Watch Out For Evil Doers
Revelation 17
Michael H. Koplitz
When Andrew was much younger, he decided he wanted to play baseball. The first year that he played baseball was actually tee-ball. In the second year that he played in the West Manchester township league, the coach from each team would get about 10 ft. away from home plate, get on their knees, and pitch the ball to their kids. So there I was, ready to pitch the ball to Andrew for his first time. All I remember from that point on was a white blur flying from his bat directly at my nose. Luckily I fell backward as the ball sped over me.
The book of Revelation is similar to that of baseball in that it is a warning from God for us to get out of the way of evil. It is just like the baseball because it is not subtle. The book of Revelation does not have a hidden agenda. It doesn't sugarcoat anything. Instead, it is as direct as the baseball coming at your face. This is one of the reasons why people throughout the years have not liked to read nor discuss the book of Revelation.
It is a book about God's tough love. We find the same kind of tough love in the pages of the Hebrew Scriptures as God gave warnings to His people Israel throughout their history. God is giving us the same warnings here in the book of Revelation. To ensure that there is no mistake about it, God makes the Revelation extremely clear.
Why would God do this for us? Because God wants us to be in heaven with Him. God created us so that we could love Him and so that we could worship Him. God will not be satisfied with us ending up in Satan's corner. Instead, God wants each of us in heaven, and because of that, He sent us the prophets and His Son and the book of Revelation. So no matter how much we don't like the message of this book because it is not subtle, nevertheless, we must see it as an expression of God's love for us and treat this book in this manner.
As we have done with the past chapters of Revelation, let us take some time to look at the symbolism we find. In chapter 17, we are introduced to a woman named Babylon. At the beginning of this chapter, one of the seven Angels offers to show John the punishment of Babylon, the great prostitute. This description of Babylon seated on the rivers reminds what we read in the book of Jeremiah 51:13. The mighty rivers are the Euphrates and the Tigers rivers, which are located in modern-day Iraq. The kings of the earth who have committed fornication with Babylon sided with evil and are references from Isaiah 23:17 and Nahum 3:4. Nahum is one of the minor prophets found in the Hebrew Scriptures. The golden cup that Babylon is holding that made the earth drunk is the spreading of Babylon’s evil and references Jeremiah 51:7.
John was taken by the Spirit into the desert, which reminds us of Ezekiel 8:3. John will come face-to-face with Babylon, the woman in the desert. This has a similar overtone to it as our Lord Jesus was taken into the desert to come face-to-face with Satan after his baptism in the Jordan as written in the gospel of Matthew chapter four. The desert has always been viewed as a place of insight and renewal, as told in Hosea 2:14, another minor prophet. The woman Babylon is seated upon a beast full of blasphemous names of God, which is reminiscent of Daniel 7:25. The beast has seven heads and ten horns just like the beast that rose out of the sea a few chapters back.
The woman Babylon is dressed in purple and scarlet. It is adorned with gold, precious stones, and pearls traded by the Babylonian empire when it existed over 2000 years ago. The golden cop that Babylon is holding is full of the world's sins, as can also be seen in Ezekiel 28:13.
What is fascinating about the woman Babylon is that she resembles the Saints. She has a name upon her forehead. The expression upon her forehead is Babylon. By having a name upon her forehead, she is symbolic of someone belonging to God. She is here to trick us into thinking that she is from God. This is a similar symbol that John used when he described the beast with the seven heads who had a healed fatal wound. That fatal wound that was healed is a symbolic reference to Jesus. He appeared to the disciples with fatal wounds that had been healed especially emphasized in the Gospel of John. So the woman is trying to convince the world that she is from God, but she is genuinely from Satan because she is not dressed in white.
Have you ever run into a circumstance where the person you are dealing with whom you trusted and thought was godly had you do something that turned out to really be sinful? When I was young and my family lived in Queens, New York, I remember going to the local grocery store with my parents. There was a display of Bracht’s candy at that grocery store, which you can still find in the giant grocery store in Red Lion. Back then, you could purchase pieces of candy from the display for a penny and eat them while you were in the store. The Giant used to do this until a couple of years ago. So here I was with my father and my brother and sister and we walked up to the Bracht’s candy display, and my father told each of us to take two pieces of candy. I never saw him ever put any money into the cashbox that sat with the candy display. That means that we shoplifted the candy.
