Come Out of Babylon, My People!
This message is being written in the United States of America, but it could originate from almost anywhere within the land of modern-day Anglo-Saxons: Canada, the British Isles, Germany, Scandinavia, Poland, Austria, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, or elsewhere. All of these nations are suffering an affliction far more virulent than a raging infection like pneumonia, or a cruel and chronic ailment like cancer. This affliction has been gaining momentum for many decades in the modern era and has now reached the point of no return … a terminal illness that must bequeath an untimely death after decades of degeneration.
This degeneration has been caused by years of lawless living. As the disease was initiated by the patient forgetting to abide by the faithful precepts of living that would have brought exuberant health and longevity, so the continued breaking of those precepts allowed the disease to progress to the point that now no treatment — no medicine or life-change — could turn the battle toward healing. The prognosis is so sad because the life of the patient had begun so, rich and fresh, so filled with hope and idealism. Now all that remains is a slow, but now accelerating decline towards ignominy.
I call this affliction “descent into Babylon”. It is a disease that has pervaded mankind ever since Adam and Eve’s first sin, and after the Flood was revitalized by Nimrod in Mesopotamia not long after the nations began rebuilding. Let us first remember that all the nations of the earth were prophesied to be descendants of this great nation of Babylon — or Babel, as some would call it — as clearly shown in the great image dreamed by Nebuchadnezzar, outlined in Daniel 2. Daniel described the image thusly:
“You, O King, saw and beheld a great image, whose brightness was excellent, stood before you, and the form thereof was terrible. This image’s head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his belly and his thighs of brass, his legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part of clay. You saw till a stone was cut out without hands, which smote the image upon its feet that were of iron and clay, and broke them in pieces. Then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold broken to pieces together, and became like the chaff of the summer threshing-floors; and the wind carried them away, that no place was found for them, and the stone that smote the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth.”
Daniel went on to describe to King Nebuchadnezzar the meaning of this image. He — Nebuchadnezzar — was the head of gold at the very time Daniel wrote these words (Daniel 2:38), and the other parts of the image would follow in history. The records of history show that the inferior kingdoms of silver — the breast and arms — refer to the Medo-Persian Empire, and the belly and thighs of brass, even less valuable than silver, relate to the Grecian Empire, championed by Alexander the Great. Following him was a divided kingdom based in Rome and Constantinople that was characterized by harshness and even less value, the legs of iron … the Roman Empire that has continued in one form or another down to the present time. Lastly, at the very base of the image were the two feet of iron mixed with clay, the least precious material of all. Daniel 2:41-43 indicates this world kingdom will be partly strong and partly weak, and will not stick together well even as clay and iron will not adhere well. These ten toes of mixed iron and clay are identified with the ten kings of Revelation 17, which are part of the great beast having seven heads and ten horns (civil government) upon which the whore (religious government) sits … the religious power controlling the civil government.
This filthy woman has a name written on her forehead, “Mystery Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth” (Revelation 17:5). The worldwide harlot system is wonderfully rich with all of the precious physical things one can imagine but has a “… golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication”, and she is, “… drunk with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus …” (Revelation 17:5-6). It is a worldwide system, as affirmed in Revelation 17:15, which shows the waters upon which the whore and the beast sit are … “peoples, and multitudes, and nations, and tongues.”
The stone that struck the feet of the image in Daniel 2 is, of course, Jesus Christ at His return to the earth along with His saints and holy angels, to destroy the armies of the Beast and False Prophet (Revelation 19:11-21) as He sets up the earthly kingdom. This Kingdom is the foremost subject of the entire Bible. Destruction of the ten toes of iron mixed with clay is spelled out in Revelation 17:16-17, where the kings are said to hate the whore that sits upon the beast, and will ultimately “… make her desolate and naked, and shall eat her flesh, and burn her with fire.” The woman sits on “seven mountains” (Revelation 17:9), which indicates the city of Rome, a city having seven hills. It is sometime during the reign of the ten kings that the Tribulation occurs, directly before the return of Jesus Christ and the saints at the Last Trumpet, to rule the earth and bring back Eden for 1,000 years.
