Revelation 17:1-6 (The City That Always Falls)

Revelation 17 reveals the world's seductive power through the image of a beautiful woman called Babylon who represents global systems that pull people away from God. This harlot appears attractive with her golden cup, purple robes, and jewels, but she's drunk with the blood of believers and her cup contains spiritual poison. The passage shows two competing forces: the beast representing raw persecution and the harlot representing comfortable seduction that makes people spiritually numb. Every believer faces the daily choice between drinking from the world's golden cup of temporary pleasures or from Christ's cup of eternal life.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Break, we continue our study in the book of Revelation this morning. Turn with me to Revelation chapter 17. Now, if you have ever felt tired, tired of trying to live faithfully in a world that seems to pull you in every other direction, and Revelation 17 is written for you. And my hope and my prayer today is that today's message is a message of encouragement for you. And we sometimes approach Revelation as if it's a puzzle to be solved, a secret timeline to be decoded. But before it is anything else, the book of Revelation is a pastoral letter. The Apostle John wrote it to real churches, to real congregations, seven of them, named in chapters two and three, who were living under a lot of pressure. Some of them faced outright persecution. Others faced something subtler and perhaps more dangerous: the slow seduction of a prosperous, comfortable, powerful empire that kept whispering, you can have all of this if you just stop being so different. If you just get in line and do as the world does. John writes to those people. Now the meaning and the intent of the book of Revelation has been applicable from the first seven churches it was written to over the past 2,000 years to us today. And the meaning has not changed. I would continue to argue that Revelation is not arranged as a linear timeline of future events. It is definitely about the future, but is brimming with symbolism that has application for the church throughout all time to endure with wisdom and to keep our eyes on Christ. It unfolds in seven parallel sections, each one giving us different perspective of the same meaning. Persevere in the face of persecution. Follow Christ and trust in his victory and overcoming of the world, and that it will come to its final fruition, and the church will be victorious in Christ. Now, the section we enter today, chapter 17, focuses on the fall of Babylon, the world, and its proud and seductive opposition to God. And the central image of this chapter is a woman. Now we've seen a chapter where we've had a central image as a woman back in chapter 12, the radiant woman clothed with the sun who represented the people of God. In chapter 17, this is a different woman entirely. And John's vision of her is meant to do something for us to help us see clearly so that we can live faithfully, so that we can hold on to what is real and not be seduced by a mirage of what appears to be good, but is destructive in its core. So let's read together Revelation chapter 17, verses 1 through 6. Then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and said to me, Come, I will show you the judgment of the great prostitute who is seated on many waters, with whom the kings of the earth have committed sexual immorality, and with the wine of whose sexual immorality the dwellers on earth have become drunk. And he carried me away in the spirit into a wilderness, and I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was full of blasphemous names, and it had seven heads and ten horns. The woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet and adorned with gold and jewels and pearls, holding in her hand a golden cup full of abominations and the impurities of her sexual immorality. And on her forehead was written a name of mystery, Babylon the Great, mother of prostitutes and of earth's abominations. And I saw the woman drunk with the blood of the saints, the blood of the martyrs of Jesus. When I saw her, I marveled greatly. As we walk through this text this morning, I want to show you these four points. Firstly, in verses one and two, we have the invitation to see. The chapter begins with an invitation from the angel for John to come and see. The angel's words to John are at their heart an act of kindness. Come, I will show you. God is not hiding this from his people. He is pulling back the curtain. He is saying, I want you to see the world as it really is. Because if you see it clearly, you will not be destroyed by it. A few years ago, about this time of year, spring was springing, and we were preparing to receive the new chicks on our farm. It was about dusk, and Courtney and I went to tend to the chickens and then to the barn to prepare the brooder that would house our new chicks for a time. And lazily we were both in flip-flops, which is not the best attire for farm chores. And we began walking across the barn talking, and suddenly I saw in front of us, perfectly blended in with the dirt floor, a big copperhead coiled up right in our walking path. And in the moment, I did not ask my wife for permission before grabbing her and calling her attention to danger. I immediately reached across and stopped her and then showed her the danger that she did not see, but I did. This is what the angel is doing with John and subsequently what John is doing with us. Look at the danger in front of you. Do not go that way, but avoid the