Do Not Stay in the World
The Conquering Lamb • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
0 ratings
· 9 viewsNotes
Transcript
INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
I want you to imagine that it is the mid-400’s BC.
You are in Babylon. You are a Jewish Exile.
You were born there and you have grown up there.
You have heard tales of the homeland. Tales of Zion.
The old men weep about it, but you don’t weep so much.
You haven’t adopted the polytheism. You are not bowing down to idols and revering statues. You have kept the dietary laws all your days. You observe the Sabbath.
But your family owns a business that you will inherit.
You have social ties there—friends that you have made that are important to your life.
There is now a fair amount of religious tolerance
And even though many Exiles are heading home, you aren’t so sure.
This was the decision facing many of the Jewish people in those days.
We read Ezra and Nehemiah and maybe we assume that all of the Jewish people came flooding home in waves after the Persians conquered Babylon and Cyrus allowed various conquered people to return home.
But the reality is that while close to a million Jewish people were in Exile in Babylon, only about a football stadium’s worth returned. Around 50,000 (aish.com, Rabbi Ken Spiro).
Many of them remained in Babylon.
They put down roots.
They made the place of sojourning their home.
And God knew they would be prone to do this. So He spoke to them through Jeremiah before the time of returning to Jerusalem had even come.
He spoke to them about the coming fall of Babylon. He told them not to stay:
“Go out of the midst of her, my people!
Let every one save his life
from the fierce anger of the Lord!
Babylon must fall for the slain of Israel,
just as for Babylon have fallen the slain of all the earth.
“You who have escaped from the sword,
go, do not stand still!
Remember the Lord from far away,
and let Jerusalem come into your mind:
Babylon is not your home. Babylon will be judged.
Come out from her. Remember Jerusalem.
That is the message of the prophet to the Jewish man or Jewish woman contemplating a return to Jerusalem.
This was the message to the Israelites considering calling Babylon home for good.
CONTEXT
CONTEXT
As we come to Revelation 18 tonight, we arrive at a passage that parallels the days of Jeremiah and Babylon and Exile.
We have Babylon—the great mother of prostitutes
She is Rome. She is the city that is the cultural, political and economic heartbeat of the Empire.
That is who Babylon was to the first-century reader
But we would also take this symbol to refer to any city of man that thrives as a mill for the ideas and ingenuity of man.
Any city during the age of the church where humans have come together to compact their rebellion against God make a name for themselves
Babylon was riding on the blasphemous Beast in chapter 17.
She sleeps with his kings in a disgusting exchange of influence and power
But in the end, those kings will turn on her.
The very nation-states that humanity trusts in to implement their depraved ideas, will annihilate them in the end.
We have see this throughout history and it will be this way to the finish line of history.
Governments destroy cities and the people in them. It happens all the time.
It is a standard of war.
And we saw last week that all this happens in God’s sovereign plan.
He puts it into the hearts of the kings to destroy the woman.
It will be a part of her judgment to be torn apart by the kings she gave her business to.
Tonight, another angel from heaven will give John more detail on this.
And a voice from heaven will speak. And it will call on the church to be separate from the world.
To come out from Babylon.
To avoid the temptation to put down roots in the city of man.
To stay out of the Prostitute’s bed
After this I saw another angel coming down from heaven, having great authority, and the earth was made bright with his glory. And he called out with a mighty voice,
“Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great!
She has become a dwelling place for demons,
a haunt for every unclean spirit,
a haunt for every unclean bird,
a haunt for every unclean and detestable beast.
For all nations have drunk
the wine of the passion of her sexual immorality,
and the kings of the earth have committed immorality with her,
and the merchants of the earth have grown rich from the power of her luxurious living.”
Then I heard another voice from heaven saying,
“Come out of her, my people,
lest you take part in her sins,
lest you share in her plagues;
for her sins are heaped high as heaven,
and God has remembered her iniquities.
Pay her back as she herself has paid back others,
and repay her double for her deeds;
mix a double portion for her in the cup she mixed.
As she glorified herself and lived in luxury,
so give her a like measure of torment and mourning,
since in her heart she says,
‘I sit as a queen,
I am no widow,
and mourning I shall never see.’
For this reason her plagues will come in a single day,
death and mourning and famine,
and she will be burned up with fire;
for mighty is the Lord God who has judged her.”