Note that when the stone (Christ) strikes the feet of the image the entire image collapses and turns to chaff. How is it possible for the kingdoms throughout history that have existed, represented by this great statue, to all fall and be destroyed at one time? The mystery is explained by understanding that the culture of mankind develops over time, one generation enfolding the next, as it were, so that today’s culture is actually a blend of all that existed before it. Nimrod’s system of hierarchal tyranny, merchandising, banking, education, and what have you has been adopted by all kingdoms ever since his day, except for the short time that Israel existed before the monarchy of Saul.
Like-wise, the additional quirks in the culture introduced by the Medes and the Persians, the Greeks, and finally the Romans have intermingled through the nearly 4,000 years of human post-Flood history to give us the current culture of the world’s nations. These nations, having English as the common communicator of the leaders across boundaries, now greatly compounded by rapid transportation and instantaneous communications, have blended more and more into a present-day menagerie of beliefs that began at Babylon. When the stone smote the feet of the image, all of these blended aspects of daily life amongst all people throughout the centuries collapsed with it. Time’s progress, as it were, came down in one instant.
Let us return to America, the land of the free and the home of the brave. This nation originated from Anglo-Saxon European, British, and Scandinavian settlers intent on forging new lives in an untamed land. Many left their homeland due to religious persecution by the Roman zealots themselves — the Mother of Harlots — and for them, life itself so often depended on their leaving for a land of freedom to worship as they pleased. For others the lure of free land under the Homestead Act was an overpowering attraction as their families in the old country simply ran short of land; the fjords of Norway, for example, had little farmland on their banks for a family of several kids to survive. Others simply craved adventure in a new and exciting land of promise.
For whatever reason, millions of wide-eyed immigrants sailed the Atlantic Ocean for North America. Unbeknownst to them, their leap over the ocean was motivated by the Creator God who was fulfilling His pledge to Abraham to have him multiply exceedingly (Genesis 17:1-7). That promise was never completely fulfilled during the time of recorded Bible history, but with the opening of new lands in North and South America, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa the promises given to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob could finally be fulfilled in preparation for the end-time climax of the age: the Kingdom of God on the earth!
The United States was born in a rather peculiar way. Representatives from thirteen states got together and formed a confederation, first by a Declaration of Independence, and then by a Constitutional Convention, which contained within them precepts of God that made the nation unique in the pages of history. The Constitution and its amendments guaranteed — at least in writing — the liberty of the individual granted to him at birth … which, of course, required the acknowledgment that God created each person. Among these guarantees were “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (originally the “pursuit of property” in earlier versions of the document). People were affirmed to be “created equal” in the sight of God, not that all are equal in abilities or potential, but equal to pursue goals while living in freedom. That equality was eventually extended to Negro slaves as well.
The essence of the founding fathers — Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, and others — was to create a nation that was governed “of the people, by the people, and for the people”, the power being at the local level rather than in the hands of a centralized federal dictatorship that commonly ruled in England and Europe. The leadership was split into legislative, executive, and judicial branches having checks and balances to reduce the risk of a despotic leader gaining a foothold. They wanted a government free of the clutches of the Roman Catholic Church that ruled over people hand-in-hand with the secular government. After all, the Roman authorities copied the civil dictatorship system within their own ranks and did their best to squelch any opposition to a system bent on obedience to a man — the pope —who claimed kingly authority to torture and kill those who disagreed. With this false ecclesiastical system, the Creator motivated many children of promise to venture to more peaceful and free lands.