destruction that seeks to harm you. The danger is camouflaged at first. It's hard for us to see at first glance. That's why the angel is saying, Come, I will show this to you. And it's a symbol of God showing us the dangers of the world. Now we see that the great prostitute is seated on the many waters. Then we see later in verse 15, which we didn't read, but later in verse 15 we'll see, tells us that the waters represent peoples, multitudes, nations, and languages. This is a global reality. The harlot's reach is not limited to one city, not to one empire. She is present wherever human civilization organizes itself around anything other than the living God, wherever comfort, power, pleasure, or pride become the ultimate goods. And she has done what? She has seduced the kings of the earth, and the dwellers of the earth are drunk on her wine. Now it's worth sitting for a moment in the word drunk. Here is a modern analogy that might help you. Social media. Social media platforms are deliberately designed by engineers to be addictive. The variable reward, the infinite doom scrolling, that dopamine hit of a notification, it is engineered intoxication. Now people walk around genuinely convinced that they are freely choosing how to spend their attention when, in fact, they have been carefully, scientifically, seduced into a stupor. They don't feel imprisoned, though, they feel entertained. All the world has to do is entertain you to death. The wine of the harlot is a distraction from the truth. It is not suffering, it's numbness. It is the slow, pleasant loss of clarity. The people drunk on the world's offerings are not in agony. They are comfortable. They are satisfied in the way that a drunk person is satisfied. They cannot see straight, but they don't know that, and they don't feel the danger. This is one of the most compassionate things that revelation does for us. It tells us the truth about what the world's seductions actually are. Not pleasures that will make us happy, but a wine that will make us blind. It distracts us from the beauty of Jesus Christ and a life lived in complete devotion to him. Secondly, in verses 3 and 4, the vision in the wilderness. So here John is taken into the wilderness. Now it's a strange place for an encounter like this, but it's in the wilderness that Revelation shows us a honest vision. There are no distractions out in the wilderness, no ambient noise. In the wilderness, John sees things as they really are. And what John sees is at first very stunning. The woman is magnificent, purple and scarlet, the colors of wealth and royalty, gold and jewelry and pearls, the accumulated beauty of civilization and triumph and power and greed. She is everything that the world holds up as a picture of success, refinement, and power. She is dazzling, proclaiming to the world that if you're not here, you need to orchestrate your life in a way to get here. And she's also holding a golden cup. Now, the book of Proverbs warns us about an adulteress. And it uses exactly this kind of imagery: lips that drip honey, a voice smoother than oil, a path that looks like a shortcut, but it leads down to death. Now, Solomon here was not describing someone who looked sinister. He is describing someone genuinely attractive, genuinely persuasive, genuinely pleasant to be near. The danger is not in spite of the pleasantness, the danger is embedded in the pleasantness. The harlot of revelation is the proverbs adulteress manifested and then scaled to the size of a global empire. The honey is real, and so is the poison. The cup is golden. It's not bad. Gold is not bad. Many of you in here have gold jewelry on. God made a beautiful world and declared it good. The problem is not that the cup is attractive, the problem is what's inside of it. It's full of abominations. It's filth, dressed up in finery. And this is how the world so often presents itself, though, isn't it? Not as something obviously ugly, but as something genuinely appealing. C.S. Lewis captured this in the Screwtape Letters, where the senior demon screw tape instructs his nephew never to let humans examine what they are actually pursuing. Because if they look closely at the pleasure itself, the spell is often broken. The strategy is to always keep people moving toward the thing without ever letting them stop to look at the cup. The harlot's power depends on you not looking too carefully at the cup. Every one of us knows what this feels like: the pool of a lifestyle, an ambition, a relationship, a habit, a comfort that looks so golden on the outside. Now, revelation is not asking us to pretend that the cup isn't beautiful, it's asking us to look at what's inside. Now, in a similar way, Jesus chided the Pharisees for being fixated on the appearance of the outside of the cup, but on the inside being full of greed and self-indulgence, and he called them blind, not blind in that they could not physically see, but blinded by the outer appearance, so that the inside that mattered was neglected. The distractions of the world are enough to blind most. But look inside the cup, see the destruction that the world offers, and compare it to the eternal life that Christ offers. We must keep our eyes on Christ. That's the message of the entire book of Revelation. This harlot is riding a scarlet beast, the great persecuting power of earthly powers that we've already seen in chapter 13. Now, the harlot and the beast are not the same. The beast represents raw, coercive power, the world that threatens you, and the harlot is a seductive cultural power, the world that entices you. Think of it