JUSTICE FOR DECEPTION (v. 1-3)
JUSTICE FOR DECEPTION (v. 1-3)
ANGEL FROM HEAVEN (v. 1)
ANGEL FROM HEAVEN (v. 1)
We start by seeing another angel coming down from heaven.
We are used to angels as messengers at this point in Revelation. We have been seeing them doing this work throughout the book.
In chapter 17, one of the angels of the plagues did the talking
But in chapter 18, it is an angel descending with “great authority” and the earth was “made bright with his glory.”
He doesn’t have great authority in and of himself.
He has received it from God, just as any created thing that has authority
And his bright glory that he sheds over the whole earth is also not a glory that is his own.
It is a reflection of the glory of the One he serves.
It is a reflection of the great Light of the World who employs him.
14:8 DECLARATION
14:8 DECLARATION
The angel calls out with a mighty voice, “Fallen, fallen is Babylon the Great!”
This is an echo of the declaration from Revelation 14:8
Another angel, a second, followed, saying, “Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great, she who made all nations drink the wine of the passion of her sexual immorality.”
This is a reminder to us that the destruction of Babylon that we read about in 17:15-17 is as good as done.
It is decreed and decided.
It is a guarantee of what God is going to do.
1. The harlot must suffer justice for her deception (v. 1-3).
1. The harlot must suffer justice for her deception (v. 1-3).
The angel’s words are a refrain Isaiah’s oracle against Babylon in Isaiah 21:9
And behold, here come riders,
horsemen in pairs!”
And he answered,
“Fallen, fallen is Babylon;
and all the carved images of her gods
he has shattered to the ground.”
In those days, Babylon was too busy eating and drinking and feasting and fattening themselves to prepare for war.
They prepare the table,
they spread the rugs,
they eat, they drink.
Arise, O princes;
oil the shield!
But destruction is going to come upon them. Isaiah issues the warning that Babylon is not ready in verse 5, but in verse 9, he says it is done.
And so it goes with the Babylon of this age.
Sinful humanity sits in their cities, as well as their suburbs and ranches, and they eat and drink and are merry.
They think there is no way that judgment will ever come on the world.
After all, the world has moved on from the idea of God. We have written God out of the equation.
We all got here by a random sequence of events.
We are all just stardust banging into one another.
All the thoughts and feelings you have are just chemical reactions producing the human experience
The world has erased the Creator and declared that there is nothing but creation.
They speak of the Universe as if it is God.
But one day, their assumption will be proven to be folly.
Babylon will fall.
God will expose her sin and her philosophies and her sinfulness for what it is.
And all of Babylon’s efforts to suppress the truth so she can continue in sin will be brought to nothing when God uses the kings of the earth to make her desolate.
TOTAL AND COMPLETE DESTRUCTION (v. 2-3)
TOTAL AND COMPLETE DESTRUCTION (v. 2-3)
And you can see that the desolation is total and complete.
Babylon is no longer the flirty, expensive prostitute, batting her eye-lashes with all her make up and jewelry and colorful clothing.
She is now exposed for what she is:
She is not a city of beauty.
She is a wilderness of whoredom.
She is now only fit for demons and animals that would be unclean according to Jewish law
The picture is one of a ghost town.
The former glory of Babylon is gone.
Now it is filled with unclean spirits and birds of death.
Goats and scavenger dogs.
The streets are filled with predators, cleaning up the scraps
These are the only tenants that makes sense now
This is the same way it was with Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon
But wild animals will lie down there,
and their houses will be full of howling creatures;
there ostriches will dwell,
and there wild goats will dance.
Hyenas will cry in its towers,
and jackals in the pleasant palaces;
its time is close at hand
and its days will not be prolonged.
And we are reminded in verse 3 of why all of this is happening.
Babylon made the nations drink the passion of her sexual immorality
Remember that we established this is bigger than just sexual immorality
It is a phrase that speaks to the nature of our sin before God
We are idolaters and when we choose make idols out of creation, we are offending the Creator.
We are like a woman who rejects her husband and sells her body so she can be self-sufficient and live without his care and provision.
Babylon commited immorality with the kings of the earth
Babylon has made the merchants of the earth rich through her lavish ways
That is why they cry out in horror when she is destroyed in 18:15-17.
