One of the most famous cities of the Bible,
Babylon, an empire that dominated the ancient world as a center of trade,
military power, culture and religion.
Babylon, the symbol of wealth and opulence, mystery and intrigue,
decadence and corruption.
Babylon, the imperial city of Hammurabi and of Nebuchadnezzar, its greatest king.
But at its peak, Babylon fell suddenly, in a single night, by the decree of God
Himself.
That was over 2,500 years ago.
Today, Babylon is rising again on the Mesopotamian plain.
Its partial rebuilding has captured the attention of theologians, scholars and
teachers of Bible prophecy alike.
To some, it signals the rise of the dreaded Babylon the Great, foretold in the
book of Revelation.
What relevance does it hold for us today?
And why does the legacy of Babylon continue to fascinate us?
Join us as we explore Babylon, past, present and future.
Hello, I'm Neal Earle.
For years, as a minister and as a historian, I have been fascinated with the
ancient Near East, especially as it relates to the Bible.
You know, when we think of the places where the events of the Bible occurred,
we usually think of Bethlehem, where Jesus was born, Nazareth,
where He grew up, or perhaps Jerusalem, where He was crucified.
But many famous events of the Bible took place in a land hundreds of miles from
where Jesus lived, in a part of the world called Mesopotamia.
Mesopotamia means the land between the rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates.
Today, much of ancient Mesopotamia lies within the borders of the modern country
of Iraq.
Mesopotamia is renowned as the cradle of civilization.
Some of its cities date back to the very beginning of recorded history.
Possibly the most famous of all is Babylon.
Located on the banks of the Euphrates, about 60 miles south of present day
Baghdad, Babylon has had a long and fascinating history.
Today, most of ancient Babylon is nothing but crumbling ruins and broken remnants
beneath the sands of time.
So, why this fascination with a long-gone empire and a decayed city?
Well, there's a story here, an intriguing story, and it's told through the hundreds
of historical and religious texts that have been uncovered by archaeology.
This information, put together with the Bible, makes the story of ancient Babylon
an important one for us today.
Because in the Bible, Babylon is more than merely a place on the map.
Babylon symbolizes an idea, a philosophy, a way of thinking opposed to God.
That ideology, based on human reason, human pride and arrogance, often expressed
as self-indulgent materialism, is still with us today.
That attitude caused God to intervene in the affairs of ancient Babylon.
As we'll see, the Bible writers chronicled and preserved the story of ancient Babylon
to give us insight into our world today and far into the future.
But before we consider what lies ahead, let's examine what history can reveal to
us, for history holds the key to our future.
Our story begins long before there was a city named Babylon.
It begins with a group of travelers who made their way into the sun-baked plain of
southern Mesopotamia over 2,000 years before the birth of Jesus.
The Bible tells us these wanderers were descendants of the patriarch Noah and his
family.
In the decades following the great flood, they migrated southward along the valleys
of the Tigris and Euphrates.
The book of Genesis tells us that Noah's sons settled in the plain of Shinar.
Shinar is the biblical name for the region later called Babylonia.
Today it's known as southeastern Iraq.
God had wanted Noah's sons to move out and fill the earth.
Instead, they defiantly resolved to unite under their own authority.
They said to each other, come, let us build ourselves a city with a tower
that reaches to the heavens so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be
scattered over the face of the whole earth.
According to the first century historian Flavius Josephus, the leader of these
people was Nimrod, Noah's great-grandson.
The Bible tells us Nimrod was a mighty warrior on the earth.
Under his leadership, the people began to build a great tower.
Nimrod wanted to excite people's awe and wonder.
He wanted to build an empire.
He wanted to hold people together under his authority.
The Tower of Babel, I think, illustrates that purpose perfectly because that's
exactly what they attempt to do there.
They attempt to be creators.
Because when you stop and think of it, Genesis presents creation in terms of
being in the form and nature of God.
And so we become little creators.
And especially in roles of power, they felt that they become creators.
And so if you create something and feel that it is so superior, then in a sense
you can almost see yourself as being a person of destiny, even somewhat divine,
as the ancient rulers often thought of themselves.
To build a tower that would reach to the heavens.
Doesn't this sound familiar?
It's humanity's age-old attempt to try to reach the spiritual through the physical.
Artists have offered their impression of what this tower, the famous Tower of
Babel, may have looked like.
Some of them quite fanciful.
More than likely it was a simple terraced mound of brick and earth, not unlike the
later temple towers known as ziggurats.
Ziggurats are square at the base with sloping step sides leading upward to a
shrine at the top.
The plain of Shinar is flat.
A building just 100 or so feet high can be seen for miles around.
The medieval Tower of Samarra, for example, located north of Baghdad,
is a spiral minaret about 150 feet high.
Its prominence throughout the region serves as a convenient directional marker.
In fact, some medieval travelers thought it was the Tower of Babel.
The Bible tells us that God allowed the builders to work on the tower for a while.
Then He intervened.
The Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building.
The Lord said, If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do
this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.
Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each
other.
So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building
the city.
That is why it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the
language of the whole world.
In a sudden act, God confused the language of the people.
A babble of voices arose on the scaffoldings.
Suddenly the foremen and architects could no longer communicate with the workers.
Panic reigned.
The building of the city and its great tower came to an abrupt halt.
In the Akkadian language, the site of the uncompleted city was known as the Gate of
God.
But the Hebrews named it Babel, based on the Hebrew word meaning to
confuse.
Babylon is merely the Greek mode of spelling the Hebrew Babel.
Either way, Babylon and Babel are one in the same.
And Babylonia referred to the region centered around the city.
The story of the Tower of Babel was designed to teach an important lesson.
God's tolerance of human pride and rebellion has its limits.
And very early we see Babylon becoming a symbol of opposition to God.
In fact, human pride is a consistent theme whenever the Bible mentions Babylon.
The grandiose dreams of the builders of the Tower of Babel makes an important
historical benchmark.
It gives us our first glimpse into a civilization organized against God.
The Tower of Babel was God's first intervention in the history of Babylon.
It wouldn't be the last.
Over two centuries passed.
Then we find Babylon re-emerging on the world scene, this time under the Amorites.
They founded a dynasty there around 2000 B .C.
Historians call this the Old Babylonian Empire.
The most famous king of this empire was a ruler named Hammurabi.
Hammurabi is perhaps best known for his set of laws that have been preserved to
this day.
The famous Code of Hammurabi, one of the first structured systems of law in
history.
The laws are inscribed on a polished black diorite stela, or pillar, over 7 feet
high.
It's topped by a bas-relief showing Hammurabi standing before the sun god
Shemesh, God of Justice.