With a new land so fashioned, having unabashedly at its foundations the Word of God, it is no wonder that the Adversary would strive to attack and destroy its moorings. He wished that all of the earth would be under one centralized dictatorial agency that he could control in all ecclesiastical and civil matters, a Babylonian Harlot riding on a Beast! The effort to bring about this end has been brutal, to say the least. As if the inception of the nation was not brutal enough, consider the Civil War, which at its roots was much more about the Roman Catholic Church seeking to lure away the South from the North than it was about abolishing slavery. In that war, about 850,000 were killed, and nearly 1,100,000 were injured. Then came along efforts to gain control of the banking system — itself unscriptural, since it survived on interest — that culminated in the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. This bank was anything but “federal”, but was owned and operated outside of the Constitution by wealthy European bankers. Added to this was the personal income tax in 1913, and the Social Security Act in 1935 that moved the nations toward a larger and more powerful federal government. More and more socialistic programs have been added over the years like Medicaid, food stamps, housing allowances, disability, workman’s compensation, and on and on the list goes.
Now federal debt has reached over 17 trillion, and there is no end in sight, We know that the borrower is the servant of the lender. The lenders are the Chinese and other governments, and now increasingly the Federal Reserve Bank that simply creates “funds” out of thin air. The privately-owned international bankers have now taken control of the country’s financial moorings
We are truly living within Babylon!
A Closer Look at Babylon
The Word “Babylon” is used 286 times in the Bible. It is number 894 in Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance, and means “confusion”. The word comes from “babel” (Strong 1101), a primary Hebrew root word meaning to “overflow (specifically with oil); by implication to mix.” In the New Testament, Babylon (Strong 897) is equivalent to its use in the Old Testament, and means the capital of Chaldea, and can be figuratively used as a type of tyranny … which Nimrod in Babylon certainly practiced.
Babylon is first used in Genesis 10:10, where it is the name of the first city Nimrod built. Nimrod, the “mighty hunter before the Lord”, attempted to place himself before God, to be the one all would look to, perhaps for protection from wild animals that were pervasive in the area. God had directed the various families of nations — of which there were 70 (Genesis 10) — to migrate to various destinations across the surrounding landmasses, but Nimrod attempted to prevent this by unifying the people. To do this he had the people build a tower — likely a huge ziggurat — that was an object of pagan worship, a gigantic symbol of unity to prevent the tribes from dispersing. The people at this time were all of one language, and God indicated that … “now nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do” (Genesis 11:6).
Let us look at Genesis 11:1-9.
“And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men built. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel, because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.”
Not only were the people slipping into idolatry by worshipping a man — Nimrod — and the huge tower they were building, as well as living within a tyrannical regime wherein the leader was forcing people to obey “federal regulations”, but they very likely were intermarrying among the seventy nations represented … a result never intended by the Creator of the races. Thus, He confused their languages and caused them to move to the destinations across the earth He had prepared for them. His plans were to be carried out despite the wickedness of man!
This was only the beginning of this reign of evil that Nimrod was imposing upon the citizens of the world, the “one-world government” that existed at that time. Remember that all of the nations of mankind were at that time concentrated in the region of Mesopotamia where Babel was being built. Here was a perfect opportunity for Satan the devil to disrupt God’s plan of the ages at the very beginning of the post-Flood period, to “nip it in the bud”, as it were.
The Character of Babylon
We see in Babylon the same traits as in Eden: man deciding from himself what is right and wrong and taking of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Like Satan, the serpent, or “nachash” (bright and shining one), deceived Adam and Eve, so he deceived Nimrod, and likely as not possessed him, seeing the horrible things he did. Let us dissect the character of this perverted society of Babylon and see how the “lusts of the flesh”, so succinctly outlined in Galatians 5:19-21, Romans 1:29-31, and II Timothy 3:1-7, were carried out by Nimrod.
