How much of the world do we let into our church? How much of the world do we let into our lives? This is the issue. Why have churches declined? Why has the world got into so many churches? The entertainment and the behaviour of the world? Because people have not been holding fast the things that are good and vital. The officers, the members – ‘Oh, let’s do this. Let’s do that,’ the suggestion comes in. ‘Let’s alter our worship. Let’s do things differently.’ What is the response? ‘Oh, that’s a good idea. Oh, that appeals. Let’s change everything.’ So the whole thing drifts into worldliness, because people have forgotten the reasons why things are done as they are: why there is reverent worship; why there are certain procedures in the house of God. If people forget why, then they won’t protect and defend these things. We are the church in a hostile world, with the devil as a roaring lion trying to tear precious obedience to the word away and bring us down to worldliness and sin. This is given by the Holy Spirit, the great burden on the apostle Peter’s heart. See things as they are and be a great defender of your heart, or your Christian service, of the lifestyle in your church and remember, we are in the world but we are not of it.
What does Peter mean by Babylon, the church at Babylon? Was Peter literally at Babylon? I think there's no reason not to take this literally. Some people today are very inclined to adopt the teaching of Rome on this – ‘No, of course, Peter here is using Babylon just as a term for Rome’ – because they want Peter in Rome, having invented the idea that he was the first pope or the head of the church. So they want to place him in Rome. However, today, even many sound preachers say this must be a reference to Rome. Where do they get it from? ‘In the Book of Revelation’, they say, ‘Rome is called Babylon’, but it depends how you understand the Book of Revelation. If you take a Dispensational view of the book or alternatively a Preterist view, then you might think that the references to Babylon particularly refer to Rome. But the Book of Revelation is a book of symbols. You should expect to find symbols in Revelation; you don't expect to find them in a straightforward epistle like 1 Peter. Besides, in the Book of Revelation, Babylon probably doesn't stand for Rome specifically, though it would include Rome. It stands for the world, and all worldly government and rule, not just Rome. So there's no reason to assume this is not meant literally. It would be a good thing for Peter to be in Babylon. In Acts 2 we read of Jews from many different dispersions who came to Jerusalem to worship on the Day of Pentecost, and among them were those from Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates, and what is in the middle of Mesopotamia? Babylon. There was a huge Jewish population there. It doesn't surprise us at all that is an apostle would have wanted to minister at Babylon of all places, to the Jewish community, and spread the gospel. If we take this literally, then we are to understand that there was a church there, a sister church, and descendants of the Jewish dispersion just over 600 years before were there in abundance. Some experts, if they are right, say they made up a third of Babylon at this time.
Others however say that Peter was at Jerusalem, his normal base. Why then does he call it ‘Babylon’? Some claim that he didn’t want the authorities to know where he was, but that is a little bit silly. No, they knew that the apostle Peter was normally at Jerusalem, if they wanted to find him. So why use the term ‘Babylon’? Because Babylon already stood for this world: the pleasures, the lusts, the order of things under the prince of the power of the air, the tyranny of Satan in this world. Even if he had written from Jerusalem, he might well have spoken of the church at Babylon. There was a very big church at Jerusalem, probably divided into numerous churches, congregations, because of the numbers of the people. Even though it was a religious city, the focal point of Judaism, yet it was a worldly city and that church, like every other church in the world, had to be in the world but not of the world. It had to be a church that kept itself distinct from the practices and the lifestyle and the thinking of the city in which it was set.