and the world a long period to suffer her.

 As Revelation 18:22 makes so very clear, the 'mystery' is found in a movement back in time to long before Rome's day. That is why the phrase "death mask" is used here of Rome relative to Babylon, as she is described in Revelation 17. This is the long established and final form, and it is this by which she will be palpably known. However there is a background which reaches, in the first instance, right back to the literal and historical Babylon, where the prophet Jeremiah cast in the stone to the waters, just as John sees it, at the day of her destruction, similarly cast (Jeremiah 51:63-64).

THUS the Lord there indicates, is Babylon, the historical one, to sink, like a stone thrown into the Euphrates. Now in Revelation 18:21, in an elaboration of imagery but not of reality, is a MILL-STONE thrown into the sea, not the river of some, but the sea of all people.

THIS, the millstone is the classic referent of Christ in referring to those who make the little ones, young disciples, stumble: it would be better for them that it be hung round their necks, and they be cast into the water with it. More: it would be better if in that condition, such an offender were to be DROWNED IN THE DEPTH OF THE SEA (Matthew 18:5-9).

	As men do not spare in their inquisitorial fires and tortures, in their presumptuous idolatries and wedding of things Christian with things of this world (James 4:4), such as power and the seeking of riches and glory:
	so the Lord will not spare where hands of carnal kind, move to slither into or pierce the hearts or minds or souls of those who have sought Him.

As here, so likewise was it in the day of self-generated errors on the part of the scribes (Luke 11:52). There the charge leading to woe, was this, that they neither entered into the kingdom themselves nor failed to hinder those who were so entering! It is a type of evil, whether in scribe, or Babylon, literal or mystery in kind.

As for the one, historical Babylon, so for the other, mystery Babylon, which reaches forward to Rome's ultimate fall, there is a just and a devoutly apt end. Many remain, despite Revelation 18:4, within the bounds of this mystery entity, which though centred in Rome, has many intoxicated with her potions, her charms and her deceits. Thus the command to  COME OUT OF HER becomes the opposite, as if the command were rather to lie with her, and the word of God were precisely countermanded by the brilliance and sophistication of the dupers, transmitting the results to the duped.

Accordingly, the World Council of Churches, keen on Roman participation, the Uniting Church, equally keen on lustrous closeness to Romanism, and a multitude of participants in the same spirit of intoxicated licence, which as for the drugged, allows new morals, new doctrines, new tolerances - like a piston with a toleration of one millimetre given one of a centimetre, permitting wobble and early collapse, proceed on their own way. They refuse to leave this spirit of compromise and disorder, indolent continuation and satellite circling about the spirit of the thing, its fraud, its luxury of self-indulgence and its treachery to Jesus Christ (cf. I Corinthians 4-5, Jude, II John, Romans 16:17). His name they continue to use. However, some go further with new additions, some ever are increasing, some leave the basis altogether, and invent new gods, dropping even the name, though keeping some of the aspects selectively, satellites of satellites.

Thus, for some, the Christ is left, or turned entirely into a man-made figment (as in II Corinthians 11),  the Lordship forgotten in the sheer wantonry of a 'toleration' which know no truth except its own thrust of spiritual lust, being merely rebellion re-labelled, along the lines of Romans 1:17ff... In another field, this resembles what reputedly has been in the case in New Zealand, in the case of one food distribution company, thus spreading the produce of China under a false name.

So do many trust in the patter, and ignore the pollution, and stay put, leaving neither Romanism nor satellite status about her, or the same spirit of apparent drugged, insensibility to spiritual reality. In this way, compromise becoming the stain, more of it becomes the mainsail, and before long the ships are all at sea, the people not playing the role in the testimony. Carried afar off, they become troops pre-occupied, not in service for the athletics to come, the wars to follow, thereby starving through their absenteeism, the forces of obedience, sometimes even indulging in separation from these^*2A, if not formally, then informally. Yet it is all part of the divine plan, in which ALL things are tried, all are tested, and many who are last will be first, and the first last.

Let us now move back in time, to gain more perspective in this total affair.

There is indeed much to learn of the historical Babylon, prototype and prominent illustration, distinct parallel, to the unfolding mystery which was to continue past that ancient paradigm to the lap of Rome as in Revelation 17-19.

HISTORICAL BABYLON

As to this historical Babylon, then, which suddenly lost power in an overthrow of Belshazzar as in Daniel 5, to it also, it came: its end, its due terminus. Just as it did, so it received. In Jeremiah 50:61-63, we see some of the parallels to the plight and lot of the Roman part of Mystery Babylon, in its terminal day. The prelude was an excellent illustration of the culmination. Thus in Jeremiah the proclamation of doom in 50:54 resembles that in Revelation 18:21-24. It is final, measured, total.

