This is a different angel1—not one of the seven angels with the seven bowl judgments.2 No explanation is given of the fact that he has great authority, but he brings Another Angel from Revelation 10:1 very much to mind—that Angel which we identified as Christ Himself—the Angel of the Lord Who Himself is called Lord. This is a being with great power and authority and He is surrounded by a brilliance indicating that this is no ‘ordinary’ glory. In fact, the earth is radiant with His Glory3—something that is never said of an ‘ordinary’ angel. The brilliance of the ‘Glory of God’ and of the ‘judgment of God’ spreads over the earth—the judgment He has placed into the Lamb’s hands.4 We previously came across the great, powerful voice when we heard the angel who asked who would be worthy to open the scroll,5 the angel who restrained the four angels at the corners of the earth until ‘those from Israel who were to be sealed’ were in fact sealed,6 the angel who flies in the midst of Heaven with the eternal Gospel of Creation.7 Here the voice is triumphantly proclaiming the ‘Judgment of Babylon’. This takes place in the “prophetic past tense” once again in that what still has to happen is seen as having already taken place: “Babylon has fallen, has fallen!” This refers to the great ‘city of Babylon’, as a power, as a principle and as a city. Great joy sounds through this proclamation.8 Babylon’s end is the end of ‘the city of man without God and against God’. The Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic era and the Industrial Revolution bore many characteristics of Babylon: unrestrained perversion of power, ‘doing business’ unscrupulously (as in Europe’s colonial past) with even ‘human souls’ bought and sold in the slave trade, the exploitation of millions of the poor that lead to the proletariat of industry and thus to the rise of communism and socialism. The true character of a superficially ‘Christian’ society has been progressively unmasked in the First and Second World Wars. It has been followed by the development of another culture since those wars. Today we experience the information revolution with a new information society based on computers, internet, and unlimited information available to all worldwide. This is accompanied by uncensored pornography, child sex, Satanism, anti-Semitism, graphic violence and so on. A materialistic hedonism (love of pleasure) seems to be the basis for the building of ‘New Babylon’. It happens in a deliberate way. The ‘captains of industry’, the ‘political leaders’ and the ‘church and religion leaders’, the ‘opinion leaders’ in the media, the educational systems in schools and universities, the judicial systems and the military powers are fully conscious of what they are doing, while building this ‘New Babylon’. They all mean well, of course. They all ‘believe’ in it. They all ‘go for it’. They all are convinced that finally we all together can make a ‘new world of peace, prosperity, freedom and righteousness’, a ‘new age’. They have no idea that they all are ‘puppets on a string’. The “New Babylon” is a dwelling-place for supernatural demons and a hiding place for every impure spirit, every unclean bird, and every unclean and detestable animal.9 Could the ‘birds of the air’ in the parable of mustard-seed also contain a warning in this respect, that the ‘hatred birds’, mentioned in this verse—the demons—will nest in the branches when the tree, the unified world religion, including ‘Christendom/Christianity-at-large’, has become fully grown? “He presented another parable to them, saying, “The ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ is like a mustard seed, which a man took and sowed in his field; and this is smaller than all other seeds, but when it is full grown, it is larger than the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and nest in its branches.”10 ‘Birds’ sometimes stands for ‘demons’. Revelation 18:2 “With a mighty voice he shouted: “’Fallen! Fallen is Babylon the Great!’ She has become a dwelling for demons and a haunt for every impure spirit, a haunt for every unclean bird, a haunt for every unclean and detestable animal.”
• Ezekiel sees the radiance of a ‘bright light’ with which the ‘Glory of the Lord’ appears from the North. Maybe he saw that ‘bright light’ coming along the caravan route that leads from Jerusalem—where the Lord has His dwelling upon Zion—via Riblah to Babylon.11
• In spite of all the blessings of modern Western civilisation, this is basically a god-less culture and the shady sides of it are rapidly on the increase: environmental pollution, exploitation of the Third World, A(tomic), B(iological), C(hemical) weapons, reducing the human body to a ‘thing’, hatred against Jews and Christians, god-less, sexual and demonic pop music, a violent and immoral film industry and the list goes on. End-time ‘Babylon’ is on the march.
Bible References:
1.Revelation 7:2, 8:3, 10:1, 14:6, 8, 15, 17 and 18 2.Revelation 17:1 3.Ezekiel 43:2 4.Revelation 5:6–7; John 5:22, 9:39 5.Revelation 5:2 6.Revelation 7:1–3 7.Revelation 14:6–7 8.Isaiah 21:9 9.Isaiah 13:21-22; Jeremiah 50:39 10.Matthew 13:31–32 11.Ezekiel 1:4–5
