Revelation 18:5

Babylon the Great is the great city whose fall fills Revelation 17–18. She is pictured as a harlot seated on many waters and riding a scarlet beast, in league with the beast and its kings, corrupting the nations with her influence (Revelation 17). Chapter 18 opens with a mighty angel announcing that she is fallen and has become a dwelling place of devils and foul spirits (Revelation 18:1–3). Later the kings, merchants and mariners who grew rich from her stand and mourn her loss, while heaven rejoices over God’s judgment. Our verses come between the announcement and the laments, and in them God speaks first to his own people before the end comes.

The name comes from the city that conquered Judah and carried its people into exile. The prophets spoke long oracles against that Babylon for its idolatry, its luxury and its pride (Isaiah 13–14, Jeremiah 50–51), and these verses take up their words again and again. For John’s first readers the name very likely pointed to Rome, the empire of their own day. Rome, like Babylon, was a centre of great wealth and trade, full of idolatry and the worship of the emperor, and it persecuted Christians. Babylon in Revelation also stands for every human power, political, economic, religious or cultural, that sets itself against God, grows rich on idolatry and luxury, and persecutes his people. That is why the call of these verses still reaches us.

The voice John hears is “another voice from heaven”. The word állos means another, a different speaker from the angel who has just announced Babylon’s fall, and the word for voice, phōnḗ, is any sound or spoken word. Here it is a clear message with the authority of heaven, and it is addressed to God’s people directly. It calls them “my people”, so the voice speaks for God himself. Laós is the common Greek word for a people, and it is the word “my” that marks them as his own.

“Come out” translates exérchomai, the ordinary verb for going or coming out of a place, made of ek, out of, and érchomai, to come or go. Here it stands as a command to all of them together (“ye”), and it calls for a real departure from Babylon, from her ways, her values and her gains as well as from the city itself. The words echo the prophets’ warnings to Israel about the first Babylon: “Remove out of the midst of Babylon” (Jeremiah 50:8), and “Flee out of the midst of Babylon” (Jeremiah 51:6).

God has always called his people to be distinct from the world around them, because he is holy and wants a people who reflect his holiness. He told Israel to leave behind the doings of Egypt and of Canaan (Leviticus 18:3), and Paul gives the church the same call: “come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord” (2 Corinthians 6:17). For the first Christians this meant standing apart from the worship of the emperor, from trade bound up with idols, and from the moral decay of Rome, often at great cost to themselves.

Verse 5 gives the reason for both the call and the judgment. “Reached” translates kolláō, a verb that means to glue, to stick, to join or cleave. Babylon’s sins have piled up and clung together until they reach heaven itself, in full view of God. “Sins” is hamartía again, the same word as in verse 4. The parallel word “iniquities”, adíkēma, means a wrong done, an act of injustice, so between them the two words name her sin and the particular wrongs she has committed.

The picture is an old one. When the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah came up to him, the LORD said he would go down and see whether they had done according to it (Genesis 18:20–21). The builders at Babel wanted a tower whose top would reach unto heaven (Genesis 11:4), and here what reaches heaven is Babylon’s sin. Of the first Babylon, Jeremiah wrote, “her judgment reacheth unto heaven, and is lifted up even to the skies,” and in the same verse God’s people say, “forsake her” (Jeremiah 51:9).

God waits until sin has come to its full measure. He told Abraham that “the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full” (Genesis 15:16). With Babylon that measure is reached, and the verse marks the point where his long patience gives way to judgment.

“Reward her even as she rewarded you” gives the rule of God’s justice here. Babylon is repaid in kind for what she did to God’s people and to the world, and her punishment is fitted to her deeds, “according to her works”. Érgon is a deed or a work, and the phrase ties her sentence to everything she has done, including the blood of prophets and saints found in her (Revelation 18:24). Her judgment is fully deserved. Scripture says the same of God’s justice everywhere: he renders to every man according to his work (Psalm 62:12), and Paul writes of Alexander the coppersmith, who did him much evil, “the Lord reward him according to his works” (2 Timothy 4:14).

Then the measure grows. “Double” comes three times in the verse. Diplous is the adjective, twofold, and diplóō is the verb, to double or render twofold.

Verse 7 names the sins behind the sentence and the heart behind the sins. “How much ... so much” (hósos ... tosoûtos) sets her punishment against her guilt in exact measure. She “glorified herself”. Doxázō means to honour or magnify, to make or count something glorious, and with heautoû, herself, it describes Babylon giving herself the glory that belongs to God. She “lived deliciously”. Strēniáō means to live in wanton luxury and indulgence, often with the arrogance and disregard for others that go with it. Against these God sets “torment”, basanismós, and “sorrow”, pénthos, the grief of mourning.

