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Revelation 17:1 - 18
     1 And one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and spoke with me, saying, “Come here, I shall show you the judgment of the great harlot who sits on many waters, 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.” 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. 4 And 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, 5 and upon her forehead a name was written, a mystery, “BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND OF THE ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.” 6 And I saw the woman drunk with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the witnesses of Jesus. And when I saw her, I wondered greatly. 7 And the angel said to me, “Why do you wonder? I shall tell you the mystery of the woman and of the beast that carries her, which has the seven heads and the ten horns. 8 “The beast that you saw was and is not, and is about to come up out of the abyss and to go to destruction. And those who dwell on the earth will wonder, whose name has not been written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, when they see the beast, that he was and is not and will come. 9 “Here is the mind which has wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains on which the woman sits, 10 and they are seven kings; five have fallen, one is, the other has not yet come; and when he comes, he must remain a little while. 11 “And the beast which was and is not, is himself also an eighth, and is one of the seven, and he goes to destruction. 12 “And the ten horns which you saw are ten kings, who have not yet received a kingdom, but they receive authority as kings with the beast for one hour. 13 “These have one purpose and they give their power and authority to the beast.
     14 “These will wage war against the Lamb, and the Lamb will overcome them, because He is Lord of lords and King of kings, and those who are with Him are the called and chosen and faithful.” 15 And he said to me, “The waters which you saw where the harlot sits, are peoples and multitudes and nations and tongues. 16 “And the ten horns which you saw, and the beast, these will hate the harlot and will make her desolate and naked, and will eat her flesh and will burn her up with fire. 17 “For God has put it in their hearts to execute His purpose by having a common purpose, and by giving their kingdom to the beast, until the words of God should be fulfilled. 18 “And the woman whom you saw is the great city, which reigns over the kings of the earth.”

Zech. 5:8  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. 9Then 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. 10  I said to the angel who was speaking with me, “Where are they taking the ephah?” 11Then 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.”  Tower of Babel.

I am a dispensationalist.  Sort of.  But not a rigid one.  One of my favorite christian blogger's has a banner at his blog that says he's a Calvi-dispi-bapti-gelical.     Dispensationalist.

In the world of Bible scholarship, most of our hero's are not.  My hero's are all reformed.  The strong men that believed in Sola Scriptura - Sola Fide and wrestled the true church away from Roman Catholicism.  

The Martin Luther's and the John Calvin's and William Tyndale's who realized the picture in the Word of God didn't look anything like the picture in the Roman church and chose a faith in God, even if it cost them their very lives.

And the generation of puritan scholar's after them.  The John Owens' and John Bunyan's.  The great theological thinkers and preachers like Whitefield and Edwards.  

We have a rich heritage of hero's.  Brilliant men.  Most of us are painfully ordinary, like me, but God has also blessed His church with men who have had brilliant minds.  These have left us a great feast, a rich banquet to sit at table and get full of wonderful things.

Recently, I've found myself interested in the history of the Westminster Confession.  I'm reading a book about this group of Puritan Bible scholars that met in Westminster chapel for 4 years and hammered out 370 years ago a statement of faith that if you get into it, is not less than brilliant.

The language and the thought in that confessional statement is still in use in many or even perhaps most of the churches that are still on solid ground today.

That's our legacy.  Those are my hero's in the faith!  But not one of them, if they were still alive, would recognize my theology of end times things.

Or then again, maybe some of them are bright enough that they would embrace what I'm about to say.  But many, or most, of the folk who revere these hero's have skidded to an eschatological stop and remain exactly where their hero's remained in the 1730's.  It's almost like hero worship.  "That's what John Owen believed so that's what I must believe.  John Owen is my hero."

And John Owen is a good hero to set your sights on, but I believe in another phenomenon called, for lack of a less scary name, "progressive revelation."

What that says is this.  Just as God told Daniel to seal up those things until the end, it pleases God to reveal things by His Spirit, through His closed canon of scripture, at different times in this pageant of history.