1. Mixing up what is pure. This mixing certainly applied to the immutable laws of God, which Nimrod forsook in favor of his own. This involved putting himself in God’s place, thus committing idolatry by causing the people to look to a man for safety (salvation) and protection, and to a monument for an idol, to “make us a name”. Ancient history teaches that worship of the “mother and child” — Semiramus and Horus — began here, and the Sabbath was changed to Sunday, the day of the sun. Sun worship, another form of idolatry, as well as Christmas — originally the Saturnalia in honor of Nimrod’s birth, not Christ’s — began at this time as well, and has been carried down through the various heathen cults of the world to infect the Roman Empire, and eventually become institutionalized within the Roman Catholic Church.
More Babylonian confusion occurred by encouraging racial mixing. With all of the families of man in one area, assuredly the various races had begun to intermarry and produce an array of crossbreeds that were not in God’s plan. To keep these families pure it was necessary to separate them by distance, and that He did by confusing their language.
2. A system of marketing, merchandising, and community. It is a curious fact that Satan’s first sin was one of merchandising. Note Ezekiel 28:15-18:
“You were perfect in your ways from the day that you were created, till iniquity was found in you. By the multitude of your merchandise they have filled the midst of you with violence, and you have sinned: therefore I will cast you as profane out of the mountain of God, and I will destroy you, O covering cherub, from the midst of the stones of fire. Your heart was lifted up because of your beauty, you have corrupted your wisdom by reason of your brightness: I will cast you to the ground, I will lay you before kings, that they may behold you. You have defiled your sanctuaries by the multitude of your traffic; therefore will I bring forth a fire from the midst of you, it shall devour you, and I will bring you to ashes upon the earth in the sight of all them that behold you.”
By the “multitude of your merchandise”, and by the “multitude of your iniquity, by the iniquity of your traffic”, did Satan defile his sanctuaries and become filled with violence. His heart became lifted up and vain, proud and self-centered. Merchandise is from the Hebrew rekullah (Strong 7404), meaning “trade, (as peddled)”, and is rooted in the word rakal (Strong 7402), meaning “to travel for trading”. Imterestingly, the fault which overtook Satan was the sin of traveling to trade things, by which he accumulated wealth for himself. Such occupation in today’s world is taken for granted as normal and honorable … but is it? (This is not a condemnation of ethical salespeople!)
God’s condemnation of merchandising is especially virulent in His description of the fall of Babylon in Revelation 18. The merchants are called the “great men of the earth” (Revelation 18:23), those who traded by ships (Revelation 18:17) such things as gold, silver, precious stones, fabrics, wood, ivory, vessels of wood, marble, and metals, spices, oils, flour, grains, animals, slaves, and surely much more (Revelation 18:12-13). By trading these items by ships they became rich.
Is such not true in today’s world of commerce, where oil, cars, machinery, foodstuffs, fertilizers, grains, manufactured goods, clothing, cotton, and everything under the sun is traded, mostly by ship? This is especially true between China and the United States.
Is the problem here the very essence of trading — of purchasing a good and then shipping it to someone else who will pay a higher cost to net the merchant a profit — or is the problem of a deeper sort? Surely one can envision shipping an item to a distant land, with the seller and shipping company charging a very nominal fee to get the product to the end-user as a service. However, that is not the way things are usually done, especially in the corporate world where a few wealthy individuals gain the bulk of the increase, especially with modern multinational companies whose executives and boards of directors consolidate huge profits at the expense of low-paid labor. That labor is usually centered in populous Third-World countries like India, Viet Nam, Mexico, Sir Lanka, or China where a subsistence wage is common.
This means of production and marketing brings to mind James 5:1-6:
“Go to now you rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you;, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. You have heaped treasure together for the last days. Behold, the hire of the laborers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, cry, and the cry of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth. You have lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton; you have nourished your hearts, as in a day of slaughter. You have condemned and killed the just; and he does not resist you.”
Is the temptation of this marketing system utilizing ship traffic to selfishly accumulate wealth too great, so that Satan, created perfect at the beginning, was unable to withstand the temptation? This appears to be the case. In fact, the Canaanites were noted for their wickedness on many fronts — idolatry, sexual lewdness, and violence – it’s curious that the word Canaanite means “peddler or merchant” (Strong 3669): these miscreants were to be utterly wiped out due to the malignancy of their evil. There appears to be a natural connection between merchandising and lawlessness.
