Revelation 17:1-6

The next couple of chapters do not seem to be in chronological order with what we just finished looking at in the final judgments and war in the valley of Har-Megiddo. This is a pause to provide details of the events that occurred during the judgments that affected Mystery Babylon and what that meant to the people on earth. My guess would be that with the rapid speed of the judgments of the bowls that this is the first chance anyone has gotten to take a breath for colour commentary. I’ve seen basketball games like this. This is like that – The action has been so rapid, we have to have a replay as to what was going on at a slower pace.

We have already talked about how the judgments were against the Antichrist and his kingdom, especially the bowl judgments we just looked at. We are also familiar with how the kingdom of darkness will have a common(ish?) set of beliefs to unify it, and it will extend to all false religions on the planet. It was and still is not a surprise that this false religion is the primary persecutor of those of true faith. It was true in the days of Noah, it was true in the days of the prophets, it was true in the time of Jesus, and it is still true today.

God has always hated false religion because it lies about Him, puts false words in His mouth, and promises false hope that has no salvific value. Chapters 17 and 18 are about how He will end all false religion on the Earth as part of the judgments that have already fallen on the Earth. The name of the false religion may be different than what the Lord tells us its true name is, but it will end, and I think it also speaks more than a little about its composition. These next two chapters will discuss the details of the ending of that false belief system that only ever led people to destruction, physically or otherwise. As we read, you will see it does not go well for the false religion in a number of ways over the next two chapters.

I broke the text down in the following manner into thought units or paragraphs:

KV1: The Judgment of the Great Harlot

1: Then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and spoke with me, saying, “Come here, I will show you the judgment of the great harlot who sits on many waters,

1-2: The Revelation of The False Religion

3-6: The Description of the False Religion

There is a lot of use of the word prostitute or harlot (depending on the translation you are using). A prostitute is the modern term, and for the purposes of our study, we could define this as the ideology where people go to have their spiritual needs met, because this is the use of a false religion. An irreversible connection between harlotry and idolatry is made in the Scriptures: “My people consult their wooden idol, and their diviner’s wand informs them; For a spirit of harlotry has led them astray, And they have played the harlot, departing from [marginal: under] their God.” (Hos. 4:12) The context of that verse shows that the Lord is speaking with Hosea about the spiritual harlotry of His people and turning away from Him, and that is clear in the text if you want to go to Hosea 4 and read the surrounding verses. In his commentary on Jeremiah 3, Calvin states, “…whenever the people departed from the pure worship of God, they were justly said to have played the harlot, for they violated their pledged faith: as simplicity of faith is spiritual chastity, so apostasy is that shamelessness and perfidy, when a wife becomes unfaithful to her husband by following adulterers.” Idolatry is considered to be spiritual adultery by the prophets and all of the commentators I looked at, as well as myself. Our faith is much like a marriage. We enter into a covenant with another, and the violation of that covenant with another is adultery. If we are speaking about Christ and His church, if we are messing around with pagan or occult beliefs or traditions, we are committing spiritual adultery. For a believer, it isn’t a good look, I’m sure you will agree.

In this evening’s text, we will examine some of the details about the false religion and its evils, as well as the composition of the body of individuals who practice it. Let’s get into the text.

KV1: The Judgment of the Great Harlot

1: Then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and spoke with me, saying, “Come here, I will show you the judgment of the great harlot who sits on many waters,

It is important to understand that the harlot or prostitute involved is the focus of the spiritual adultery with whom the harlot performs her services. Because we are speaking of spiritual ideology, we are going to allegorize to a point, because as I have already demonstrated, there is some actual analogy between adultery in a marriage and spiritual adultery with a false religion.

You must also remember that those who commit this spiritual adultery with the false religion are also punished individually, but as the focal point for people who attempt to meet their perceived needs with this false ideology, she will be our primary focus for examination. We are reading about the judgment of this great false religion. I need to be crystal clear about that. I do not want anyone to hear the wrong things.

Let’s get right into the text here.

