Gooding, David: 8 - The Woman and the Beast

The book of the Revelation, chapter seventeen. And there came one of the seven angels that had the seven bowls and spake with me, saying, Come hither, and I will show you the judgment of the great harlot that sitteth upon many waters, with whom the kings of the earth committed fornication, and they that dwell in the earth were made drunken with the wine of her fornication. And he carried me away in the spirit into a wilderness, and I saw a woman sitting upon a scarlet-colored beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet, and decked with gold and precious stone and pearls, having in her hand a golden cup full of abominations, even the unclean things of her fornication. And upon her forehead a name written, Mystery, Babylon the Great, the mother of the harlots and of the abominations of the earth. And I saw a woman drunken with the blood of the saints and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus. When I saw her, I wondered with a great wonder. The angel said unto me, Wherefore didst thou wonder? I will tell thee the mystery of the woman and of the beast that carrieth her, which hath the seven heads and the ten horns. Verse twelve. And the ten horns that thou sawest are ten kings, which have received no kingdom as yet, but they receive authority as kings with the beast for one hour. These have one mind, and they give their power and authority unto the beast. These shall make war against the Lamb, and the Lamb shall overcome them, for he is Lord of lords and King of kings, and they also shall overcome that are with him, called and chosen and faithful. And he saith unto me, The waters which thou sawest where the harlot sitteth are peoples and multitudes and nations and tongues. The ten horns which thou sawest, and the beast, these shall hate the harlot, and shall make her desolate and naked, and shall eat her flesh, and shall burn her utterly with fire. God did put it in their hearts to do his mind, and to come to one mind, and to give their kingdom unto the beast, until the words of God should be accomplished. And the woman which thou sawest is the great city which reigneth over the kings of the earth. Chapter nineteen and verse one, please. After these things, I heard, as it were, a great voice of a great multitude in heaven, saying, Hallelujah, salvation and glory and power belong to our God, for true and righteous are his judgments, for he has judged the great harlot which did corrupt the earth with her fornication, and he has avenged the blood of his servants at her hand. The second time they say, Hallelujah, and her smoke goeth up forever and ever. The four and twenty elders and the four living creatures fell down and worshiped God that sitteth on the throne, saying, Hallelujah. And a voice came forth from the throne, saying, Give praise to our God, all ye his servants, ye that fear him, these small and the great. And I heard, as it were, the voice of a great multitude, as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of mighty thunders, saying, Hallelujah, for the Lord our God, the Almighty reigneth. Let us rejoice and be exceeding glad, and let us give the glory unto him, for the marriage of the lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself. And it was given unto her that she should array herself in fine linen, bright and pure. For the fine linen is the righteous acts of the saints. And he saith unto me, Write, blessed are they which are bidden to the marriage supper of the Lamb. And he saith unto me, These are the true words of God. And I fell down before his feet to worship him, and he saith unto me, see, thou do it not. I am a fellow servant with thee and with thy brethren that hold the testimony of Jesus. Worship God, for the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy. And may God give us good understanding of his holy word. Now, this afternoon, using the imagery and the metaphors of this wonderful New Testament book, we began to think together of the coming great empire that the West shall experience in the days just before our Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven. We found that that great coming empire is represented in Holy Scripture as a wild, destructive beast. We reminded ourselves, however, that we should not misapply or misunderstand that imagery. That empire will be marked by all the very latest of technological advance, by philosophical and scientific discovery. It shall be headed up by a wonder genius of a head of state, in addition to his own human giant intellect, shall be helped in no little way by the supernatural power of the greatest intelligence in the whole universe, God and Christ and the Holy Spirit accepted. Great head of state and his empire shall be the product of his satanic majesty. We notice secondly this afternoon that in describing this empire as a beast, the Revelation is not doing anything new. We found indeed that three or four of the visions that John was given to see in the book of the Revelation were given in similar form to Daniel the prophet, as he records in chapter seven of of his prophecy. So this afternoon, as we thought