The symbolic language of Scripture offers a thousand fuzzy mental objects. Fuzzy because the context can alter some elements of the picture conjured by the word or phrase. Far too many people have tussled too long over the Biblical image of Babylon. Most of the time, people want to restrict it artificially to a single and precise abstract concept. Sorry, but the Hebrew culture makes no allowance for that. You know, Hebrew -- that language and culture in which God chose to reveal Himself.
The shortest answer is this: Babylon symbolizes the concept everything has a price, and that nothing else matters.
The path to that understanding is not direct. There is more than one stream feeding into that pool of meaning. First, though, we have to establish what it is Babylon corrupts.
The Kingdom of Heaven is fundamentally a gift economy. In a community of spiritual believers, each will tend to give freely out of the endowment they receive from God. Freely you have been given; freely give to others. That includes goods and services. Generally those are offered on the basis of need, or at least usefulness. Inevitably, the Lord will anoint at least one of the community to leadership. In every spiritual community, a significant focus of giving is to the leader, if for no other reason than to organize the distribution. So long as all the giving is giving -- a voluntary offering in God's name to another -- we remain within the boundaries of the Kingdom.
At the point when any of that giving becomes the least bit other than a freewill offering, we have moved into taxation. We find ourselves then in the territory of human government, and not a spiritual family. This is generally seen at the most primitive level where the non-spiritual leader is the strongest or most powerful in some way or another. As leader, he expects to have it better than anyone else under his leadership. Often the only reason anyone gains that sort of power is because there is at least the perception of an external threat. The essential nature of the office of "king" is that of warlord. If there is no threat, there is simply no reason to allow anyone to hold such power. When things get rough and the attack comes, somebody has to give the commands everyone else follows, or stumbling over each other in chaos, too many in the group will die.
In the Bible, our first glimpse of Babylon is Genesis 11. In the previous chapter we are first told of Nimrod, the legendary hunter. It is typical of ancient Hebrew to leave a little ambiguity, as it notes Nimrod was a mighty hunter, as if that might be a thing men admire. What is not obvious to us, and should be, is the primary image of a proper king is that of shepherd, not of predator. Nimrod held power not because he was a good protector, but because no one could defeat him. Reading between the lines, as we are meant to do in any Hebrew text, we build a picture of a fellow who was probably stronger, faster and certainly more cunning than anyone else. He may well have been a really big dude, but certainly superior in every measure noticed by men in the flesh. That's the whole point: Nimrod was anything but spiritual.
In the Tower of Babel narrative, we don't get much more about Nimrod, but see clearly the imprint of his character. Realizing the tower was essentially a ziggurat, an astrological observatory, we see he attempted to replace worship of the Creator with that of stars and signs in the heavens. (I note in passing, prior to the Flood, all these things were hidden behind the permanent cloud cover over earth which contributed to the Flood, so stars and such were a fairly new phenomena to humans.) Nimrod sought to bind all humanity under his rule by giving them a new religion, one he could manipulate in his favor.
The original Babylon depicts a direct challenge to God's supremacy in man's concerns. That it was astrology was secondary. The point is Nimrod reduced his subjects to objects which existed only to serve his ambitions. It was dehumanizing, and the heavenly cure was to destroy the unity of the human race via linguistic variations. This was grace, because humanity united under any focus other than God Almighty was doomed to Hell. Get everyone clinging to Nimrod's religion, and the revelation of God fades from human memory, and the truth of man's real need for salvation is lost. Humanity becomes locked under an all-encompassing bondage.
Babylon II revives some of this. First, the Chaldeans pretended to inherit the secrets of the more ancient Babylon of Nimrod. The previous generations of city states, petty kingdoms, etc., had left a very ancient legacy of human knowledge. While the truth of God could be found in the eclectic mix of ancient religious materials, it was buried in the cacophony of competing claims. The rest was a big pile of nonsense, some of which was obviously derived from the true story. But that pile included claims of secret knowledge recovered from before the Flood, the knowledge gained when spiritual power was corrupted by fallen men, and very powerful spiritual evil was loosed on the earth. We call it today "Black Magic." Should any of that stuff actually work, men could shortcut the natural process of Creation, and God's demand humans acknowledge Him, to gain what they did not have rights to claim. Naturally, that meant using power over nature and other humans for evil motives.
Again, we see attempts to bypass the Flaming Sword of God's Word and return to a mythical version of Eden. It would be a fantasy Eden's powers to manipulate Creation without having to satisfy the Creator's requirements. All of this denies the spiritual, claiming instead this world is all we have, and that's all that matters. Put another way, it dethrones the spiritual truths, the call of a higher plane which is unspoiled by the Fall. These people were denying there was a Fall, denying man was inherently evil. Instead, fallen human lusts and desires were regarded as an appropriate indicator of what men should seek.
We note in the numerous texts touching on Babylon II, these folks had a fascination for wealth and power. What else could a man want? Thus, with enough gold and silver, everything was available. They were the first crescendo shouting the maxim, "Everything has a price." What could not be bought didn't exist. Near as we can tell, their predecessors in Imperial Assyria did admit to a higher plane, and while her conquerors were brutal and arrogant, they did harbor a healthy doubt about their grasp of spiritual things. The Babylonians, with their Chaldean libraries and ancient academies, were pretty sure they had it all figured out. While paying lip service to gods and such, their actions betrayed an utterly mercenary concern, particularly in a contempt for the gods of those they conquered.
Lastly, in John's Revelation, we see Babylon attached to several major themes regarding human sin nature, but a repeating theme is the commerce of the city. It's the ultimate market for all things. When Babylon falls, everybody whose world is built on commerce is really heartbroken. Without Babylon, there is no market for the frivolous luxury goods. It's not so subtle. John clearly disdains the importance of human trade in goods and services. Were there far less of it, we could still be joyfully focused on Christ. Since we cannot stop human trade, essentially built on greed, we piggy-back on their constant travel and carry the gospel as our "trade goods." Once the world has been seeded with the gospel, we no longer need Babylon. It can be destroyed for its profligate sins.
Sure, we all enjoy creature comforts. It can save us a lot of time if we can heat the whole house instead of struggling with thick clothing for every little household task. Grain already uniformly ground into flour makes preparing food a lot easier. But a hard chair is probably good enough for most uses, and we don't need that plush recliner. This sort of thinking was inherent in the Apocalypse as John openly criticized the trade in luxury goods. Believers who become wrapped up in either seeking luxury, or built a false asceticism rejecting them by hard rules, both served Satan by missing the fundamental nature of the gospel of Jesus Christ. You cannot defeat the flesh by the abilities of the flesh. As beings living in a fallen Creation, we all need redemption we cannot get on our own. Jesus got it for us, and we can have that redemption if we embrace Him and His ways, in part by rejecting the flesh and the world in which is lives. In Him, creature comforts are not that important, mere tools. We just don't need gold-plated rakes and shovels.
Babylon: "Everything has a price, and that's all that matters."
By Ed Hurst
updated, 23 January 2011
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