Quotes and Questions

 

 

“The idolizing of material prosperity characteristic of Rome [Rev. 3:17] characterizes a whole church.”

 

“What the Nicolaitans and Jezebel are urging is not some minor accommodation to the ways of pagan society Christians have to live in, but complicity in that denial of the true God and his righteousness which characterizes the forces of evil incarnate in the Roman system. No wonder Jezebel is said to “deceive” Christians (2:20) – a word used elsewhere in Revelation only of the devil, the false prophet and Babylon…”

 

“Their [the Nicolaitans and Jezebel] teaching made it possible for Christians to be successful in pagan society, but this was the beast’s success, a real conquest of the saints, winning them to his side, rather than the only apparent conquest he achieved by putting them to death.”   Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation, pages 123 – 124. Italics mine.

 

 

Richard Bauckham – On Babylon in Revelation:

 

“The hyperbole makes clear what is at stake in the conflict between the church and the Empire. The conflict truly concerns the coming of God’s kingdom. But the hyperbole also shows that what is at stake in the ultimate conflict of that time is what is always at stake in the church’s history. The beast as the Roman Empire never held truly universal power, but what the beast represents, in a thousand other historical forms, contests the control of God’s world until the coming of his eschatological kingdom. Therefore also the street of the great city, in which the witnesses to God’s truth lie dead at the hands of the beast, need be neither in Jerusalem or in Rome nor even in the cities of Asia. It may also be wherever the unprecedented numbers of Christians martyrs in our own century have died. The eschatological hyperbole gives these symbols intrinsic power to reach as far as the parousia. Furthermore, it is not only the hyperbole that gives the images this power. Because John’s images are images designed to penetrate the essential character of the forces at work in his contemporary world and the ultimate issues at stake in it, to a remarkable extent they leave aside the merely incidental historical features of his world. There are enough of them to make the reference unmistakable; Babylon is built on seven hills (17:9) and trades in a very accurate list of the imports to first-century Rome from all over the known world (18:11 – 13). But they are sufficiently few to make the reapplication of the images to comparable situations easy. Any society whom Babylon’s cap fits must wear it. Any society which absolutizes its own economic prosperity at the expense of others comes under Babylon’s condemnation.” Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation, pages 155 – 156. Italics mine.

 

Now that we’ve read the quotes, here’s a question, “What society is wearing Babylon’s cap today?”

 

Here’s another question, “Can you think of a more remarkable victory for the beast, than that of seducing the professing church into the adulation of Babylon?”