The passage: One of the seven angels who held the seven vials invited John to come and see the judgment of the great whore who sits on many waters, with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication and by whose wine the earth’s inhabitants have been made drunk. Carried in the spirit into the wilderness, John saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast covered with names of blasphemy, with seven heads and ten horns. She was dressed in purple and scarlet, adorned with gold, jewels, and pearls, holding a golden cup full of abominations and filth, and on her forehead was written “MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.” She was drunk with the blood of the saints and martyrs of Jesus, and John marvelled greatly. The angel promised to explain the mystery of the woman and the beast that carries her, with its seven heads and ten horns. The beast “was, and is not,” and shall rise from the bottomless pit and go to destruction; those on earth whose names were not written in the book of life will wonder at it. The seven heads are seven mountains on which the woman sits, and are also seven kings: five have fallen, one is, one is not yet come and will last only a short while; the beast that “was, and is not” is himself an eighth, yet one of the seven, and goes to destruction. The ten horns are ten kings not yet crowned, who will receive power for one hour with the beast, give their strength to him, and make war with the Lamb, who will overcome them because he is Lord of lords and King of kings, and those with him are called, chosen, and faithful. The waters are peoples, multitudes, nations, and tongues. The ten horns will come to hate the whore, strip her, devour her flesh, and burn her with fire, for God has put it in their hearts to fulfil his will until his words are fulfilled. The woman is that great city which reigns over the kings of the earth.
In an earlier chapter we saw a woman clothed with the sun, the moon under her feet. Here we read of a woman with “Babylon the great, the mother of harlots, and abominations of the earth” written on her forehead. Everyone has noticed that the two visions correspond. A Protestant controversialist would say at once that the first describes the true Church of God, kept alive through the ages—hidden from human eyes but beautiful in the sight of her Lord—and that the second points to the Papacy, seated in outward grandeur and power, but marked by God as idolatrous and apostate.
An interpretation that has sunk so deeply into the mind of a nation like ours, shaping our everyday speech and colouring our devotions, is not something we can safely throw away. It must mean something. If we ignore that meaning, we risk missing lessons the prophecy was meant to teach, shrinking it to fit our own private notions, or reducing it to mere antiquarian curiosity.
But there are other uses of the title “great Babylon” which, by the same principle, we should not overlook. It has been applied to the city of London, the very capital of Protestantism, and our consciences have accepted the name as fitting. Again, the most earnest religious teachers have urged their hearers to flee from Babylon and shun the Babylonian harlot, meaning by both phrases that world which Romanists and Protestants alike renounce in their baptism. While we do justice to one of these ways of speaking, we should test whether it is not possible to do justice to all three. If we stay close to the book itself, I believe we can.
I have given you my reasons for thinking that the vision of the woman clothed with the sun, about to give birth to the man-child, is a vision of humanity seen truly: in itself weak and feminine; great only while it looks up to a glory above its own, which becomes its clothing; poor and incomplete until it has found a Son of Man who is also a Son of God, one who does not stay on earth but is carried to heaven’s throne, where he is to be acknowledged as our living Head, our Redeemer, our Representative. The discovery of this true Head of Man, and of the glory of Man in him, is what I took the vision to be about. Before this could be discovered there was war in heaven; when it was made, the adversary was cast down from heaven. There was no more darkness over the form of him on the throne. Those who confessed the crucified Man to be at his right hand could overcome all doubts and temptations by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of his testimony. But there was war on the earth. The adversary had not finished his battle here; he was carrying it on furiously. What that battle was, and who would be caught up in it, we were to learn as we went on.
Taking the first vision in this sense, it would, I thought, justify those who said the Church was implied in it. The Church is that body appointed, in its own life and acts, to testify of a Son of Man and Son of God, to say that humanity is complete only in him, to call men to claim the glory he has claimed for them, to tell them that God’s face has been fully shown in the only begotten Son and is therefore a face of clear, unclouded light. In its hour of deepest sorrow—which has been its hour of greatest triumph—the Church must represent the woman who sees the sun above her and the moon at her feet. And she must be in danger of looking at the moon instead of the sun, at herself instead of her divine Head.
On the other hand, I have shown you how the image of a woman forgetting her true lord and becoming a harlot runs through all the language of the Old Scriptures, illustrating every national sin. In the Old Testament this harlotry is charged upon Israel—upon Israel alone—precisely because Israel was said to have been claimed as the bride of an unseen, spiritual Lord. The sin that earns this shameful name is idolatry. Israel forgets its unseen King and worships visible things—it becomes a creature of the senses. In doing so it tries to be like the surrounding nations, when it was set in the world to tell those nations that they were made for another service, a nobler fellowship. The punishment for this crime was captivity in the very land that gathered up the idolatry of all the nations, where idolatry had its head and crown, was organised into a system, openly propped up a universal tyranny, was fast turning into the worship of a mortal ruler, and that worship into the worship of what is below humanity.
