Babylon Part 3

Readers are advised to refresh their minds by glancing over the preceding articles on a subject which bears very significantly on present-day conditions.

One of the visions which were given to Zechariah contributes materially to the study of Babylon the Great. He saw a measure with a woman hidden within it and a weight of lead used as a cover to hide her. No sooner was “lawlessness” cast into the ephah than two women appeared out of it and lifted up both measure and weight and bore them away (Zech. 5. 5-11). To the question of the puzzled prophet, “Whither?” the answer was given, “To build her an house in the land of Shinar: and when it is prepared, she shall be set there in her own place” (v. 11, R.V.).

The locality of the house which will be built for the woman in the land of Shinar establishes her identity. She who is hidden in the measure is the woman, “Babylon the Great.” The building for the house for her indicates the centralising of her universal system in that part of the world. Then will she realise that future power depicted in the Apocalypse. The hiding of her in the ephah clearly represents her present secret activities which in due time will result in her supremacy.

It is scarcely possible to read of the land of Shinar without thinking of the book of Genesis, and of the movement which, using brick for stone and slime for mortar, began to build a city and a tower. This great public movement was scattered and driven underground by the judgment of God. There it has worked for the centuries since, corrupting truth and evolving as many doctrines as there are winds. In this way the hidden mother has been producing the idolatrous systems of the earth, her brood of harlots. In some mysterious way she works hidden in the commercial world (weights and measures), and in a more mysterious way infiltrates her commercial spirit into religion. As she perverted truth by addition to it from the days of Noah, so she has developed numerous systems such as that which existed in Egypt at the time of the Exodus. In a similar way since has she perverted Judaism to the extent which the Cross exposes. And, likewise, she has been at work in Christianity. With the cunning of the serpent adding the leavens of human philosophies she has produced the many voices of Christendom. Legion are the names of sects, schisms and systems which understand not one another’s speech, and the man in the street is bamboozled, and the undeveloped believer is beguiled.

Nothing is immune from her influence and no work of God is safe from her interference. Until the removal of all true Christians at the Rapture will this movement persist. Then the many movements left will gravitate to one and, united to eastern religions, universally organised, dominate for a short time the ten-kingdomed empire which has power for but an hour, and that the last brief hour of this age.

The judgment of God in this case, as in most, will be poetic. She who will dominate the federated empire will in turn be dominated and destroyed. The very men who have been duped by her will become, in the overruling will of God, the agents of her doom (Rev. 17. 16, 17).

She is shewn to be holding out a golden cup to the thirsty masses of men. Through the centuries her unclean daughters have done likewise. But instead of quenching their thirst with the water of life the ornate cup is full of the abominations in which consists the uncleanness of her fornication. Externals cannot satisfy. God, the fountain of living waters, only can be the perennial spring which will ever requite the constant longings of the human heart, Religious paraphernalia only mocks the soul. Whether it be for our own souls, the assemblings of His people, or in our message to men, let it be the living Christ. And may our object be: “That I may gain Christ,” to “know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, becoming conformed unto His death; if by any means I may attain unto the resurrection from the dead” (Phil. 3. 8-11, R.V.).