The stela carries more than 4,000 lines of cuneiform script in the Akkadian language
containing nearly 300 legal provisions.
They cover business, crime, family disputes, agricultural interests and other
matters.
Though the Code invokes some harsh punishments, it did bring law and order to
a land where crime and disorder had long held sway.
Punishment was swift and certain.
Under Hammurabi, Babylon achieved military supremacy in Mesopotamia.
He built an empire of unequal power.
It stretched from the Persian Gulf to the upper reaches of the Tigris River.
Babylon became a leading literary and cultural center, the intellectual capital
of Mesopotamia.
Babylonian civilization was highly advanced.
Mathematical and astronomical texts reveal, for example, that the ancient
Babylonians developed the 60-minute hour and the 360-degree circle.
Hammurabi extended Babylonian rule not only by conquest, but also by trade.
Babylon stood at the crossroads of world commerce and communication.
Caravans brought rare and exotic products from far and wide.
Cloves, indigenous to the Moluccas or Spice Islands of faraway Indonesia,
were among the many luxuries imported.
The enticements of trade and commerce, blended with religion, as we'll see,
have always been key to the success and dominance of the Babylonian system.
Babylon, with its original name meaning Gate of God, was a prominent religious
center, and it boasted some of the most striking temples of the ancient world.
Like most ancient peoples, Babylonians worshipped many gods.
Their religion centered around idolatry.
They feared the forces of nature.
In the barren deserts of Mesopotamia, the margin between survival and prosperity
was a very thin one indeed.
Too little or too much rain could wipe out a whole year's food supply.
The Babylonians worshipped scores of different deities, looking to them for
mercy and protection, conducting intricate and sometimes chilling rituals.
The gods needed appeasing.
In ancient times, whoever controlled the religion controlled the people.
It was no wonder then that the Babylonians believed their king reigned as the earthly
representative of the gods.
They were among the first to fuse religion and politics into a totalitarian mindset.
That mindset has carried on throughout history.
Idolatry permeated every facet of ancient Near Eastern life.
And the problem with this was that the ordinary person was almost completely cut
off from the knowledge of the true God, the God of the Bible.
This we will see is also the Babylonian pattern.
Hammurabi's laws enabled the king to maintain strict control.
After all, Babylon was built on slave labor, and that state required complete
subordination of the individual to its power and its gods.
The ancient monarchs were totalitarian.
While they ruled, they had almost absolute authority because they were the
legislature, the judicial, and the executive branch all tied up in one.
Practically, historically, every king has in a sense set themselves up as a little
god.
But there are very few rulers who recognize God in terms of a power greater
than they are.
Oh, they may use the language, but they see themselves as above the law,
as the key interpreters of the law.
So I always say there are just very few rulers that you could say did not see
themselves as little gods.
Hammurabi forged one of the greatest empires of the ancient Near East.
He laid the basis of a civilization that would endure for more than a thousand
years after his death.
But it was a civilization based on power, prestige, the pursuit of wealth,
and with little knowledge of the creator God.
Even Hammurabi's dynasty could not last forever.
After a reign of more than 40 years, barbaric tribesmen from the mountains in
the east moved in to raid and weaken Babylonia.
A long, drawn-out time of trouble began.
Around 1600 years before Christ, Babylon was sacked and burned by another
people mentioned in the Bible, the Hittites.
The Hittites carried off Babylonian wealth and prisoners to far off Anatolia,
our modern Turkey.
Later, the Assyrians, well-known to readers of the Old Testament, conquered
Babylon.
Centuries of political chaos would prevail before Babylon would rise again as an
independent city.
The first great age of Babylon had ended.
Ancient Assyria was one of Babylon's powerful rivals.
This massive, human-headed, winged bull is striking testimony to the power of
Assyria.
The Assyrian Empire was a huge military machine, widely regarded as one of the
most brutal and oppressive kingdoms in history.
In 689 BC, Assyria's hammer blows inflicted the worst humiliation yet upon
Babylon.
In an attempt to throttle a Babylonian resurgence, the Assyrian hordes under King
Sennacherib pillaged and burnt Babylon.
They threw its rubble into the Euphrates.
The Assyrians flooded the city.
Its very foundations were destroyed.
Sennacherib boasted, I made its destruction more complete than that by a
flood, that in days to come the site of the city and its temples and gods might
not be remembered.
I completely blotted it out with floods of water and made it like a meadow.
Sennacherib left Babylon thinking he had dealt the death blow.
He was painfully mistaken.
Babylon does not go down easily.
She would rise again to claim her revenge.
And that's precisely what happened.
The site of Babylon was eventually occupied and rebuilt by the Chaldeans.
It was the Chaldeans who finally humbled proud Assyria.
It was in the year 612 BC when the Chaldeans stormed the walls of Nineveh,
Assyria's capital city.
Nineveh fell.
It was utterly destroyed.
Today the ruins of Nineveh attest to the near total destruction of that ancient
city.
So complete was Nineveh's disappearance that it wasn't rediscovered until just 150
years ago.
Assyria's power was broken.
But under the Chaldeans Babylon was back with a vengeance.
And here is a major clue to biblical history and prophecy.
Babylon, this great city, this great symbolic nemesis of God emerges repeatedly
from the abyss of destruction.
She reappears again and again on the stage of history, powerfully influencing the
course of civilization.
The Assyrian collapse left a vacuum which both Egypt and Babylon sought to fill.
A thousand years after the golden age of Hammurabi, Babylon at last had a chance to
regain the prominence and prestige that had once been hers.
It was the summer of 605 BC.
Well-armed Babylonian forces struck a sudden and decisive blow against the
Egyptians.
Their forces met at Carchemish in northern Syria.
The battle cost Egypt its control of the Middle East.
Now, almost a millennium after Hammurabi, Babylon once again held undisputed power
in the ancient Near East.
Yes, Babylon was back, but could a resurgent, rebuilt Babylon avert the fate
that had already overtaken Nimrod's city and Hammurabi's empire?
Time would tell.
Babylon, past, present, and future.
The Egyptian army of Pharaoh Necho II clashed with Babylon in 605 BC at
Carchemish on the Euphrates River.
The fighting was fierce.
Egyptian losses were staggering.
The battle cost Egypt control of the Middle East.
The general who routed the Egyptians was the 25-year-old crown prince of Babylon.
He would later become Babylon's greatest king, the legendary Nebuchadnezzar.
Babylon would achieve its greatest glory under this powerful ruler.
Nimrod, Hammurabi, and now Nebuchadnezzar.
The Old Testament rings with the terror of his name.
Under his rulership, Babylon became the most powerful metropolis of its time,
envied, feared by friend and foe alike.
