Revelation 18:17 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Revelation 18:17

Comments

After the kings and the merchants, it is the mariners who mourn, and in much the same terms. Mariners were at the bottom level of society and yet they also mourn the loss of Babylon. Even those who enjoy very little of the city’s merchandise are inconsolable. There are some who make good in the world, and others who never get much further than wanting these things. But they also go down into judgement. They spent lives lusting after its goods, even though they never acquired them. Ship owners and officers and ordinary seamen: they represent the widest possible influence of worldliness. So many threads were connected to Babylon. So many have depended on her for their living. Their life of prosperity is at an end and nothing can restore it. They stand like those who watch a burning city, which they knew so well, and where their homes are situated. They entered it daily and enjoyed its bustle. There was an atmosphere of optimism in her. She promised much to all who cooperated with her. But all things to do with God were excluded from within her for she boasted that she did not need God. Those who watch her know that there never has been and can never again be a city like her.Babylon has fallen suddenly. How unstable she was all along. Nothing that has lasting value and stability could disappear so quickly. In the days of her glory, she kept up a pretence of power and durability, but it was a fiction and in the light of day, she is laid bare. How can the riches of this world have any lasting value in heaven. Babylon is built on a lie. Its foundations are deceit, theft, and murder. It boasted that it was more wonderful than the Lord himself and claimed that it could satisfy all who trust in it. But how bitter is trust betrayed.

Application

‘And they cast dust on their heads, and cried, weeping and wailing, saying, Alas, alas, that great city.’ The mourners are like those who have suffered bereavement; they cannot stop repeating again and again their great sorrow at their sense of loss. Again, it is the suddenness of her end that appals them. They cannot understand how something that seemed so substantial could disappear so quickly. God removes her in this way to show that actually, she was always transient. Therefore believers should not fear man or the worst that man can do, for God is able to remove what seems invincible to us in a moment. As believers we have been placed in a situation where the powers of this world seem to tower over us. As individuals we do not possess the ability to resist them. God need not have made things this way, but he has done so deliberately to teach us to trust him. We cannot do anything in our own strength to defeat our earthly enemies let alone our spiritual enemies, yet God will remove them in an hour.

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Revelation 18:17 Commentary and Bible Study