Some of the ruins of Babylon, dug out of the desert
We don’t have television in our home, so I miss some of what is going on with our culture. But I went to the eye doctor today, so I saw more TV than is good for me.
Bad enough there was an alleged newscast in which the alleged newsman prattled, “So Trump likes torture! Hey, that’s bad news for Melania!” No media bias here. And bad enough it was followed by a Democrat commercial urging the public to “stand with Governor Cuomo and Senator Schumer to preserve your right to healthcare!” By preserving Obamacare, is what they meant. Those things were annoying, but not unexpected.
What really threw me was a Hallmark commercial which proclaimed, loud and clear, that the famous card company has gone over to the dark side.
Valentine’s Day. Scenes of long-term, loving marriages, one after another. And old people with their grandchildren. Very sweet. And just thrown in, alongside unions sanctified by God, a couple of homosexual “marriage” proposals and anniversaries. Not sanctified by God, but condemned in Scripture as mortal sin.
When I looked on youtube afterward, I was horrified to discover that Hallmark has produced many TV ads along these lines. No, I will not post any of them.
We all have sins to fight against, and sometimes sin wins. Otherwise, we wouldn’t need a Savior and God would not have had to send His Son to earth. Fornication in all its varied forms has always been with us.
But what’s different in our time is the all-out efforts by important, wealthy, powerful and influential people to rebrand sin as virtue and convince the rest of us to “celebrate” it. This is more than ordinary sin. This is worse. They do it to make more money. They do it to get more power. And it is by their work that Satan seeks to establish his kingdom on the earth. His parody of Christ’s Kingdom.
Our culture is being corrupted and debauched. We have a thousand Jeroboams out there, going all-out to make the people sin. To estrange them from their God who loves them. To lead them into condemnation. This, I do believe, is the Babylon discussed in Revelation: which God has marked for destruction. I am afraid that this is our Babylon.
I doubt we have the strength to stop it. That is something God will do. It’ll be hard enough for us just not to give in to it: to hold out, to be faithful, to endure until the end. Not to accept it. No matter how many politicians, teachers and professors, big corporations, and bent churchmen try to make us accept it.
Because even if everyone else in the world declares it’s right… it will still be wrong.
Sobering, but true. The immorality of today’s world seems to be all but ubiquitous, yet it still can harm us, and those around us for years to come. I’ve heard some interesting theories regarding the identity the the mystery, Babylon, including the hub of Islam, in Mecca. I’m not dogmatic about it, the book of Revelation calls it a mystery and I don’t think anyone will know to a certainty until that mystery is revealed, in God’s due time.
That having been said, anything that seeks to separate us from obeying the True God certainly serves the purpose of Babylon, and there are all sorts of things trying to push us away from God’s standards.
Those walls are a stark reminder. Ancient Babylon was no trivial operation, yet God brought them down at the height of their power.
In fact, just before the Persians got ’em, they were planning to expand.
There’s a lesson in there, somewhere. Basically, don’t expect to defy the True God forever, without consequences.