His Perfect Love

Guest (Male): Judgment is coming for commercial Babylon and it will be sudden when it occurs. Hear the reaction of the people of that day as well as heaven's reaction to next on His Perfect Love.

Welcome once again to His Perfect Love online at hisperfectlove.org. Pastor Matt VanderVen is leading a study in Revelation and today the plan is to wrap up chapter 18. The focus all this week has been on the political, economic, and commercial aspects of Babylon. We're about to see how that will be judged and suddenly destroyed, leading the leaders and merchants to mourn. It's also a good time for some healthy introspection to see if self-interest or pride has taken root in our own lives.

Matt VanderVen: Look at verse 15 and 16. The merchants of these things who became rich by her will stand at a distance for fear of her torment, weeping and wailing, and saying, "Alas, alas, the great city which was clothed in fine linen and purple and scarlet, and adorned with gold and precious stones and pearls." These merchants share the same response as the kings did because there's no loyalty. All at a distance, they watch their goods destroyed, their gods destroyed.

So not only is it the kings or the leaders, the government, whoever, we then see it with the merchants doing the same thing. You see how it just runs downhill. There's no loyalty or commitment to that. Why? Because it was all on the back of other people and in an immoral way, this commercialization. Again, this is not saying you can't own a company, you can't work hard and diligent at your job. The scriptures teach us to do all those things. But the goal isn't to become rich. The goal is to do that, to provide for your family, and if the Lord should bless you with that, how are you taking that and blessing God? Because after all, it's just a resource.

Everyone who has life in them has a mouth and the ability to speak. That is a resource; that is a gift. How are you doing that? So quickly and so easily, so often, somebody who's struggling, maybe in poverty, they always say, "Oh, they're against me. I don't have the cultural capital. I don't have these things," and the wealthy are just fleecing the poor. Well, some of that may be true, but we all have the gift and ability to do the things that are other-focused, to be the hands and feet of Jesus Christ.

It's amazing how we'll point out somebody else's error and say, "Oh, the rich or the big, they're not doing their part," and meanwhile we're not doing what either. We're not turning around and engaging in the service of Christ either. It's so easy to do that because we don't take a proper examination or account of the heart.

Next, we read in verses 17 through 19: "For in one hour such great riches came to nothing. Every shipmaster, all who travel by ship, sailors, and as many as trade on the sea, stood at a distance and cried out when they saw the smoke of her burning, saying, 'What is like this great city?' They threw dust on their heads and cried out, weeping and wailing, and saying, 'Alas, alas, the great city in which all who had ships on the sea became rich by her wealth! For in one hour she is made desolate.'" We keep seeing that. The idea here again is that the sorrow for commercial Babylon's fall is all self-centered and it appears sudden to them, as though they didn't see it coming, as though God didn't say it in the word of God.

Please understand, this has never been a matter of misunderstanding. I know that's really hard for everybody to hear and I'm sorry, I'm not trying to be the ill-mannered messenger, but there is no such thing as a misunderstanding. It's a matter of wills: thy will be done or God's will be done. It's always come down to a matter of wills. There's plenty of opportunity for everybody to know who Jesus Christ is and what he stands for and how he has given us life and life abundantly, how he has called us to be born again.

That's not something that we misunderstand. That's something we agree with or disagree with, and there are consequences, eternal ones, to the choices we make in this life. But let's not water it down to say, "Well, I didn't know," especially for a Christian. There's no excuse for a Christian to say, "Well, I didn't understand that. I didn't know that my life shouldn't revolve around my wealth or my gods or my materialistic covetous nature or my desire for more, more, more, my greed, my all the things you want to fill in the blank."

Please don't ever say that you didn't know that. You knew that even before you were a Christian because there's a moral and ethical aspect to that that is inbred in every human being. You want to know how you know that? Because if you just study human nature. The very aspect of human nature often is very self-centered. If you take two babies and you put them in a little sandbox, they don't know the gender, they don't know the color of their skin, they don't know the economic stature of the parents. They don't know any of those things.

These are really interesting studies because you can do these in ways that all things are held constant. It's a way to do a study holding things constant. And when you look at these things, what's interesting is I see a baby if there's a rattle and the baby wants that rattle and another baby goes to get the rattle, even if the other baby didn't want that rattle, they grab the rattle. If you're a parent, you've seen that. And you notice every one of your children is different. So there's individuality and aspects of that.

We're born into a fallen world, and we have a carnal nature until born again. But there's also an interesting study that you can do. I was down there for 9/11. Some of you know that I was in the city and I was supposed to be in that building. I had actually missed the train. I remember heading down. I had a meeting with an intellectual patent attorney for work we were doing. Patent law is simple: you box it in. You find four angles to it so that it makes it unique and able to be held up by the court of law.