about this beast, this coming world empire and its representative head of state, we spent a little while listening to Daniel the prophet and his chapter seven. And we saw there that God presents to us in visionary form this final Gentile empire and gives us his critique, why that empire has to be destroyed and its place and power given to the glorious Son of Man and his saints, even to Jesus Christ our Lord. We noticed this afternoon that the beasts of Daniel seven show, for all that they are beasts, a great deal of progress. The first of them, his wings were plucked, he was made to stand on his feet as a man, and a man's heart was given him. We notice that thereby God tells us that he recognizes that Gentile political power, Gentile imperialist powers have down the centuries shown a tendency from time to time to become considerably more humane. So has the government of many Western nations, even in the course of my life. In spite of that, we saw how God warns us that this apparent humanizing of Gentile political power will not prove the key to man's problems, will not introduce the age of peace and glory that all of us seek. And for this reason, amongst others, that when God characterizes Gentile political governments as animals, he is not being rude, but realist. As the great theologian professor Ronald Niebuhr put in his book, Moral Man, Amoral Government, governments cannot afford to be moral in the sense that individual men and women are moral. Individual members of individual governments can act like ordinary citizens and be very reasonable and self-sacrificing individuals and treat their neighbors with due consideration. But when they become heads of government, then the first thing that they feel charged to do is to guarantee that their country survives. And given that first responsibility, then they act, for they have no choice, like animals act. The Allies in the last war said they wouldn't bomb ordinary civilians, but when it was a case of Britain surviving against its terrible enemies, then Britain too acted like an animal will act, fighting for its life, and bombed innocent civilians by the thousands. Governments are like animals, not immoral, but amoral. And we notice God telling us in this figure of a beast that the time shall come in human civilization and political experience, when the beast will get eyes like a man and a mouth like a man. They make enough noise to the governments anyway, but the more relevant point, perhaps, is that they have eyes like a man, attaining to the perceptions, the insights that are peculiar to man, how not? And we thought to ourselves of the tremendous insights to which mankind has attained in these last fifty years, so that we now know the very secrets of nature and have it within our power to blast this world into smithereens. It is a chilling thought to think that that power is in the hands of human governments that at the last point will behave like animals and destroy the world for the sake of their own survival. In Daniel's vision, we are told that God himself in the end had to intervene because of the hideous strength that the final empire had achieved. Unless it should go on breaking and stamping and biting and devouring and destroying at every level, God intervenes and destroys that last form of human government and replaces it with the glorious government of the Son of Man and his saints. And logic prevails, and reason prevails, and divine wisdom prevails, and humanity prevails, thank God, and our world will yet be ruled by the ideal of humanity, Jesus Christ, our blessed Lord, Son of God and Son of Man. In the day when he rules, thank God, there will be millions of those whom God describes as saints, whether of an age that's now past, or an age that's current, or an age that is yet to be. Men and women redeemed and conformed to the glorious humanity of Jesus Christ, our Lord. Then we moved on this afternoon to consider the vision of the beast as it is given us in the book of the Revelation. And notice that it is divided up into three or four distinct parts of this book. And we looked at that vision of the beast that is given us in chapters tw- thirteen in particular, of the book of the Revelation and in its context, and found that there it was not so much a critique of Gentile government that God was interested in, but putting in the background to the rise of this great, magnificent, but sinister power at the end of our age. So we were taken by behind the scenes, taken up from earth to heaven for a while to see the cosmic significance of humanity on this earth. Man made in the image of God, man made to rule, man made to have dominion as the creature of God, in fellowship with God, but of course in humble dependence upon God. We saw the war break out in heaven, where the arch rebel Satan himself, in his great attempt to overcome the purposes of God and to thwart them and to destroy them, enticed our first parents to sin, to grasp at independence of God, to take of the forbidden fruit under the idea that if they took it, they should be as God. No longer need to depend on God for God's decisions, judgments, and directions, but could