Nebuchadnezzar the king, from what we can tell, is a composite of various aspects of
human beings.
He's powerful and ruthless when he needs to be.
He also, though, is a human being that has his doubts, his questions.
He can't answer all the questions, so he tries to pull around him those that
at least can answer some of those questions.
And if they don't answer them very well, he eliminates them.
And that would be true of many of those Oriental despots.
And Nebuchadnezzar is like that.
He's also a builder.
He wants his name carried on, so he builds Babylon, but he also builds outside of
Babylon.
Again, he rebuilds temples.
He does all these kinds of things in an effort to please the gods, because he's
not always sure what the gods are going to do.
Even though he might rule human beings, he can't rule everything.
And so you see this composite in one individual.
Now, we can't delve into his mind.
We can only see what he attempted to do and create and try to figure out what
motivates this character.
It was Nebuchadnezzar who conquered Jerusalem in 605 B.C.
During his reign, the kingdom of Judah was reduced to a vassal state.
Five years later, against the advice of the prophet Jeremiah, the Jews rebelled
against Babylon.
Nebuchadnezzar retaliated two years after that by laying siege to Jerusalem,
the holy city of the Jews.
Jerusalem fell in 597 B.C.
At that time, Nebuchadnezzar took the Judean monarch, young King Jehoiachin,
back to Babylon.
He then set up a puppet king, Zedekiah, on the throne of Judah.
All of this is mentioned by the biblical writers, and interestingly enough,
some of these very details are confirmed by inscriptions found in the ruins of
Babylon itself.
This clay tablet from the British Museum, called the Nebuchadnezzar Chronicle,
was translated in 1956.
It records the Babylonian defeat of the Egyptians at Carchemish in 605.
It tells us about Nebuchadnezzar coming to power.
It mentions the capture of Jerusalem and the appointment of Zedekiah as puppet king
in Judah.
This is striking confirmation of some of the most famous events in biblical
history.
But a decade later, Judah was to rebel for the last time.
Jerusalem's puppet king, Zedekiah, plotted with the Egyptians.
Nebuchadnezzar responded with a final devastating attack.
For 18 months, the city was besieged.
Finally, in the summer of 587 B.C., Nebuchadnezzar captured and this time
destroyed Jerusalem and its temple.
He plundered its treasures and carried off most of Judah's remaining population to
Babylon.
The kingdom of Judah ceased to exist.
The Jews became a people of exile.
A poignant record of all of this is found in Psalm 137.
This beautiful song expresses the extreme sadness of the Jewish captives,
crying out for their homeland.
We sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion.
If I forget you, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its king.
May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth.
If I do not remember you, if I do not consider Jerusalem my highest joy.
Babylon was at the height of her glory when the Jewish exiles came streaming in.
At their first sight of Babylon, the captives must have been dazzled.
According to Greek historians, Babylon surpassed in splendor all the
cities of the known world.
Visitors came from many lands to view Babylon's wonders.
Nebuchadnezzar was a great builder as well as a great general.
Like Ramses II in Egypt, like Solomon in Israel.
Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon was a city of magnificent palaces, temples, parks and
gardens.
The sheer size and scale of the city was overwhelming.
Its population was estimated between 100,000 and 200,000.
It was the largest city on earth.
Our detailed knowledge about Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon is the result of
the painstaking work of the German archaeologist Robert Koldewey.
When he began his excavations in 1899, Koldewey's glowing reports were at first
dismissed by his colleagues.
But as his excavations began to uncover the Babylon of the Bible as a historical
reality, his work became the talk of Europe.
Just north of the city, Koldewey discovered piles of beautiful blue-glazed
bricks laying in the sand.
The bricks had once decorated the walls flanking the city's processional way.
Brick was the standard building material of the Babylonians.
Koldewey sent the bricks back to Germany for identification and reassembly.
The results were astounding.
Here, in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, are the actual bricks of Nebuchadnezzar's
time reassembled.
These magnificent lions, for example, were a symbol of the goddess Ishtar,
one of Babylon's major deities.
There were 120 of these flanking the approaches to the massive Ishtar Gate.
This is what the processional way looks like at Babylon today.
The paving stones are the very ones upon which Nebuchadnezzar himself walked.
Its walls have been partially rebuilt by archaeologists, and though they lack the
beautiful glazed brick lions that once adorned them, they still convey an idea of
the magnificence of this famous boulevard.
One man who was impressed by Koldewey's discoveries was the pioneer motion picture
director, D.W.
Griffith.
In 1916, Griffith produced Intolerance, an historical film based on the theme of
man's inhumanity to man.
The centerpiece of Griffith's movie was a spectacular reenactment of life in
Babylon, climaxed by the city's fall.
In the film, Griffith magically brought to the silver screen the magnificence and
grandeur of Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon, a city that had been buried for some 25
centuries.
When we use the phrase, pagan splendor, it could have been coined for ancient
Babylon.
Griffith showed a Babylon of great architectural wonders,
a Babylon teeming with life and vitality, its streets crowded with merchants,
fortune tellers, strolling musicians, money lenders, soldiers, prostitutes,
government officials, bankers, and slaves.
Griffith offered the public its first glimpse of the power and magnificence of
Babylon in its heyday, and Babylon's incredible greed and sensuality.
Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon would dwarf even many of our modern cities in size and
splendor.
Let's try to grasp its immense scale.
Babylon was roughly square in shape.
Divided in half by the Euphrates River, the city was built with precision.
Its broad, straight streets crossed one another at right angles like most cities
today.
Babylon was enclosed by a double defensive wall circled by a moat.
It was the most solidly protected city in the ancient world.
According to one ancient source, Babylon's walls were over 300 feet high
and 85 feet thick.
There was enough space on top to enable a four-horse chariot to turn completely
around.
The Babylonians felt that their walls were impossible to scale or breach.
Defensive towers were positioned at regular intervals.
But Babylon's walls were only the beginning of its wonders.
The processional way was the main north-south avenue of the city.
It was over 70 feet wide, paved with stone and flanked by carved lions.
The magnificent processional way led northward to the great temple dedicated to
the god Marduk.
It was the most impressive street in the ancient world.
This is the Ishtar Gate, magnificent and imposing.
This was one of eight fortified gates of the ancient city.
They named it after Ishtar, the popular goddess of love.
As with the glazed bricks from the processional way, German archaeologists
also shipped these vividly colored bricks back here to the Pergamon and reassembled
this magnificent gate.
The Ishtar Gate was renowned throughout the world, a symbol of Babylon's unrivaled
power and might.
Through it passed the victorious armies of mighty Babylon as they returned home from
distant conquests.
The actual Ishtar Gate is in Berlin.
