THE GREAT WHORE

A whore is a deep ditch’, Prov. 23. 27, and nowhere is this truth better illustrated than in this chapter.

She can be seen in her true character when she is contrasted to the bride, the Lamb’s wife, who is seen to all eternity ‘pre­pared as a bride for her husband’, Rev. 21. 2, ‘a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing’ and ‘holy and without blemish’, Eph. 5. 26. Arrayed in fine linen, clean and white’, Rev. 19. 8, the righteous acts of the saints, she is pre­sented to her husband who gave Himself that He might secure her for Himself, the object of His eternal and unceasing love.

The whore, on the other hand, ‘was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour’, bejewelled and drinking from a cup ‘full of abom­inations and filthiness of her fornication’, v. 4. This harlot church is ‘drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus’, v. 6. She exercises a dominating influence over ‘peoples, and multitudes, and nations and tongues’, v. 15, and reigns ‘over the kings of the earth’, v. 18.

She is ‘Mystery, Babylon’. Dressed in the gaudy splendour of this world and appealing to the flesh, her imperial colours dem­onstrate her pretensions to ecclesiastical superiority. She is the ‘mother of harlots and abominations of the earth’, v. 5, and is, therefore, the patroness of myriad idolatries which are offensive to God. However alluring she has been to man, she is, in God’s eyes, fit only for judgement. This judgement is recorded in verses 16 and 17.

This whore is man’s effort to replicate, in ecumenical and syncretistic union, what is described in scripture as one pearl, one body, one new man and one flock. The words of the Lord Jesus on the night before He went to Calvary were ‘that they all may be one’, John 17. 21. This prayer was gloriously answered at Pentecost when the body of Christ was formed by the activity of the Holy Spirit. It should be clear that God would have His peo­ple entirely separate from all that is represented by the harlot church. Ecumenism will never honour God. His word to His own is, ‘Come out of her, my people’, 18. 4.