She has poisoned the world with her idolatry. From the top to the bottom.
She has lured them in with the promises of pleasure and riches.
And now, she must pay for what she done.
This is not her world. It is not the Dragon’s world. It is the not Beast’s world.
It belongs to God and He will bring His justice down upon it in the end.
The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.
The world knows this day is coming. They know that the great cities of this world are destined to be left as ghost towns one day.
That is why we keep making apocalyptic movies with Will Smith running around slapping zombies
We feel it. This all can’t last.
JUST IN DETERMINATION (v.5-8)
JUST IN DETERMINATION (v.5-8)
Verse 4 shows us another voice speaking, this time a “voice from heaven.”
We will come back to the heart of verse 4 in a moment, but for now, I want us to focus on v. 5-8, because in them, we get vivid details into the nature of Babylon’s judgments.
HIGH AS HEAVEN AND GOD REMEMBERS(v. 5)
HIGH AS HEAVEN AND GOD REMEMBERS(v. 5)
You see the voice says that her sins are heaped as high as heaven.
Clearly this is a reference back to Babel’s original appearance in Genesis 11.
“God has remembered her iniquities.”
All of it.
He remembers all of the sin that He has seen.
From the days in which the evil network of humanity stacked their tower
To the days in which Babylon rides along with the Beast, trading immorality and power back and forth like money
There is nothing that has happened under the sun that has escaped the account of God
All of the scandals and scandalous people in the news
All of the subversive philosophies that warp the hearts and minds of the younger generations and those who teach them
All of the awful attacks launched at the church
The Lord has seen it all.
But honestly, that is just the start.
Have any of Babylon’s philosophies slithered their way into your heart and caused you to sin against the Lord?
Today? Yesterday? Last week? A year ago?
Well God saw that too.
There is no sin executed by a human heart as a result of Babylon’s lies that escapes the eyes of the Lord Almighty.
And that is the point here.
This is about big sins.
This is about small sins.
This is about all sins.
Any sin that men and women commit with the Great Prostitute is a sin that is first and foremost against God.
Even if they commit that sin with and against other people.
There certainly different types of sin.
Killing someone’s child and killing somone’s cat are very different in both the eyes of God and the government
But they are both sin
And with each Babylonian sin we produce to pollute God’s world, humanity just keeps stacking the tower of iniquity higher and higher
I know someone people deny this and they think they are escaping God’s wrath.
They are living like Atheists and since they have gotten away with it, they plan to die like Atheists and get away with that too.
But Joel Beeke tells the story of an American farmer in his commentary on Revelation.
He wrote to his local newspaper to brag about how he had a great crop and he didn’t need God for it.
In defiance of your God I plowed my fields this year on Sunday, I disked and fertilized them on Sunday, I planted them on a Sunday, I cultivated them on a Sunday, and I reaped them on a Sunday. This October I had the biggest crop I have ever had. How do you explain that?
Anonymous Atheist Farmer, Revelation, Joel Beeke
The editor of the newspaper, who was a Christian, published the letter. He offered just once sentence of commentary in reply.
God does not always settle all His accounts in October.
Anonymous Christian Editors, Revelation, Joel Beeke
DOUBLE PORTION (v. 6-7)
DOUBLE PORTION (v. 6-7)
As we get to verses 6 and 7, we see that the voice from heaven calls for God to “pay her back as she herself has paid back others.”
That is justice. Retribution from God’s throne.
No issue there.
But in the second half of verse 6, the voice says that God should repay her “double for her deeds” and “mix a double portion for her in the cup she mixed.”
This is quite different from what was said at the beginning of the verse.
Initially the call was for her to be paid back as she had paid back others
But now the call is for a double portion.
Is this a call from God’s heaven from for God to punish Babylon beyond what she deserves? Double what she deserves?
That seems unlikely to me because that seems unfair.
God is not in the business of punishing beyond the boundaries of justice.
In fact, that is not even in Him. He is good and pure and there is no shadow of turning in Him.
So what does this mean?
Well if you look at verse 7, I think verse 6 becomes more clear.
What has Babylon done to express her arrogant and boastful evilness?
How has she demonstrated her brash disregard for God and her hatred for His good and perfect Law?
The voice from heaven says that she does not just glorify herself, which is a direct attempt to steal God’s glory from Him—she is also guilty of living in luxury.
