Babylon — the mystic Babylon of the Revelation — may be brought to boast in a crucified Christ, and be Babylon still. For what is it as delineated by the Spirit? Is it not a thing worldly in character, as well as abominable and idolatrous in doctrine and practice? Revelation 18 gives us a sight of Babylon in its worldliness, as chapter 17 more in its idolatries. Babylon of old, as in the land of Chaldea, was full of idols, and guilty of the blood or of the sorrows of the righteous. But it also had this mark: it displayed greatness in the world in the time of Jerusalem’s depression. So with the mystic Babylon. She has her abominations in the midst of her, and the blood of the martyrs of Jesus stains her; but still more fully is she disclosed as great and splendid and joyous in the earth during the age of Christ’s rejection. She is important in the world in that day when the judgment of God is preparing for the world; she can glorify herself and live deliciously in a defiled place.
It is not that she outwardly ignores the cross of Christ: she is not heathen. She may publish Christ crucified, but she refuses to know Christ rejected. She does not continue with Him in His temptations, nor consider the poor and needy Jesus (Luke 22; Psalm 40). The kings of the earth and the merchants of the earth are her friends, and the inhabitants of the earth are her subjects.
Is not, then, the rejection of Christ the thing she practically scorns? Surely it is. And again, I say, the prevailing witness of the Spirit about her is this — she is exalted in the world while God’s witness is depressed, and in defiance of that depression, for she knows of it. Babylon of old well knew of the desolation of Jerusalem; Christendom externally knows and publishes the cross of Jesus.
Babylon of old was very bold in her defiance of the grief of Zion. She made the captives of Zion contribute to her greatness and her enjoyments. Nebuchadnezzar had done this with the captive youths, and Belshazzar, with the captive vessels. This was Babylon, and in spirit this is Christendom. Christendom is the thing which glorifies herself and lives deliciously in the earth, trading in all that is desirable and costly in the world’s esteem, in the very face of the sorrow and rejection of that which is God’s. Christendom practically forgets that Christ is rejected on the earth.
The Medo-Persian power is another creature. He removes Babylon but exalts himself (Daniel 6). And this is the action of “the beast” and his ten kings. The woman, mystically Babylon, is removed by the ten kings; but then they give their power to the beast who exalts himself above all that is called God or that is worshiped, as Darius the Mede did.
This is the closing, crowning feature in the picture of the world’s apostasy. But we have not reached it yet. Our conflict is with Babylon and not with the Mede — with that which lives deliciously and in honor during the age of Jerusalem’s ruins (that is, of the rejection of Christ).
J. G. Bellett (adapted)