1-2: The Revelation of The False Religion

Those of us who have had some experience in greater Christendom as a whole will understand that not everyone who says they are a Christian is necessarily a Christian. It is not our job to point that out necessarily, but we need to be aware that there are 4 kinds of people that you may find around a church. First, you have people who don’t believe, and know they don’t believe. I’ve met them, and I think anyone should be allowed to attend the church. That’s the mission field coming to your door, so preach the gospel faithfully to these individuals. I am aware of at least one adherent of Buddhism who attends where I go, and I make sure they hear the gospel. Pray for her. Then you have people who believe and know they believe. Those are your brothers and sisters in Christ, and holy partakers in the divine calling of God to be in covenant in the church with you. You usually know who they are because they self-identify with fruit. Third, you have people who don’t think they believe, but really do. You can usually tell these individuals by their lack of assurance, and you can see the fruit of the Spirit in their lives in anything they do. Such are to be encouraged in the faith and built up. Finally, and these are the folks who are too readily found in a church, and it is people who don’t really believe but think they are Christians. We can thank Emperor Theodosius I for that, as the one who made Christianity the religion of the state of Rome. People accuse Constantine I of that, but it was this Theodosius guy who did it. It forced unsaved individuals to pay lip service to Christianity even if they were not believers, and thus filled the churches with unbelievers along with the believers. These people are still our mission field today, and I am aware of more than one individual who was suddenly redeemed as they listened to the gospel from the pastor on Sunday morning.

The problem here is that it makes a rather large population in any given gathering who may not be believing Christians, who will have a strong tendency to be manipulated by the falsity of the world system and the lies it propagates. Think about this for a moment. The harpazo event comes and goes. Those of us who are believers are gathered together to meet Jesus in the air with all other real believers. Let’s say this happens on a Sunday morning (as is the plot of at least a couple of movies I’ve seen (it’s a hobby)). Is your church sanctuary empty? Well, maybe if you’re in a Philadelphia-style church like we read in Rev. 3. But what if, like the rest of us, our congregation is more like Sardis or Laodicea? There will be some who are taken, but there may be a significant portion of people left behind on the earth to go into Daniel’s 70th week.

What will happen to these people? God will either save them or not; those are the only two options. Some will doubtless know what happened and become believers, and this is the group we have been calling “The Tribulation Saints” for lack of a better name. But what about the others? They have a religion but not the Spirit of God and the power of the religion to go with that, through no fault of God’s, by the way.

These individuals will likely turn to this now-forming false religion and apostatize from Christianity officially. These will join the harlot in Spiritual adultery and use her to attempt to meet their needs, ultimately falling prey to the Antichrist and his False Prophet. Let’s see what she’s like.

1: Then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and spoke with me, saying, “Come here, I will show you the judgment of the great harlot who sits on many waters,

One of the angels who had the seven bowls came over to John to explain the details of what had just happened. This is how we know the book isn’t in strict chronological order, though this is just an explanation of the details of what has just happened. If you want to skip it and stick with the chronology, go directly to chapter 19. We’ll stick with this, because it is important.
The angel says that he is going to show the judgment of the great harlot. The word used for judgment here is κρίμα, meaning “the sentence pronounced, a verdict, a condemnation, the decision resulting from an investigation…” (Vine’s) It is used in the same sense as the sentence pronounced on a criminal convicted of treason, murder, theft, or any other criminal act.
Sits on many waters. Because this is being used in this way, as a location, as opposed to it being the sound of many waters, it can be seen as the multitudes of nations and peoples and tribes and languages. Whatever else may be seen, this great harlot so-called, is a multinational organization. This makes sense to me because this false religion will have its representatives from all around the globe. Apart from the false religions we know today that will simply just in some way fold into the religion somehow, apostates from Christianity who were left behind in that harpazo event will form a strong contingent, and it will likely be they who form the majority of the persecution force against the real believers.

2: with whom the kings of the earth committed acts of immorality, and those who dwell on the earth were made drunk with the wine of her immorality.”

