The Destruction of the Final World Religion, Pt. 2

Revelation 17:1-6 

     We have had a great adventure going through the book of Revelation.  Its practicality in Christian living is unquestioned because the promise at the beginning of the book says, "Blessed is the one who reads and understands."  Its impact on our understanding of human history, the present, the future is profound.  We know where the world is going.  We know how it will all fall out in the end.  There are so many specific prophecies, so many general things we have seen that have made us aware of Satan's great power escalating as we get closer to the end.  We've tried to all the way through this book give you a fair, clear, sound interpretation of these passages without running in to the sensational.  I want to avoid that because I don't want to go beyond the interpretation that Scripture allows.

     I remember when I first came to Grace Church twenty-five years ago, a gentleman had come here on a Sunday night and he preached a sermon.  He announced that he would be preaching on this sermon and he preached it, and the title was, "Why God will never allow man to walk on the moon."  It wasn't long after that sermon that Neal Armstrong walked on the moon.

     I have read prophetic books written in the thirties and the forties that identified Hitler as the Antichrist, Mussolini as the Antichrist.  I have read books written in the sixties that introduced Henry Kissinger as the Antichrist.  There have been all kinds of applications of the interpretation of Revelation that have gone beyond what an appropriate interpreter would do.  Those books lie somewhere gathering dust.  And the credibility of the one who wrote them is certainly in question when what he predicted so absolutely has not come to pass.

     It's not necessarily a modern foible, to be honest with you.  Even in the early church there were many early church interpreters of Scripture who identified certain specific Popes as the Antichrist...only to have missed.  And so I want you to understand that interpreting the book of Revelation, we cannot be sensational, we cannot identify any current human being.  It's very difficult for us to go beyond the Scripture without feeling that we have somehow pressed the Word of God beyond its intention.  And frankly, there's enough here anyway that gives us specificity so that we can sense and feel that we are certainly living in a day that is nearer to the coming of Christ probably than any of us believe.

     You don't need to sensationalize chapter 17 to have it shock you and leave a tremendous impact.  You don't need to particularize it.  You don't need to identify a given individual or a given religion by its name to feel the tremendous impact of this chapter.  Revelation 17 tells us the story, the future account of the destruction of the final form of false religion.  As we have been learning, the end of man's day of ruling this world under satanic influence will come to an end.  We have been studying the ending, that's what Revelation is.  It's the event surrounding the end of man's day and the return of Jesus Christ.  We have learned very much about the end.  We've seen it from God's standpoint, the standpoint of Christ.  We've seen it from the standpoint of the church.  We've seen it from the standpoint of Israel.  We've seen it from the standpoint of the unredeemed people in the world.  We've seen it from the standpoint of Satan.  We've seen it from the standpoint of demons.  We've crisscrossed it every way that the book of Revelation indicates.

     One of the most fascinating, one of the most important develops of the end will be a one-world religion...which certainly seems to me to be an agenda in our current world religious culture.  And the book of Revelation indicates to us here in this seventeenth chapter that there will be a one-world religion in existence, dominating the whole kingdom of Satan and Antichrist at the end, that kingdom, that religion will be destroyed by Christ when He returns and destroys Satan.

     Now the name of that final world religion is given to us in verse 5.  This is not necessarily going to be its official worldly name, but this is its descriptive name, the name is, "MYSTERY BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND OF THE ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH."  We went into that last time and I just want to pick up the pieces of what we didn't say and maybe give you a brief review.

     This final form of world religion described here in chapter 17 is, first of all, called a mystery.  That is it is more than physical, it is more than geographical, it is more than human, it is more than that which is devised by men.  It is mystical, it is supernatural, it is deep.  It is demonic.  And as yet, that final form of world religion has not yet been revealed, so it is still a mystery.

     It is also called Babylon the Great because it is the final form of religion when all forms of religion roll into one.  And as we described to you last Sunday night, all world religions have come out of one initiating religion, namely the religion of Babel or Babylon.  When the Lord scattered all of those people who had erected a religion to other than the true God, when the Lord scattered them and changed their language, He scattered their false religion into many languages and cultures all over the face of the earth so that all false religion finds its birth in Babylon and in the end, all of those children will come back to mother.  And the final form of Babylonish religion will be Babylon the Great.  All the religions originally spawned out of Babel will recollect themselves as the final world religion, Babylon the Great.

