THE WHORE OF BABYLON, MYSTERY BABYLON, A CHALICE AND GODDESS WORSHIP? ~ EXPOSING HYPOCRISY ~ Part 31

 

The next portion of this study has brought me to a place where the whole study is coming together. My prayer is that it does the same for the reader. I’m excited to share with you all that I am learning! At the same time as I am finishing up this ‘Exposing Hypocrisy’ study, I am putting together a Bible study to be used in a Zoom format, so please bear with me if I am not blogging more than one or two posts a week. It is obvious to me that the woman who rides the beast, Mystery Babylon, will take several blog posts to fully expound upon, (even to skim the surface of her identity).

 

Revelation Chart

Bible Prophecy End Times chart

It might be helpful for the reader to refer to the above charts as we look at this third woman of the apocalypse.

 

What we know about ‘Babylon’

 

—  Located in modern-day Iraq, it was first mentioned in Genesis 11 associated with Nimrod who founded a kingdom that included Babylon. From its birth, Babylon’s reputation was as a city of rebellion against God. From that point on, the biblical writers consistently used Babylon as a symbol of evil and defiance.

—  Rose to dominance after throwing off the bonds of the Assyrians

—  Babylonian King, Nebuchadnezzar, invaded Judah, destroyed Jerusalem and the temple, and carried off many Jews to Babylon as exiles. God’s prophets revealed that God would judge Judah for her sin at the hands of the Babylonians. Daniel was taken to Babylon as an exile.

—  Babylon overthrown after several decades, and the Persian king allowed the exiles to return to Judah to rebuild the city and the temple.

—  Babylon came to be known as a symbol for the enemy of God and His people.

—  Babylon, prominent in the book of Revelation, is seen as the ultimate enemy of God and persecutor of His people.

—  When Babylon the Great is ultimately destroyed, the world will lament her destruction while the saints rejoice.

—  Babylon, in Revelation, is a symbol of Antichrist’s evil world system, a national entity that will persecute and destroy God’s faithful in “the spirit of the Babylonians.” She will be judged by God.

 

Revelation 17:1-2—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, 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.”

 

When we see the bowl judgments, we know we are looking at the second half of the Tribulation when God pours out His great wrath upon the earth. In Chapter 16, the seven bowls of judgment (plagues) are poured out upon the earth. When the seventh bowl is poured out, a voice from heaven exclaims, “It is done!” All that John is writing about is to take place in the future from that point in time. Part of the bowl judgments in focus here is the judgment of Babylon. In Revelation 16:19 it says: The great city (Jerusalem) was split into three parts (see Zechariah 14), and the cities of the nations (Gentiles) fell. Babylon the great was remembered before God, to give her the cup of the wine of His fierce wrath. The capital of Antichrist’s empire will receive a special outpouring of God’s wrath (according to MacArthur). See Isaiah 13:6-13. Chapters 17 and 18 are the details of that judgment. Revelation 17-20:3 shows us additional details regarding the bowl judgments and their recipients: Babylon, the Beast and his armies, and the binding of Satan in Revelation 20:1-3.

 

Isaiah and Jeremiah give us much insight into understanding the events of this chapter (Isaiah 13, 14, 47; and Jeremiah 50, and 51). It is important to also understand that prophecies in the Old Testament are often mixed with near-term and far-future predictions. For example, the prophesied destruction of Babylon, the near-term events were fulfilled in the capture of Babylon seen in Daniel 5:30-31. Babylon was never destroyed, however, in the far-future aspects of Isaiah and Jeremiah’s prophecies. According to Revelation 17 and 19, her future judgment is because she has corrupted the earth with her fornication and has shed the blood of God’s servants.

 

We have seen over and over again in this study where harlotry in Scripture often symbolizes idolatry and religious apostasy. Different cities in Scripture are referred to as harlot cities. Here, however, is THE great harlot who sits on many waters. John MacArthur has said that this picture emphasizes the sovereign power of the harlot. The waters represent the nations of the world (v. 15). She is GREAT in the sense that she has had a dominant role in spiritual idolatry throughout history. In essence, she has birthed all daughter harlots having predated them and begot (influenced) them. (Tony Garland)

Tony Garland also makes a great point in saying: “These facts argue against any primary identification of the Harlot as a system, city, or government which is a relative newcomer from a biblical perspective upon the stage of world history. Roman Catholicism is one such candidate. To be sure, the Harlot can be identified in a secondary way with such systems because she is their mother, and they are her daughters. As in any family relationship, we expect great similarities between a mother and her daughters. Therefore, in any exploration of the identity of the Harlot, it is insufficient to make the case on similarity alone. All this proves is a mother-daughter relationship. To be the true mother requires a historic pedigree that many suggested candidates lack.” He goes on to ask the question, “Was there no idolatry before Pagan Rome? Was Rome the mother of the worship of Moloch, Ashtoreth, etc.? The answer to both questions is ‘No’. The first king of ancient Babylon was Nimrod who presided over the kingdom of Babel, the precursor to Babylon.

