Babylon the Great Lion: The Golden Empire

Rev 14:9-11 January 9, 2017

God’s majesty and omnipotence firmly established, we can now turn our attention back to “The Redemption Play” and the appearance of the first great empire in God’s quintessential plan. The “audience” now sees a parade of well-dressed, sophisticated people marching on to the world scene. The inhabitants of the world gawk with envy at this procession of arrogant and proud nation. The world is awed by their resplendent riches as the Babylonians, by their majesty, captured the imagination and the hearts of Mankind.

Babylonian may not have had a monopoly on pride, but in their day they certainly cornered the lion’s share of it. They ate delicate cakes and sweet things as they reclined in fine linens made from fabrics brought by extravagant caravans from the far reaches of civilization. Woolen cloaks of broad design and color and masterful workmanship protected them from the weather. Babylon’s noblemen spent their days in luxury and refinement. Culture was both a pursuit and a product. Writing had been invented by their ancestors. The sciences, like mathematics, engineering and astronomy were highly developed disciplines. The city itself was an engineering feat; no! A marvel, that enabled the citizens of Babylon to live in open spaces with a general cleanliness that would make modern cities like Tokyo, New York, London or Mexico City, with their crowded conditions and burnt out neighborhoods, blush with embarrassment. All first-hand accounts – such as the one by the Greek traveler, known as the father of history, Herodotus – are recorded in agreement: everyone stood speechless in the presence of Babylon’s majesty and power. It should be no mystery that God labeled Babylon, The Head of Gold.

Try to envision this “city”, though it is impossible to compare it with anything in the modern world. The capital of the empire, it was fifteen miles square (225 square miles), encompassed by walls 350 feet high and eighty-seven feet thick. Six chariots – each six horses wide – could ride abreast on the paved roads that capped off the tops of the wall. Twenty-five brass gates better than twenty feet high were stationed proportionately on each of the four sides. The city was divided down the middle by the Euphrates River which allowed for lush farms and gardens, and provided the lifeblood for one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. The city had a comprehensive sewerage system and a municipal water works. On one side of the river the King’s glorious palace loomed, while on the other, the Tower of Jupiter Belus (Baal or Bel) as it was called then – it was actually the Tower of Babel which had been restored and even completed by Nebuchadnezzar – rose high above the walls into the skyline and stood as the center and the symbol of Babylon’s vibrant, occult religious life. A number of lesser ziggurats (religious towers like the Tower of Belus) dotted the city. In reality, the city was more a province than a city having stores and provisions stockpiled in it that could last years and years in case anyone was daring enough, or foolish enough, to lay siege to her. As the Titanic was billed unsinkable centuries later, so Babylonians – and all who witnessed her majesty – thought she was impregnable. The glory of the city of Babylon is almost impossible to believe or comprehend, even in this day of star
wars technology.

Just a quick scan of Babylon’s glory and magnitude shows why God identified it as the Colossus of Empire’s Head of Gold. But, calling Babylon the head also has spiritual symbolism. As the Empire’s head, it is the seat of the mind – the soul – of the Empire, and as the soul of the Empire, Babylon injected false religion into it. Through its religion, the Empire set its direction: that is, to establish the worship of creation instead of the Creator. With the subtlety and wisdom of Satan behind it, Babylon set precedents about worshipping creation that would stay with the Beast throughout its evolution. In the end, revealed in the book of Revelation, Babylon is synonymous with the word whore which is associated with universal false religion. Even the concept of making everybody, on pain of death, worship a great image was used by the King of Babylon and is a prophetic tip off of the Antichrist’s ultimate demand that everyone worship his image at the time of the end.

Babylon’s False ReligionChapter 3 of Daniel, the well-known story about the three Jews, Meshach, Shadrach, and Abednego, provides a prophetic and graphic warning about the Antichrist and his blasphemous demands at the end.

These three Jews were accused of treason and sentenced to a fiery death because they refused to do the “sensible” thing: bow down before the idol which the king had set up in the plain of Shinar. To Babylonians, the king’s request must have seemed a small thing, and it must have been hard for the three Jews to resist, especially when the alternative was to be incinerated in a raging furnace. But they did resist and their faith is recorded as a warning against the Antichrist tactic of the end time when the battle over the issue of worship and faith will also be one of life and death. At the end, those who are not willing to worship the image made in the likeness of the Antichrist himself will be sentenced to death just as Meshach, Shadrach and Abednego were. The strategy, with the image of Shinar, as in the end, was supposed to teach people that those who do not worship the idol will lose their lives in a fiery torment, but as usual the exact opposite is true. The true fate of those who worship the false gods of this world is loudly proclaimed by another “watcher” of the Lord, in the book of Revelation,

“And the third angel followed them, saying with a loud voice, If any man worship the beast and his image, and receive his mark in his forehead, or in his hand,
The same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out without mixture into the cup of his indignation; and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb:
And the smoke of their torment ascended up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night, who worship the beast and his image, and whosoever receiveth the mark of his name.” Rev 14:9-11