this way: the beast is that iron fist, and the harlot is the velvet glove. They are not always the same thing, but they work in concert. And the church in every age has felt both. The open hostility that says, you will bow or you will suffer, and the soft seduction that says, just stay and enjoy. John's first readers felt both of these pressures from Rome, and so has the church in every generation. It's a reminder that we are attacked from every angle. The beast will persecute, the harlot will seduce, and we have to prepare for battle against both fronts. One seeks to destroy you by making you as uncomfortable as possible for following Christ. The other seeks to make you as comfortable as possible in not following Christ, only to pull the rug out from you in the end. Roughly around the 5th century BC, the ancient military Chinese uh Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War, in which he argued that to succeed in battle you must know your enemy. The persecuting attack, perhaps, is more easily seen. It is the attack of seduction that sneaks in from our flank, catches us off guard, and offers us the golden cup of poison. Listen to the words of John. Take heed. Know your enemy's strategy well, so that you may withstand the enchanting arrows of seduction. Armor up and follow Christ so that you do not fall victim to either. Thirdly, this morning in verse 5, we see the name. Her name is on her forehead, visible, public. And the name is called a mystery, but not because it's unknowable, but because it is being revealed. This is what the whole book of Revelation is: an apocalypse. It's an unveiling. God is showing his church what is true, what is real, what is underneath. The name Babylon. Every Jewish and Christian reader would have felt that name to the depth of their bones. Babylon was the great enemy, the empire that destroyed Solomon's temple, that carried God's people into exile, and that seemed in its day entirely unstoppable. And you know what happened? Babylon fell. There is a famous ancient cylinder now in the British Museum on which the Persian king Cyrus recorded his conquest of Babylon, describing how the great city capitulated with hardly a fight. How its last king was captured. How the empire that seemed eternal dissolved almost overnight. The people of God in exile had wondered if Babylon would stand forever. It did not, it falls. Every Babylon falls. This is John's point. He uses Babylon the same way that Peter does in his first letter when he's talking about Rome, as a code for Rome, and by extension, for every expression of every godless imperial power in every age. John is not describing one future city that will arise at the end of time. He is describing a pattern, the Babylon pattern that recurs throughout history. Every generation of the church encounters it. It wears different clothes in different centuries, it speaks different languages, but the name is always the same, and the cup is always golden, and the wine always intoxicates. This means that Revelation 17 is not primarily a message for some future church. It is a message for every church. It is a message for us right here in our own global Babylon, in our own moment, constantly being offered the golden cup from a velvet gloved hand under the shadow of an iron fist. Fourthly, this morning in verse 6, the horror and the comfort. And here's where the vision turns and it takes a sharp turn. The harlot is not only seductive, she is violent. Behind the beauty, behind the golden cup is something Scripture tells us is absolutely terrible. She is drunk on the blood of the saints. Now we have learned in our study of Revelation about severe persecution of Christians in the early church under Rome. Historians who have studied the persecution of Christians under the Roman Emperor Nero describe how the executions were turned into public entertainment. Christians burned as torches, Christians thrown to the wild animals in the Colosseum. Christians killed to the delight of the crowds. And the remarkable thing, noted by an historian named Tacitus, and grant you, Tacitus was no friend of Christians, was that even he found it excessive and even felt pity for the victims. But the crowd was entertained, the empire was drunk on it. The harlot clothed in Rome's purple was drunk on the blood of the saints. But this has not been just Rome. The Reformation martyr William Tyndale was strangled and burned for translating the Bible into English so that the common man could. Read it. Only one of many martyrs during the Reformation period. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged by the Nazi regime just before the end of World War II. Thousands of believers in China, North Korea, Nigeria, all across the Middle East today know the harlots' violence in ways that most of us comfortable in Western churches can barely imagine. The cup may look different, the dress may have changed, but she's always the same woman. And John says he marveled greatly, astonished, perhaps even bewildered. How can something so beautiful be so murderous? How can the golden cup be so full of blood? This is the great mystery of evil. We have to know. It is both glamorous and lethal. The angel's response in verse 7 is essentially: don't be surprised by this. Don't be taken in and seduced by her beauty. Now you see her for what she is. And here is the pastoral word that I want you to take home from this message. When the world is hostile to your faith, when you feel the cost of following Jesus, whether that is social awkwardness, perhaps being ostracized or left out of worldly