The Revelation of St. John the Divine

by A. H. Ames

If any of the prophecies of this book can be proven to find their exhaustive fulfillment in any particular and definite body, individual, or event, so that when we have identified the body or individual or event we have reached the whole purpose of the writer, then, of course, its value as inspiration ceases or, at least, is materially diminished. It may have an archæological interest as a record of past conditions, but its influence upon the present and future is somewhat like that of a fossil upon living types.

When the prophets of the old dispensation uttered their denunciations of the luxuries, the sensualism, the cruelty, the gilded vices, or the coarser sins of the cities and empires of the ancient world their purpose was not to vent vindictiveness against conquerors under whose might the Israel of God was oppressed and trampled down, but to direct thought and attention to a spirit of evil, a principle of the kingdom of darkness, which for a while found an embodiment therein, yet was not wholly comprehended in it. The empires crumbled into dust, the great capitals became masses of decaying ruins, but the spirit which animated them lived on, surviving their destruction.

Such was, doubtless, the design of this Apocalyptic vision. Babylon is a symbol of something that has its fulfillment again and again, but is never exhausted in any manifestation. The generations of men, down to the close of time, must watch for and be warned against the spirit which it embodied, and every individual Christian, as well as the Church at large, needs the caution which is here given him against such forms of it as are likely to tempt him from the path of duty or safety.

Of all the hostile powers with which the Hebrew people were brought into contact and from whom they suffered Babylon seems to have been the most dreaded, and the animosity expressed toward it by the prophets was emphatic and marked. Its approaching doom evoked no sentiment of pity, but was hailed with unmingled satisfaction. What there was about Babylon which justified such exceptional fear and dislike it is, perhaps, not possible for us fully to understand, although we may attain some appreciation of it.

Regarding Nineveh, we have reason to conjecture that its peculiarity was intense and supreme secularism. No temple has been found amid its ruins that was not merely the adjunct of a palace. The priest was the servant of the king. All religious instincts and institutions were simply tools which the haughty monarch unscrupulously used to carry out his cruel and ambitious projects. Such a condition of things can never endure long. It works its own destruction, finding its cure within itself. It was the demoralization resulting from a similar condition which sapped the strength of the Greek Empire of Byzantium and, by isolating it from all allies or sympathy, led to its overthrow.

In Egypt the spheres of the State and of the Church maintained some independence of each other. Vast as was the sovereignty of the Pharaohs, it was not such as to encroach upon or absorb the functions of the priestly caste.

In Babylon, however, still another condition prevailed. Here the priesthood was the ruling order; the religious element dominated the secular. The palace was a part of the temple. It is noticeable how strongly in the prophetic descriptions of Babylon the Chaldean element is emphasized. It is styled “the beauty of the Chaldees’ excellency,” “the land of the Chaldeans,” marking thus the supremacy of that order of soothsayers, sorcerers, and professors of magic and occult science. Babylon was a theocracy, but the god who ruled it was the prince of darkness, not Jehovah. The Church governed the State, but the Church was one that incarnated the spirit of worldly-mindedness, not heavenly-mindedness. So that, in an altogether peculiar and special sense, it was the rival and counterfeit of the true Church of God, giving exercise to the religious instincts of men sufficient to satisfy conviction and quiet conscience, while debasing them by turning them into the channels of lust and sensual gratification.

Yet, as a matter of fact, the domination of Babylon proved less hurtful to the Jewish nation than did the hostility of any other of their great enemies. The form of worldliness which the Israelites encountered in Egypt was such as almost to make them forget their bondage in remembering the enjoyments they had found there. Their actual experience in Babylon during the years of their captivity, the lessons they learned and the comparisons they drew when brought into personal relationship with its life, left no lingering love of idolatry and cured them forever of any desire to worship its gods.

But the Babylon of the book of Revelation comprehends more than the Babylon of the Hebrew prophets. The dangers which beset the Christian would be far less than they are if the Babylon of this world, which opposes itself as a rival to the kingdom of Christ, had no fascinations beyond those which the great city by the Euphrates could offer. The wily enemy of mankind is too subtle to depend upon any such powers of attractiveness as were embodied in the capital of the Chaldean Empire. And in describing the counterfeit of the kingdom of Christ the writer of the Apocalypse adds to his portrait of Babylon features which are used by Ezekiel as characteristic of another great capital, Tyre. Babylon was never a center of commerce; in no sense could it be described as a city whose merchants were princes. The same is also true of Rome, and is thus adverse to the opinion that John meant to describe the city of the Cæsars and of the popes. His delineation of Babylon would apply to Corinth or Carthage in ancient times, and to Venice or Amsterdam or London in more modern days, with greater aptness than to the metropolis on the Tiber. In this alteration of the emblem in which the writer of the Revelation indulges, in the blending and interweaving of details descriptive of both the Babylon and the Tyre of the Old Testament into the composite figure of the Apocalyptic Babylon, in the transition from Isaiah’s sublimely ironical shout of triumph over the metropolis by the Euphrates to Ezekiel’s sad and pathetic dirge over the fall of the commercial emporium of Phœnicia, a clew is given us to the interpretation of his meaning.

The influence of Tyre upon the Hebrew people and religion was always deleterious, almost disastrous. The intercourse which began in the magnificent Solomon’s love of show and splendid state and luxury, and which was increased by the intermarriage of the royal houses of Ahab and Jehoshaphat with Tyrian princesses, was fruitful of moral degeneration. From the spiritual pesthouse upon the Mediterranean came, first, Tyrian art, then, Tyrian wares, then, Tyrian idols, and, then, the unbridled and lawless sensualities for which Tyre was notorious, until Baal had displaced the golden calves set up by Jeroboam in Bethel and had well-nigh overthrown the altars of Jehovah in the city of the great King.