     It is further described as the Mother of Harlots.  And I told you that all false religion and all idolatry is characterized in Scripture as harlotry, as prostitution, being intimate with other than the true God, a kind of spiritual fornication or spiritual adultery.   And the system in Babylon gave birth to all of it.  Babylon originally was the mother of all harlot religions, all false religions.  And additionally, it is called not just the Mother of Harlots, but the Mother of the Abominations of the Earth.  She is the source of every blasphemous abominable religious system on the face of the earth.  They all came from Babel and they'll all come home to mother Babylon.  This then will be the world religion of the last days.

       This system that falls into its final form will be the spiritual side of Satan's world empire.  The material side will be the economic system described in chapter 18.  The leader of the spiritual side is the false prophet.  The leader of the material side is the Antichrist.  The spiritual side is the twin of the material side, or the political economic kingdom.  Both will be destroyed when Christ returns.

     So, our apparently increasingly irreligious culture, we are living in a culture when we feel it getting less and less religious is not at all becoming less and less religious, it is becoming less and less Christian but more and more pagan in its belief.  Our seemingly irreligious world will become utterly religious, totally religious.  Not atheistic, it will fall under Satan's power, under the leadership of Antichrist and under the influence of the False Prophet during the time of the Tribulation and it will become increasingly religious.  It will turn to the supernatural, according to Revelation 13, only it won't worship God, it will worship Satan and it will worship the beast and it will worship the demons.  And all the harlot religious all over the world will come together.  And that final form of world religion will gather probably initially motivated by social action, by existential religious experience, that is that which cannot be defined by dogma, by emotion, a sort of an ethereal sentimentality and by mysticism.  Mainly it will not be humanly engineered.  We can look at the human side and say...what will draw these parts of religion all over the globe together, social acts and existentialism, emotion and mysticism may be on the human level, but the reality of what pulls them together is the influence of Satan, the doctrines of demons and seducing spirits.

     We already learned that the great kings of the east are going to come to the battle of Armageddon and they're all going to be slaughtered there.  We ask the question...what in the world would ever make all the great empires of the east march across the Middle East, across a dried-up Euphrates that God sovereignly and supernaturally dries up and march over to the land of Palestine in the end time to be destroyed by Christ?  And the only answer that you could find in the Scripture is that they are deceived by Satan and his demons.  The same kind of deception will form up the final world religion.  So it's fine to look at some of the current components in anti-Christian, non-Christian pagan religion and to assume what will make men get together, what's going to be the common ground, social action, experience, or whatever.  But in the end it's going to be a satanic process.

     Now the entire empire of Antichrist that will exist in the time of the Tribulation just before Christ returns will be called Babylon the Great.  I believe there will be a literal city, most likely.  There will be a literal rebuilt Babylon as there is now a rebuilt Babylon in the Middle East.  But the city is not really in view here.  What is in view here in chapter 17 is the religious part of the system of Babylon and what is in view in chapter 18 is the material side, or the economic, political side of it.

     T he papacy and the worship of Mary are not Christian, they are Babylonish.  On February 15, 1926, Catholic dogma tells us that the child Jesus came and urged Catholics, quote: "To spend this devotion of and reparation to the Immaculate Heart of the holy Mother Mary."  And the child Jesus declared, "Reparation must be made to the Immaculate Heart of Mary in order for mankind to be saved."  And I remind you that in that system, Jesus serves in some ways to bring the world to Mary.  Catholicism persists even today in depicting Jesus as a helpless babe, or a small child, dependent on His mother Mary who is still called the Queen of Heaven.  Lest you think this kind of preoccupation has faded, no...no one is more convinced of the authenticity of the apparitions and the supposed appearances of Mary than the present Pope.  Nor is anyone more devoted to Mary.  John Paul II has dedicated himself and his pontificate to Our Lady.  He bears on his coat of arms an "M" and that "M" stands for Mary.  His personal motto is embroidered on the inside of his robes and on the inside of his robes in Latin is Totus Tuos Sum Maria, Mary, I'm all yours.  This current Pope has unusual personal reasons for his special devotion to Mary.  While recovering from the assault on his life that occurred, remember back on May 13, 1981, an assassination attempt, it took place, interestingly enough on the anniversary of the Virgin Mary's first appearance, supposedly, on May 13, 1917 at Fatima in Portugal. In a vision she appeared to him to declare that she had spared his life for a special mission he was to fulfill.  John Paul II made a solemn pilgrimage to Fatima on May 13, 1982 where he prayed before the statue of Our Lady of Fatima, thousands heard him speak and consecrate the world to Mary.  On at least three other occasions, October 16, 1983, March 25, 1984, December 8, 1985 he consecrated the world to Mary.