There are apparently others who will be involved, other than either practitioners of false religion and false practitioners of religion. They are listed here for the convenience of the reader: Kings of the earth, that is, those who form the limited number of people who like to think they are in control (called oligarchs today). They may not be called kings, but instead presidents, prime ministers, ministers of state, military dictators, junta leaders, chairmen, and the like. In fact, all those who dwell on the earth, a biblical euphemism of sorts that means unbelievers, will be lured in by her intoxicating ideals and actions (the wine of her immorality). I think we see the start of this today with the health and wealth movement within the Charismatic movement, though there remain a few who do not participate in the nonsense we read about in Strange Fire, the book by the late Dr. John MacArthur we are reading on Friday evenings. You are invited to join us if you like. Email me and I can send you a link.

What we can observe here is that this will be a set of beliefs that will govern the behaviour (as much as that can be governed at this point) of the great and the small of the Earth. This is the backdrop for all of the judgment that befalls during that final 7-year period of judgment by a holy God on a traitorous and rebellious Earth.

I pause here to make a point. I have heard (and had) conversations with unbelievers that have said things like, “Well, if that happens (referring to the harpazo), I will have absolute proof and I will become a Christian on the spot.” Although I pray that will be the case, I don’t think that’s a guarantee of what you will do. The “Restrainer” will have been removed, as per 2 Thessalonians 2. We contend that the Restrainer is the Holy Spirit that is living inside real believers today. At the harpazo, the restraining influence this has on society as a whole will no longer protect people. The entire world will be subject to the great deception that Antichrist will reveal to the entire world. What deception? I don’t know, and I hope only to find out after I’m gone. Some of my friends and I think that it will be demons masquerading as space aliens. “When we go up, they show up,” one of them (L.A. Marzulli) says. My point here is that you do not have to wait until then to learn the truth, which you may or may not be able to accept at that point. You can avoid the whole thing if you will repent of your sins now and believe Christ paid the price for your sins on the cross! That’s what I encourage. Moving on.

3-6: The Description of the False Religion

We have laid a kind of historical backdrop for how I think this may go. I could be wrong, but I don’t think I am, details notwithstanding, and there is some minor disagreement between us as to those details. From the backdrop of what it will look like and who will be involved, we can now move to what this set of false governing ideals will look like. We will just jump right into the text here and exposit as we go.

3: And he carried me away in the Spirit into a wilderness; and I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast, full of blasphemous names, having seven heads and ten horns.

The angel carries off John “in the Spirit.” We’ve seen the phrase before. Paul said he didn’t know if he was in or out of his body, so I’m not going to speculate. He is carried to a wilderness where he sees an astonishing vision. He is not terrified, but it does trouble him, and that is worth mentioning. When we get to verse 7 next study, we will look at it in more detail.
He sees a woman sitting on a scarlet beast. We will see that the woman is, in fact, the harlot of whom we speak, and she has been around for a long time. Last time we looked at Zechariah 5:5-11. “Then the angel who was speaking with me went out and said to me, “Lift up now your eyes and see what this is going forth.” I said, “What is it?” And he said, “This is the ephah going forth.” Again he said, “This is their appearance in all the land (and behold, a lead cover was lifted up); and this is a woman sitting inside the ephah.” Then he said, “This is Wickedness!” And he threw her down into the middle of the ephah and cast the lead weight on its opening. Then I lifted up my eyes and looked, and there two women were coming out with the wind in their wings; and they had wings like the wings of a stork, and they lifted up the ephah between the earth and the heavens. I said to the angel who was speaking with me, “Where are they taking the ephah?” Then he said to me, “To build a temple for her in the land of Shinar; and when it is prepared, she will be set there on her own pedestal.”” You should see what an ephah looks like.