So I go down, sit with a patent attorney and they're really relatively good at that. They're able to think through the different things and how do we protect this asset so that other people can't copy it. So I was heading down there for that meeting. It's amazing when what looked like snow started falling. I was in the taxi cab. What I saw in Manhattan, and those that were down there would all testify to this, there were terrible things. You saw people jumping out of buildings. You saw things you don't want to talk about or ever relive in your mind.

That's all true. But there was also this idea of it wasn't every man for themselves. In the moment of crisis, people begin to work together. People are able to come together and that isn't something that has to be taught. When I realized what was happening, the taxi driver turned around and took us back to Grand Central Station. Much of the satellites were on the Trade Towers, so most cell phones stopped working instantly. You couldn't get ahold of loved ones.

All of a sudden my phone rings because I had tried to call earlier. And it's Lisa and she's saying, "Where are you?" She knew where I was going. She says, "You need to come home." And I said, "No, I have to go get my brother-in-law because there's an old saying, you never leave a man or a woman behind." Because what's life? How are you going to live life? Everybody's different. That's me processing. So I turned around and said I have to go get Michael. And she says, "I very rarely do this, I'm asking you something, please just come home and then when you come home we'll regroup, we'll assess, and then you can go back in." I said okay.

And so I'm on the train. It's amazing. People are watching their loved ones as the other tower starts to fall. I'm not even thinking, I just start giving... people start taking the phone. Nobody's fighting who could have the phone. People got on their knees, they were praying, people started handing the phone very orderly all around the train so that they could call their loved ones or say goodbye. And that happened. There were some people on that train that I heard their conversations. They were saying goodbye to their loved ones in the tower.

But it was done orderly. It was amazing how people came together. There was no pushing or shoving. There were some people that fell down and were overwhelmed with shock, and then people came around them and were hugging them and holding them. I flew a couple days after 9/11 because I had to for work and I remember thinking about the planes and everything. We were on the plane and I think probably half the plane was empty because a lot of people were still frightened and didn't want to fly.

And I remember flying on there. I had to go to a business meeting. They had oxygen tanks up there because people were having a lot of panic. And it was again, I saw this kindness, I saw this gentleness come out where people were going to other people. I remember going and sitting next to a woman. She was older. I could tell she wanted to go see her grandkids, she wanted to make it there. And I remember just holding her hand for hours. I just held her hand. I didn't know her.

It wasn't like, "Oh you're weird, you're a guy, I'm a gal." Who cares? You needed comfort. I'm going to comfort. There's something interesting that happens, but again, that is really important because that is something we want to do. But then there's also this evil and wickedness and carnality and all of that nature of goodness to want to do good begins to be overridden with self. So the propensity is there in the human species to want to do good with and for another.

But so often when the greed and selfishness and wickedness and evil trumps that because of self being lifted up higher than another person, that's when we begin to enter into this sin. But again, it's not a misunderstanding. It's a lamenting. Why? For one hour even the people on the ships that were delivering this commercial Babylon, it was all centered on self. I wanted to present that there are both aspects. I don't want you to just think Pastor Matt's saying everybody's selfish. No, they're not.

Everybody is not selfish. And during critical crises, people can come together and work together. We just have to guard our hearts and analyze what's the motive of the heart. Look at verse 20: "Rejoice over her, O heaven, and you holy apostles and prophets, for God has avenged you." The idea is John's response moves to heaven now. His eyes are not necessarily looking to the earth and what he's seen. And should God's people rejoice when judgment comes? Have you ever thought about that?

Yes. But we rejoice in the righteous resolution of God's judgment that it brings. We don't rejoice in the harm to others that comes. It's all done in righteousness and without compromise. That's the thing that we need to see here. Otherwise, we commit the sins of old like the Assyrians and Babylonians did where they took joy in watching Jews murdered and destroyed, just like Nazi Germany at the time of the Holocaust. We're not to turn around and do that or let our hearts even be weakened that way.

Well, let's close out the chapter here. We have a few minutes. "Then a mighty angel took up a stone like a great millstone and threw it into the sea, saying, 'Thus with violence the great city Babylon shall be thrown down, and shall not be found anymore.'" So this mighty angel takes up a great millstone and threw it into the sea. This was a large stone. The idea behind that, this angel's obviously strong because a millstone could be four to five feet in diameter. It was typically one foot thick and it weighed around a thousand pounds.

That's what we're talking about here, a thousand pounds. Doesn't it remind you of another passage of scripture when you think of a millstone and what Jesus spoke about? Reminds me of Matthew chapter 18 verse 6: "But whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to sin, it would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were drowned in the depths of the sea." This applies to Babylon in Revelation 18 because she led others into sin.