“For she saith in her heart” shows where it all began. The kardía, the heart, is the seat of her thoughts and intentions, and what she says there is a threefold boast. “I sit a queen”: káthēmai means to sit or to reside, and basílissa is a queen, so she pictures herself enthroned and ruling. “And am no widow”: chḗra is a widow, and in Israel a widow was often poor, dependent and exposed to hardship. With the plain verb eimí, “I am”, and the simple negative ou, she claims to be safe from loss and want. “And shall see no sorrow”: here ou and mḗ stand together as a doubled denial meaning “not at all” or “never”, and eídō means to see. She is sure that grief belongs to others.

These are the words of the first Babylon in Isaiah: “I shall not sit as a widow, neither shall I know the loss of children.” God’s answer follows at once: “But these two things shall come to thee in a moment in one day, the loss of children, and widowhood” (Isaiah 47:8–9). The boast in Revelation ends the same way. The queen who said she would see no sorrow is given sorrow, and the city that called herself secure is left desolate.

Her punishment is measured to her sin because God’s judgments are righteous and exact. “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap” (Galatians 6:7). “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall” (Proverbs 16:18), and “God resisteth the proud” (James 4:6). Jesus told of a rich man who stored up goods for many years and was called a fool on the very night his soul was required of him (Luke 12:16–21). Babylon’s wealth and pleasure had become a false security that blinded her to the judgment coming, and true security is found in humble dependence on God.

“Therefore” ties verse 8 to the pride of verse 7. Her plagues, plēgḗ, the same word as in verse 4, are now named. Death is the loss of life in the judgment and its aftermath. Mourning is the grief that follows, above all among those who grew rich from her. Famine is the hunger that comes when a society collapses, and it often goes with God’s judgment in the prophets. Together they describe the whole of life breaking down at once, as God’s plagues once fell on Egypt (Exodus 7–12).

“And she shall be utterly burned with fire.” Katakaíō joins katá, down or completely, to kaíō, to burn, and means to burn down to the ground or consume wholly. Fire fell on Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19), and here it pictures a destruction that is complete and final. Babylon’s power, influence and very existence come to an end.

“For strong is the Lord God who judgeth her.” Ischyrós means strong, mighty or powerful. Babylon trusted in her wealth and power, and the verse answers her with the strength of God. He is the Judge, and his might makes his sentence certain. Heaven later praises him because “true and righteous are his judgments: for he hath judged the great whore” (Revelation 19:2).

These verses find their deepest answer in Jesus Christ. The judgment that falls on Babylon is the judgment Christ bore for his people. He is “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), and he is the propitiation for our sins (1 John 2:2). God made him to be sin for us (2 Corinthians 5:21), and on the cross he drank the cup of wrath that we deserved. He blotted out “the handwriting of ordinances that was against us” (Colossians 2:14), and he spoiled the principalities and powers (Colossians 2:15).

So the call “come out of her, my people” rests on what he has done. God has called us “out of darkness into his marvellous light” (1 Peter 2:9). Our old man was crucified with him, so that we are freed from sin’s rule (Romans 6:6–7), and “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). He is made unto us wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption (1 Corinthians 1:30), so our separation from Babylon is a reality given by our union with him, and our own resolve follows from it.

The Lamb is also the Judge. The Father has committed all judgment to the Son (John 5:22) and has given him authority to execute judgment, because he is the Son of man (John 5:27). Babylon’s fall leads on to his coming as the rider on the white horse (Revelation 19:11–16).

Babylon’s pride stands against his humility. She glorified herself, and he, being in the form of God, “made himself of no reputation” and humbled himself to the death of the cross (Philippians 2:6–8). She said she would see no sorrow, and he was “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3), who took sorrow on himself for us. She boasted that she was no widow, while the church, his bride, waits for the marriage supper of the Lamb (Revelation 19:7–9), a security far surer than any boast. Babylon is repaid double in judgment, and God promises his people double in blessing: “For your shame ye shall have double” (Isaiah 61:7).

The end of Babylon opens onto the new heaven and the new earth, where the holy city comes down and God dwells with men (Revelation 21:1–3), new heavens and a new earth “wherein dwelleth righteousness” (2 Peter 3:13). The death and mourning that fall on Babylon in one day are gone for ever there, for “there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying” (Revelation 21:4).

These verses show God speaking in mercy before he strikes. The same chapter that announces Babylon’s ruin carries a call to his own people, “my people”, to come out while there is time. They show that he sees every wrong, that the sins of the proud reach him and the cry of those they crush is before him, and that his judgment, when it comes, is measured to the deeds and certain, because he is strong.

Every Babylon looks secure for a while, with her wealth, her trade and her power. Her boast is the boast of every heart that trusts in riches and gives itself the glory, and the voice from heaven still calls God’s people out of her sins and her ways, in what we love, what we buy and where our loyalty lies. If you belong to Christ, that voice calls you “my people”, and the God who judges Babylon is the God who has already given his Son to bear judgment for you.