Tourists at Babylon can view a half-size replica at the entrance to the site.
This was built by the Iraqi government.
Not far from the Ishtar Gate, Nebuchadnezzar built a magnificent palace.
This palace contained five great courtyards surrounded by many apartments
and suites.
Nebuchadnezzar's throne room lay directly to the south of the central courtyard.
Proud Nebuchadnezzar called his palace, the marvel of mankind, the center of the
land, the shining residence, the dwelling of majesty.
This modern reconstruction gives us some idea of what the palace looked like in
Nebuchadnezzar's day.
Modern bricks stamped with the name Saddam Hussein sit atop the ancient bricks
bearing the stamp of King Nebuchadnezzar.
The new bricks substitute for the broken and pilfered bricks that once formed the
upper courses of the ancient palace.
With a little imagination, you can step back in time and enter the palace.
Travel through the main entrance, cross the eastern courtyard into a second
court, and then on into the large central courtyard.
This central courtyard under reconstruction is an open area measuring
200 feet by 180 feet.
Here, 25 centuries ago, walked visiting dignitaries, foreign ambassadors,
court officials, slaves, and exiles.
Just to the south of the central courtyard is Nebuchadnezzar's grand throne room.
Let's have a look inside.
The throne room measures 170 feet by 56 feet.
It compares in size with the famous Hall of Mirrors at Versailles in France.
Upon this dais, partly recessed into the wall, stood the throne of Nebuchadnezzar
himself.
In Berlin's Pergamon Museum is a reconstruction of a glazed brick frieze
from the walls of the throne room.
It gives us a taste of the magnificence of the architecture and decorations of the
royal palace in its heyday.
What a place this must have been.
The effect must have been overwhelming.
And that was precisely the point.
Nebuchadnezzar's public works were designed to imprint the glory of Babylon
and its gods on everyone's mind.
Just to the west of the palace, along the Euphrates River, lay the famous
Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.
It's said that Nebuchadnezzar built the hanging, actually terraced gardens,
to please a favorite wife.
This young queen, unused to the flat, hot Mesopotamian plain, longed for the
cool mountains and forests of her native land.
Until recently, many archaeologists believed that the hanging gardens had been
situated near the Ishtar Gate.
It was there, at the northeast corner of the palace, near the Ishtar Gate,
that Professor Koldewey had discovered an unusual structure.
It was an underground crypt consisting of a series of 14 arched vaults.
Nearby was a unique well with three shafts.
He and later archaeologists concluded that the vaults were constructed to support
some enormous weight, possibly the foundations of the hanging gardens.
But today, many archaeologists believe the vaulted chambers served as a warehouse and
administrative complex, because they found ration lists for Jewish exiles.
The gardens then would have been more logically situated at the other end of the
palace, nearer the river.
Imagine what it must have been like.
Babylon was at its zenith.
Her towering walls were emblazoned with the colorful symbols of a great empire.
Yes, Babylon was impressive, but it was also notorious for decadence and
sensuality.
Cut off from the true God, addicted to commerce and idolatry, Babylon's moral
decadence and corruption plummeted to such a level that Babylon became known as the
cesspool of vice.
That was quite a distinction, especially in the generally licentious climate of the
ancient Near East.
Once again, we see Babylon as a symbol of all that is opposite to the way of God.
Obsessed with their evil pleasures and filled with pride over their great
achievements, the people of Babylon, like their king, drifted inexorably toward
a day of reckoning.
It's easy to see how people could have been seduced by the wealth, power and open
sensuality of Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon.
Through Babylon's wealth and commercial enticements, the people of the ancient
Near East were seduced into serving the gods of Babylon, Marduk and Ishtar.
As we'll see later, the Babylon as described in the book of Revelation is
also an enticing mixture of idolatry and commercial power.
Another dominant landmark of Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon was a massive
seven-stage tower or ziggurat.
This great edifice was reputedly built on the site of Nimrod's original tower of
Babel.
The ziggurat was located about half a mile south of the royal palace.
Standing nearly 300 feet tall, it was about the same height as the Statue
of Liberty in New York Harbor.
The Babylonians call it a Temen Anki, the house that is the foundation of heaven
and earth.
It was topped by a temple covered with blue-glazed bricks.
Nebuchadnezzar boasted, I raised the summit of the tower of stages so that its
top rivaled the heavens.
The attitude of Nimrod was alive and well.
Nothing is left of the ziggurat today.
Only the crumbling brickwork of its base remains.
The tower was long ago quarried for its bricks and is now simply a hole in the
ground.
Opposite the ziggurat stood a huge temple, the Temple of Marduk.
It housed the great statue of Marduk, said to have been made of 22 tons of gold.
He was commonly called Bel, meaning Lord.
From Marduk's shrine, Nebuchadnezzar spread the knowledge of Bel throughout the
ancient Near East.
This is one reason the prophet Jeremiah singles out Marduk in a prophecy
predicting Babylon's downfall.
Babylon will be captured.
Bel will be put to shame.
Marduk, filled with terror.
Her images will be put to shame and her idols filled with terror.
A nation from the north will attack her and lay waste her land.
No one will live in it.
Both men and animals will flee away.
Yes, Babylon looked impregnable.
Its power and its wealth dominated the ancient Near East, but so did its cruelty
and its rank idolatry.
As we saw at the Tower of Babel, God does not forever tolerate human pride
and arrogance.
In his mercy, God tried to warn Nebuchadnezzar.
Nebuchadnezzar began having troubling dreams, but they were dreams of warning
from the creator God himself.
Nebuchadnezzar did not know all was happening.
Neither did anyone in his court, except one, a young Jewish captive,
a man of God named Daniel.
Babylon, past, present and future.
Nebuchadnezzar had built the greatest empire of the ancient Near East.
As a general, he was unsurpassed.
He was also a very shrewd ruler.
When the king's armies had carried Daniel and other prominent citizens of Jerusalem
back to Babylon, Daniel was placed in Nebuchadnezzar's own court.
And ancient kings often chose foreigners to fill those key spots because they are
not the threat to the throne that someone of their own ethnic or national identity
would be.
So you use a foreigner, like a Jew, because you use his ability, but at the
same time you are not threatened by that individual.
Among this select group were Daniel and his three companions, Shadrach,
Meshach and Abednego.
Although they were captives, they remained completely loyal to the true God,
the God of Israel.
Their experiences of standing up to materialism and idolatry are among the
best known stories of the Bible.
When Daniel's three friends refused to worship a golden statue which
Nebuchadnezzar had set up, the enraged king committed them to the famous fiery
furnace.
Then Nebuchadnezzar was furious with Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego and his
attitude toward them changed.