     So the Christianity of the Roman Empire which became known as Roman Catholicism and of which the Pope is the head today is never to be assumed to be the same as biblical Christianity.  It is not the biblical Christianity of the early church, it is the old paganism of Rome surviving under a thin veneer of Christian terminology and form.  No less than the great historian Will Durant writes, "When Christianity conquered Rome, the ecclesiastical structure of the pagan church, the title and vestments of the Pontifex Maximus, the worship of the Great Mother, and a multitude of comforting divinities, the sense of super-sensible presences everywhere, the joy or solemnity of old festivals and the pageantry of immemorial ceremony passed like material blood into the new religion and captive Rome captured her conqueror.  While Christianity converted the world, the world converted Christianity."  So says Will Durant.

     Many of the lives of the Popes exemplified Antichrist-type evil.  More than one Pope vacated when killed by a furious husband who caught him in bed with his wife.  Even Catholic historians admit that many of the Popes were among the most inhuman monsters to walk the earth.  In Vicars of Christ, a book by Jesuit Peter DeRosa(?), he reminds us that Pope after Pope engaged habitually on a grand scale in wholesale mayhem and murder, pillage, rape, incest, sodomy and corruption of the worst sort.  Their evil lives...he said...are a blot on the pages of history.

     So the mother of all harlots found her way to Rome and will find her way back to Rome again and the final form of world religion may well be centered there.

     It should further be noted that the Roman religious system also confuses salvation by grace as do all other false religions, and also confuses the work of Christ.  That is precisely why there was a Reformation.  There had to be a Reformation to sort out true Christianity from the unholy mix.  Sadly, if Martin Luther were alive today in the United States of America, he would be considered by many evangelicals a trouble maker, unloving and arrogant.

     Roman Catholicism opposes the true gospel by imposing works and confounding the true work of Christ.  Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones explained the cause of confusion among so many Protestants when he wrote this, "In one sense, you might well think that the Roman Catholic Church is the most orthodox church in the world.  It believes that Jesus of Nazareth was the eternal Son of God.  It believes in the virgin birth.  It believes in the incarnation.  It believes in His miracles.  It believes in His substitutionary work on the cross and His resurrection," etc.  "But at this point, the subtlety comes in and the difficult arises.  To all that orthodox truth she adds with a damnable plus things which are utterly unscriptural and which indeed become a denial of the Scripture.  So she lands us eventually in a position in which if we accept her teaching we're believing a lie," end quote.

     For example, to the confession that Christ died for our sins.  Romanism adds dogmas whose effect is to deny that His death was sufficient.  One's own good deeds, obedience to the church, participation in the sacraments must be added to what Christ has done.  The rosary, confession to a priest, baptism in the church and indulgences earned are also required.  In addition to Christ's suffering on the cross, the individual must also suffer for his own sins in purgatory where the soul through...I should say...where the soul though cleansed by the blood of Christ must be more thoroughly purged.  Then there is the endless of alms and good deeds and Masses that others must engage in after one is dead in order to obtain his or her release from purgatory and finally an entrance into heaven.

     The Council of Trent came up with a lot of this.  Lest you think that antiquated council no longer stands, it was affirmed by Vatican II.  This is what they said, "If anyone says that after the reception of the grace of justification the guilt is so remitted and the debt of eternal punishment so blotted out to every repentant sinner that no debt of temporal punishment remains to be discharged by the person's own suffering, either in this world or in purgatory, before the gates of heaven can be opened, let him be anathema," which means eternally damned.