She does not just sit as a queen, which is a direct attempt to steal God’s throne from Him—she is also guilty of claiming that she will never have sorrow for her rebellion.
She is a harlot that will never a widow.
Her business will always be booming.
She will always have another king in her bed with her.
The Babylonians of old said the same:
Now therefore hear this, you lover of pleasures,
who sit securely,
who say in your heart,
“I am, and there is no one besides me;
I shall not sit as a widow
or know the loss of children”:
Babylon said she would never be a widow and she would never lose her children—the citizens of her empire
Babylon says the same in Revelation 18.
So how will God punish her for this?
He will not just give her a like measure of torment, but also a like measure of mourning.
She mixed up her swill of impure abominations in her cup and made the nations drink it.
She put in her glory-stealing. She put in her throne-stealing.
She put in her luxury. She put in her arrogance.
So the voice from heaven says, “When you give her judgment, give her a double portion, just like she gave the world a double portion.”
Let the justice of God pour both torment and mourning in her cup.
And then make her drink it, just as she made the nations drink it.
So in saying “double portion,” in verse 6, it is not a fall for a punishment that is beyond the boundaries of fairness.
It is a call for a punishment that is full measure.
A double portion in response to her double mixture.
And this matters because the Bible tells us that God’s scales are balanced.
A just balance and scales are the Lord’s;
all the weights in the bag are his work.
He gives justice and He loves justice.
And that is bad news for Babylon.
It will be time for her live the words of the prophet Isaiah:
Sit in silence, and go into darkness,
O daughter of the Chaldeans;
for you shall no more be called
the mistress of kingdoms.
2. The Lord will be just in His determination (v. 5-8)
2. The Lord will be just in His determination (v. 5-8)
SINGLE DAY AND PESTILENCE (v. 8)
If you look at verse 8, you see how God’s just determination will bring Babylon to ruin in an instant.
People marvel at how cities have evolved over time and you can see the fingerprints of human thought and culture all over them.
Well thousands of years of human brilliance will be brought to nothing in a single day.
God did the same with the Babylonian Empire at the time of Cyrus.
She may have claimed she will never be a widow, but God already made her one back then:
These two things shall come to you
in a moment, in one day;
the loss of children and widowhood
shall come upon you in full measure,
in spite of your many sorceries
and the great power of your enchantments.
You see this idea of “double portion” again.
She claimed she would never be a widow or childless and in a single day, God gave her both—a “Double Portion.”
Not unfair—full.
She receives death and mourning and famine.
These are words of pestilence.
Pestilence is another word for a “fatal disease.”
Imagine the bubonic plague.
Where you find pestilence in a people, you find death and mourning and famine
And I looked, and behold, a pale horse! And its rider’s name was Death, and Hades followed him. And they were given authority over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword and with famine and with pestilence and by wild beasts of the earth.
It is very similar to the description of the horse of death in the Seal judgments
And then, what we learned of at the end of chapter 17 is playing out in verse 8.
And the ten horns that you saw, they and the beast will hate the prostitute. They will make her desolate and naked, and devour her flesh and burn her up with fire,
The future horn kings will turn on the Harlot.
At the end of the world, there will be one final, awful version of the Beast and it will turn on the evil network of humanity.
Society will rip itself apart with the mercy of God removed and His judgment will reign down
This is how every Babylon ends.
In the end, cities end up getting destroyed by the governments that built them or the governments that conquer them.
The Beast always turns on the Harlot.
It has happened in ancient wars and modern wars alike
Beautiful cities turned into ghost towns by guns and bombs
It will be the same way in the end—it will just be on a global scale.
And when the Lord uses the ten kings in this way—He will be just in His determinations, just as He is in the double portions.
JUNCTION FROM THE WORLD’S DOMAIN (v. 4)
JUNCTION FROM THE WORLD’S DOMAIN (v. 4)
Let’s close out our time by taking a look at verse 4.
We have seen the just end of Babylon, but there are instructions for the church in the midst of the pronouncement of judgment.
There are instruction for the people of God that parallel instructions for the people of God in the days of the Old Testament prophets.
When the voice from heaven first speaks, it says:
“Come out of her, my people, lest you take part in her sins, lest you share in her plagues.”