Perhaps the source of the problem goes deeper yet. Nimrod, a man after Satan’s heart, built the first reordered post-Flood cities. Cities require their inhabitants to be dependent upon others for basic needs such as food, water, fuel, and sanitation. This is the reverse of the Godly environment of Eden, where people were given food produced in their own proximity, water was locally accessible, and sanitation was a matter of digging a hole and covering it (Genesis 2:8-10; Deuteronomy 23:12-13). Moreover, cities are usually built with little space for true privacy, away from the bustle of marketplaces and traffic. God’s plan for, living, clearly states that houses are not to be built close together.
Isaiah 5:8. “Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth!”
Micah 4:3-4. “And he shall judge among many people, and rebuke strong nations afar off; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree, and none shall make them afraid; for the mouth of the LORD of hosts has spoken it.”
By having one’s own “vine and fig tree” is implied self-sufficiency, producing one’s food, and having space to live in peace … being able to, pray and mediate, without interference from the rancor of one’s neighbors. Such an arrangement would not preclude providing out of one’s plenty for the needs of neighbors.
Leviticus 25:35.”And if your brother be waxen poor, and fallen into decay with you, then you shall relieve him: yes, though he be a stranger, or a sojourner, that he may live with you.”
Deuteronomy 15:7-11.”If there be among you a poor man of one of your brethren within any of your gates in your land which the Lord your God gives you, you shall not harden your heart, nor shut your hand from your poor brother: but you shall open your hand wide unto him and shall surely lend him sufficient for his need, in that which he wants. Beware that there be not a thought in your wicked heart, saying, The seventh year, the year of release is at hand; and your eye be evil against your poor brother, and you give him nought; and he cry unto the Lord against you, and it be sin unto you. You shall surely give him, and your heart shall not be grieved when you give unto him: because for this thing the Lord your God shall bless you in all your works, and in all that you put your hand unto. For the poor shall never cease out of the land: therefore I command you saying, You shall open your hand wide unto your brother, to your poor, and to your needy, in your land.”
This provision was to be given out of love, not out of coercion as governments do today, taxing the populace and doling out welfare in a faceless, loveless program. God’s system is one of deep concern for the welfare of one’s fellow-man, giving without the expectation of anything in return.
Luke 6:35.”But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and you shall be the children of the Highest: for He is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil.”
Isaiah 55:1 “Ho, every one that thirsts, come to the waters, and he that has no money; come and buy, and eat; come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.”
Conversely, to maintain the order of the unnatural environment within towns and cities, fear and force must oftentimes be utilized, tactics of centralized governments utilized since Nimrod’s time to the present.
There is every reason to believe that the great inherent evil within the Babylonian system is a money system: gold, silver, or other precious metals, seashells, wooden tokens, or paper, plastic, or digital representations of money. After all, money is merely a representation of buying power for the goods and services and the needs to live; it has no value of and by itself.
Adam and Eve had no money system; of that we can be sure. The system in Eden was ideal for all of mankind. Only through the initiation of a money system could Nimrod manage to support a dependent population in Babylon who had need of food and supplies from without the city, provided by merchants in marketplaces. With the initiation of market places, the banking system was born. That system has morphed into a world where even electronic digits in computers have become money for the masses. “The love of money is the root of all evil” (I Timothy 6:10), and usury on money, condemned by God, is an added insult upon mankind (Psalm 15:5; Leviticus 25:36; Proverbs 28:8; Ezekiel 22:12) … and it all began in Babylon.
