Babylon - A Mystery Revealed Part 2. Sam Soleyn

Transcription

1 1 8/13/2008 1:11 PM Babylon - A Mystery Revealed Part 2 Sam Soleyn In our discussion of the harlot of Revelation 17 and 18, Mystery, Babylon, is being revealed. Many people at this moment are sort of just tossing back in forth in the wind calling American 'Babylon', or Europe 'Babylon', or just trying to find their way. And in these wild speculations we can find no reason to rest or to be secure. The word says, You will know the truth and the truth will set you free. What is happening in our day and in our time, is that we're seeing that the method by which Scripture has been interpreted, which is either logic and reason on one hand, or just the kind of opinions that people think others will agree with, on the other. That whole system is falling down. What is required and what is emerging in it's place is the understanding that comes from God as a gift of wisdom and revelation. For the longest while people have thought that hearing from God is something of a figment of peoples imagination and that anyone who purportedly heard from God was someone in dire need of psychiatric care. Well that assumption, those statements, are now catching up with the ones who have made them because what we're seeing is the wisdom and the revelation that comes from God and the process by which it comes as the hearing of God, is entirely supplanting this whimsical way we've had of assuming things to be true because they made rational sense or that we agreed with them without even the support in rational tenants. What is happening in the place of it now of course is wisdom and revelation is coming from God, and by this the Scriptures are being opened to us. In the previous message, identifying the woman of Revelation 17, we looked at the contrast between the harlot, Babylon, and the Bride, the New Jerusalem. The contrast found in the 17th chapter of Revelation and again in the 21st chapter; one presenting the harlot, the other presenting the Bride. Now let's fill in some of the details of what we have seen. We have already seen that it was the captivity in Babylon that the enemy used to try to extinguish the Holy Seed, and this is a type of drinking the blood of the saints. We traced it back to Abel and saw that the first murder ever committed was a religious murder. Now let's pick up some things that begin to show how this woman moves through history, how this mystery is revealed with more and more depth, and with more and more texture as history advances. In verse 9 of Revelation 17, it says, This calls for a mind with wisdom. The seven heads are seven hills on which the woman sits. They are also seven kings. Five have fallen, one is, and another is yet to come and when he does he will remain for a little while. Now when he says, The seven heads on which the woman sits are seven hills, and then again he says, they are also seven kings. What he's showing us here is that there is a particularized use of this imagery, this symbol, of the seven heads. Now you'll remember reading earlier on, in this very chapter, that the woman sits on a beast that has seven heads and

2 2 8/13/2008 1:11 PM ten horns. Just for a point of interest, you'll find the same beast referred to again in Revelation 13, 1-3, seven heads and ten horns. Let's make a distinction here; the beast on which the woman sits is of course different from the woman herself who sits on it and raises the cup that contains the blood of the saints. The woman sitting astride the beast gives us the understanding that shes able to use the power of the beast, on which she sits, for her own purposes. Now it tells us the seven heads of the beast on which the woman sits stands for a city of seven hills. Now this historically has been and is a classic reference to Rome. So not only does the woman named Babylon sit on a beast, but now we know something of one of the manifestations of this beast in history. You remember that Daniel, when he had a vision, Daniel saw four great beasts coming up out of the sea in Daniel 7. One was like a lion, the other like a bear, and the other like a leopard, and then the fourth had seven heads and ten horns. Now John saw the same beast and records it in Revelation 13; the beast coming up out of the sea. In Johns case though, in Revelation, he spoke of one beast, not four. But he said, The beast I saw resembled a leopard, a bear, and a lion. The three beasts of Daniel that proceeded the fourth were a lion, a bear, and a leopard. In Johns case, he sees the order of these previous three backward from the way Daniel sees them; Daniel sees a lion, a bear, and a leopard; John sees a leopard, a bear, and a lion. And the question is why, what's the difference? The answer is of course, Daniel is looking forward into history. 700 years separate the writing of the book of Daniel from the book of Revelation and as Daniel is looking forward into history, the beast nearest to him is the lion, the next one is the bear, and the most distant and closer to Johns time is of course the leopard. John is looking backward through history and the beast nearest to him, in time, is the leopard; further back the bear, and the most distant the lion. In both cases, three of these beasts have already risen, the fourth one is the one with ten horns and seven heads. Now because of that there is a family relationship between these previous kingdoms and the one that is to come. So when John is writing and he says, The seven heads are seven hills on which the woman sits, and then right after that he goes on and he says, And they are also seven kings. Five have fallen, one is, and one is yet to come, and then he goes on to say, And there is an eighth king to come, the beast who once was and now is not, is an eighth king and he belongs to the seven and is going to his destruction. Then he says, The ten horns you saw are ten kings who have not yet received their kingdom. So he's using the seven heads here to mark out for us where things are in history, not that they are the fulfillment of the final event, that will be a global kingdom that has seven heads (or seven systems) and ten kings ruling over these systems. But John is marking out where he is in history looking backward and looking forward. But the importance of this is that he uses the seven heads as a symbol of seven hills and also a symbol of seven kings. Well you'll readily admit seven hills and seven kings are very different. So this is an 'excerpted out' prophetic utterance which is meant to tell us something. Now heres what it's meant to tell us: The seven hills was a common reference, in the days of the New Testament, to the city of Rome and the reference came from a writing by the Latin poet Virgil who chronicled the development of Rome from the time when it's great ancestor Aneos, left the burning city of Troy and through his journeys made his way to the natural fortifications of the seven hills of Rome. And everyone knew that this was a reference to Rome, because it was prominently referred to in the poem Inead which was commissioned by Octavius, the nephew of Julius Caesar, and was written by the poet Laureate of Rome and some would say the greatest poet ever of the Roman civilization, the poet Virgil.

