"My Personal Babylon"

Revelation 18.2-5 NASU

“Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great! She has become a dwelling place of demons and a prison of every unclean spirit,… For all the nations have drunk of the wine of the passion of her immorality,...”

“Come out of her, my people, so that you will not participate in her sins and receive of her plagues; for her sins have piled up as high as heaven, and God has remembered her iniquities.”

“Come out” of your personal Babylon. It is a “fallen, fallen” place to be. Babylon is a prison for the soul and home to “every unclean spirit” filling the imagination with thoughts of violence, lust, greed, and envy. It is the “dwelling place of demons” and a place moral failure.

“Come out of her, my people.” What is your Babylon? Have you “drunk of the wine of the passion of her immorality”? Of course you have... 

“…for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”
Romans 3.23

“For all have sinned” and all “have drunk of the wine of the passion of her immorality.” Our “sins have piled up as high as heaven” and also stinks to high heaven. Like the tower of Babel, our misdeeds are a city of filth with “a tower whose top will reach into heaven” (Genesis 11.4). If it were not for the gracious intervention of a loving God who could have left us to our own devices, we might have succeeded. Thankfully, our mountainous pile of sins was destroyed before it reached the heavenn’s entrance, before it toppled us from the high places in our imaginations, flinging us permanently into the “dwelling place of demons.” 

Who destroyed my lofty edifice and saved me from myself? It was Jesus, my savior.

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The award-winning image displayed at the top of this post is called "Rage over Babylon" by Israeli born graphic artist Ziv Qual. I was mesmerized by the image as I imagined the event (in Ziv's own words) "5,500 years ago... clouds strangely started to gather over the Tower of Babel." The edifice of incredible human ingenuity "collapsed and changed the face of human history forever." Check out Ziv Qual's making of this CGI (computerized generated imagery) wonder at http://zivcg.com/galleries/babylon/index.html and read the original story in Genesis, chapter 11. Ziv kindly gave me permission to place his image here.

The text from the book of Revelation above is more likely an historical allusion, not to the the tower of Babel, but rather to the destruction of the city of Babylon in 539 BC at the hands of Cyrus, King of Persia.