3. A culture of sensuality and materialism. One would expect within a culture of greed and merchandising that the great men would be those enriched by it. We have touched upon these issues already in James 5 and Revelation 18. Today in the United States, those that have clout are those with money and physical wealth, backed by corporate profits in most cases. The hard-working, morally sound head of a household is granted discouragement on every side. Taxes consume 50% or more of his income, and his wife is often forced to work outside the home and place the children in daycare. Cities, less than perfect environments for raising families, oftentimes provide the only opportunities for work. The food supply through grocery store chains provides inferior nourishment, and doctors, lawyers, and accountants eat up their share of the income. Women in the workplace provide temptations for men, as do men for working wives, and the mixing up of roles becomes a source of conflict … oftentimes wrenching apart the marriage — about 50% of the time — and leaving spouses and children in hurt and despair.
Heroes and role models are oftentimes sports stars and music or film personalities, instead of law-abiding, hard-working fathers and mothers whose main focus is serving their Creator. Government schools make commandment-keeping difficult. Support for the weak, the maimed, the orphans, and the widows is often neglected.
At the same time, the fruits of carnality are encouraged in this urban environment through advertising and examples of high-profile personalities. Drunkenness, reveling, premarital sex, drug usage, lying, cheating, and homosexuality are oftentimes glamorized and practiced by those in high positions … the very leaders who control the law-creating apparatus that further punishes the people with higher taxes, loss of liberty, and dependency on the socialist … “man is god”. The pressure upon young people to conform to the decline of civilization places them more and more into dependence on the very government that exacerbates the problems in the first place.
4. A program to destroy life. One every side Babylon seeks death to the creations of God, those made in His express image. After all, these individuals are designed to someday replace Satan on the throne of government on earth … a “nation of kings and priests” who will reign on the earth (Revelation 5:10). He is doing everything he can to thwart this marvelous plan that forms the core of His entire Scripture: the return of Jesus Christ to reign with His saints on the earth for a thousand years (Revelation 20:4-6), to return Eden to the earth once Satan is deposed (Acts 3:19-24, Revelation 20:1-3).
In the sight of a burgeoning world population, the so-called elite of the world, through darkened human reasoning, believe that the solution to this “overpopulation” that is stripping the earth’s support systems is to reduce the population. Forget the fact that “children are the gift of God …” (Psalm 127:3). Rather, by rejecting God they “… became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish hearts were darkened” (Romans 1:21), and reasoned that the killing of innocent unborn children was a legitimate way to reduce the population. Never mind that it was murder.
Then homosexuality was encouraged and glorified as “normal”, in spite of God’s commands in Old Testament times to kill these individuals (for the Canaanites practiced such perversions: Leviticus 18:1-30), and in New Testament times to repent of such evils or face death (Revelation 21:8).
God’s desire is that mankind “… be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth” (Genesis 1:28; 9:7). He desires that mankind increase enormously, to magnify His “imagers”, most of whom will ultimately inherit salvation and rule with Jesus Christ on the earth. Satan, the Adversary, desires to destroy mankind. He hates the plan of God from which he has been disqualified, but he continues to defy the Father, thinking that somehow he can gain rulership again over the earth.
What Is a Christian to Do?
We have identified Babylon, that culture begun in Nimrod’s time not long after the Flood which has bequeathed its character through many nations over the millennia. We know that the final stages of society’s collapse are upon us: the iron feet and toes mixed with miry clay are forming — if not already here— and it is these ten kings remaining at the end of 6,000 years that the great Stone, Jesus Christ, will strike and dissolve into dust, so ending Satan’s reign on the earth. This great image of Daniel 2 will totally collapse, and all of the accomplishments and dreams of godless men along with it.
How are us Christians to live as we see Babylon the Great about to expire … this society whose foundation is built upon sand with the culmination of the Industrial Revolution and the onslaught of the computer age? The potential now exists to capture every human being into slavery through government monitoring by satellite, cameras, and the internet, The threat is real.
The command is simple and direct: “Come out of her, My people, that you be not partakers of her sins, and that you receive not of her plagues” (Revelation 18:4).
