DEVOTION
THE
REVELATION
RUN
Rev
18:4-8
4
Then I heard another voice from heaven say:
"Come
out of her, my people, so that you will not share in her sins, so that you will
not receive any of her plagues; 5 for her sins are piled up to heaven, and God
has remembered her crimes. 6 Give back to her as she has given; pay her back
double for what she has done. Mix her a double portion from her own cup. 7 Give
her as much torture and grief as the glory and luxury she gave herself. In her
heart she boasts, 'I sit as queen; I am not a widow, and I will never mourn.' 8
Therefore in one day her plagues will overtake her: death, mourning and famine.
She will be consumed by fire, for mighty is the Lord God who judges her.
NIV
Whatever
this is, this great prostitute, this Babylon, we are to come out of her. These
are words that are very much the same as the prophet Jeremiah spoke to the people
about coming out of Babylon, run for your lives. Run from the fierce anger of
the Lord. He goes on with much the same kind of treatment we are seeing John describe
for us here. Yet the point is we are to run for our lives, we are to come out
of her. This means if we are involved in anyway in drinking the wine of her
adultery, we are to immediately, if not sooner, run away as fast as we can from
doing whatever we are doing that is connected with her. Now if this great
prostitute or Babylon is some religious practice, such as Papal Rome as our
ancient scholars are suggesting, then run. If this great prostitute is an
ideology of the political nature, run. If it is economic in nature we are to
run for our lives. If the kings of the earth are intoxicated with her adulterous
wine, then we can be certain we should not have anything to do with the kings
of the earth, we should come out from them and run for our lives. Let’s just
cut to the chase. Because we believe this great prostitute is in fact the
desire for wealth or money, the love of money is the root of all evil, we
cannot serve God and money and when we are involved with investing, saving,
storing it up for our own future, to spend on own selfish lives we are engaged
in drinking her wine, being intoxicated by it. We are to come out from her. When
the whole of the world economy collapses, when the stock market simply falls
apart and all our faith in our future security in our old age is all gone, what
will we do then? We are to come out from her, run for our lives for a great
disaster is about to happen. Death, mourning and famine are coming to the
world, to the system man has created to have faith in for the future. God is
the only one we need faith in for our future, whether that be in the immediate
future, the next few days, weeks, months or years, or in the future that is to
come, eternity. It seems rather bizarre to say we believe God for the eternity future,
but not for the immediate future, we should look to ourselves for that. If we
are thinking like that, we have drunk the wine. Are thinking is that of an
intoxicated person, not clear, foggy, making back choices. In the movie, Finding Forester, this young man accidentally leaves some of his writings in Forester's apt while trying to steal
something. Forester reads them and returns them with a footnote, "constipated
thinking". This is how we think if we are engaged with the world and its system,
hoping we will supply our needs for our older years. A collapse of everything
the world holds dear is coming, and we are warned here to come out from it, run
for our lives. We are not to share in her sins at all, because if we do we
might well be in grave danger of her plagues. "Run, Forest, Run!" Run as far away
from this ideology as we can. Run!
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