An Unfortunate Beverage

“Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great, she who made all nations drink the wine of the wrath of her sexual immorality.”

It’s not enough for the chronic sinner to quietly sin in a corner. Whatever tattered shreds of conscience he retains will trouble him just enough that he must rationalize his behavior, and that requires seeking the validation of others.

To secure their approval, he needs them to be thinking the same way he does. The quickest way to pervert their intellects along the same lines as his own twisted reasoning is to introduce them to his favorite sin, so they can experience the very same sort of moral tension with which he is struggling. So the sinner in the corner becomes the cause of stumbling in the public square, and sin spreads. Maybe if everybody’s doing it, it won’t feel so bad.

Wine of Wrath

Babylon the great makes all nations drink the wine of the wrath of her sexual immorality. We wouldn’t expect anything called “Babylon the great” to be satisfied with sinning in a corner, would we? In Revelation, mystery Babylon is a religious system, so her “sexual immorality” is probably the standard Bible metaphor for idolatry, though it may well be literal in some cases. False religiosity and secret sexual sins are common companions. In centuries past, pagan idolaters didn’t even try to hide the sexual component of their religious rituals: it was part and parcel of their program.

When you worship idols in whatever form, you store up the wrath of God against a future date. It’s the very first commandment you’re breaking, after all. That day may come sooner or later, but apart from repentance, that day will surely come. So Babylon stores up wrath against the day described in great detail in Revelation 16:17 through 19:4, but here’s the point: she is taking the nations down with her, teaching them to worship the false gods she does. The judgment with which she will be judged will be theirs as well. They will drink the wine of the wrath of her sexual immorality.

An Unexpected Exchange

When our dog got older, my son and I sometimes had to make him drink something he didn’t want to for his own good. He wasn’t thrilled with the taste of the medication, but with the right combination of patience and gentle coercion, we got him to swallow what he needed. But that’s a small dog. How do you “make” a nation drink, let alone “all nations”?

Well, the Greek expression is a little less forceful than our English translation, something like “She gave the nations wine to drink …” That’s a little different and probably less coercive, more like the waitress substituting one alcoholic beverage for another, or discreetly smuggling in a little additive to what you’re consuming. To the veteran drinker, wine goes down easily, and the flavor may cover a multitude of sins. Who knows what’s actually in the bottom of the cup? As with everything energized by Satan, there’s deception involved.

The Bottom of the Cup

And that’s what Babylon is doing in our day, isn’t it. It’s replacing one thing with another, exchanging the natural for the unnatural, the truth of God for a lie, the glory of the immortal God for the image of man. It’s all there in Romans 1, but it’s religious in nature. After all, we are beings made to worship. When we stop worshiping God, we don’t become secularists. We don’t stop believing in everything or anything at all. What happens is we invariably turn our hearts to other, lesser objects and we begin to put our faith and trust in things that can’t hold us up and never could.

That explains so much about the level of intensity with which we find the unsaved pursuing their various “gods” today. What drives them is not the curiosity of the dilettante, the cool analysis of the intellectual or the hobbyist’s desire for amusement; it’s the rabid devotion of the religious zealot.

And just wait until they get to the bottom of the cup.