So, the canon is closed.  Sola Scriptura!  But it was closed with a lot of prophecy that cannot be understood completely until a time frame that God begins to reveal some of these sealed up things, at the end.

Why did God wait until the 16th century to wake the church from it's 1,000 year slumber?  Why didn't He have a Martin Luther in the 800's or the 1100's?

All Martin Luther did was peer into scripture.  It was right there all the time!

Because, I believe, in His sovereignty, God reveals these things that are seemingly locked up in His Word, at times that are pleasing to His sovereign plan.

So God gathered brilliant men for 250 years that completely reformed the church into the protestant era, and we revere them.  They really were brilliant!

BUT.............they were largely 'out to lunch' in this area of eschatology.  Eschatology is the study of future things.  Eschatos.  Future.

In God's timing and sovereign plan, the reformers needed to dig out of the canon of scripture, Soteriology.  The study and meaning of salvation.  And that's what they did, and they did it brilliantly!

But when you read these same brilliant men on this topic, that we're attempting to look into tonight, to a man they'll tell you that none of these events are in the future, that all of this happened in 70AD when Rome came and destroyed Jerusalem and systematically dismantled the Jewish religion and drove the Jews scattered into the world.  And what does it matter because the church is spiritual Israel.

The reformers accomplished their mission which was Soteriology.  But they are not helpful in eschatology.  They're still my hero's!  I can't wait to meet them in heaven!  But to hold to a defective eschatology because scholarship is connected to these men and anything else is lowbrow.... that borders on hero worship.

Beginning in the mid 1800's men like Darby and later, Schofield began to say, why are we spiritualizing away some of the words in the book that seem to be quite literal.  Like God's promise to never ever ever abandon His people Israel, and, oh, what about this millenium thing where Jesus returns and sets up His kingdom on earth.

I believe it was a case of progressive revelation.  God didn't need His reformers to understand eschatology, but then a couple hundred years later, it was time to begin showing some of this obvious stuff to other men.  God doesn't go in for hero's.  He always has some hero's.  Maybe Darby and Schofield will live on the same block as Luther and Calvin in heaven.

And so while you will find me quite 'reformed', my hero's are the reformers, and my doctrines of grace are their doctrines of grace, I'm also adaptable to dispensationalism where I think it's helpful, and I do believe that God is still revealing things (from His canon of scripture!!) to men even today.  

NOTE!  I would earnestly contend for the once for all delivered to the saints faith.  I would fight to the death that there is NO new revelation beyond this canon of scripture.  I DO NOT believe that men are getting new prophetic visions and revelations that are extra-biblical.  I simply believe there are things in this book that will light up like a street light on the day that God sets forth.

And some of them are in this chapter.

Now the problem and dis-credit to dispensationalism is that dispensationalists go wacky!  They assign the nuttiest things to prophecy.  If I had a nickel for every wacko dispensationalist that was teaching to some dumbstruck audience that Hitler was the anti-christ, I could probably make a car payment.

That's why the scholarship crowd lumps us all together with bumpkins and hill billies who are missing their front teeth.  Some of the scorn is well earned.  Harold Camping, anyone?  He finally died the other day.  He had to go to his final resting place the ordinary way.  None of his dates came true.  Wacky.  

The difference between Camping and me is, I'm going to make some wacky guesses tonight, but I'm going to tell you to take my wacko guesses and $2 bucks and get yourself a coffee at Starbucks.

OK, so with that lengthy introduction and dis-claimer, let's get started.

1Then 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, 2with 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.”

In John's vision, one of the angels with one of the bowls of final wrath, is who takes him and shows him these things.  Same angels and bowls that we saw in Chapter16.  Which one?  Don't know.  It doesn't say.

He says; Come here, I will show you the judgment   Judgement.  This angel is going to show John, and us, judgement.  The word is Krima.  It means a sentence that a judge delivers.  Death is a sentence.  Damnation forever is a sentence.  The angel is going to show us what the final judgement will be for this harlot.