     In other words, if you say that there is complete and total forgiveness through faith in Christ and there's no requirement to suffer in this life and in purgatory, you be damned.  Further the Vatican II said, "We affirm that there is a purgatory and that the souls there detained are aided by the suffrage of the faithful and that the Bishops shall see to it that the suffrages of the living, that is the sacrifice of the Mass, prayers, alms, and other works of piety which they have been accustomed to perform to the faithful departed be piously and devoutly discharged in accordance with the laws of the church," end quote.

     In other words, those people can't get out of there unless you're doing stuff that somehow is going to expiate their sin.  Rejection of the simplicity and comprehensiveness of the biblical gospel could not be more clearly stated.  How in the world then can Protestants join along with Catholics in evangelizing the world?   Martyn Lloyd-Jones protested again, he writes, "There are movements afoot which are trying to bring a kind of rapprochement between Roman...that's a coming together...between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism.  The Roman Catholic system is all together more dangerous...said Lloyd-Jones...than is Communism.  Roman Catholicism is the devil's greatest masterpiece.  It is such a departure from the Christian faith and the New Testament teaching that her dogma is a counterfeit, she is as the Scripture puts it, the whore.  Let me warn you very solemnly that if you rejoice in these ecumenical approaches to Rome, you're denying the blood of the martyrs.  There are innocent people who are being deluded by this kind of falsity and it is your business and mine to open their eyes."

     It just shakes me to the core when the host and hostess of the popular Christian TV show, the largest Christian television network which we have here, we see it all the time, frequently give viewers the impression that Roman Catholic doctrine is no different from that of evangelicals.  On one program while interviewing three Catholic leaders, the host declared,  "The difference between Protestant and Catholic doctrine is merely a matter of semantics," quote.  As for transubstantiation, a heresy so great that thousands have died at the stake through the years rather than accept it, the host said, "Well we Protestants believe the same thing.  We were really meaning the same thing but just saying it a little differently.  I'm eradicating the word `Protestant' even out of my vocabulary.  I'm not protesting anything, it's time for Catholic and non-Catholics to come together as one in the Spirit and one in the Lord," end quote.

     Transubstantiation was the belief, is the belief of the Roman Church that the priest literally turns the cup and the bread into the actual blood and body of Christ. And when they eat, they're eating Christ.  As I said, thousands have died fighting that heresy.  To just erase it as a matter of semantics and push it aside, foolish.

     Furthermore, the Roman system always has absorbed its dissidence.  You may read about dissident Roman priests.  You may have heard or read of people like Hans Kung(?) and others who dissent.  The system never throws them out, it just keeps absorbing and embracing so that it never divides, it always conquers.  It just keeps getting wider and wider.

     You have, for example, Mother Teresa whose place for the dying, sick and dying, which I visited, is right next to the most gross, unimaginable worship place in all of Hindu, India.  It is so gross it's not even worth describing.  And they're still offering blood sacrifice there and worshiping in a perverted and deviated way.  She is right next door.  This is what Mother Teresa said in her book, the book about her, I should say, called Mother Teresa: Her people and her work, published in 1976.  "If in coming face to face with God we accept Him in our lives, then we become a better Hindu, a better Muslim, a better Catholic, a better whatever we are.  What God is in your mind you must accept."  Now that is an all-embracing and all-encompassing kind of statement.

     A famous Roman Catholic mystical monk who has become very popular even with some evangelical people by the name of Thomas Merton(?) told an ecumenical gathering of representatives from many religions who were gathering in Calcutta, I'm quoting, "My dear brothers, we are already one but we imagine that we are not.  And what we have to discover is our original unity."  Let's go back to Mother Babylon.

     So, I'm not saying this to be unkind to people who are Roman Catholic. I am bound in dealing with the Word of God to speak the truth.  There are many Protestants who are lost and on their way to hell and will be a very large part of the final form of world religion.  But Rome will also bear much of its foundation.  The Roman Catholic hierarchy is courting Buddhists.  Global religious unity is on the agenda.

