The Revelation of Jesus Christ ..And there followed another angel, saying, Babylon Is fallen, ls fallen, that great city, because she made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication." ..And great Babylon came in remembrance before God, to give ~?to her the cup of the wine of the fierceness of hls wrath.
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These two references state in summary what the Holy Spirit enlarges upon in chapters seventeen and eighteen and in the first four verses of chapter nineteen. In these chapters it would seem that the Spirit of God draws aside the veil and shows us the doom toward which all the godless systems that have come· in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ are rushing headlong, what their end is going to be, and how God- is finally going to judge them just prior to the personal, visible, bodily return of our Lord to the earth. Now let us read 17: 1-19:4 carefully, prayerfully, more than once. The repeated reading of this portion of the book, as a unit, will show us that chapter seventeen describes the corruption and the fall of Babylon; chapter eighteen enlarges upon the same theme, revealing further the lamentations of "the kings" and "the merchants of the earth" for the loss of their gains in the fall of "the great whore"; while 18:20 and 19: 1-4 add the truth that, when God sends desolation upon Babylon, this false religious system.'He will not only be deal ing with her in righteous judgment, but He will also be aveng ing "the blood of his servants at her hand." I "A WOMAN •• • UPON A SCARLET COLOURED BEAST" Chapter seventeen describes her as "a woman ... upon a scarlet coloured beast." First we see her riding the beast in all her ungodly pride and vainglory. Then we see the beast turning upon her with hatred (verses 16, I 7). We see that " the ten horns .. . upon the beast ... shall hate the whore, and shall make her desolate and naked, and shall eat her'flesh, and burn her with fire." And what does the beast represent, with the seven heads and the ten horns? Without a question, it is the same beast that we have seen in the thirteenth chapter of this book. We have already found that it represents the Roman Empire in
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