carve out their own way in history. We observe how that that idea has nestled in the heart of the human race over many centuries, to flower from time to time in different situations. When man has conceived it in his heart again to become God, to act God. Antiochus Epiphanes in the ancient world tried it. Nebuchadnezzar deified the state. The Roman emperors required that their subjects, some of them, some Roman empire- emperors required of their subjects that they should be offered divine worship. What has happened in the past, so God warns us, will happen again in the future. It lies in the heart of men, inspired of his majesty the devil, to try and usurp the place of God. Get the ultimate loyalties of men and women, their worship indeed, harnessed to the state and harnessed to the head of state. The other night we warned ourselves how far advanced we are in our modern world towards that end. Vast millions in our world have already accepted materialistic atheism, evolutionary atheism. When it is found that science cannot cause the human race to cohere, then for the survival of the human race, the government shall decree that there must be a new religion, and that religion the worship of the state, and the head of state will be deified, and men will be required to give their utter and absolute loyalty and allegiance to him. Instead of proving freedom for the human race, it will prove the biggest, the saddest, the most grinding slavery that humankind ever knew. The beast's ministry of propaganda shall make an image and require that men and women bow down to the image. And the irony of it all, says the inspired prophet, is this: read his name, six six six. you will find it to be the name and number of a human being. Consider the degradation of mankind made in the image of God, worshiping the image of a man, made to have dominion and kowtowing at the feet of a mere human being. Oh, be warned, my good young friend, it might sometimes appeal to you, and Satan would help you in the thought, that to, uh, get rid of the idea of God would introduce you into a certain freedom of lifestyle. You wouldn't be bothered by thinking that the moral imperative is backed home by divine authority. You could more or less do as you please. It would be freedom. Mark the loyalty of God to you, as he warns you, that when men get rid of the idea of God and seek to go their own way, ultimately, in the history of man, it shall lead to the most colossal slavery, as men and women are forced to bow down to a mere man claiming deity. So this afternoon then, and you who have come in, you won't disturb me if you come and en- enjoy these beautiful seats here. They are the most comfortable in the room, sir, and they are completely free. Sir, if I may so say, so it suits your dimensions, do please come and fill the channel. So thinking along that lines this afternoon, then in chapter thirteen and fourteen of the book of the Revelation, we saw God describe the beast once more, but this time they may, one of the major themes was victory over the beast. And we noticed what that victory means and how that victory is obtained. And therefore, we were not a little interested to find that in chapters thirteen and fourteen that talk about the beast, there is no explicit reference to the beast's destruction. And yet there is talk of victory over the beast, and we ask ourselves why that is. As you may remember, I used a crude analogy. I said, suppose you put me in the ring, the boxing ring, I mean, with Cassius Clay, and here is this giant of a world champion heavyweight boxer and me with my buckley legs. And you say, however, will Gooding get his victory over Cassius Clay? You say, station somebody there to shoot Cassius Clay, and then Gooding will have the victory over him. Not so, madam. Sir. Just shooting Cassius Clay will deliver me from Cassius Clay. It won't give me any victory. I could never claim I beat Cassius Clay. I didn't. Somebody shot him for me. How shall I overcome the beast? You say, Mr. Preacher, I've been taught I shan't be there, so I shan't need to overcome him. Well, OK. But if there is to be an antichrist in the future, so the Apostle John warns us that there are many antichrists already. And how shall we overcome them? Listen to the word of God writing to Christian folks, says John, you young men, you are strong because the word of God abides in you and you have overcome the evil one. Talking of the spirit of Antichrist, John says in one John chapter four, he says that, uh, greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world. That's how you have overcome them, the spirit of Antichrist. We may fight in different battles, we fight in the same war, and all of us shall yet have to learn how to overcome his great satanic majesty. We reminded ourselves that every man and woman, boy and girl born into the world is born under the power of the prince of the air, is in the kingdom of Satan and of darkness. How can we overcome him? Then we thought of God's secret, and we borrowed the analogy, as the book of the Revelation does, from Old Testament history, where Israel overcame Pharaoh, that ancient tyrant of