     So the final form of world religion will not be atheism, but sweeping supernaturalism, involving Satan, the beast, the False Prophet.  And the one who deceived the people at Babel and started it all will deceive them again and bring them back to where they started. 

     That gets us to verse 1 of Revelation 17.  Let's look at the text.  The destruction of this final world religion is the theme of the chapter and I'm going to give you three points, one of them tonight.  The exposure of this religion, the explanation of it and the extermination of it...the exposure, the explanation and the extermination.

     Here is the vision of the judgment on the final Babylonian religion...the exposure of the harlot.  Verse 1, "And one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and spoke with me saying, `Come here, I shall show you the judgment of the great harlot who sits on many waters." 

     One of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and spoke to me...now this connects this judgment here in chapter 17 with the last seven plagues being poured out.  Remember there were seven angels that poured out the seven bowls described in chapter 16?  One of those angels comes and tells him about this great harlot religion.  This connects, as I said, the judgment with the last seven plagues being poured out.  It is not some additional event.  It is not in addition to.  This is just the angel who steps out and says, "I've told you about the destruction, now let me tell you what it is that's going to be destroyed."  It is a religious system...chapter 17, it is an economic or material system...chapter 18.  He is no longer describing the judgments as in the seals and the trumpets and the bowls, but he is describing what and who is being destroyed by those judgments.  And here you have in these two chapters the most comprehensive description of the final system of Satan in the book of Revelation, or for that matter anywhere else.

     The bowl judgments are going to be the last judgments.  Chapter 16 described them.  They end in verse 21 with these hundred-pound hailstones crushing people.  And whoever survives that, of course, is going to be destroyed when Christ returns to Armageddon and destroys the gathered armies of the world.

     So chapter 16 really ends just before Christ returns.  But Christ doesn't return until chapter 19 so we have chapter 17 and 18 inserted to describe for us the system that is going on in the world that will be destroyed by the bowls and by the return of Christ.  Chronology halts.  The scene goes back, looks carefully at the kingdom being destroyed.

     So one of the seven angels then says, "Come here, I shall show you."  This is a wonderful invitation to a great insight not only for John but for all of us.  The angel says, "Come here, I'll show you a harlot."

     Look at chapter 21 verse 9, just for an interesting comparison.  Chapter 21 verse 9, same introduction.  "One of the seven angels who had the seven bowls full of the seven last plagues came and spoke with me saying, `Come here, I shall show you...not a harlot, but what?...the bride, the wife of the Lamb."  There it is, the bride, the wife of the Lamb, the true church cleansed from every stain, from all defilement by the shed blood of the Lamb, the bridegroom of the Lord, pure, holy, virtuous, magnificent, glorious forever.  But here it is the harlot, mother of all harlotries and abominations and filthiness of idolatry.  Before I show you the bride, I have to show you the harlot.  I'm going to show you the judgment of the great harlot.  The theme in the chapter is judgment.  It takes us a while to get to it but that's the theme.

     When that judgment falls, by the way, heaven rejoices.  Chapter 19 verse 3, they're shouting hallelujah because the smoke of the destroyed Babylon rises up forever and ever.

     As I told you, the great harlot is really a metaphor for spiritual false religion, spiritual defection, idolatry, religious apostasy.  In prophetic language prostitution, fornication, adultery equals idolatry or apostasy.  And we noted last time that in the Old Testament several cities are called harlot cities because their...their population was involved in idol worship.  In Nahum chapter 3 verses 1 and 4, Ninevah is described as a harlot city.  In Isaiah 23, Tyre is described as a harlot city.  And sadly in Isaiah 1:21 Jerusalem is described as a harlot city.  How is the faithful city become a harlot?...says Isaiah.  Any city that has prostituted itself, committing spiritual fornication is a harlot city.

     One commentator says, "All the harlot cities societies mentioned in scriptures have certain common characteristics that are also reflected in John's description of the great Babylon in which he merges the descriptions of ancient Babylon and Jerusalem into one composite."  What are those characteristics?  Royal dignity and splendor combined with prosperi