He ordered the furnace heated seven times hotter than usual and commanded some of
the strongest soldiers in his army to tie up Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego and
throw them into the blazing furnace.
So these men, wearing their robes, trousers, turbans and other clothes,
were bound and thrown into the blazing furnace.
The king's command was so urgent and the furnace so hot that the flames of the fire
killed the soldiers who took up Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego.
And these three men, firmly tied, fell into the blazing furnace.
Then king Nebuchadnezzar leaped to his feet in amazement and asked his advisors,
weren't there three men that we tied up and threw into the fire?
They replied, certainly, O king.
He said, look, I see four men walking around in the fire, unbound and unharmed,
and the fourth looks like a son of the gods.
For once outflanked, the astonished Nebuchadnezzar called Shadrach,
Meshach and Abednego to his side.
The fire had not harmed their bodies, nor did they smell of smoke.
In an amazing turnabout, Nebuchadnezzar praised the god who had sent his angel to
rescue them.
He promoted them to high positions in his kingdom.
The relationship between Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar was a strange one indeed.
On one hand there was Nebuchadnezzar, pagan ruler of the known world,
whose dazzling accomplishments rested on military force and slave labor.
On the other, a young Jewish captive brought from his homeland to Babylon,
a servant of the one true God, yet loyal to his new king.
Nebuchadnezzar is presented as being, at least in the book of Daniel,
somewhat sympathetic to the god of Israel and the god of Daniel.
But to call Nebuchadnezzar someone who has placed his faith in the god of Israel and
Daniel, I would say no.
These ancient kings were great politicians and, you know, they made decisions on that
which was based, they felt, in terms of their own favor.
It was while Daniel was captive in Babylon that he and the king began having
disturbing dreams and visions.
God was giving them both insight into the future.
The second chapter of the book of Daniel records one particularly disturbing dream
of Nebuchadnezzar.
Daniel describes it.
You, O king, were watching, and behold a great image, this great image whose
splendor was excellent stood before you, and its form was awesome.
This image's head was of fine gold.
Its chest and arms of silver.
Its belly and thighs of bronze.
Its legs of iron.
Its feet partly of iron and partly of clay.
You watched while a stone was cut out without hands, which struck the image on
its feet of iron and clay and broke them in pieces.
Then the wind carried them away, and the stone that struck the image became
a great mountain and filled the whole earth.
No wonder this dream troubled Nebuchadnezzar.
Daniel told the king both what he had seen and gave him an interpretation,
a revelation from God himself.
The head of gold was Nebuchadnezzar's empire.
The silver, bronze, and part iron, part clay portions of the statue
represented successive kingdoms.
Each was inferior to the one before.
The stone symbolized the ever-ruling kingdom of God, the unseen God who
determines the fate of all kingdoms, including Nebuchadnezzar's.
When Nebuchadnezzar heard this interpretation, he fell on his face before
Daniel.
Once again he praised the God of Israel, but the old arrogance soon reasserted
itself.
The book of Daniel portrays Nebuchadnezzar in the mold of many dictators we've seen
strut across the stage of history.
He was filled with pride and given to fits of rage.
He controlled a great empire, but he couldn't control himself.
Daniel warned Nebuchadnezzar that the God who controlled all the kingdoms of the
earth would humble him if he didn't change his ways.
The warnings fell on deaf ears.
Instead of giving God the glory, Nebuchadnezzar saw himself as the source
of greatness.
The book of Daniel describes how God humbled this proud king and how God taught
him there was a kingdom far more powerful than Babylon, a spiritual kingdom,
the kingdom of God.
While walking one day on the roof of his palace, Nebuchadnezzar at the height of
his greatness looked out over the city.
He just couldn't help himself.
He boasted, Is not this the great Babylon that I have built for a royal dwelling by
my mighty power and for the honor of my majesty?
While the word was still in the king's mouth, a voice fell from heaven,
King Nebuchadnezzar, to you it is spoken.
The kingdom has departed from you.
That very hour the word was fulfilled concerning Nebuchadnezzar.
He was driven from men and ate grass like oxen.
His body was wet with the dew of heaven till his hair had grown like eagle
feathers and his nails like bird claws.
He was given over to insanity.
For seven years he behaved more like a wild beast than a human being.
At the end of the seven years, Nebuchadnezzar's mind was restored.
But the experience had taught him a crucial lesson.
It is perhaps the key lesson in the book of Daniel.
God, not petty princelings, holds ultimate authority over this world.
The Bible records Nebuchadnezzar's warning to those who would follow him in positions
of power and authority.
Whether in the cabinet room or the boardroom, it's advice that all of us
would do well to heed.
At the end of that time, I, Nebuchadnezzar, raised my eyes toward
heaven and my sanity was restored.
Then I praised the Most High.
I honored and glorified Him who lives forever.
His dominion is an eternal dominion.
His kingdom endures from generation to generation.
No one can hold back His hand or say to Him, what have you done?
Everything He does is right and all His ways are just.
And those who walk in pride, He is able to humble.
But if Nebuchadnezzar had learned this important lesson, his descendants had not.
After a 43-year reign, Nebuchadnezzar died in 562 B.C.
He was succeeded by four kings within a period of seven years, each successor
weaker than the one before.
The last king of Babylon was Nabu-Nayyad or Nabonidus.
He seized the throne in 555 B.C.
His son and crown prince was Belshazzar, the one the Bible calls Belshazzar.
For reasons not fully clear, the scholarly and eccentric Nabonidus spent the last ten
years of his reign at the distant oasis of Tima in Arabia.
He was studying history and religion.
While Nabonidus was away, his son Belshazzar ruled in Babylon.
Now comes a fascinating piece of Bible detective work.
For centuries, Belshazzar's name was found nowhere outside the book of Daniel.
Historians named Nabonidus as Babylon's final king, but no Belshazzar.
No wonder some skeptics rejected Daniel's statements about Belshazzar, labeling them
fiction or one of the Bible's historical mistakes.
But in 1854, several small clay cylinders came to light.
They were found here, at Ur of Mesopotamia.
They were inscribed with accounts of the rebuilding of this ziggurat by King
Nabonidus.
The inscriptions concluded with prayers for the health of Nabonidus and for his
eldest son, the crown prince, Belshazzar.
And as for me, Nabonidus, the king of Babylon, protect thou me from sinning
against thine exalted Godhead, and grant thou me graciously a long life.
And in the heart of Belshazzar, my firstborn son, set the fear of thine
exalted Godhead.
This archaeological find is important for the story of Daniel, because the
inscription sheds light on Belshazzar's command in the fifth chapter of Daniel,
in verse 29.
This is where Belshazzar proclaimed Daniel the third highest ruler in the kingdom.