As Rome, in Revelation, receives results not least because of her treatment of the saints of God, His people, so in Jeremiah, Babylon receives the summed up result of her atrocities against Jerusalem and accordingly,  its temple (Jeremiah 51:24-25,29,34-35,44,49, 50:29-34). As Babylon destroyed physically much in Jerusalem, appointed city of testimony, so Rome destroyed much spiritually seeking to enter the kingdom, turning them aside like the scribes of Christ's own day (Luke 11:52, cf. SMR pp. 1032 -1088H, and *1). She also deployed things physical, such as the cause of the shedding of the blood of the saints (Revelation 17:6). The parallels are enormous, portentous, potent.

Not from Babylon will be taken (Jeremiah 51:26) "a stone for a corner, nor a stone for a foundation," but she will be desolate. SHE will be used for NOTHING in the plan of salvation, in the Lord's intervention in and for this earth, to bring structure to salvation, basis for belief, consummation to preparation, the Messiah to His mandate. Nothing was her contribution and nothing is her lot.

By contrast, and famously, in Psalm 118:22-24, and Isaiah 28:16, the MESSIAH IS the foundation, the stone on which those who look in trust, will find no shame. HE comes to Israel, through Bethlehem (Micah 5:1-3), for while most had fallen, many had not, and the Lord keeps to His planned beneficence, to  do it. Thus to Babylon, to her, troubled as Israel also has been, however, no such glory would come, only desolation and it is precisely this which is the lot of the Roman 'mystery Babylon' in Revelation 18.  There is deserved desolation, final ruin and a thrust to the earth of what had spurious glory, furious power and gross desecration on its way through mounds of slain flesh, to doom.

Infamously, in the broader container unit of Mystery Babylon, only its last face that of Rome, just as this at last  is dismissed with a stone with her judgment attached (Revelation 18), so was historical Babylon dismissed to the eternal depths (Jeremiah 51). The parable is the same: the stone, its heaviness, its condemnation read or written upon it, cast away, cast into deep waters, river or sea itself, cast never to rise. Daring to dabble, though enabled, by a spirit of triumphalism, Rome is ditched with a desolation the complete opposite, though intensively apposite! So was historical Babylon. They form a message, a doublet, a coupling, a calamity with the one name, Mystery Babylon, the one the bearer of the name, the other its extension.

As with the scope of Rome, not at the first ruined or ruinous, but gradually coming of age in her harlotry over several centuries, there was of course a time when, before her fatal and sustained fall, when there was hope, so was it with historical Babylon. Each had opportunities. Neither responded at length. Both insisted, persisted ruinously both to their victims, spiritual and physical, and to themselves! Hence their sobering end!

The Lord is great in trying, and testing, and when mercy and remedy is despised, bringing to judgment, sometimes with a patience all but incredible; yet it is there (Psalm 103). It is when the very cords of mercy are cut (Proverbs 1), that justice falls. How often did the Lord give Israel opportunity to escape the devastation which came in 587 B.C. as in Jeremiah 1-17; but she did not heed, as attested in II Chronicles 36! Hence came destruction from Babylon in its lust for which it in turn duly paid; yet in mercy still, the Lord affixed a time, after which thousands of Israel did return from their exile in Babylon, as in Ezra and Nehemiah, and the Lord used the predicted Cyrus, as prophecy predicted and archeology confirms, to send them back home complete with precious temple furnishings. Indeed, that Temple was even rebuilt.

With Babylon also, there was a time when the Lord was still calling her, but she did not listen, and still again, did not. Thus we read in Jeremiah 51:9, the delightfully surprising words, "We would have healed Babylon, but she is not healed." To think that this hideous mess of spirituality and idolatry and godlessness and cruelty and religion and religiosity was ONCE in line even to be healed! How great is the mercy of the Lord and how intensively must a person seek for Him, who would have all to be reconciled to Himself and come to a knowledge of the truth (Colossians 1:19ff., I Timothy 2, II Corinthians 5:17ff.).

Let therefore other nations, and individuals alike, heed. Opportunities sometimes come as if they were families, inseparable; but this is not time for intoxication, but sobriety, to use these with wisdom. Not only the final judgment, but intervening aspects appear. As far as salvation, redemption, restoration to God is concerned, the end is sudden and unexpected (I Thessalonians 5:1ff.).

The time is coming, but opportunity is going. But let us revert to the spread of history about the spirit of Babylon.