3 3 8/13/2008 1:11 PM So this was not some 'off the beaten path', hidden manuscript or document off to the side; it very proudly traced the history, from the burning city of Troy to the establishment of the early settlement of Rome in and between the seven hills. So here, when it says the seven heads stands for seven hills, he's tying in the beast of Daniel and the Revelation, with Rome. And indeed, one of the three great beasts that proceeded the fourth, one of the three is a reference to the Roman empire. The first one is a reference to the Persian empire, the second is a reference to the Greek empire, and the third is a reference to the Roman empire. The fourth, of course, is the final compendium of this evil, counterfeit to the kingdom of God, moving through time and space. Now, with that understanding, one asks the question, Why Rome? Why is Rome the beast on which the woman sits? Well you see, the woman by herself has no power, that's why she has to commit adultery with kings. The civilizations of mankind believe that the woman has the right to say who is God, that's the power that she has; the right to declare someone is God, but she has no power. So she sits on the beast, the beast has power. The beast represents, throughout history, various kinds of kingdoms together with their kings. The one thing that makes a king a king, is that he has power. Why would the harlot commit adultery with the kings? In every harlotry there is an exchange, something for something. What do the kings want from the harlot? Well, when you have power, the thing you lack is glory; you want to legitimize the use of your power and make it glorious. Power without glory has no longevity, it doesn't remain. When you have consumed all that you can consume, when you've decked yourself out as a king in all of the finery of kingliness, when you have partaken of every vice and of every available opportunity to satisfy the flesh that you have, what is left? Really nothing. So you think about immortality, you want glory. The woman promises to be able to enshrine the kings in glory because religion is what decides who is and who is not God. The seduction of the Roman kings is very plain in this matter because in exchange for the power of Rome, the harlotry of false religion called the Roman emperors 'gods'. To the point where when the Christians in the first century were being executed in the arenas in Rome, the crowds would commonly scream, Kill the atheist, kill the atheist! Well why would they call them atheists? The answer is that the Roman kings, the emperors, believed themselves to be gods because Roman religion called them gods and the Christians did not believe that the Roman emperors were gods. So as unbelievers in the godhood, in the deity of the Roman emperors, they were qualified to be called atheists; those who did not believe in the gods. So, with that in mind, the prostitution seduces the kings into the belief that religion declares them to be gods. You remember the case of Herod, who was told that he was a god. Now even though he knew better, he said, Well, I believe I am a god. Of course he was struck down and the worms devoured him. The Roman kings were not necessarily struck down, religion routinely called them gods and made them objects of veneration and worship among the people; there were temples to Roman emperors because of their status among the people as deities. In fact Octavius himself created quite a stir among the priestly class when he took for himself the title Pontafus Maximus, the ultimate bridge between the gods and humans and he of course claimed that he himself was a god. But what does the woman get in exchange for this flattery? Well she gets what she needs and doesn't have; kings have power, and that's what she needs. If she is going to conduct warfare against the saints, she cannot do that out of her cloistered existence; she must have the armies of kings do her work for her. The first empire, that as an official policy of the empire, declared Christians as enemies of the state

