No place in the Bible is described in worse terms than Babylon, a city that birthed an empire that ruled the entire civilised world. In every place it conquered it brutally imposed its worldview. Babylon stood for everything that was debased and immoral, but it was especially contemptible to God because it killed His people.
God called Babylon a “pleasure-loving kingdom, living at ease and feeling secure, (saying), ‘I am the only one, and there is no other. I will never be a widow or lose my children’ (Isa. 47:8 NLT). Despite thinking itself invincible and god-like it disappeared out of history, just as God said it would, when it fell to the Medo-Persians, almost exactly 2,560 years ago (October 539 BCE).
Fast forward to the New Testament and Babylon pops up again. Whatever regime was at war with God’s people was referred to as Babylon (eg Rome in I Pet. 5:13-14). In Revelation we get an image of Babylon as a heavily bejewelled woman sitting atop a strange beast covered in blasphemies against God. In her hand was a goblet full of everything obscene and immoral. She was drunk with the blood of Christians and on her forehead was written: “Babylon the Great, Mother of All Prostitutes and Obscenities in the World” (Rev. 17:3-6 NLT).
John was being showed this spectre while he was “in the Spirit”, indicating that we are looking at a spiritual dimension unseen by the human eye. He was looking at a pervasive and deceptive spirit power that was behind all the evil opposed to God that existed in the world and that still exists in the world today. She is riding a beast of anti-Christian government so that she disappears and then reappears throughout history, in a repetitive cycle.
At the end of earth’s history she will reappear far more majestic, far more powerful, far more threatening than she has ever appeared before. This whole period described in Revelation is terrifying, if you are not a Christian!
The Babylonian harlot of Revelation is darkness – the very darkness that Jesus came into the world to destroy. “For this is how God loved the world: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. God sent his Son into the world not to judge the world, but to save the world through him.
“There is no judgment against anyone who believes in him. But anyone who does not believe in him has already been judged for not believing in God’s one and only Son. And the judgment is based on this fact: God’s light came into the world, but people loved the darkness more than the light, for their actions were evil. All who do evil hate the light and refuse to go near it for fear their sins will be exposed. But those who do what is right come to the light so others can see that they are doing what God wants. (John 3:16-21 NLT).
So Christ came to destroy this spirit of Babylon, those who love darkness, from this earth and this time is soon. You get to choose today if you want to be on Jesus’ side or the side of the harlot – if you want to win or lose.