Reflections on God and Money: Babylon and the Beast (1)

Then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and said to me, ‘Come, I will show you the judgment of the great prostitute who is seated on many waters, with whom the kings of the earth have committed sexual immorality, and with the wine of whose sexual immorality the dwellers on earth have become drunk’. And he carried me away in the Spirit into a wilderness, and I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was full of blasphemous names, and it had seven heads and ten horns. The woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet, and adorned with gold and jewels and pearls, holding in her hand a golden cup full of abominations and the impurities of her sexual immorality. And on her forehead was written a name of mystery: ‘Babylon the great, mother of prostitutes and of earth's abominations’. And I saw the woman, drunk with the blood of the saints, the blood of the martyrs of Jesus… And the woman that you saw is the great city that has dominion over the kings of the earth

Revelation 17

It is not my usual intention to comment on current events in these Reflections but as the Eurozone Crisis unfolds and various national governments vacillate on how to regulate banks and other financial organisations, and especially watching events in Cyprus as few weeks ago, events seem to me to reflect what we see symbolised in Revelation 17:1-19:10.

Revelation is the final book in the Bible that draws back a curtain on world events to reveal what goes on ‘behind the scenes’ and to show how they will ultimately pan out. I touched on some of this during the Advent Reflections (Days 22-23) and will try to avoid duplicating what I wrote then.

Babylon is mentioned a few times in Revelation but at the start of chapter 17 an angel takes the author, John, to have a closer look at it. He is taken into the wilderness where he sees a glamorous, disease-ridden, woman riding a hideous Beast. The name ‘Babylon’ is on the woman’s forehead, by which I assume she is wearing some sort of crown or tiara. Later, this same Babylon is described as a city but that is the way that images and symbols fluctuate in dreams and visions.

We can draw conclusions about this Babylon from what is described in Revelation 18 and from the real Babylon that existed in ancient history: a place of wealth, splendour, trade, culture, pride, vanity, greed, conspicuous extravagance, sexual indulgence and decadence.

We can know the identity of the Beast from earlier chapters in Revelation (particularly chapter 13:1-10) and similar visions in the Old Testament book of Daniel (particularly chapter 7): it represents governments.

Babylon is riding the Beast but the relationship between them is not harmonious but like a horse trying to throw off its rider! Is this a graphic illustration of the way that international financial organisations are ‘riding’ national governments?

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Friday 31 May 2013

Babylon and the Beast (1)