4 4 8/13/2008 1:11 PM and launched an all out attack on them to exterminate them; the first empire to do that was the Roman empire. It was the Romans who persecuted the Christians. Now in Babylon, the Jews were not being exterminated, if the attack by Satan against them has succeeded they would have been perverted from their faithfulness to God and the line that would bring the Holy Seed into the world, that would bring Christ into the world, would have been lost and the purposes of God would have been frustrated. But the enemy, still wanting to destroy the saints, drinking their blood from the beginning from the blood of righteous Abel; we see the pattern of how false religion wages war and opposes the truth and those who are the embodiments of the truth. He was not content now to simply try to seduce them as he did in Babylon. Now, by the Roman connection, he wants to annihilate them. And of course this foreshadows the modus operandi of the enemy as the age comes to a close. When he's no longer dealing with the Roman empire, but he's dealing with the global empire that he now controls. One of the heads of this global empire is a religious head and it produces a horn and a mouth that speaks blasphemy against the saints and wages war against them and overcomes them for time, times, and half a time. Now God allows this onslaught and allows some success for the purpose of purifying the saints. An interesting exchange takes place in heaven between the LORD and those whose souls are under the altar in heaven and they had been beheaded for the witness of Christ while they lived on the earth. They said to the LORD, How long o LORD, how long will You permit this to happen? 'This' being the execution of the saints, How long will You permit the beast to triumph over the saints? And the LORD's answer was, Until the full number of your brothers have come in. So the question is, why? Well you see, the saints who had been beheaded for the witness of Christ could see that as this global kingdom was forming up, they could see that it was connected to all the kingdoms before that had spilled the blood of the saints. How would they know this? Simple, their heads were cut off by these kings and these kingdoms through which these kings exercised their power. So when they see this new global kingdom coming up, controlling the whole earth, they know in advance that more bloodshed is about to happen, more blood is about to be spilled, more will come into the cup that the woman drinks as she sits upon the beast. And so they said to the LORD, being fully aware that the LORD knows what is going to happen, they said to the LORD, Lord, why are You allowing this to happen? Why are You permitting the beast to kill more of Your people? It's not like they don't know how it's going to come out as they see the formation of the beast, as they see the beast become this global kingdom that increasingly tries to control everything. It's not like they don't know how it's going to come out, they know perfectly how it's going to come out and they say, O LORD how long are You going to permit it? And the LORD says, Until the full number of your brethren who are to come in this way, have come in. Now understand this, that there can never be a compatibility between false religion and the children of the truth, there can never be. What then is false religion, how do you define it? Well from the time of Cain and Abel the clearest understanding is, anything that reflects the works of a mans hand, by which he hopes to please God and to make amends for his sins, is false. Anything that reflects the sacrifice of a holy or righteous one for an unworthy and an unrighteous one, relates to the truth. In the case of the Old Testament, that which typified holiness and righteousness was a lamb. In the case of the New Testament, it's not just typified, it's actual; Jesus is the Lamb and He is holy

5 5 8/13/2008 1:11 PM and He is righteous and He dies a substitutionary death for all. So in this exchange, one who is saved by the blood of the Lamb does not offer a sacrifice by which he himself is atoned for, or his sins are remitted. Indeed, he recognizes that he has no ability to do that, and so he depends entirely on the offering on the cross. False religion is not content with that, it always has to remind you of how much of a sinner you are and how great the need is for you to pay for your sins. Literally, the hold, the hook, that false religion has upon people is the continuation to string them along through feelings of guilt based in past acts and actions. The blood of the Lamb is supposed to wash, and to keep on washing us, so that we're cleansed. Now the obvious question is: Now can we just live any way we want to? The answer is: God forbid. That's typically the attitude of someone who is either not a believer or is very young in his understanding of the things of God, because God will change you from glory to glory. So false religion is anything that offers the works of what a man can do in atonement for his sins and in payment for a relationship with God. And the truth is that you can never do anything to save yourself, God has to save you. Now having saved you, He will work a work of holiness and perfection in you; He wills and He does. And He will change you by that, if you will let Him. So that's the framework, one is represented by Babylon, mystery Babylon is false religion and the city Jerusalem is reflective of the truth; those who come to God and abide in His peace forever. Let us continue this discussion. Until next time, I'm Sam Soleyn and I'll see you again. Bye bye.