And they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.”
Genesis 11:4
In Genesis chapter 11, we read of man’s first attempt to create an idolatrous, globalist empire. Rather than obeying God’s command to “fill the earth,” a command first given to Adm and Eve and then later repeated to Noah, who himself was a sort of second Adam, they decided to rebel by remaining in one place and making, “a name for themselves” by building, “a tower whose top is in the heavens.”
This first attempt ended badly for the empire builders as God frustrated their plans as he confused their language and, “scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.”
But because of sin man continued to attempt to create empires in his own image and likeness. In the pages of Scripture, we come across the names of many empires, Babylon, Assyria, Greece, and Rome.
But great empires are not a thing of the distant past. The Ottoman Empire - the Ottoman Empire was the successor to the Byzantine Empire, but the Byzantines didn’t call themselves Byzantines, they called themselves Romans; if we accept this, the Roman Empire didn’t fall until 1453 when Constantinople was conquered by the Turks – fell in 1918, barely a century ago. The sun famously never set on the British Empire, which existed within living memory. Although no one calls it an empire, the American Empire of the post-WWII era has dominated the world we live in.
But none of these empires are named in Scripture. But there is another empire that makes an appearance in the pages of holy writ, and that empire we meet toward the end of Revelation, almost as a bookend to Babel in Genesis 11. The name of that empire? Mystery Babylon the Great, The Mother of Harlots and of the Abominations of the Earth.
So who is this woman drunk with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus? The reformers to a man had the correct answer, the Roman Catholic Church-State. The notes in the Geneva Bible of 1560 provided this note on Revelation 17:6, “This woman is the Antichrist, that is, the Pope with the whole body of his filthy creatures.”
Commenting on Rev. 17:6, John Gill wrote, “’Babylon the Great’; that is, the great city, Rev 14:8 by which name the church of Rome may well be called, because of the signification of its confusion, Gen 11:9 its doctrine and worship being a confused mixture of Paganism, Judaism, and Christianity; and because of the pride and haughtiness of it, its tyranny and cruelty, and its sorceries and idolatry, see Isa 14:12.”
In his book The Two Babylons, Alexander Hislop wrote, “There never has been any difficulty in the mind of any enlightened Protestant in identifying the woman ‘sitting on seven mountains,’ and having on her forehead the name written, ‘Mystery, Babylon the Great,’ with the Roman apostacy.”
Writing in his commentary on Revelation, E.B. Elliot referred to the woman in Revelation 17:6 as “Rome personified.”
And yet for all this, 21st century Protestants have largely forgotten, or more to the point never learned the identity of the woman who rides the beast. Dave Hunt writes,
The leaders of the Reformation were certain that she represented the Catholic Church in general and the pope in particular. That belief, however, has been rejected lately by most Protestants as provocative and demeaning to a body of fellow Christians with whom evangelicals desire to work together in the task of winning most of the world for Christ before the year 2000. In fact, the subject of the woman is generally avoided today as too divisive to discuss (A Woman Rides the Beast, 14).
Beginning in the 19th century, the Protestant church’s salt began to lose its savor. And by the early 21st century, that savor has all but disappeared. Indeed, the lack of discernment among Protestants is such that Christianity Today, the flagship publication of the neo-evangelicals, featured an article in 2015 titled “From Antichrist to Brother in Christ” just in time for Pope Francis’ visit to the United States.
There has been much talk among political conservatives and so-called conspiracy theorists in recent years about globalism and the dangers it represents. This author is very sympathetic to the view that there is indeed a conspiracy to destroy the sovereignty of the nations of the world and the liberties of the people and subsume them under a system of world government. In essence, there is an attempt underway to, in the opinion of this writer, reconstitute the Tower of Babel. One might call it Tower of Babel 2.0. If this is the case, it should come as no surprise that the drive for world government has been spearheaded by Mystery Babylon, picking up where the builders of the Tower of Babel left off.
In effect, the RCCS is repeating the words of the builders of the ancient Tower of Babel, “come, let us make a name for ourselves.”
But while Rome is the granddaddy of all globalist organizations, it is not the only player. The World Economic Forum (WEF), is another organization dedicated to overturning the Protestant Westphalian World Order, erasing sovereign nation states, and setting up a system of world government, has made a name for itself in recent years. That, Lord willing, will be the subject of next week’s post.