I will show you the judgment of the great harlot who sits on many waters

OK, so who or what is the 'harlot' here.  We started to talk about this breifly last week, and having studied more this week, I can say, I think I was spot on, last week.

The harlot sits on many waters.  When you look at one of the globes we all had as kids around the house with the pretty colors, blue, is the water, and the different nations, usually different colors, sit on the waters.  That's exactly what we have here.  This harlot is the nations who cover the whole globe, but she's more than that.

Harlotry in the Bible is the symbol for false worship.  False god's.  False religion.  Idolatry.  Spiritual affection for some thing or some one who is NOT God.

This judgement is against false religion and spiritual idolatry, world wide.  All of it.  And then it says;

2with 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.”

The kings of the earth.  The governments and the power men behind the governments have all embraced idolatry and false religion in all of it's forms in order to gain political power.  

False religion and political power have always been in bed together.  Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are both christians.    Well, they are!  Just ask them.  Why do you think that is?

It says the kings of the earth committed acts of fornication with this harlot.  That's pretty graphic.  We don't let our little brains dwell on that picture too long.  But in God's mind, that relationship of political power to false religion and idolatry is a vile, filthy, gross thing.  I'm picking on the low hanging fruit here, but Mitt Romney and John McCain are in the same club.

The kings of the earth use religion for their purposes.  False religion.  Tribalism and power.  And in the end, we'll see how Satan and the Beast will take this to a whole new level.  Right here in this chapter.

We've already seen it, right.  In Ch. 13; no mark of the beast, no buy, no sell.

Then it says;  and those who dwell on the earth were made drunk with the wine of her immorality

Karl Marx said; "Religion is the opiate of the masses." and he was dead on.  Spot on.  

In the tribulation period, I believe this is teaching clearly, that after the church is removed, OK, this is me guessing, I think something that affects the whole earth, those who dwell on the earth will happen, like a financial meltdown that stalls the whole planet.

Everything grinds to a halt.  Financial house of cards, blown down.  And one man rises out of the murky chaos and miraculously puts humpty dumpty back together again.  

One of the ways he's going to organize the whole earth around his financial plan is going to be religion.  

I believe that the kings of the earth have always been whoring with false religion and the dwellers on the earth have always been drunk with the opium of false religion, but in the end, when anti-christ rises up out of the murk, the world will see a whole new meaning to these words.  This picture.

My guess, (starbucks etc.  don't take it to the bank) is that a financial meltdown after the rapture (or before??) will cause world wide panic.  All commerce and production will temporarily grind to a halt.  

One man will rise from the pandemonium and with miraculous powers, he will unite the whole world.

How?  How do you get all of the different tribes to pull together as one?  Again, here's my guess.  Religion.  A common religious esperience.  A common spiritual experiential phenomenon world wide.

Some phenomenon.  It'll be experiential.  It'll be spiritual.  (Not the Holy Spirit).  It will be worship like, and common world wide.

Think about a Hitler like phenomenon.  A whole nation drunk with Hitler.  A common enemy - worldwide - christians and jews.

Now let that infection spread over the whole earth, not just a single nation.  The germans were rational people.  But somehow the drunkeness spread to a whole nation.  Same idea, but whole world.  

Add a spiritual - experiential - component, the whole world wide, - a common - supernatural - miraculous - other worldly experience.

I hope you see where I'm going with this, because that's all I'm willing to say right now.  Think of an experience that Mormons and Catholics and Tibetans, and Hindu's and Africani's and some evangelicals already all have in common.

Something like that.  A common "religious" "spiritual" "worshipful" experience that acts as an umbrella that causes all of the tribes on earth to come together under the hypnosis of a false messiah.

Bingo.  Chapter 17.

3And 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.