Nabonidus was first, Belshazzar was second, and Daniel the third.
This is a striking example of the Bible's often minute accuracy.
It was during Belshazzar's reign that God gave his prophet Daniel another important
vision.
Once again, he saw a prophetic overview.
Daniel saw a succession of empires that would control the ancient Near East from
his day forward.
Four great beasts came up from the sea, each different from the other.
The first was like a lion, and had eagle's wings.
And suddenly another beast, a second, like a bear.
It was raised up on one side, and had three ribs in its mouth between its teeth.
After this, I looked, and there was another like a leopard, which had on its
back four wings of a bird.
The beast also had four heads.
After this, I saw in the night visions, and behold, a fourth beast, dreadful and
terrible, exceedingly strong.
It had huge iron teeth.
It was different from all the beasts that were before it, and it had ten horns.
To those of us living at the end of the 20th century, depictions of strange
looking beasts seem curious and bizarre.
But to ancient people, composite beast-like creatures were far more
familiar.
This raises an important point in understanding prophecy.
Some Bible interpreters make the mistake of trying to explain biblical symbolism
without reference to a book's historical background.
Elaborate speculations soon follow.
To avoid this trap, it is vital to determine the meaning of a book or a text
in its original setting.
The key question is, what did this mean to the people who first heard it?
This is a sound principle of good Bible study.
For the people of Daniel's time, composite animals had meaning.
Living and working in Babylon, Daniel saw these depictions every day.
Let's take the famous dragon of Marduk, for example.
It was a favorite decoration piece in the city, used by artists to ornament the
gate.
It's a hybrid or composite beast.
It has the front legs of a cat.
The hind legs have claws like a bird of prey.
Its head has the double horns of the Arabian horned viper.
And its tail ends in a scorpion sting.
These strange mystical beasts had important religious significance for the
ancient Babylonians.
So when Daniel recorded the strange animals of his vision in chapter 7,
he realized the vision was going to be significant for Babylon.
An angel explained to Daniel that the four beasts were four empires that would
dominate the ancient Near East.
The winged lion symbolized Babylon itself.
Interestingly, the lion of Babylon is found to this day on the ancient site of
the city.
In 1176 AD, local villagers in Iraq discovered this monumental basalt lion.
It confirms the lion was the symbol of the goddess Ishtar and of Babylon itself.
The lion stands over a fallen enemy trampled beneath its paws.
The lion's back has markings indicating that it was meant for Ishtar's saddle.
A woman riding a beast?
This would be a significant image later on in the book of Revelation.
According to many commentators, the bear in the vision symbolized the
Medes and the Persians.
And sure enough, the Medo-Persian Empire replaced Babylon.
The four-headed leopard has four wings.
It represented Alexander the Great and the four divisions of his empire after his
death.
The fourth beast has been identified by many Bible commentators as corresponding
to the Roman Empire.
The book of Daniel paints a vivid picture of the transition from Babylon,
the lion kingdom, to the bear kingdom.
It's one of the most famous scenes of the Bible.
It was October 539 BC.
Apparently during the New Year's festival, Belshazzar planned a great feast.
The king had invited a thousand of the leading men of his empire for the
celebrations.
Little did they realize what was going to happen.
What made this great banquet so unusual was that it took place while the Persians
were besieging Babylon.
Yet Belshazzar's faith rested in the mighty walls of the city.
That fatal overconfidence would be his undoing.
It was during the banquet, in a great show of arrogance in the face of God,
that Belshazzar ordered wine to be served.
He then toasted the gods of Babylon.
He did this with the very golden cups his grandfather Nebuchadnezzar had plundered
from the temple in Jerusalem.
Suddenly a strange, terrifying event occurred, probably right here in the
throne room of Belshazzar.
A mysterious, disembodied hand appeared out of nowhere.
It began to write great, blazing letters on the king's wall.
In the same hour, the fingers of a man's hand appeared and wrote opposite the
lampstand on the plaster of the wall of the king's palace.
And the king saw the part of the hand that wrote.
Then the king's countenance changed, and his thoughts troubled him.
Now all the king's wise men came, but they could not read the writing or
make known to the king its interpretation.
Then Daniel was brought in before the king and said, I will read the writing to the
king and make known to him the interpretation.
And this is the inscription that was written, Mene, Mene, Tekel, Parson.
This is the interpretation of each word.
Mene, God has numbered your kingdom and finished it.
Tekel, you have been weighed in the balances and found wanting.
Pires, your kingdom has been divided and given to the Medes and Persians.
Taken literally, the words Mene, Tekel, and Pires were the names of common
Babylonian weights.
Before coins were invented, business was conducted using metal ingots as currency.
They had to be weighed in a balance against accurate measures, like this two
Mena lion weight, to test their worth.
Daniel's interpretation of the writing on the wall played on the root meaning,
Mene, which means numbered, Tekel, which means weighed, and Parson,
divided.
Babylon's time had run out.
As the Bible tells the story, on that very night, while the ominous writing glowed
upon the wall, the armies of Cyrus the Great were already entering the city.
Babylon's mighty walls and massive fortifications could not prevent its
downfall, a downfall decreed by God.
The prophet Isaiah gives us some background to King Cyrus and his part in
the fall of Babylon.
This is what the Lord says to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I
take hold of to subdue nations before him and to strip kings of their armor,
to open doors before him so that gates will not be shut.
I will go before you and will level the mountains.
I will break down gates of bronze and cut through bars of iron.
I will give you the treasures of darkness, riches stored in secret places,
so that you may know that I am the Lord, the God of Israel, who summons you by
name.
This scripture hints at the remarkable way Cyrus was able to capture Babylon.
With its massive walls, Babylon seemed impregnable.
But unknown to the Babylonians, Cyrus had devised an ingenious plan.
The Bible doesn't give the specifics, but it's described in great detail by the
ancient historians Herodotus and Xenophon.
While Belshazzar feasted, Persian troops were busy upstream, diverting the course
of the Euphrates River.
The river normally flowed under the massive gates and through the city.
So the Persians dug a channel.
This redirected the river into an old lake bed.
The Euphrates began to lower, permitting the Persians to wade under the gates and
into Babylon under cover of darkness.
Reports tell us that Cyrus placed a spy in the city.
That very night, he unlocked the gates of the inner wall.
Through these gates, Cyrus' army poured into the city.
The Babylonians were completely surprised.
Babylon was so large that when the outer parts were invaded, those living in the
center of the city were unaware of the attack.
Belshazzar and his guests continued their idolatrous defiance of God until it was
too late.
As the book of Daniel tells us, that very night, Belshazzar, king of the
Babylonians, was slain.