Babylon, then, seen first on the plain of Shinar—where trust in God was traded for trust in brick walls, where the family rescued from the flood forgot its task of colonising and subduing the earth and tried to make itself a name and build a tower to reach heaven—and seen in all its later tyranny and conquests, was the living type of the idolatrous city. And when the chosen Son was revealed as head not of one nation but of every man, the idolatrous city began to be seen as the mother of harlots: as that which had all along been drawing men away from the worship of a Spiritual Being, their Lord, Friend, and Redeemer, into the worship of many natural things and powers—worshipping not the archetype of man but his mere image, worshipping evil instead of good. From the moment the mystery of God—the mystery of a redeemed humanity—was revealed, Babylon became the mystery of iniquity, representing the degradation and misery of humanity, both socially and individually. The place itself need not stay the same. What was Nineveh under Sennacherib was Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar. The type endured, even when a western city, at a wholly different stage of civilisation, became the ruling power of the earth.
If, then, as we Protestants believe, there is and has been a system spread through Christendom that robs man of his true dignity, blocks his communication with his risen and ascended Lord, and separates heaven from earth by making a mortal man the highest of all rulers—if such a system deserves to be called idolatrous and apostate—then it is a true instinct that links this system with Babylonian harlotry, precisely because our charges against it imply that it is a relapse into the state of the heathen world, that it has canonised the very despotism of sense from which the birth and glorification of the Man-child was meant to free God’s creatures made in his image. And if in this city of ours there is, among clergy and laity, idle and busy, noble and tradesman and workman, on one plea or another, on religious or irreligious grounds, in deference to aristocratic or democratic notions, a tendency to revere the visible above the invisible, the passing above the permanent, the customs of society above moral and eternal laws—if this tendency has grown powerful and threatens to become supreme—then it is also a true instinct that recalls the greatness of Babylon when we are tempted to boast of the greatness of London, and warns that London may prove no more lasting than Babylon. A citizen of Paris, Madrid, Vienna, or Venice might rightly feel the same. But our consciences tell us that we have less to do with those cities than with London; their evils are, to some extent, foreign to us, while London’s evils are our own. And so it is right that those who teach children or grown men to renounce the pomps and vanities of this wicked world should explain what they mean: “Now, as of old, there are idols’ processions and sacrifices offered to worthless things that cannot help or save. Members of Christ, who gave himself away, you are tempted by a society that makes self its centre. Children of God, you are tempted to think yourselves children of Mammon, with everything around you bowing to him. Heirs of the kingdom of heaven, you are led to suppose there are no treasures for you but those that moth and rust corrupt and thieves steal. An evil atmosphere surrounds you. Call your world religious, political, commercial, or fashionable, whatever you like—it is still a harlot world, a world of sense; still a Babylonian world, a world of confusion and bondage.” But all these applications assume a conclusion already reached. They would be worth nothing unless there were some type of them in the old world. What that type is we are to learn from the Apostle himself, who will always tell us more than his commentators do.
The first six verses of this chapter refer to the mystery of this woman—that is, to the meaning of the symbol, to what belongs not to one age but to all, to the evil that has threatened the heart of human society ever since there was such a thing. They connect with the earlier vision of the seven vials, and they point, as all the earlier chapters have done, to an approaching judgment.
I. “And there came one of the seven angels who had the seven vials, and talked with me, saying, Come here; I will show you the judgment of the great whore that sits on many waters, with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication. So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness; and I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet-coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of the abomination and filthiness of her fornication. And on her forehead was a name written, Babylon the great, the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth. And I saw the woman drunk with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus; and I wondered with great admiration.”
In one of Zechariah’s visions, which resembles this one in many striking ways and clearly presents the mystery of wickedness in contrast to the divine mystery shown in the Temple at Jerusalem, an angel speaks of a “House in the land of Shinar, which shall be established and set there upon her own base.” A political order standing on its own foundation, its gods shaped out of human ideas, and by their help becoming a cruel and bloody tyranny—this is the idea of Babylon here and throughout Scripture. We have often been shown the final result. She who would not stand on divine ground must at last be carried by a beast. Humanity has only these two choices. In the end she must confess either a spiritual Lord or a brutal one. On her way to complete degradation she has been drinking the blood of righteous men who witnessed to her of her true greatness and of her fall. All these are called martyrs of Jesus. It does not matter when or where they lived, in what city they made their protest, or in what words or deeds they expressed it. So far as they testified that man is more than an animal, that there is a divine Power seeking to give man his true human rights, that a man is not to save his life but to lose it, not to glorify self but to give himself away—so far they were witnesses for Jesus, and his Spirit and no other was working in them. An apostle must say so. Other men might call them brave or heroic. He must trace everything good in man back to the Lord of Man—all partial light back to the perfect light.