the ancient world, and escaped his grip, partly through the blood of the Passover and redeeming lamb, thus saved from the wrath of God, but partly at the Red Sea, when with Pharaoh coming up behind them to get them once more under his dominion, and the Red Sea in front promising a watery grave. God made the way of escape possible and the way of victory, for he opened the sea and he stationed Moses, and he gave them the choice. You choose Pharaoh and his tyranny, or you choose Moses as the captain of your salvation, and you get yourself baptized to Moses in the cloud and in the sea. That ancient thing, a ancient model of thought in our minds, we thought of ourselves in our age. How would you overcome his satanic majesty and gain your freedom? And the answer is first through the redeeming blood of Christ, that you may escape the penalty of sin and the wrath of God against sin. And secondly, by committing yourself one hundred percent and utterly to the Lord Jesus Christ as the captain of your salvation, and get yourself baptized to the Lord in wa- in the cloud and in the sea, if you like. If I talk to some Christian here that's not yet baptized, oh, pray madam, pray sir. Do let the world know, and God himself, on which side you stand. For here there is no neutral ground. And even where it could cost us all we had. It cost us friend and family and physical life itself. We were well advised, nonetheless, to trust and to follow the Savior. Oh, what a victory God gains over the beast. I can't resist the opportunity to tell you a little bit about it again. For in that context, in the book of the Revelation, God depicts the Lamb standing on Mount Zion, God's king on his holy hill of Zion, and with him are one hundred and forty four thousand. And when inquiry is made as to who they are, we are told that they've been bought out of the earth. You say, is that how God gets his followers? He buys them, does he? Well, pre- precisely so, ma- ladies and gentlemen, he buys them. And he was in competition, I might remind you, with the very beast. For the beast said, if you don't fall down and worship me, you shall neither, uh, buy or sell, eat or drink. And he bought men, bought their allegiance with material goods, with promotion at their work, with promise of security in life, and with a promise that if they worshipped him, he would see that their lives were preserved. But if they didn't worship him, they had to pay the supreme sacrifice, give up, uh, work and life itself, maybe. So the beast will buy men with material advantage. God unashamedly says he'll get the victory over the beast because he'll buy men too, only he'll offer a bigger price. I stand here in the name of God to put that price before you too again. Satan and his world and all this world can offer, he'll buy you with it. And Jesus Christ, God's son, he'll buy you. God will buy you. And the price, the blood of Jesus Christ, his son. What a price. Millions of millions of millions have found that price to be the higher and will let themselves be bought by God, the great redeemer. Doesn't promise you physical life, physical security. He offers you the love of God and the blood of Jesus Christ, his son, as release from the bondage of Satan, release from the penalty of sin, and as the eternal assurance of his love towards you. You'll be bought by one or the other. May I ask you, as I pass on, who has in fact bought you thus far? God will yet get the victory over the beast, will he not? Of course he will. We read subsequently in that same context of the great harvest of the earth. The angel comes out on a white cloud with a sickle in his hand. The harvest of the earth is said to be ripe, and it is harvested into the heavenly, uh, granary. Following our Lord, I take it to be the harvest of the just. Let me point out to you the wisdom of God's strategy. The devil huffed and puffed and blew. And the beast will put all his forms of rage and terror on. He's done it in the past, has he not, Satan? He's doing it now to your brethren in many countries, some of which I visit. You say, why doesn't God stop it? But my friend, God is outwitting Satan and the beast, for he's using present persecution and the opposition of the devil and the heat of the day to ripen the harvest, ready for its heavenly home. Ha! So that in all these things, we're not just conquerors, we are more than conquerors. O him that loved us, for God takes the very opposition of the enemy with which to refine his people and so prepare them for their, uh, responsibilities above. But now we move on necessarily to another section in the book of the Revelation, chapter seventeen, that talks to us about the beast. And here we notice how colorful it is and how different, once more, from the book of Daniel. For in the book of Daniel, there were no riders on the beast, not any of the four, but here in Revelation seventeen, when the beast is introduced to us, the beast is being ridden by a woman. What a colorful woman she is. Mystery Babylon, so she is called, mother of harlots and of the abominations of the earth. Babylon, the great, colorful, and distinctly unpleasant woman. You say, what does