The greatest city of the ancient world had fallen.
The head of gold, which we saw in Daniel 2, had been replaced by the chest and arms
of silver.
The lion by the bear.
Babylon was the economic colossus of the ancient world.
But it had become a byword for moral decadence and corruption.
Its leaders had become drunk with their own power.
The fall of Babylon teaches a lesson we are only too prone to forget.
God rules in history.
It's a lesson for us today.
Babylon was finished as a great power.
Yet Babylon had fallen before.
Would it?
Could it?
Rise again.
We have traced the rise and fall of Babylon.
From Nimrod to Belshazzar.
Belshazzar was the last king of Babylon.
But the city itself continued under the Persians.
Then, a little over 200 years later, Alexander the Great, on his quest to
conquer the world, defeated the Persians and captured Babylon.
Alexander was bewitched by the idea of Babylon.
The thought that the whole world could be unified under one civilization,
one city, one man.
But Alexander's dreams of world unity died with him in Babylon in 323 B.C.
In the very throne room of Nebuchadnezzar.
In the years that followed, the city began its slow deterioration.
By the time of Jesus, Babylon's palaces and temples had crumbled.
Shifting sands had buried the parks and waterways.
Even the Euphrates River had shifted course.
A Roman emperor visited Babylon some 85 years after the death of Jesus and found
nothing but mounds and stones and ruins.
Today, the superpower of the ancient world lies desolate and forsaken.
Its palaces, temples, parks and gardens, its broad streets and boulevards are dust
and rubble.
Cracked bricks bearing the name of Nebuchadnezzar are strewn by the thousands
across the site.
Only a small section of the once great city has been restored as an
archaeological park.
And even that only in part.
Most of the vast metropolis remains a desolate wasteland.
No longer the thriving city of its glory days.
It lies unoccupied, abandoned and forsaken.
Babylon, the jewel of kingdoms, the glory of the Babylonians' pride,
will be overthrown by God like Sodom and Gomorrah.
She will never be inhabited or lived in through all generations.
The handwriting on the wall had marked the end of Babylon as a thriving city.
But it was not the end of Babylon as an idea.
Even Alexander the Great was seduced by its legacy.
And when we get to the New Testament, we find that Babylon becomes more than
merely a geographical location.
Babylon symbolizes an ideology, an attitude, the epitome of a civilization
organized in opposition to God.
I would describe Babylon as being a city that symbolizes in Scripture that which is
the height of human power.
And how it rules, conquers and so on all the way down through history.
But ultimately how its rulers were corrupt and it kind of gets what it deserves in
the course of human history because those who ruled it thought of themselves as
little gods.
Here's the point.
In all ages, the people of God have lived in the midst of a spiritual Babylon.
A godless world.
In such a world, a world in pursuit of the physical, the material, the profit motive,
little thought has been given to the spiritual realm, to the kingdom of God.
This is, as we've seen, the Babylonian pattern.
And in that sense, Babylon is with us now.
When the New Testament wants to picture evil and defiance of God reaching ultimate
fulfillment, it uses a phrase we can now well relate to, Babylon the Great.
That phrase is found in the last book of the Bible, the mysterious Apocalypse or
Book of Revelation.
The Book of Revelation is written around a remarkable vision from God given to a man
named John.
His vision is often considered one of the most difficult parts of the Bible to
understand.
It's filled with strange images, sights and sounds.
And one of the most well-known are the mysterious four horsemen.
We generally call the Book of Revelation an example of apocalyptic literature.
And by that we mean there is a kind of literature in the first century,
it also exists prior to and after the first century, but it's common in the
first century, which has certain features.
And many of these can be found in the Book of Revelation.
Some of them include visions, in other words, someone will have a vision and
record what was seen.
And the vision can either be a vision of what is going on in heaven, or a vision of
the future, or sometimes both.
Sometimes there are journeys to heaven in this kind of literature.
Someone is transported to heaven to see this.
It's not simply a vision on earth, but there's actually a journey made.
A couple of the other features that would be typical of apocalyptic literature
include a lot of symbolism.
And symbolism could be one of several kinds.
There are, for example, many animals, both natural, a ram or some sort of sheep
or goat, which will figure in this literature, as well as fantastic animals
with strange heads and wings and almost bizarre sorts of creatures.
Colors are very important in the Book of Revelation.
There are white robes, there is red blood, there is gold.
So that you get the sense of quite a visual... there's a very dramatic sense,
but the colors are symbolic.
Numbers are also important in apocalyptic literature.
So symbolism is an important feature of apocalyptic literature.
It's really difficult to understand the Book of Revelation if you do not have some
kind of background in the various Old Testament books, because of the symbolism
there is drawn right out of the Old Testament books.
And the context, of course, in the Book of Revelation from the time of the writer is
future, for the most part.
Some of it is historic, but some of it is future.
And he uses the symbolism, very much so, to talk about the future of time and the
future of people and what's going to happen.
Apocalyptic writers looked forward to the time when God would decisively intervene
in history.
John, in the Book of Revelation, was living in a time of persecution.
Christians were being killed by the Roman state.
The majority view is that Babylon the Great is a symbol, a name for the Roman
Empire.
And that if you think of this book as written sometime in the first century,
almost anywhere Christians were living, they were living in a reality dominated by
Rome, ruled by Rome, controlled by Rome.
And therefore it's very natural that the world power would be symbolized with a
symbol that comes from Israel's own past, namely Babylon the Great.
In the Old Testament, Babylon is an actual country that carries off the people of
Israel into captivity.
And I think the author of the Book of Revelation then reapplies that symbol as a
warning to Christians to say that Rome today can offer the same kind of threat.
Maybe not a physical captivity, but can indeed be a real danger to the
people of God.
So there is a sort of recurring or timeless nature to that symbol.
The attitude of Babylon the Great is timeless and pervasive.
It's an attitude of opposition to God and to the teachings of Jesus Christ.
The attitude is insidious because wealth and prosperity look so good on the
outside.
This is why the references to Babylon the Great in chapters 17 and 18 of the Book of
Revelation have such meaning for us today.
I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was covered with blasphemous names
and had seven heads and ten horns.
The woman was dressed in purple and scarlet and was glittering with gold,
precious stones, and pearls.
This title was written on her forehead, Mystery Babylon the Great, the Mother of
Prostitutes and of the Abominations of the Earth.
Then the angel said to me, The woman you saw is the great city that rules over the
kings of the earth.
Here we have all the vivid imagery of apocalyptic writing.
It's a future time.
There's the woman, the beast, the vibrant colors and the symbolism.
The symbolism of a harlot.
The Bible has a lot to say about harlotry.
