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Bible Notes - Tabernacle Commentaries
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Revelation 18:3
Comments
The reason for her judgment is given: all the nations and the rulers have participated in her immorality and her perverted standards, and have in effect committed fornication with her. All nations throughout the gospel age, and before, have drunk of her wine. It is called the wine of the wrath of her fornication, not because she has wrath, but because God has wrath towards those who have drunk her wine. If we ask how extensive is the influence of the harlot, Babylon, the answer given by this verse is that she touches the whole world. All nations have been deceived by her into committing that spiritual fornication which makes them unfaithful to the one true God. The nations have considered her beauty and desired it, even though they know that to take of it is to forfeit the soul. They have become drunk with the lusts of this world and with its false ideas and worship. These make men drunk figuratively speaking, for they dull the mind and stifle the conscience. Her pleasures can only be received by breaking every commandment that God has given. They have admired and invested their lives in what Satan’s temptations have suggested to their minds. We are God’s by right. To go after this world in preference to him is an act of harlotry.The kings of the earth have also committed fornication with her. These have had special opportunity and power to drink of her pleasures, and few there are who have the self-control not to indulge in what is so easily accessible to them, sometimes at the direct expense of their people. This happened in the case of Saul, the first king that Israel had, just as Samuel warned it would.Further, the merchants of the world have become rich through her. With what do the merchants of all the earth enrich themselves? Is it not with the goods of this world, the produce of various countries which the rich gather to themselves in disproportionate measure? Rather than worship God, they worship and serve created things, the things that they can possess and hold and count. These are their gods. Whether then it is the seduction of the world through false religion or through blatant worldliness, the world draws men away from God.
Application
‘Of her delicacies’. Modern versions strengthen this. It is about excesses, and the extreme position you try to get to through love of riches. We become addicted to those things. It we are shut in room for a few hours and we don’t know what to do. What a warning for Christian, not to be half a worldling, acquisitive. This is not just about immorality and lying, but about God not being enough for us. If we behave like this we approve of, condone, this world, and set an example to others which consolidates them in their rejection of God. Receive not of her plagues – there is a judgment for believers also in the form of loss of what could have been theirs.
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