A woman.  False religion is always pictured as a woman, because the idea of spiritual harlotry, whoring after other gods, is consistent from Genesis to Revelation.  That's an easy one.  

The woman is sitting on a scarlet beast.

Scarlet.  What color was Rahab's rope.  Scarlet.  Now Rahab has a glorious ending, but at the time, she didn't have a gold or white or blue rope.  She had a scarlet rope.  What color is the lamp in front of Janies Ranch if you happen to be driving to Vegas at night?  

You've got it.  Scarlet and harletry have something going on.  If you think of a great pageantry, a new pope being crowned with his pope hat, what color is the very first one to come into your mind?  Hmmm.......

The woman, this whore, is sitting on a beast who is her favorite color.  And it says the beast is full of blasphemous names.

What does that mean?  Again, my guess, starbucks etc.  I think, my money's on...
all of these names will be the one's we most commonly associate with orthodox christianity.  Mighty God.  Everlasting Father.  Prince of Peace.

My guess is the beast, who we know as Anti-Christ will take all of the Biblical names of God and Jesus, the son of God, including those last 2, and claim them as his own.  What could possibly be more blasphemous than that!  I picture him on his throne with a sign over him that says' Rose of Sharon.

4The 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,

This verse just solidify's the things I just said.  All of the traditional trappings of High Church.  That's why I've never been much into vestments and magistereum.  I think it ends up here.

In heaven, in the throne room, there we'll have vestments and pageantry.  I'll wait for the real thing.  High Church turns me off.  When you see religions with gold and precious stones and pearls, on this earth, be suspect.  

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."

Back in verse one we talked about the harlot who sits on many waters being the nations.  But here she has a name.  Mystery.  Babylon the Great.  The mother of harlots and of the abominations of the earth.

Do you remember that last week I took you to an obscure chapter in Zechariah's prophecy about a woman who is in a basket and she is flown to the Plain of Shinar, and God says about her, This Is Wickedness.

So there's something about wickedness and spiritual harlotry and false religion that is all mixed up with this region where ancient Babylon was.

Even though Sadam Hussein started rebuilding ancient Babylon, I don't think that's what this reference, this name is talking about.  A physical Babylon during the end times.  Maybe.  I don't rule things out when I'm guessing.  But I think that's the purpose of the word Mystery.  

This harlot, which encompasses idolatry and wickedness at the end is somehow a picture of Babylon of old.  There's a connection there.

So what happened on the plain of Shinar within just a few generations of Noah that is still present with us now, and will be magnified in the end?

Stay with me now as we take a look in Genesis, beginning with ch. 10:8Now Cush became the father of Nimrod; he became a mighty one on the earth. 9He was a mighty hunter before the LORD; therefore it is said, “Like Nimrod a mighty hunter before the LORD.” 10The beginning of his kingdom was Babel and Erech and Accad and Calneh, in the land of Shinar. 11From that land he went forth into Assyria, and built Nineveh and Rehoboth-Ir and Calah, 12and Resen between Nineveh and Calah; that is the great city.

What is important there is this.  When Noah and his sons left the ark to re-populate the earth, there was no other name that men feared except God.

Nimrod is the great grandson of Noah.  Grandson of Cush.  And what's important about the passage above is the reference to a kingdom.  Babel was the beginning of Nimrod's kingdom.

All of a sudden, the almighty has got some competition in men's hearts.  200 years after the flood, a mighty man, Nimrod, establishes not only a kingdom, but look with me in the next chapter, chapter 11 of Genesis;

1Now the whole earth used the same language and the same words. 2It came about as they journeyed east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. 3They said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks and burn them thoroughly.” And they used brick for stone, and they used tar for mortar.

Now Josephus tells us the reason they used tar for mortar was that their plan was to build a waterproof tower so that if God sent another flood, their tower would defeat God himself.  

4They said, “Come, let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let us make for ourselves a name, otherwise we will be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.”

A tower that reaches into heaven.  What did Satan say in history past?  Isaiah 14:14  'I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.'