 

The kings of the earth have committed fornication with the Great Harlot. Here, we see the unity of religion and state. Her influence is global. There are both commercial and spiritual aspects to this woman. In everything she does, she is and has been in opposition to God from the beginning.

 

Wine – can mean literal wine or metaphorically as the fiery wine of God’s wrath.

 

Jeremiah 51:7—Babylon has been a golden cup in the hand of the Lord, intoxicating all the earth. The nations have drunk of her wine; therefore, the nations are going mad. In Revelation, she is pictured with a gold cup in her hand. Here, the golden cup is seen to really have been in the hand of the Lord. She made the nations drunk with the enticements of her immorality. They consistently reject God by returning again and again to fulfill the lusts of their flesh. In their drunken stupor, God gives them over to their desires and, at the same time, allows her to keep serving them. But judgment day is coming!

Revelation 14:8 speaks of Babylon who has made all the nations drink of the wine of the passion of her immorality. It ties the drinking of the wine of God’s wrath, mixed in full strength in the cup of His anger, to those who worship the Beast in verse 9 of that same chapter. She has made them, but they willingly drank.

 

MacArthur says this of Revelation 14:8—"Babylon refers to the entire worldwide political, economic, and religious kingdom of Antichrist (Cf. 16:17-19 for details of this fall.) The original city of Babylon was the birthplace of idolatry where the residents built the Tower of Babel, a monument to rebelliousness and false religion. Such idolatry was subsequently spread when God confounded man’s language and scattered them around the world (cf. Genesis 11:1-9). The wine of the passion of her immorality pictures Babylon causing the world to become intoxicated with her pleasures and enter an orgy of rebellion, hatred, and idolatry toward God. Fornication is spiritual prostitution to Antichrist’s false system, which will fall for such iniquity.”

 

Ephesians 5:18-19—And do not get drunk with wine, for that is dissipation, but be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody with your heart to the Lord.

 

Drunkenness and debauchery were characteristic of the sensual lives from which the Ephesians had been saved and in which their contemporaries still lived. Paul was delineating a very definite line of demarcation here between the old way of life and the new way of life. There are also similarities of being drunk with wine and being filled with the Spirit. The Christian is to be under the control or influence of the Holy Spirit which is contrasted with one filled with wine being under its influence.

 

Christians are not to get drunk. To be under the influence of alcohol is to inhibit the fruit of self-control that the Holy Spirit gives to those who are filled with Him. That is just a logical and general biblical principle that is not hard to understand. However, the context of this passage is Paul speaking to people who were very familiar with the pagan worship ceremonies of that day which involved drunken orgies. That worship involved the ritual ingestion of wine that supposedly induced some ecstatic communion with the deities. Paul refers to this as the “cup of demons” in 1 Corinthians 10:19,20.

The adherents of the “mystery religions” popular in the first century during the time of the birth and development of the Church, participated in secret rituals and sought emotional experiences often working themselves into an altered state of consciousness which they believed to be an elevated realm of reality. Throughout all ages, people have sought religious experiences, while Satan worked to deceive them. The mystery religions were the counterfeit of that age for the one true faith.

 

Revelation 17:3-5—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 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, and on her forehead a name was written, a mystery, “BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND OF THE ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.”

 

I will focus on the rest of this passage in the next blog, but I want to look briefly at something I noticed during my studies which is fascinating to me. It regards the gold cup in the hand of the Great Harlot.

We’ve looked at ancient goddess worship throughout this study. We went back to the tower of Babel to see possible ties there, and then followed this idolatrous worship throughout the Old and New Testaments. Further, goddess worship has made a strong comeback in the spiritual lives and academic thought of feminists across the country since the 90s. From ecology-minded followers who worship ‘Mother Earth’ to those who subscribe to occultism and the witchcraft of Wicca, “we have seen a considerable overlap between the goddess movement and the forces of New Age,” as one writer said in an article written in 1990.