she represent? There is an easy answer to the question, because we are in fact now in section five of the Book of the Revelation. If you have your sheet of notes, you might care to check it. We are now in movement five of the Book of the Revelation. And there at the beginning we read of this woman, Babylon, in all her filthiness and disloyalty, her whoredom. But when this section of the Revelation comes to its climax, as it does, uh, in the opening verses of chapter nineteen, verse, uh, uh, chapter nineteen to verse eleven, we read, by contrast, of the great celebrations, universal. Let us give glory to God, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his wife has made herself ready. Two women then. And one is disloyal. Her honor compromised. Her love and allegiance given to all kinds of people, and finally to the beast. Dirty, filthy, dissolute woman. The other, a delightful virgin, in all her beauty, bride of the Lamb, destined to be his wife for all eternity. And my good friend, without going any further, we should have to ask ourselves, shouldn't we? If these are again two great movements that have been going on in history and shall come to their head at the end of time, when they come to their head, which one will you be in? So you haven't told us yet what that unpleasant woman represents, that Babylon. Well, the first answer would be, wouldn't it, that she represents false religion. Because if the true bride of the La- uh, true woman and the bride of the Lamb represents those that are truly devoted to the Lord Jesus and faithful to God, that will form God his eternal dwelling place amongst men, as the final chapters of the book tell us, then by definition, Babylon is the opposite of that, the false thing. Not the opposite simply in the sense that Babylon will attack the true believer, but the opposite because she's the pseudo, the false, of which the bride of the Lamb is the true thing. Those who care for that kind of thing will see, if they look at their sheaf of notes, therefore, that great, the movement four and the movement five form together a pair. For in movement four, we have the Antichrist, Satan's perversion of the male of the human race. And in movement five, we have Babylon the Great, Satan's perversion of the female side of the human race. Now this woman is called Babylon the Great, to send our minds back to Old Testament. Let me sketch in for you some of the Old Testament background. When God made man, he made him in his image, made man male and female, and gave to them both dominion over the earth. But as the second creation story distinctly tells us, the male was made first, and the woman was made as a help meat for the man. That was no accident. And our Apostle Paul recurs to it in one Corinthians chapter eleven when he discusses the different role of male and female in the church. Woman made as a helpmeet for man. But now, if we have been watching the Antichrist, the beast, the man of sin, Satan's perversion of the male, mark now in the revelation Satan's perversion of the female. Mark where she is in the picture presented to you. She's not even, uh, holding on to his tail and coming on behind, is she? She's not got him on the lead. She's sitting on his back! Attempting to control the beast. Things have got topsy turvy. As the female is trying to rule the male. Let's transpose it from nature into things spiritual. In the book of the Gen- uh, Genesis, we are told how Babylon, city Babylon, came to be. God had told the early nations to spread abro- board upon the earth, but they came a point when they decided to do so no longer. They said, let's stop being scattered like this. Let's build us a city and a tower so that we shall no longer be scattered. We shall make a name for ourselves. So they built their city and their tower, a unity independent of God. God had told them to separate into their independent natures and go their nations and go their way, each dependent on God. Now we have a confederacy who is determined in independence of God and in defiance of his injunction to build their city and make themselves secure, independent of God. Against that background, we are told of the call of Abraham, the great Hebrew saint, who left the cities of the Far East in that far off day and began his life's pilgrimage. And the New Testament tells us what it was that Abraham was looking for as he left those ancient cities and their godlessness. He looked, says the Bible, for the city that hath the foundation, whose builder and maker is God. For it was Abram's considered opinion that those ancient cities, having gone the way they had, Babylon particularly, and started to organize themselves in independence of Almighty God, that those cities were built on rotten foundation. And in the end were doomed to disaster. He set himself to be a pilgrim looking for the city whose builder and maker is God, built on the right foundation. And that foundation is, as we are told in Genesis and in the New Testament epistles, first absolute faith in God, justified by faith. That faith being proved genuine and justified by works, as the believer learns so to live and to work, as demonstrates