Next we come to the explanation of this mystery as it applies to the particular period the prophecy is concerned with.
“And the angel said to me, Why did you marvel? I will tell you the mystery of the woman, and of the beast that carries her, which has the seven heads and ten horns. The beast that you saw was, and is not; and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit and go into perdition; and those who dwell on the earth shall wonder, whose names were not written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, when they behold the beast that was, and is not, and yet is. And here is the mind which has wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains, on which the woman sits. And there are seven kings: five are fallen, and one is, and one is not yet come; and when he comes, he must continue a short space. And the beast that was, and is not, even he is the eighth, and is of the seven, and goes into perdition.” The angel’s explanation of the Babylon of that day has, as I noted last Sunday, been accepted by all interpreters as clear and conclusive: it must mean Rome. The only dispute has been, Rome at what period? On that I said the statement seems to me quite as precise. If there are, as I argued in an earlier sermon, grounds for treating the founding of the military despotism under Augustus—together with the divine honours given him as its head—and the Incarnation, or proclamation of Christ’s kingdom, as parallel events in the world’s history, then Augustus would be the first of the five kings here. Tiberius would be the second, Caius Caligula the third, Claudius the fourth, Nero the fifth. These kings “are not.” In the absence of any real evidence for the old tradition that the Apocalypse belongs to Domitian’s time, almost any thoughtful critic would take this very passage as reason to place it in Galba’s reign. He, the sixth, “was”; Otho, the seventh, “was not yet come.” A figure was seen rising behind—an eighth, yet strangely like one of the seven. When Nero died, it looked as if the wild beast into which imperial government had turned itself was dead. Vitellius would show that it still lived and breathed. The world would not only submit to this new apparition but stare after it in blank astonishment, as though beastly tyranny had now proved itself all-powerful, as though nothing else could be meant for mankind—a very natural conclusion, which the facts seemed fully to bear out, and which every attempt to shake off the yoke only confirmed. No one who merely watched passing events and reasoned from them could resist believing that evil would permanently prevail. Only those whose names were in the book of life from the foundation of the world, who saw all things in the light of eternity and watched a book of life unrolling from the beginning, claiming a place in that roll rather than the roll of death—only they could sing of the beast’s ruin in his hour of triumph, only they could be sure he would last only a short while. I do not say the tyrant’s followers expected his power to last long. Anticipation belongs to men, to spiritual beings; they could feel only the leaden weight of the present; they could only suppose that a yoke like the one then on the earth must always be there. And so it has been again and again, and so it will be. The revelation may belong directly to the brief reign of Vitellius. But it is the revelation of that state of mind which, at one time or another, overtakes those who have no king but Cæsar, who, being “sensual and dark,” must carry the image of a sensual and dark tyranny in their hearts.
“And the ten horns which you saw are ten kings, who have received no power as yet, but receive power as kings one hour with the beast. These have one mind, and shall give their strength and power to the beast.”
I have already suggested that these horns stand for the military force on which the empire rested. The ten kings would then be the commanders of the legions in the various provinces, who had received no power as yet, though they had just as much claim to the purple, and were just as likely one day to seize it, as the usurper they were content to serve, and for whose sake they set aside their own claims for now. There could not be a truer picture of an organised anarchy. The condition Hobbes imagined society emerging out of was the condition into which it had sunk.
- “These shall make war with the Lamb, and the Lamb shall overcome them; and those who are with him are called, and chosen, and faithful.”
In old Roman legends, mounted champions recognised as the divine Twins would appear suddenly to encourage a failing army and then vanish when the victory was won. An old Hebrew, an apostle of Jesus Christ, has no sympathy with such legends. He does not want appearances. The whole point of the prophecy is to free us from slavery to shapes and apparitions. Those were for the sense-bound idolater. The Christian believed in the crucified Lamb, whom he could not see. Whatever visible armies fight, he sees the real King of kings and Lord of lords on one side and his enemy on the other. What would give him strength in such a crisis as we are reading of is the assurance that unseen hosts are on his side, that Christ leads them, and that therefore the beast will go down to destruction. And the first century was to give the watchword for all centuries to come. Whenever a conflict is being fought in which the order, freedom, and well-being of mankind are at stake, it does not matter how strong the combatants are, or whether they even know in whose name they fight. The victory that puts down the oppressor is the victory of the Lamb. He, with the chosen, faithful, and true, goes out against the beast. In hoc signo vinces—“in this sign you will conquer”—is a message to the true warrior. God’s Spirit can bring it to him without any cross appearing in the sky.