As a young child, I looked up to my father as being godly. I thought for sure that he would pay for the candy that he told us to take. But he didn't pay for the candy, and we children ended up sinning against God because we stole candy. It wasn't our fault but rather my father's fault gut we still sinned. The next time we went to the grocery store, my father told us to go ahead and take two pieces. I should have said no. But since my father told me to do this and I saw him as a good person, I took them anyway. This is an example of a woman named Babylon entering into my life.
Another example would be in the mid-1960s, the 110 Instamatic camera came out. Remember, they had the little cartridges for film, which was a lot easier to put into the camera than having a pull out a 35mm role and thread it into the camera. I really wanted to have a 110 Instamatic camera. I was learning to develop my own pictures, and I thought the 110 camera was cool. However, the cameras were costly, and I didn't have the money. One day a friend of the family, who we called our Uncle Eddie, showed up and handed me a box. Inside the box was a top-of-the-line Kodak 110 Instamatic camera. So I opened the box and was thrilled that I now had a 110 Instamatic camera. I pulled out the instruction booklet, and when I did, the registration card came out and fell on the floor. Eddie picked up the registration card and tore it in half, telling me that I couldn’t register the camera.
Later on, I asked my mother what that meant, and she told me that the camera was stolen merchandise. It was very common for merchandise to be stolen from the docks in Manhattan and make its way throughout the city. Knowing that the camera was stolen, I should have given it back to Eddie. Instead, I looked the other way and used the camera. After all, both Eddie and my parents said that it was OK that the camera was stolen merchandise. Again this is Babylon, the woman looking godly, and yet she's causing sin in the world by taking me away from God. Babylon looks godly, but she is evil, and we must learn to beware of her. In fact, that is the theme of this chapter. There are times when we will commit sins because it looks right. It is from someone who we think is godly, but it's really evil.
The other thing we learn from this chapter about evil is that evil devours evil. The beast who Babylon the woman is sitting upon will strip her naked and eat her flesh. Evil devours evil. At the end of World War I, Germany lost the war, was a bankrupt nation. Things were horrible in Germany during the 1920s, while in the United States, things were fantastic. The German people experienced something called hyperinflation. The money would become worthless overnight. The country was humiliated, and so were its people. In 1932 Adolf Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany.
He gave the façade that he was going to help the people and bring Germany back to her former glory. In fact, during those next five years, he managed to turn that country around. He fixed the economic system of the country. He got the factories back up and running. He even reestablished an Army and Navy in Germany. From the point of the ordinary people in Germany, Hitler was godly. However, the people did not know the evil that lurked behind the facade of good. It wasn't until after World War II that most of the people of Germany who supported Hitler realized what was really going on and the evil there. In this case, the evil that was the Nazi movement ended up destroying itself. The evil became greedy and started to fight within itself and went to devour more than it should.
We can see evil devouring evil when we think about how lies promote bigger lies that promote bigger lies until finally one is caught and the whole thing falls apart. From the politics of our country, we had an incident back around 1972 called Watergate. What would have happened if Nixon had come out and said, yes, this happened, we are sorry about it, and those who committed the crime simply paid the penalty. Instead, Nixon lied about his involvement. He lied about others' participation, and the lies became bigger and bigger and bigger, devouring itself until it all fell apart with President Nixon's resignation. Evil devours evil in this case. The lies became more significant lies that became bigger lies that drove Nixon and his advisers deeper and deeper into sin.
To be fair to the Republicans, we have on the Democratic side of the aisle the incident with President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. If Clinton would've come out and told the truth initially, he would never have been impeached. Instead, he told a lie which became another lie which became a bigger lie until eventually, the whole thing fell apart. Evil devours evil which devours evil, and Satan gets stronger and stronger.
True wisdom consists of correctly identifying Babylon's evil and not being deceived by Satan in whatever form he takes. True wisdom tells us that when we are deceived by Babylon or when we fall into evil, we must immediately repent our ways and make restitution for the sin, especially before God. This is the crux of this chapter in the book of Revelation. It is a warning from God that Satan will come to us in many different forms. The most difficult one to recognize is when Satan comes before us looking like God. It is up to us to resist Satan and to recognize Satan's evil.
God loves us so much that He has sent us not only His Son but also the book of Revelation as a warning to us. God wants us in heaven with Him so much that He had us preach the entire book of Revelation here this past summer. God loves us so much that he will continue to remind us to beware of evil and sin so that when our time comes, we will be ready to meet Christ at the gates of heaven so that on our individual Judgment Day the doors will be swung open to heaven so that we may enter. We should always praise God in tribute and adoration for his love, care, and concern for us. Amen.