How can we do so in the face of such a powerful enemy? Our God is far more powerful than Satan and his minions. When our Creator says to come out of Babylon, He means just what He says. “I can do all things through Christ, who strengthens me” (Philippians 4:13). With the spirit of God in us, we can resist the evil one.
James 4:7-8. “Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners; and purify your hearts, you double-minded.”
Though living within a world unfriendly to those possessing God’s spirit, we are protected everywhere we go.
John 17:14-16. “I have given them Your word; and the world has hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. I pray not that You should take them out of the world but that You should keep them from the evil. They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.”
Though living in the world, we are not a part of it. We are not a part of it because the law in our hearts cannot conform to the laws of licentiousness inherent with this present evil world. Our hearts will convict us if we attempt to step into that “alternative universe”, as it were.
God’s ways of living never change. We keep the commandments of our heavenly Father. We love our God with all our heart, all our soul, and all our mind, and our neighbor as ourself (Matthew 22:36-40). We do to others as we would have others do to us (Matthew 7:12).
Pray without ceasing (I Thessalonians 5:17), meditate on His ways (Psalm 49:3), fast when needed (Mark 2:18-20), fellowship with the brethren (Malachi 3:16), and never grow weary in doing good, especially to the brethren (Galatians 6:9-10).
Above all, never forget to listen to God speak to you regularly, for His word is “… a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path” (Psalm 119:105.
If possible; live outside of a city. Be a part of the countryside and raise a garden, plant an orchard or vineyard, and gain the self-sufficiency that will maintain you in better health, and allow you to mediate upon spiritual ways amongst the green leaves and blue sky.
God gave specific directions to the Israelites that were captured by Nebuchadnezzar’s as the siege of Jerusalem ended.
Jeremiah 27:8-11. “And it shall come to pass that the nation and kingdom which will not serve the same Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon, and that will not put their neck under the yoke of the king of Babylon, that nation will I punish, says the Lord, with the sword, and with the famine, and with the pestilence, until I have consumed them by his hand. Therefore hearken not to your prophets, nor to your diviners, nor to your dreamers, nor to your enchanters, nor to your sorcerers, which speak unto you saying, You shall not serve the king of Babylon: for they prophesy a lie unto you to remove you far from your land; and that I should drive you out, and you should perish. But the nations that bring their neck under the yoke of the king of Babylon, and serve him, those will I let remain still in their own land, says the Lord; and they shall till it, and dwell therein.”
Jeremiah 29: 4-7. “Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, unto all that are carried away captives, whom I have caused to be carried away from Jerusalem unto Babylon; build you houses, and dwell in them; and plant gardens, and eat the fruit of them; take wives, and beget sons and daughters, and take wives for your sons, and give your daughters to husbands, that they may bear sons and daughters, that you may be increased there, and not diminished. And seek the peace of the city where I have caused you to be carried away captives, and pray unto the Lord for it, for in the peace thereof shall you have peace.”
Just as the Israelites; were taken captive in Jeremiah’s day we’re told to live peacefully, build homes, raise crops and livestock, and rear families, so today we ought to build our houses and families despite the evils of Babylon around us. We must be wise as serpents and harmless as doves in avoiding the evil, and take the prophet’s words to heart:
Isaiah 33:14-16. “The sinners in Zion are afraid; fearfulness has surprised the hypocrites. Who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire? who among us shall dwell with everlasting burnings? He that walks righteously, and speaks uprightly; he that despises the gain of oppressions, that shakes his hands from holding of bribes, that stops his ears from hearing of blood, and shuts his eyes from seeing evil; he shall dwell on high: his place of defense shall be the munitions of rocks: bread shall be given him, his waters shall be sure”
Captivity will be removed at Christs’ return, and the Beast and False Prophet are destroyed, when finally all the earth will turn to God with their whole hearts (Jeremiah 29:13). Babylon the Great is doomed, but we must avoid her system like the plague and receive not her mark.
God’s plan is right on schedule, and the great whore of this world will soon be gone. Let us make ourselves ready, for the Bridegroom stands at the door!