This is the same warning that we heard Jeremiah issue at the beginning tonight. Isaiah offered the same words:
Go out from Babylon, flee from Chaldea,
declare this with a shout of joy, proclaim it,
send it out to the end of the earth;
say, “The Lord has redeemed his servant Jacob!”
The message is clear. Do not stay. Leave with rejoicing, for the Lord is the one who has redeemed you from the sin that brought this discipline in the first place.
The Lord has bared his holy arm
before the eyes of all the nations,
and all the ends of the earth shall see
the salvation of our God.
Depart, depart, go out from there;
touch no unclean thing;
go out from the midst of her; purify yourselves,
you who bear the vessels of the Lord.
For you shall not go out in haste,
and you shall not go in flight,
for the Lord will go before you,
and the God of Israel will be your rear guard.
Leave when the Lord makes a way for you.
Purify yourself, but departing from Babylon at the Lord’s leading.
When you go to Ezra 1 and you consider how God led the people of Judah to rise up and leave, you will see that it happened just as Isaiah said it would:
Then rose up the heads of the fathers’ houses of Judah and Benjamin, and the priests and the Levites, everyone whose spirit God had stirred to go up to rebuild the house of the Lord that is in Jerusalem.
God stirred them to go.
He led them out.
And yet, as we learned at the beginning tonight, historians tell us that many Jewish people did not come home.
They stayed in Babylon.
They did not go out from her midst.
They did not obey the Lord.
They did not remember Jerusalem.
In fact, Babylon had a Jewish community right into the mid-1950’s.
But once the modern state of Israel was born, anti-Semitism grew so strong in Iraq that the whole Jewish population had to leave to save their lives.
It shows just how long the generations of Israel went in not obeying God in this.
The church cannot afford to be like her.
So just as Judah was called out of Babel, here we have the church being called out of the world.
The harlot is going to be judged—do not get in bed with her or you will suffer her plagues.
This is the message of Revelation 18:4.
3. The church must stand at a junction from the world’s domain (v. 4).
3. The church must stand at a junction from the world’s domain (v. 4).
There is no way for you and I to physically leave this world and still live in it.
We are human beings who live on earth.
We are humans who are citizens of America.
We are humans who live in Yorktown and Newport News and Gloucester and Smithfield.
We live and move and breathe in a real world. Real locations. Flesh and bone.
We cannot escape that.
And we don’t view everything physical as evil. We are not Gnostics.
God has given us creation to show us how good He is as a Creator.
So much of this physical world can be enjoyed to His glory and good pleasure.
But not all of it.
There are the dark wounds of society that are festering all around us.
Wounds inflicted by the Dragon
Wounds infected by the Harlot.
She comes in and pours her bacteria and poison and grit and grime into our broken world and it multiplies
She pours her abominations and impurities out on the human race and they drink it and then throw it back up in all sorts of evil ideologies and actions.
We are seeing this play out all around us.
You must remember what Babylon is ultimately about.
Opposing God.
Making a name for herself.
It was this way in Genesis 11.
It was this way in the days of Nebuchadnezzar.
It is this way now.
Just walk through Genesis 1 and observe how Western culture challenges the Lord’s glory and majesty on every point.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
We substitute God with the Universe and act as if the Universe loves us and communicates with us and tells us all things.
Or we substitute God with humanity itself.
We evolved as the supreme animal.
We did it through survival of the fittest.
Who needs God? We made it on our own and we will do what we want with our lives.
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
We have been taught that we are not made in the image of God but that we came forth from the image of mud.
We have been taught that no matter how much Jane refines Tarzan, he is still an animal.
We have been taught that human beings are just beasts who are more refined
So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
Not even the basics of male and female are accepted anymore.
Our society is fighting the Lord on the most basic and beautiful difference He has given us as a human race.
We have taken it and distorted it and rejected His design.
We have said the divine prerogative to create males and females in His image no longer belongs to Him.
We have decided that society is the source of our gender and we can change it if we please.
And then we can altar our bodies to line up with whatever reality we have accepted in our brains.
This is an obstinate rebellion against the good design of God for sex, gender and sexuality.
And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
God means for His image-bearers to produce life and we have created a culture of death.
Have you noticed what is happening to children in our society?
From the abortion industry
To our children being killed in their schools by gunmen
To our kids dying in teenage years from opioids.