Does this look like an unidentified flying object to you? I got it off a page called “Mini Manna Moments.” I’ll put a link in the description below the video. You have to scroll down, but it’s on that page. https://www.minimannamoments.com/tag/epaph/

So these two (probably unseen normally) women with wings like an unclean stork fly this woman to the plains of Shinar (ancient Babylon) to build her a temple, ultimately to put her on a pedestal. Now I am aware that it does not say that this is the harlot of Babylon, but this is an otherwise obscure passage describing the founding of a religion centred around this woman. Jeremiah calls this woman the “Queen of Heaven,” and she can be biblically related to Tammuz (in Isaiah). That means that this is Venus, the Greek goddess. Tammuz is her paramour Adonis. And it is the women who offer sacrifices to her without telling their husbands. I believe this to be the form of feminism that is so pervasive in the Church today, that are leading many sisters astray and destroying the family in a general sense. It is rooted in Marxist standpoint theory and emphasizes storytelling and not doctrine and practice, not to mention referencing pagan and occult religions. I’m not saying it is all about that, but it will form a strong component of the teachings of that false religion.
That woman was sitting on a scarlet beast, and that beast had upon its body blasphemous names. The sense of the Greek did not restrict these names to the heads (like Rev. 13:1), but were all over the beast, possibly signifying the increase of its power at the inception of this 70th week of Daniel, emphasizing that its opposition to God is now about to break forth in its maximum intensity. The seven heads and ten horns are simply confirmation that we are dealing with the same beast as in Rev. 13:2, which rose out of the sea.
The false religion itself is given power and is spread by the Antichrist himself. I find it interesting that the blasphemous names are all over him. I think this is the prideful claiming of divine titles and rites to which he has no actual claim. He is trying to replace our Lord God as the divine king and has this woman riding him to help with all her seductive wiles. If you’re starting to be offended, hang in there; it does not end well for the beast or its rider. Next verse.

4: The woman was clothed in purple and scarlet, and adorned with gold and precious stones and pearls, having in her hand a gold cup full of abominations and of the unclean things of her immorality,

Purple and Scarlet are the colours reserved for royalty and high religious officials traditionally in the last couple of thousand years. Purple has been the colour that was worn by the Queen of England when she was alive. Scarlet, interestingly, at least in the Catholic religion, is restricted to cardinals and popes. In an ancient ceremony called the Roman Triumph, both a civil ceremony and a religious rite, a successful Roman General wore a laurel and a purple and scarlet embroidered robe called the “triumphal toga picta” as he rode through the streets of Rome with his army, captives, and plunder taken in war. Here is the woman riding the beast himself, decked in a triumphal toga picta of sorts. She is portraying herself as a successful general at the very least.
She is adorned with gold, pearls, and other precious stones, a signal to onlookers of her attachment to wealth and power as well as royalty. One of the commentators makes the point that she contrasts with the woman in Revelation 12, who is “clothed with the sun,” whom we identified using Old Testament symbology from Genesis as Israel. This woman on the beast is not “clothed with the sun,” but is instead decked out with all these things that can only reflect light. Who else do we know that can appear as an angel of light? Oh yeah…him. I’m not going to say his name, but he’s the one energizing the beast. In this usage in this verse, these objects reflect the light of her master, the “god of this world.” They represent compromise or being sold out to the world system and he who energizes it.
She holds a golden cup filled with defilement and uncleanness. This is undoubtedly related to her seemingly favourite pastime of persecuting the people of God while committing spiritual adultery with the people of the planet at her antichrist pimp’s request. Contrast this with the cup of the Lord at the Last Supper. It was likely a simple cup supplied by the owner of the home, and was the third of four or five cups in a Passover meal. It was the cup of redemption, and for the Lord who held it, it represented the undiluted wrath of God which He would drink on behalf of those who would turn to Him in repentance and faith. Jesus drank the undiluted wrath of God for us. This woman drinks from her own works to her own condemnation.

5: and on her forehead a name was written, a mystery, “BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND OF THE ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.”

