Revelation 18:17 Commentary and Bible Study

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.