that his faith in Almighty God is genuine. Babylon then came to be the opposite of Jerusalem. It was the opposite of Jerusalem in history, as the descendants of Abraham were led by God to choose Jerusalem, and there God was pleased to dwell for some centuries. Babylon in history became idolatrous, as men forsook the living God and went over to the worship of idols and false idolatrous religion. False worldviews, Weltanschauung, as the Germans might call them. Jerusalem stood for belief in the one true God and a worship free altogether of idolatry. What is true of the earthly Babylon and the earthly Jerusalem is now in the book of Revelation raised to a higher level. The two great competing systems. On the one side, there is the Jerusalem that is above, the new Jerusalem as shall yet be. Jerusalem above, that is the mother of all believers in the Lord Jesus, who have found their way to God and have been justified by faith and owe their salvation to their faith in God and the redeeming blood of Jesus Christ our Lord. And on the other side stands the great spiritual system of Babylon, the amalgam of all false religion. All false religions have this in common, that they offer men salvation on the ground of man's merit and work or spiritual discipline, offering them salvation as though they could themselves be independent of God and buy salvation from God by their own merit. Babylon then false religion, as against Jerusalem that is the true religion. Babylon riding the beast. Yes, how do you fit those things together? Well, this way round, that in the course of history, political powers have found religion a very convenient thing on times and a help to their processes. Religion can get the imaginations of the people, can tap the loyalties and the devotion of the human heart, and if religion is prepared to cooperate with politics, then the religion of the world can get the people to bow to the political ruler. And of course, political powers have been very attractive to false religion, haven't they? Because they give to false religion for a time a sense of tremendous power. False religion thinks that she can control the world powers. What lessons we have had to learn in history, haven't we? Not in merely in remote powers when countries were openly sacral countries, and the priests controlled the politicians, and the politicians controlled the priests. But even in medieval Europe, when a corrupt church allied itself with the political powers of the world and thought that the church was ruling the politicians. Did it at the cost of loyalty to Christ and loyalty to his word. Instead of taking her place with her absent and rejected Lord and witnessing to his holy gospel, medieval Christendom became a whole cage of foul idolatry. A salvation by works and merits. Became in consequence, like Babylon the Great, a persecutor of true believers. What happened in the past will happen again. Uh, Protestant expositors have sometimes told us that Babylon represents the Roman Catholic Church. Of course, Protestants would, wouldn't, wouldn't they? Babylon was in existence long before Protestantism. In her earlier forms, Babylon, uh, promoted the worship of all kinds of gods. Bel, Baal, Osiris, the Egyptian gods, and old Marduk and all the rest of the crowd. It has waited for Protestant Europe to develop that kind of idolatry in its Freemasonry. The Freemasonry of this country not only riddles the professing churches, but is guilty of the most extreme pagan idolatry. It's not only pagan Protestantism and pagan Catholicism, but in the end we shall see an amalgam of all world religion. Because it won't be in loyalty to the Lord Jesus. Some years ago, I was invited to a congress, to a meeting of the World Congress of Faiths. That is every religion under the face of the sun. In their letter to me, they said they invited me on the assurance, of course, that I would have the courtesy not to say anything offensive to other people's religions. I said I wasn't in the habit of jumping down people's throats, but I said, would I be allowed in my lectures and in my conversations to make the Christian claim that the Bible makes with Jesus Christ, there is no other name under heaven given amongst men whereby you must be saved. For I said, if I came, I should want to be free to make that claim undiminished. My invitation was withdrawn. So God warns us in his word of where religion will go at the end of this age, with all her show, false to God, false to his son, compromised with the world, and compromised with atheism and unbelief. And it raises us the challenge, doesn't it? Where do we stand? There is an alternative to Babylon. That is to be found in the true woman, the bride and wife of the Lamb. When we come to the end of this fourth great move, fifth great movement in the book of the Revelation, the hallelujahs we hear are because at last the Lamb's wife have made herself ready. It will be the burden of our second session of study this evening to say to ourselves two things. I would like to be among that body that is the Lamb's wife. Please tell me how I too may make myself ready for the coming of the King of Kings.