Apparently, this is an ancient form of advertising for prostitutes. They would have some distinctive marking on some kind of headband that would identify them to seekers of their services. Also, there is a nuance of the Greek that suggests that the word “mystery” is a part of the title, “MYSTERY BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND THE ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.” Again, there is a huge contrast that can be made with ancient Judaism. The mitre, the headgear of the High Priest, was inscribed with the phrase, “HOLINESS TO THE LORD.” It makes sense when you consider that ancient Judaism points to the real High Priest, our Lord Jesus Christ. The “mystery” component is used as an indication here that this is a hidden thing that has just now been revealed.
Also, the statement that the headgear of the woman riding the beast is such a statement of pride. It is yelling at the top of one’s lungs, “THIS IS WHO I AM!” Statements like that often betray the pride behind the statement, and because this is a position of privilege and power, it is fitting that this individual is proudly displaying her title as a servant of this beastly Antichrist. This is who we are talking about. This is the very beginning of the events the angel is showing to John, so this can be seen as character definition in a literary sense.
The distinct contrast between our actual King and Saviour with this false pretending whore is probably very subtle, and I kind of have a reason for saying this. Theologian Charles Spurgeon tells us that discernment is not the difference between right and wrong but between right and almost right. Consider the striking similarity in Greek between these two phrases: “He porne kai to therion; He numphe kai to arnion.” Translated into English, those phrases mean, “The whore and the beast; the Bride and the Lamb,” respectively. In my opinion, this is why people who hate Christ but who have a religious streak in them are attracted to the Catholic organization. It is the form of religion, but without its true power, the Holy Spirit purifying the saints by the power of God made possible by Christ’s death on the cross, the resurrection being the proof of that. If you don’t think that, all the reformed confessions contain a statement like this: “The Lord Jesus Christ is the Head of the Church, in whom by the appointment of the Father, all power for the calling, institution, order, or Government of the Church, is invested in a supream & soveraigne manner, neither can the Pope of Rome in any sense be head thereof, but is that Antichrist, that Man of sin, and Son of perdition, that exalteth himself in the Church against Christ, and all that is called God; whom the Lord shall destroy with the brightness of his coming.” (That’s from the 1689 London Baptist Confession, but similar paragraphs are in the Westminster and Heidelberg confessions.) I know not everyone agrees with that statement today, but again, in my opinion, that is making my point for me; remember that discernment is telling the difference between what is right and what is almost right. I’ll leave that there. Moving on.

6: And I saw the woman drunk with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the witnesses of Jesus. When I saw her, I wondered greatly.

This is adding to that discernment point. When a religion is drunk of the blood of God’s chosen people, the saints, and those who specifically give their testimony as evidence of the changing power of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, that religion is energized by that antichrist for his own purposes. All of the souls beneath the altar (incense, I think) will tell you to a person that, as horribly as their lives ended, they are thankful for being considered worthy to suffer in the name of Jesus, who saved us all.
John saw all of this and knew that this harlot was drunk with the blood of martyred Christians. He described this as being drunk. We have already considered that it is the outwardly religious who always persecute those who are walking in the inward reality and power of the only true religion, Christianity. What we need to take from this is the same thing John must have taken: sorrowful astonishment at such an extreme change of what began in the truth and had apostatized so far a distance as to be nearly unrecognizable and different entirely from the saving faith of Christ. One can understand the beast. It is natural that a beast becomes more beastly. However, when the faithful bride becomes the petulant whore, it is a tragedy. Think about what was seen in Isaiah with the northern kingdom, which ended in a permanent exile from the promised land because they would not turn from their sin and false religion. The same thing happened to Judah in Jeremiah, in which the record of the Jews being taken captive into the land of Babylon because they would not abandon their false religion and sin. I suggest, with more than one commentator by the way, that this is what became of the so-called church because they would not turn from their sin and false religion. They become the persecutors, as Saul once persecuted believers before he was saved, of the believing church. When the church falls like this, she sinks lower than the Godless world. Departure into apostacy will account for most, if not all, of the mistreatment of the real people of God by those who think they are believers but are really not. It inspires what John had – only sorrowful astonishment. The “great wonder” of John is not a good sort of wonder.

With the stage set, next time we will look further into this beast and his character. Next study, we will attempt to look at verses 8 through 13 and consider another character (or set of characters) who will be on the scene on the side of the Antichrist.

That’s what I saw this time in the text.