 

‘Female Divinity’, if we are to take dogma to its logical conclusion in defining ‘Mary’ of the Roman Catholic Church as co-mediatrix or co-redemptrix, is rampant. According to the author of the 1990 article in the Los Angeles Times, at that time it was estimated that there were goddess worshipers running as high as 100,000 coast-to-coast (that is without including veneration shown to ‘Mary’ in Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodox, Buddhism, Hinduism, Japanese religions, tribal religions, and others—now including even some liberal Protestants). The author says, “For some, goddess worship is emerging as the latest wave in the evolution of women’s rights. If feminism first took on economic issues in the 1960s and 70s, and then moved on to questions about family life in the 80s, then the 90s are seeing women grappling with an even more elusive target—the soul.”

Keep in mind, this is from a 1990 article in the Los Angeles Times: “These days, the major religions are coming under feminist scrutiny not only by goddess worshipers but also by women of the Catholic, Jewish and Protestant faiths. Goddess followers are challenging basic issues of religious equality, questioning male-oriented rituals, hierarchies and traditions. The big religions--Judaism, Christianity, Catholicism, even Buddhism and Hinduism--are patriarchal. The clergy is male. The people most celebrated are male. Now there are women rabbis, and you can have a bar mitzvah, but there are no altar girls in Catholicism and nuns are in the background. They don’t officiate. Generally speaking, it’s a male hierarchy.” 1990 LA Times article

While studying for this blog post, I spent a considerable amount of time researching the ‘chalice’ and its religious symbolism. Growing up, I had heard of the ‘Holy Grail’, never really understanding what it was. It is believed by some in Christendom that the Holy Chalice, aka the Holy Grail, is THE vessel Jesus used at the Last Supper. Some even believe that it captured Jesus’ blood while on the cross, which thought is even stranger. This whole legendary narrative stems back to Medieval times. While it makes for movies filled with suspense, the ‘cup’ Jesus drank from was probably just some sort of simple clay cup.

Having been Catholic for several years and often having observed the ritualistic, by-rote celebration of the Mass, I am reminded of things that stood out in my mind as I compared them to what I knew of the Methodist church and a simple charismatic country church. One such observation was the golden chalice the priest held up at each Mass as he offered up the Eucharist. In my study, I found that each pope has his own chalice handcrafted for his own use. For instance, in 2015, an Argentinian silversmith was commissioned to craft a silver communion chalice for Pope Francis. How was it made? By “melting down silver jewelry donated by Americans from across the country.” According to an article in Time Magazine, this chalice would be used during a mass in New York City when the Pope visited there. The same craftsman made a chalice for Pope Benedict in 2005 and also a separate personal chalice Pope Francis uses for masses at his Vatican residence.

 

Below you see several coins different popes had minted during their papacies.

 

According to Ancient-Symbols.com the chalice in Christianity is the symbol of the Eucharist. “Using it commemorates the Last Supper. It is filled with wine to symbolize the blood of Christ and bread is dipped into it to symbolize the body of Christ. Chalices have a hexagonal base, often made of gold or silver and encrusted with semi-precious stones.” This may be a symbol in churches such as the Roman Catholic Church, but I have never been a part of any Bible-based church wherein the pastor uses anything other than what the people use in the Communion service.

Interestingly, “In Wicca and Neopaganism, the chalice, cauldron or cup is a symbol of the Goddess, the womb, and the female reproductive organs. It also represents water which is a female element and the feminine qualities of intuition, subconscious, psychic ability and gestation.”

You might imagine how I almost fell off my chair when I saw the next part of the LA Times’ article referenced above: “Riane Eisler, wrote a book in 1987 entitled The Chalice and the Blade, a mainstay of women’s studies courses that went on to divide civilization broadly into male “dominator” societies and female “partnership” cultures imbued with goddess worship and nurturing values. Eisler, who considers today’s “blade” to be the nuclear bomb, argues that the Earth’s survival depends on a return to a partnership society.” One review said this resource is the most important book since Darwin’s Origin of Species.

 The referenced book is now being offered once again by modern merchandisers. Here is the description:

  Now with an updated epilogue celebrating the 30th anniversary of this groundbreaking and increasingly relevant book.

"May be the most significant work published in all our lifetimes." – LA Weekly

The Chalice and the Blade tells a new story of our cultural origins. It shows that warfare and the war of the sexes are neither divinely nor biologically ordained. It provides verification that a better future is possible—and is in fact firmly rooted in the haunting dramas of what happened in our past.

Many of the elements of this article written in 1990 could be transposed into the liberal news media in our day without question. The tie between feminism and Critical Theory is a line from long, long ago that has been woven into a much larger picture to be more clearly seen on the near horizon.

As a young Christian studying eschatology, I was perplexed to understand how a global religious and political system could ever come together under Antichrist. While discussing Critical Theory with my sons a few weeks ago, one son, who shall remain nameless, said, “It all fits perfectly with an antichrist agenda.” Eureka! It does, indeed!