Are you starting to see what's going on here.  200 years from Noah.  Satan has himself a mighty man, a dupe, and he is a king, he's building a kingdom over other men, and he is building a tower to defeat God's plan, and he's in line with what Satan said before when he rebelled against the Most High.

And then he says, let us make for ourselves a name

Before Nimrod, God Almighty was the Only King and the Only Name that men were to fear.  Satan and his dupe Nimrod are in direct rebellion with God.  Building a kingdom and a name higher than the clouds.

Phillipians 2:10 says that at the name of Jesus EVERY KNEE WILL BOW, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

At the Jerusalem council in Acts 15, James says;  14 "Simeon has related how God first concerned Himself about taking from among the Gentiles a people for His name.

So when the people of Babel say and let us make for ourselves a name it is in direct defiance to the ONLY name by which men must worship and be saved.  False worship.  False gods.  Idolatry.  It all begins just 200 years after Noah on the plain of Shinar.

5The LORD came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built. 6The LORD said, “Behold, they are one people, and they all have the same language. And this is what they began to do, and now nothing which they purpose to do will be impossible for them. 7“Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” 8So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of the whole earth; and they stopped building the city. 9Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of the whole earth; and from there the LORD scattered them abroad over the face of the whole earth.

There are verses in this same time frame that lead some scholars to believe that his is the point where continents and land masses seperated.  On our globe we have continents sitting on many waters.

So here we go to some extra-biblical sources to add some pieces to this puzzle.

Nimrod had a wife, and according to tradition, she was a harlot.  Her name was Semiramis.  Nimrod declares himself the sun god, and semiramis is the moon god.  They are to be worshipped.

Semiramis has a son, out of wedlock and declares immaculate conception.  Her son is named Tammuz.  Nimrod dies but the mother and child become a religion that after the people of babel are scattered, this mother and child religion shows up everywhere.  All over the globe, in almost every culture you can find a mother and child who are worshipped.

In Egypt, it's Isis and Osiris.  In Rome it's Venus and Adonus.  In Greece it's Aphrodite and adonis.  In Ephesus it's Diana of the Epehsians.  

In Jeremiah and Ezekiel there are references to the idolatrous israelites worshipping.  Baal worship has a connection.  In Jeremiah the women are weeping for Tammuz....and on and on it goes.  It mentions the worship of the Queen of heaven in Jeremiah 7 and also 44.  Ishtar, Ashtoreth, Astarte, wife of Baal, also known as Molech.  All the different names, all stemming from the plain of Shinar.

All of the symbols that revolve around Mary worship, stem directly to Semiramis and Tammuz in Babylon.  It has come down through the ages and is still with us today.  Rank idolatry.

This Is Wickedness, said the angel that was speaking to Zechariah in Chapter 5.  This is a view of the final form of that ancient idolatrous God challenging wickedness.

6And 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. 7And the angel said to me, “Why do you wonder? I will tell you the mystery of the woman and of the beast that carries her, which has the seven heads and the ten horns.

If you want to identify who this woman is, you simply have to ask the question, 'throughout the centuries of the saints of God in Christ Jesus, where and who has spilled the largest quantity of their blood,' and the answer is immediate.  The Roman Catholic church.

John says, when he saw her, he wondered greatly.  He's wondering who this is?  What does it mean.  What group or nation or person is this harlot who is drunk with the blood of the witnesses of Jesus?

And in vs. 7, the angel says, don't wonder, I'm going to tell you who it is.

And we've been guessing who it is ever since!

Next week, if it please the Lord for me to be here again with you, I'm going to make some guesses myself.  You'll have to come back next week to find out.

Ultimately though, this is an example of progressive revelation.  You realize of course, that during the tribulation period, the saints who are alive then will look in here and see a perfect picture that is hidden from us.  Why do we waste time guessing when in vs. 5, the angel who was speaking with John, says quite plainly, it is a mystery.