God uses it to show how individuals and nations can be seduced from allegiance to
him.
In the Old Testament, harlotry is usually an imagery for idolatry.
That is to say that people commit harlotry.
God's people commits harlotry when it is unfaithful to God, when it pursues idol
worship.
And now the church is faced with the same kind of threat, to abandon its true
worship of God for other sorts of idols.
Well, a harlot is an image of a seductress.
Someone who, as I said, is enticing them, alluring them to follow this way and to
give up their loyalties to what they know to be the true God.
The Bible uses the symbol of harlotry in a couple of different ways.
Harlotry is worshipping false gods.
But as New Testament scholar George Eldon Ladd explains, harlotry also means the
prostitution of everything for commercial gain.
The metaphor of harlotry is also used by the prophets of the heathen nations.
Tyre is a city who will play the harlot with all the kingdoms of the world upon
the face of the earth.
The idea here is not one of spiritual faithlessness, but of the prostitution of
everything to commercial gain.
Nineveh is also described as a harlot because of the way she enticed weaker
nations by her display of power and splendor, only to scorn and enslave them.
Ladd says of Revelation chapter 17, here the harlot is Babylon, the symbol of
human civilization with all its pomp and circumstance organized in opposition to
God.
The city which has dominion over the kings of the earth.
We've traced Babylon's appeal through the scriptures and through history.
From the tower of Babel to Nebuchadnezzar City.
And now to the book of Revelation, where Babylon the Great has reached
immense power.
I think John is trying to paint Babylon as alluring and enticing.
And one of the ways you would do that is to show how wealthy and prosperous and
satisfying this reality is.
And it lulls, it can lull Christians into a false sense of security.
So he's warning them by showing the seductiveness of this particular vision of
the world.
In the book of Revelation then, Babylon the Great becomes the code word
for a monstrous anti-Christian world system.
An economic colossus dedicated to accumulating power and wealth through
world trade.
This is Babylon's fatal attraction, commercial gain at any cost.
For all the nations have drunk the maddening wine of her adulteries.
The kings of the earth committed adultery with her.
And the merchants of the earth grew rich from her excessive luxuries.
Across the centuries, many have attempted to identify Babylon with specific nations,
empires, or even churches.
Every year, it seems, new candidates are nominated for the role of the symbolic
figures in the book of Revelation.
Babylon, the beast, the false prophet.
But all interpretations have one thing in common.
They've all been wrong.
The history of interpreting the book of Revelation is quite interesting.
Because almost every generation of Christians that reads it feels we are the
direct addressees of that book.
Babylon is this entity, or this church, or this empire.
Time and time again, people have predicted the end of events.
And then they've had to change their minds, revise, redo.
Maybe we read that wrong.
And this refrain is repeated over and over, not just in the 20th century.
But the whole history of reading and interpreting this book shows we've been
wrong time and time again.
Now that ought to tell us that it's very dangerous to jump to conclusions about,
and to be dogmatic about, who is Babylon?
When do these events happen?
The when question is probably not the most important question in the book of
Revelation anyway.
That God will triumph.
That God will triumph through Jesus Christ.
These are the central affirmations of that book.
But when it happens, and who fits what picture, strike me as almost leading us
away from the central message of that book.
So the book of Revelation describes the final culmination of the spirit of ancient
Babylon.
An anti-God attitude that is present today, present through history,
and will reach its climax at the end of the age.
But no matter what happens, God's final triumph over all things is assured.
Chapter 18 of the book of Revelation celebrates in advance God's final victory
over Babylon the Great.
When the kings of the earth who committed adultery with her, and shared her luxury,
see the smoke of her burning, they will weep and mourn over her.
Terrified at her torment, they will stand far off and cry, Woe, woe, O great city!
O Babylon, city of power!
In one hour your doom has come.
The merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her because no one buys their
cargoes anymore.
The merchants who sold these things and gained their wealth from her will stand
far off.
Terrified at her torment, they will weep and mourn and cry out.
Then a mighty angel picked up a boulder the size of a large millstone and threw it
into the sea and said, With such violence the great city of Babylon will be thrown
down, never to be found again.
Yes, the story of Babylon is a sobering one.
That old city buried beneath the Mesopotamian plain has become the symbol
of a society given over to greed.
A society moving farther and farther away from the knowledge of God.
Does this sound familiar?
John is describing a world very much like ours today.
Merchants in the ancient Near East grew rich by the exploitation of pleasure.
Many business people today are doing the same thing.
Business deals and buyouts are often based on greed, money and power.
Many individuals take advantage of the system to enrich themselves, while
exploiting the young, the old, the uneducated and the unfortunate.
Christians are not immune to the seductions of this Babylonian system.
We are warned against the deceitfulness of money, riches, power and pleasure.
We are to live instead according to the teachings of Jesus.
And those teachings include service, giving and sharing.
That's why John warns us,
The New Testament is full of warnings against the dangers and the lure of
materialism, that riches can lull us into a false sense of security.
Jesus said you cannot serve two masters, no one can serve God and mammon.
And then in the book of Revelation, of course, Babylon is portrayed as
extremely wealthy.
And there it is, God or mammon.
So it's all part of the picture, part of the trappings.
And probably the materialistic note is part of that as well.
In the time sequence of the book of Revelation, Babylon is destroyed.
But the good news is, this is not the end of the world.
Not at all.
In John's vision, it's the beginning of the rule of the saints under Jesus Christ.
So the apocalypse offers hope.
It's a vision of victory.
The victory of Jesus over all who oppose the kingdom of God.
To say that the book of Revelation is a vision of the victory of Jesus Christ is
actually a pretty good summary.
If you think of the standpoint of both the first century Christians and of us today,
it's a true statement in two ways.
One, you look back to the victory of Jesus on the cross.
What we talk about, Jesus' victory over the powers of sin and death.
And it's precisely that victory which guarantees the future victory and gives
hope for the future.
So, yes, a final victory of Christ is a good way to summarize that book.
But you have to always remember that's already guaranteed and begun in what God
has done in Christ on the cross.
Our story has taken us from Nimrod to Nebuchadnezzar to now.
And on into the future.
We have seen the legacy of Babylon.
It's been a familiar pattern we've seen woven across history.
And the attitude of Babylon is with us today.
So we are challenged.
What kingdom will we serve?
The kingdom of God or Babylon?
God or Mammon?
Babylon the Great represents the epitome of human power apart from God.
But the kingdom of God is far more powerful.
Our calling is to serve that kingdom and its king, Jesus Christ.
Ultimately, His is the only kingdom that will endure.
The power and the glory are Christ's alone.
That is the lesson that even Babylon the Great will be forced to learn.
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