We do not have a culture that values life.
We have a culture that values power and wealth and prestige and only values life in as much as valuing it can get you those things.
The powerful care about the right issues to keep them powerful, not the issues of justice.
And who feels that first in a society?
The helpless among us. The little ones. The children.
Be fruitful and multiply, says God.
But the children are suffering in Babylon.
And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
Babylon and those who dwell in her are hell-bent on destroying God’s good world.
Top to bottom.
In the name of progress, humanity is destroying itself.
CHURCH MUST COME OUT
CHURCH MUST COME OUT
Therefore, the church must come out of her.
She must come out of the world.
And while we cannot physically leave the world, we must make sure that our hearts don’t make a home here.
We must make sure the city of man doesn’t wrap her cruel grip around us.
Jesus prayed that we would not fall prey to the Harlot.
I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world.
Did you hear what Jesus prayed for us?
Not that we would be taken out of the world, for we must be in it to represent the kingdom of God and bear the Light of the Gospel in the darkness.
Instead, He prays that as we are in the world, we would not be of the world.
In other words, Jesus prays that our hearts would stand at a distance from the world—at a junction from Babylon.
DON’T FLIRT
DON’T FLIRT
Some believers think that they can get away with flirting with the Prostitute.
They think they can wave at her and talk to her and play footsies with her and as long as they don’t give her money and get in bed, they will be okay.
But what they do not realize is how the subtle flirtation of the Prostitute is what leads to spiritual infidelity and ultimately drinking from her cup of sexual immorality.
What does this flirtation look like?
It comes in two areas—belief and behavior
BELIEF
If I say that there is more than one way to God, maybe I will sound more progressive?
If I change my beliefs about morality to line up with the world, they won’t call me a caveman or a bigot?
If I give up traditional Christian values, it will be easier to fit in on campus. At work. At home.
And so Christians start to tinker.
Start to add in a little pluralism.
Start to add in a little karma.
A little new age.
A little gender theory.
A little this…A little that...
Until they have let go of the Gospel.
Before they know it, they are deconstructing their faith with Babylon as their guide.
BEHAVIOR
I can go to that bar with a bunch of unbelievers and I will witness to them throughout the night!
Really? Is that how that night will play out? Are you strong enough in your faith for that?
Will you be the spiritual thermostat in that situation or will you be a thermometer, changed by the environment around you?
I know that God drew the line in the sand here. I won’t cross it. I will just get close.
Really? Is that how that really plays out?
Ovens are made to bake cakes.
Once the over is pre-heated, it is tough to turn off
Why even turn the temperature up by subjecting yourself to unnecessary temptation?
There is enough temptation in this world without us willfully seeking it out.
If we are to see Jesus’ prayer bear out for God’s glory in our lives, then we must be commited in our hearts to not give into the ways of the world.
Physically we are in Babylon, but spiritually, we are in Zion.
And the way that we guard our hearts and minds from being lulled to sleep by Babylon’s lullabyes is to commit ourselves to the Word.
We hide it in our hearts.
It is the hidden sword that the Prostitute cannot defend herself against.
I have stored up your word in my heart,
that I might not sin against you.
When Babylon comes to knock upon the door of our hearts and ask if her business is welcome in lives, and we open the door and swing the sword of the Word at her counterfeit head, then she will run.
She is the Devil’s harlot.
She flees just like him.
Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.
Submit yourself to the Word of the Lord and say, “God, You set the boundaries of my belief and behavior. You are Lord. I will not listen to the Prostitute.”
She will flee just like the Dragon.
CONCLUSION
CONCLUSION
Fast-forward from the mid-400’s BC to 2023.
We are not imagining anymore.
We are talking about reality.
You are an exile here.
You do not belong here.
The world is not your home.
America is not your home.
You don’t have a real address here.
Your address is in Zion.
The New Jerusalem will come down out of heaven as a bride adorned for her husband.
It is as sure as the destruction of Babylon.
Listen—do not put your roots down here.
Do not make this your home.
Do not toil for the kingdom of man.
Work for the Kingdom of God. Build its walls.
Fulfill the Great Commission of the Son.
Spread the Gospel.
Reject Babylon the Great.
She is Fallen.
Come out of her.
Look to Zion. Look to the New Jerusalem.
In the world, but not of it.