THE SPIRIT OF BABYLON

Thus the mystery Babylon of Revelation 17 is so designated because there is a long historical lineage, and a standardised type of history to her, which Rome, the mask at the end, the death mask, merely typifies. It was so in the case of the city and imperial centre of Babylon, overturned in the 6th century BC, and that name and fame is congealed into the imperial day of Rome. But the spirit of the thing goes back even further. What IS the spirit of the thing ? It is one of cumulative aggression, power seeking, glorying where there is no glory, and giving blasphemy just where there is glory. It is a regime of victimisation, using religious grounds not least, which even dares to stretch out its hand to what bears the name of God, though it be fallen, as spiritually was Israel before its ruin BY Babylon (cf. Jeremiah 5:30-31).

It is a case of what the word of God called an "astonishing and horrible thing," which had been committed; for the

	"prophets prophesy falsely, and the priest rule by their own power;
	and My people love to have it so. But what will you do in the end ?"

The infection is total, relapse is irremediable, horror is synthetic, party on party fortifies, each one the other, in inglorious synthesis, till what might have continued and corrected, is itself so warped and mired that there is no way. THEREFORE only judgment remained.

So is it likewise in the mother of harlots situation, in the feature day of Rome: for not only is there evil, but there is evil-production, with new production units spawned on the way!

Both the mystery and the historical Babylon share a manifest manner, spirit and doom, exercised oppression with cruelty and a sense of irrevocable self-determination, as if infallible, and so haughtily dismissed correction.

This spirit reaches right back to Eden. What was the summary of the devil's desire but this: that he should show that God is only a part of the show, the living God of creation, kindness and love; that he, the devil has inside information and should be followed, EVEN IF, should his information be wrong, spiritual death and whatever other horror goes with it, should follow. He is the ultimate con, the final trickster, the quintessence of propaganda, the minimalist in evidence, the sawney and solicitous seducer bringing on the horror of dissonance, deviousness, clash of creation with its optimum, crash of creation to its ruin.

Where innocence magnified the matter many times, before sin entered mankindl, there was this unwarranted fall, this failure to consult evidence, this persistence in following the flaunting, self-vaunting devil, as he proposed gratuitous and vainglorious evil instead of the name of God. Thus he pretended and offered ludicrous power to the pride of man, and certain folly to those given all things at Eden, but now, through his ministry and their misfeasance, to lose Eden itself. So did the spirit of Babylon start at the beginning, and manifest itself in empire and Church-State synthesis, in both the historical and the mystery type. It had a beginning. It comes to an end. Liberty enabled the former; justice brings the latter. Mercy is skipped in the assault, itself misused, as if nothing but death were the desire. Indeed, of death there has been much on the way, through this spirit of Babylon.

ALL the blood of the saints is to be found in the various expressions of this spirit, Babylon its exemplar, Rome its finale (Revelation 18:24). At the first, it was the devil in person who set himself about achieving disasters for mankind, the creation of the God of truth and creation, whom he aspires to displace, now as before, as at the first, so in the epochal Babylons. In the finale, it is a Rome with itself a

"dwelling place for demons, a prison for every foul spirit, and a cage for every unclean and hated bird,"

which sees the end of the matter (Revelation 18).

Some have escaped not only these two in their infamy, but all the various innovations with the same spirit and the same design. Praise God for that; but strait, narrow, confining, not slack in construction, is the gate, and narrow the way which leads to life everlasting. It opens freely, but admits no load, sin stripped with autonomy at the outset, for God does not cease to be God because man sinned; nor does He cease now to be Redeemer, to annul the guilt, cover the penalty, and propel into a purer life procured for man as from the first meant, and now to the last offered not for self-trumpeting glorification, but for the penitent for whom God only is their necessary, present and all-time refuge. Tests do not fail. The Lord knows who are His own (II Timothy 2:19).

Australia is about to have a new kind of test, for itself, though it has nibbled at this fruit long enough.

AUSTRALIA^*4 AND BABYLON

STATECRAFT TO VOID OFFENCE BY VOIDING RELIGIOUS EXPRESSION - CALL IT EQUAL RIGHTS FOR ALL - BUT ACTUALLY BRINGING NO RELIGIOUS FREEDOM RIGHTS FOR ANY, EXCEPT FOR THE STATE WHICH SETS UP ITS OWN RELIGION AND JUDGES ALL BY IT: this is the test.

 What thus fits the ultimate concepts of the State, that is one side of the new religious coin; what does not so fit, that is the other.  It is then the State which rules religion, possibly by pretending that its peculiar concerns, maybe God, maybe not, but plenty of people none of whom must be troubled at all by anything anyone says about religion, right religion, wrong religion: this is the core of it. The idol maker is the State, before which all must bow. The idol is people, a form of humanism. People are defined as non-receptors of what they do not like at the ideational, ideological, religious, doctrinal, dogmatic level. They must by astonishing clairvoyance it is seemingly found, not have to put up with that. Instead they must put up or shut up; be silent or scramble their ideological eggs, till nobody finds anything disagreeable in the slushy mush. Internet, beware!