V. “And he said to me, The waters which you saw, where the whore sits, are peoples, and multitudes, and nations, and tongues. And the ten horns which you saw on the beast, these shall hate the whore, and shall make her desolate and naked, and shall eat her flesh, and burn her with fire. For God has put it in their hearts to fulfil his will, and to agree, and give their kingdom to the beast, until the words of God shall be fulfilled. And the woman which you saw is that great city which reigns over the kings of the earth.” When the armies of the Duke of Bourbon entered Rome and, in the name of Charles V.—the very defender of the Church—laid the holy city waste with fire and sword and took its spiritual ruler captive, no doubt the sixteenth-century Reformers thought this language was strikingly fulfilled. The great earthly powers were making desolate and naked the “great city which reigns over the kings of the earth.” “God had put it into the hearts of these soldiers of various lands to fulfil his will.” Suppose the same drama had been played out more than fourteen centuries earlier—suppose Rome had then been laid waste by military violence and its Capitol burnt—the sixteenth-century Reformers would not have been wrong to say the lesson was repeated in their day; that the same kind of instruments were at work in both cases; that the judgment, whoever carried it out, came from the highest throne of all; that the wicked and cruel tools were working out his great, gracious, and true will. Such thoughts are the only ones that can hold up men’s spirits through great crises, the only ones that let them bear the misery they see. But the Reformers spoiled the lesson if they twisted it to any party use—if they read the Bourbon’s victory as a judgment in favour of Protestantism rather than a judgment upon unrighteousness, corruption, and hypocrisy wherever it is found. That has been one very harmful result of our way of handling the Apocalypse, which I have tried to illustrate in this sermon. We have found Babylon in the Papacy and forgotten to look for it among ourselves. We have not seen that the harlotry of the senses is at work everywhere, that everywhere men are tempted to become idolaters, that everywhere there are seducers drawing them away from their true Husband and Lord. The far-off evil we have spotted; its punishment we are ready to cheer; but the evil at our own door, in our own hearts, we cannot see. We forget that God shows no favouritism; that Churches which acknowledge Rome’s supremacy and those that reject it, individual Papists and individual Protestants, Pharisees and Publicans, will all be sifted by his fan, and must all have their chaff burnt with unquenchable fire.
And this bad result of hasty, one-sided interpretation is closely tied to another. We talk of a Papal apostasy until we forget what the word apostasy even means. We forget that it means standing off from what is our proper ground; that if we revolt, we revolt from a government actually set over us. There could be no apostasy unless a kingdom of God had first been set up in the world. We have paid Popery an honour it has no right to when we have identified it with the Christian Church of many centuries, as if only some tiny body here and there had represented the divine election. It is a most necessary part of faith to believe that a fungus, however widely spread, however closely it seems to imitate the life, is not the tree it is destroying; that the tree is wholly of a good seed. Forget this and all history becomes nothing but a record of foul enormities—a record not of the reign and conquests of the Lamb, but of the Beast. Forget this, and we at once glorify ourselves as though we were better than others, and degrade ourselves by denying the glory and responsibilities laid equally on us and on them. London one moment exalts itself as the great opposite of Rome; the next it sinks into a mere Babylon where evil is the rule and good the rare exception. Whereas we ought to believe that both Rome and London are cities of redeemed men, where God has set up his kingdom, and which the citizens of either turn into a Babylon by disbelieving in their redemption and in his rule, by exalting their own idolatrous, sensual, selfish desires in contempt of their own human greatness and in defiance of his divine purposes.
This, I believe, lies at the root of all our moral evils: that we do not confess humanity to be married to Christ, that all men have been claimed as citizens of his kingdom and not of the Babel kingdom. We do not really confess that God has reconciled the world to himself; and so we do not really reject the world’s claim that it is separate from God and can live without him.
From these great errors, which are infecting both our theology and our life, I believe the study of the Apocalypse as it is actually written can be a most effective means of freeing us. It will teach us that the Babel society was always corrupt and adulterous, that it never in any age could be regarded as the true Order of the world. The history and literature of the heathen nations—which our forefathers rightly made a central part of our education—though stained and infected with idolatry, still bear witness to what is not idolatrous, and are perpetual protests against what was corrupting and degrading mankind. They looked forward to the incarnation of the Son of God, who claimed all the life, justice, and self-sacrifice of the old world as his own. The battle of the Lamb against the Beast was to vindicate that truth for the past and to make it the foundation of all the fellowship of men in the ages to come.