Reading: Revelation 17-18, Psalm 46

We are going to need to talk about Rome. Not the cosmopolitan, artistic, ancient, and beautiful city that you can visit today, but the greatest city in history. The seat of empire. The center of the world. The place that everyone looks towards and says, “That is the place to be!” The place that all the roads lead to, and all the messages come from. The crown jewel of human achievement. More idea than geographical place, it has nonetheless occupied geographical places. It was Thebes. Ninevah. Babylon. Athens. Rome. It has been Baghdad. For a long time it was Paris. For even longer it was London. Recently, it has been New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco. The places our culture look to as the capital of the world. But these are all reflections of the original, which is not Rome at all, but Babel and it’s great city, Babylon.

The great vision of the seals, the trumpets, and the bowls of God’s wrath have wrapped up with the fulfillment of everything that was predicted in God’s covenants. The wrath of God comes on those who worship the serpent, the blessings of God on those who worship Jesus. One might think this is the end. Why not just wrap up the book here? It turns out, these visions aren’t just a progression of one event following another. The persecuted church was descended pretty directly from the most oppressed people in the history of the world, the Jews. They had dealt with beasts dying and coming back to life before. They had seen what appeared to be the fulfillment of their blessings come to nothing when yet another incarnation of Babylon rose again to take the allegiance of humanity away from its proper place. Isaiah and Jeremiah warned about it. Ezekiel lived through it. Habakkuk complained about it. Daniel persisted in the face of it. But all the lessons of the Hebrew Scriptures led to a certain knowledge that the battle goes on. Even when judgment comes on Babylon it comes from another Babylon. Babylon always comes back. And it always persecutes the people of God.

Today’s reading is the counterpoint. Yes, the beast was not but then is. The great prostitute, Babylon the great continuously feeds on the blood of the saints. But the angel tells John he will see the judgment. Though it appears that the cycle of rise and fall of great human rulers and powers will continue forever, God will put an end to it. First, though, he uses some cryptic language about seven hills and ten horns that make it clear to anyone from that time that he is talking about Rome, the city built on seven hills. Then there is a call for God’s people to abandon this place, which at the time was almost ridiculously prosperous. Like many of us in the western world today, the people of Rome lived in extraordinary luxury, largely at the expense of the rest of the known world. But God calls his people out of such luxury, because such places are always doomed to destruction. The rest of the reading is taken up by laments from the merchants, the sailors, and the rulers of the earth, who put their trust in the power of the fallen city. Like Babel all the way back in Genesis 11, the greatest achievements of human who serve the serpent end in confusion, violence, and destruction.