Any such treachery to be faced down, it is this. If anyone or any State wants to state or imply that no religion is (or perhaps even can be) the ultimate truth, and that HENCE all must now cease to act as provisional partisans of this or that, and be subject to correction if they go beyond this probation situation for a given religion, then that IS the religion of the State. It is an informal agnosticism, allied to an obvious humanism, so that, to use the apostle Paul's denunciation of any such thing,

	"measuring themselves by themselves, and comparing themselves among themselves,
	they are not wise,"

II Corinthians 10:12.

Making man the measure of man (like making a metre stick the measure of a metre stick, and remaining wholly in ignorance of what the measurement actually is, in reality rather than by rule) is inhuman. If you start by such an assumption, you PROPOSE a metre as measuring something you want, and then use it, with NO grounds for the choice and  no effort to establish reality! It is mere impertinence before the truth. If it fines for departure from this foolish rule, then it merely asserts its own religion, as demi-god, pseudo-divinity and anybody's fool. To follow such things is not wise. To instal them is a special kind of madness (Hosea 9:7), a spiritual one. You have pandemics physically; you also find this sort of intemperance spiritually. It can spread like algae bloom upon the waters!

Such a device^*3, with whatever galling and appalling phrases which deceive and mislead, is the kind of thing which is near, and man, this or that one, or woman or child, or nation or race, this is to become the criterion of allowable speech. Does something 'hurt' ? Do you not find it palatable ? DOWN with it then! This is SO, in prospect, BECAUSE the government would want to invent a a religion of this kind, where such results flow from its concepts of the ultimate, with which its laws would concur.

Thus would an independent people, fighting for liberty in two world wars, simply give-in to a bunch of lawless inventors, dictating a religion, whether directly or indirectly, to supersede all liberties, and to limit all religions either to inarticulate blithering, or speechifying platitudes, till none finds anything wrong at all, except perhaps the vacuum.

Then we could have a new Babylon of our own, a hypocritical, imperious, delirious, departmentally controlled, universalised and yet particularised, pseudo-papal piece of mixed pretence and pretension, which can give lands to those who first occupy any of them, praise to anything it seeks to elevate, prison to any who do not concur, and fines to weaken those who prefer reason, evidence, proof, grounds in history for conviction, and empirical confirmation, and not a wave of feeling in exchange for liberty.

NOTES

*1 See SMR pp. 1068 -1072. In 1302 the famous Unam Sanctam 'bull' was issued, elevating the papacy to all-conquering heights, and its blasphemies to the uttermost. In so doing (Matthew 23:8-10), it divorced itself utterly, categorically and boisterously from the Church of Jesus Christ, fulfilling but once more the dictum, that he who exalts himself will be humbled. When it is of so much, so concentratedly, so grandiosely,  that it exalts itself (cf. SMR pp. 911ff., 1032 -1088H), Revelation 18-19 shows us (cf. SMR pp. 946ff.), how far down its doom may deposit it,

	when judgment comes,
	when trials are over,
	when God who knows all, applies truth,

where mercy being despised in new doctrine and illicit greatness for man,
 "the judgment of God is according to truth", an unenviable position for sinners,
such as all men are and have been, except the incarnation of deity Himself, Jesus Christ.

*1A

See for example, Loraine Boettner's Roman Catholicism pp. 385-389.

*2

See Ancient Words ...Ch. 14, and SMR pp. 911ff..

*2A

See The Biblical Workman Appendix III. See also Light of Dawn ... Ch. 2. The term 'literal' may with and for confusion, be used to disguise a whole heap of semantic trifling, very like a smoke screen. This latter reference analyses this pocket of darkness, and shows the necessity to be clear and straightforward, not only in the obviously material but the immaterial, that is the spiritual which in a logical sense is far from immaterial!

*3

See Freedom, The Nation, The Internet, and the Next Generation Ch. 1, Ch. 4 above and Mystery of Iniquity.

For what reason requires, see for example,

SMR, TMR,

Deity and Design, Designation and Destiny, together with

RELIGION, RELIGIOSITY AND REALITY IN CHRIST

LIGHT DWELLS WITH THE LORD'S CHRIST

WHO ANSWERS RIDDLES

AND WHERE HE IS, DARKNESS DEPARTS.

*4

See Ch. 2 above.