pleasures, professional pressure, or perhaps even real suffering, know that you are not in a story that has gone wrong. You are in the exact story John was writing about. The harlot's enmity toward the saints is not a malfunction of history. It is a confirmation that you belong to the bride, not to her. And the bride wins. Chapters 18 and 19 tell us that. Babylon falls. It always falls. Every empire that has been drunk on the blood of the saints has eventually collapsed under the weight of its own abominations. Rome fell. The powers that martyred Tyndale and Bonhoffer fell. They always fall. God sees the blood of his saints and he keeps account of it. And the angel holding the bowl of wrath is the same angel showing John the harlot. Judgment is coming. It's not ours to execute, never ours to execute. Vengeance is mine, says the Lord. Judgment belongs to him, and in his time it is coming for the harlot and all who follow her, not for the bride. So the conclusion this morning, I want to ask you a question. Whose cup? Whose cup do you drink from? There's a beautiful contrast running beneath the whole book of Revelation. There are two women, the harlot and the bride. There are two cities, Babylon and the New Jerusalem. There are two cups. The golden cup full of abominations, and the cup of the Lord's Supper, filled with the blood of the New Covenant. Every day, in small ways and large, we choose which cup we are drinking from. This is what I'm pressing you on. Which cup do you drink from? Do you attempt to satisfy your thirst with the harlot's worldly path of destruction? Or do you go to Christ, the one who has the living water, from which all who drink from will never thirst again? Now here's a simple image I want to carry you home. A magician's trick works because the audience is distracted, looking at the wrong hand. The flourish, the showmanship, the distraction, the jokes, the smooth talk, the assistant. All of it is designed to keep your eyes away from where the real action is actually happening. The harlot is the most elaborate misdirection in history. She wants your eyes on the gold, the jewels, the purple, the power, the spectacle, the cup. Because if you look at the cup, if you really look at it, and you see what's inside, and if you look past her entirely to what is coming, the fall of Babylon, the marriage supper of the Lamb, the new Jerusalem. That spell is broken entirely. But if she can distract you with her seduction, it's to the Venus fly trap you go. Like an alligator snapping turtle that lies at the bottom of the river using its tongue as bait to lure the ignorant fish into its mouth. So does the harlot's seduction lure you to your destruction. This is why we have to keep our eyes forward on Christ, so that we are not seduced by the ways of the harlot, and we do not succumb to the worldly comforts she offers that turn out to be nothing but a plank to walk and fall to our doom. Do not be conformed to the world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. The message of the book of Revelation, of chapter 17 this morning, the message for believers is the message that John has been telling you. He started telling you in his gospel. He told you in his epistles, he's telling you now in Revelation. Endure. Church, endure. The iron fist is coming for you. Endure. The velvet gloved hand is seducing you. Endure. The message to non-believers is this you are on a path that leads directly to this harlot. You are being seduced by her, and you are on her way, and you are drinking of her cup and its subsequent destruction, and there's nothing you can do about it. But God, being rich in mercy, has defeated her for you through Christ. He died on the cross and rose from the dead three days later, so that all who profess faith in him and believe in their heart that God raised him from the dead will be saved. Non-believer, repent of your sin and profess Christ as Lord and Savior today, and follow him, not the harlot on the beast. And you will taste the cup of the Lord forever. The same God who showed John this vision also showed him the outcome. He shows him the fall of Babylon and the marriage supper of the Lamb. He shows him the new Jerusalem where there's no more mourning or crying or pain. He showed him the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and from the Lamb. That is where the story ends. Not with the harlot on her scarlet beast, not with Babylon, drunk in the blood of the saints, but with the bride, radiant and beloved in a city that was built by and overwhelmingly inhabited by God and his radiant presence forever. With no more sin, no more death. In Christ, we as his people, we as the church, are more than conquerors, not because of what we have overcome, but because of him who overcame it for us. The Lamb who is slain and is now alive forevermore. And Jesus said, Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide, and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few. The harlot's gate is wide. Her path is easy for a time. Her cup is golden, her invitation is warm, and the crowd around her is large. But Jesus says there's another gate, narrow and hard, only for a time, and leading to life. This is the gate we are called to enter. This is the cup that we are called to drink from. Hold fast to Christ, drink from the right cup, endure, pray for wisdom, prepare for battle, and remember the words of the Lord for his people in Isaiah 41 10. Fear not, for I am with you. Be not dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will hold you up with my righteous right hand. Let's pray together.