People who worship God will not be put to a fiery death, to the contrary. Those who decline to worship the gods of this world will find life everlasting; and those who do worship the Beast and his image will find a fiery torment in Hell. The faith of Jesus rests outside the worship of things in this world, it does not find its hope in this life or this body, but the faith of God is in the heavens, in the everlasting life to come. Those who worship in truth need not fear the second death of the eternal lake of fire, nor the torment of being lost and alone, forever cut off from the Creator. “Here is the patience of the saints: here are they that keep the commandments of God, and have the faith of Jesus.” Revelation 14:12. Only people secure in a personal relationship with God through faith in Jesus Christ will be able to discern between true worship and eternal life and false worship and spiritual death.

It is no light thing that an entire chapter of Daniel is devoted to this great similitude of faith. As in this case, we can be sure that Satan will cleverly subvert the truth disguising his purposes as long as possible, but as in the story of Meshach, Shadrach and Abednego the truth will surface when false religion is resisted by faith. The three were thrown into the king’s makeshift “lake of fire”, and the flames were so great that even the men who tossed them in were scorched by the terrible heat and died. But moments later, King Nebuchadnezzar saw three men walking around in the flames unscathed, and was astonished to see another man with them, a fourth man, who Nebuchadnezzar blurted out, is “like the Son of God”. These men not only survived by refusing to refusing to worship this original image of the Antichrist, they met Jesus too! There is the true lesson! So impressed was Nebuchadnezzar by the miracle, this man who had set up the Antichrist’s prototype image, that even he was forced by the circumstances to give worship to the true God when he said, “There is no other God that can deliver after this sort”. Daniel 3:29 Once again God had used one of Satan’s evil plots to reveal a prophetic truth because it is prophesied that in the end Satan, the Antichrist, the false prophet, and all their hosts, will be forced to admit that God is the only true God. “For it is written, as I live, saith the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall confess to God.” Romans 14:11

In spite of the merciful lessons taught to Nebuchadnezzar, the beast of Babylon persisted in its prophetic mission to fill the earth with Satan’s Creed: the creature must be worshipped rather than the Creator. Who, or what part of creation to be worshipped is secondary. Satan is confident that if he can first rob God of worship that he can ultimately claim victory and get the worship of creation for himself. Babylon, as the regal lion of the beasts of the Empire (Daniel 7), rules over the others by its soulish influence brought to bare by its false religion. This roaring lion even took worship a step further by institutionalizing the incredible idea that the creature could not only be worshipped, but is even capable of being a Creator. Stealing from the truth, that God molded man from the clay of the earth, by his own hands, in his own image, and breathed life into him; Babylon dared to believe that us creatures could also mold something from the earth giving it the power of life and death over people, deserving of their honor and worship. In the end the Lord will allow this foolish deception to reach its greatest depth when the Antichrist will be given a magical power enabling him to give an image in his likeness, life (Revelation 13). To an unfaithful world it will seem as if the Antichrist has created life itself. The image will be able to both speak and kill. It will be the final expression of what is in the vain minds of the creature. The creature aspires to be God. But rest assured, the vanity started in Babylon will end in deadly folly.

The vain mind of the Babylonian religion has infested the whole earth and shaped politics and cultures everywhere throughout all of history. The world is ever filling with “beautiful”, and “loving”, and seemingly God anointed ways in which it can worship man and his inventions. How we pat ourselves on the back for creating a living chromosome in a test tube; how we believe we may do anything we desire; how we believe we are God. Deception and false light are at the heart of the “Whore of Babylon’s” gospel. Its garbage is not ordained by the true God, but the Whore’s religion will insist it is. It will even call on God’s name, without shame, whenever it is expedient. Her greatest blasphemy is to dare to say that God is with them. The Whore has no scruples, plays by no rules, and is age-old soul of the Beast. No single force in the hands of men is stronger on earth than these great deceptions passed on by the seductive whore and it is to this soul, this high and mighty head, that the silver body of Persia attached itself when it descended to the Beast’s throne by conquering Babylon the Great in 538 B.C.

All the empires of history have had a spirit, a spiritual power, that controlled it and spurred it on to dominance, but the four spirits of the Colossal image of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream which control the four great empires are the ones with the spirit and power of the Antichrist. They not only hold in common the spirit of humanism, they are responsible for filling the earth with it. This humanism is a common enterprise that has its roots in the rebellious tradition started at the Tower of Babel. And certainly the religion and hopes of the Babel conspiracy did not die with the scattering of the rebels over the face of the earth, or the confusing of languages. The ambition of men to control their own destiny by a unity that opposes God’s will has never died; and this humanism, this worship of creatures rather than Creator, is what lies at the heart of any imperial power, and never more so than in the four Antichrist Empires of Daniel. For the next 600 years – before the coming of our Hero – these four monsters march in succession across history’s stage, subduing every people and culture in their path, all according to God’s script for “The Redemption Play”.