Come Out of Her, My People

18:1-3Fallen, fallen

A new angel descends "having great authority," and the earth is "illuminated with his glory" (18:1). The same words describe God's own glory filling the earth in Ezekiel 43:2. The messenger carries borrowed light, and he uses it to cry out a sentence from the prophets: "Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great." That is Isaiah 21:9, the prophet's cry over the old city, and we heard it once already in 14:8.

Look at what her fall leaves behind: "a habitation of demons, a prison of every unclean spirit, and a prison of every unclean and hateful bird." The prophets promised the same of old Babylon, a place where jackals and ostriches and wild goats take over the palaces (Isaiah 13:21-22). A city that once boasted its beauty ends as a haunt of scavengers.

Then the charges. All the nations "have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her sexual immorality," the kings of the earth joined her, and "the merchants of the earth grew rich from the abundance of her luxury." The prophets used the language of prostitution for cities that sold themselves and others for gain, as Nahum 3:4 says of Nineveh, a city that "sells nations through her prostitution." The sin is not a single vice but a system: worship, power and wealth tied together, every partner paid and every partner compromised.

18:4-8A voice that says come out

Now a second voice speaks, and this one is for God's people: "Come out of her, my people, that you have no participation in her sins, and that you don't receive of her plagues." The words are stitched from Jeremiah 51:45 and Isaiah 48:20, where exiles were told to leave Babylon. They also remember Lot, hurried out of Sodom by angels who took him by the hand because he lingered (Genesis 19:15-16). Notice the two reasons: do not take part in her sins, and do not share her plagues. Moral separation and rescue are the same call.

This is not a call to leave the world's cities and markets. Paul told the Corinthians that avoiding every sinner in the world would mean leaving the world itself (1 Corinthians 5:9-10). It is a call to stop belonging to her and to stop sharing her appetites. In the middle of Babylon, God still says "my people."

"Her sins have reached to the sky, and God has remembered her iniquities." The tower of Babel was built with "a tower whose top reaches to the sky" (Genesis 11:4), and the cry of Sodom came up to God (Genesis 18:20-21). Both came down. The measure of repayment is exact: "Return to her just as she returned." And the boast that seals her fate comes from Isaiah 47:8: "I sit a queen, and am no widow." The goddess Roma was often pictured enthroned, and many scholars think the first readers would have caught it. The answer comes "in one day," and the reason is one short sentence: "the Lord God who has judged her is strong."

18:9-17Kings and merchants, far away

Three groups mourn, and the model is Ezekiel's lament over Tyre, the trading city whose fall made kings and sailors wail (Ezekiel 27:27-36). First the kings, who "will weep and wail over her, when they look at the smoke of her burning." Next the merchants, who "weep and mourn over her, for no one buys their merchandise any more."

Read that sentence again. They are not grieving for her. They are grieving for their sales. And all of them "stand far away for the fear of her torment." The people who profited most, and who lived with her, will not go near when the fire comes. A system built on mutual advantage has no loyalty once the advantage has gone.

The cargo list in verses 12-13 is long and glittering: gold, pearls, silk, spices, wine, horses and chariots. Many scholars note how closely it resembles what flowed into Rome. Then the list ends with something that does not belong on any inventory: "people's bodies and souls." The Greek word for "bodies" was a common word for slaves, and Ezekiel 27:13 says of Tyre that her traders "traded the persons of men." John lets the list fall from jewels to human beings, and adds "souls," because the people sold were never merely bodies.

18:17-20What is like the great city?

The third mourners are the sea people: "every ship master, and everyone who sails anywhere, and mariners." They do what Ezekiel's sailors did, casting dust on their heads and crying over the smoke (Ezekiel 27:30). Their question is "What is like the great city?"

That question sounds familiar. In Exodus 15:11, after the sea closed over Pharaoh, Israel sang, "Who is like you, Yahweh, among the gods?" In 13:4, the world asked of the beast, "Who is like the beast?" Now the sea merchants ask it of the city. Every time, the answer is the same: no one is like the Lord, and everything that has tried to be like him ends in smoke.

Three times in the chapter the destruction takes "one hour" (18:10, 18:17, 18:19). Everything people spent generations building, in one hour. Notice the contrast with the grief of earth. Heaven is told: "Rejoice over her, O heaven, you saints, apostles, and prophets; for God has judged your judgment on her." This is not cruelty. It is the answer to the cry of the martyrs under the altar: "How long, Master, the holy and true, until you judge and avenge our blood?" (6:10). Those who were silenced by Babylon hear God take up their case. If God never did, he would not be good.

18:21-24The millstone and the silence

A mighty angel lifts "a stone like a great millstone" and throws it into the sea. It is a sign act from Jeremiah 51:63-64, where a scroll of judgment was tied to a stone and sunk in the Euphrates, with the words, "Thus will Babylon sink, and will not rise again."

Then comes the silence, and John builds it with a refrain. In the WEB the phrase "no more at all" falls six times in verses 21-23. The sounds of the city go out one by one: the harpists and flute players, the craftsman's tools, the mill that makes daily bread, the lamp, and finally "the voice of the bridegroom and of the bride." These come from Jeremiah 25:10, where God promised to take from rebellious Judah the voice of mirth, the millstones and the light of the lamp. It is the quiet of a city with nothing left.

The reasons are given last. Her merchants were "the princes of the earth," and "with your sorcery all the nations were deceived." The Greek word behind "sorcery" is the root of our word pharmacy. It speaks of drugs, spells and charms, and it fits a power that numbs and intoxicates. And "in her was found the blood of prophets and of saints, and of all who have been slain on the earth." The count goes beyond the church. Babylon is guilty of every innocent death her appetite has caused, and God has not forgotten one of them.

But the silence is not the last word. The voice of the bridegroom, stilled here, is about to be heard in heaven. Tomorrow's chapter opens with a shout of "Hallelujah" and a wedding.