It's a terrible thing to sin unto yourself, but it's even more terrible when you lead others into sin. And that's what we should see here. And this great city Babylon shall be thrown down and shall not be found anymore. Someday this world system, the Egypt of this world, is going to pass away. And like a great stone that falls to the bottom of the sea, it will be no more. And then God's millennial kingdom and reign, the theocracy that we all long for, true justice, true holy righteousness will be, and all this will be a distant memory.

Verses 22 and 23: "The sound of harpists, musicians, flutists, and trumpeters shall not be heard in you anymore. No craftsman of any craft shall be found in you anymore, and the sound of a millstone shall not be heard in you anymore. The light of a lamp shall not shine in you anymore, and the voice of bridegroom and bride shall not be heard in you anymore. For your merchants were the great men of the earth, for by your sorcery all the nations were deceived." That's what God calls it. He calls it sorcery.

That whole idea of worshiping the world, the flesh, and the devil. He attributes it to a form of sorcery. Sort of poetic language here, John describes the industry and commerce of Babylon coming to an end. He says the ceremony and the fruit punch is over. The party's over. He says, "For by your sorcery all the nations were deceived." Sorcery, this is an ancient Greek word here that's used. It's actually the word we use for pharmakeia. Pharmacology, right? It means a direct translation would be to prepare drugs.

What he's saying here is that the world has become drugged and addicted. I already believe this has happened. The system didn't wait for the great tribulation for this to happen. Have you seen or are you experiencing debt like you've never had before or even seen in humanity before? And yet when you're going through depression or sorrow and anxiety, there's really an addiction, a psychology to this. So many people go out and buy and buy and buy because they do that in an attempt to cope, to help the heart.

Next thing you know, sometimes the husband or the wife finds out because the credit card statement comes: "$5,000! What happened?" "Oh, I was feeling really sad, so I just went out and I just opened a card and they told me I'd get 15% off. I saved you money!" Have you ever heard that conversation? "I saved money!" Yes, but you spent thousands of dollars that we don't have and while I may have saved 15% of that, I just indebted our family. I basically have put ourselves in a position to be the slave.

The debtor is the slave to the lender. It's like a drug. It really is. Half the stuff we have we don't need. And now we buy bigger houses so we can put more stuff in it. There was a comedian, I won't reference his name because he was crass, but there was this one part of what he said and I was sitting there and I was going, even the carnal understand the idea of commercialization. He's like, "We now buy sheds and we have sheds for sheds. We have a he-shed, a she-shed."

We turn around and we have all of these amazing things. We now have to finish our basements because we need more room. And oh, by the way, I've done that. We turn around and we keep doing things in the house. We need to build a closet for the closet. I remember going to a family member's house and they just had their closet done. I literally walked in this closet and it looked like a master bedroom. It had an island. I'm like, "Are we eating in here? Should we get chairs?"

I didn't know what else to say. I was like, "This is beautiful, it's wonderful. You feel more organized, that means you can get more stuff." I'm like, "But you just spent all this money, do you want to eat in here tonight? I would feel better if we at least put it to good work." My wife's laughing because she knows who it was. And then I said it. I'm saying it because we don't even realize we do it. How many people could we have fed with that? What could we have done to further the kingdom?

Do we need that? But we do, we don't realize we're drugged. We're literally being addicted to this and it is sorcery. It isn't something that you set out and I set out to do. It wasn't intentional sin. It wasn't premeditated sin. It becomes something that we come back and go, "Yeah, but that makes sense because I want to take care of the things I have." Why do I know that so easily? Because I've justified that myself. Back when I used to work in business, I had suits, different things made, and I had parts of closets designed for that.

I had more shoes than my wife at one point. I'm being transparent. I'm not standing up here and going, "I've arrived." But I recognize what it is. The word of God is not wrong. The word of God is right and I could see where my heart is when I'm doing this and how I justified it. "Well, if I have all of these things to take care of the shoes, then the shoes will last longer and therefore I'm being a good steward of what God has given me." Do you realize I tell myself that? To do what? To cope with the addiction.

It's like pharmakeia, man. The lure of commercial Babylon is like a drug addiction fed by deceptive advertising. In debt we trust. Materialism, commercialization can be a drug to many well-meaning Christians. It's not just the unsaved in the great tribulation.

Guest (Male): You're listening to His Perfect Love and a study in Revelation chapter 18 from Pastor Matt VanderVen. He'll be right back. If you were blessed and encouraged by the Lord, we'd like to know. Email us while it's fresh on your mind there at our website, hisperfectlove.org. Be sure to include your prayer requests. Also at our website, you'll find an archive of these studies in Revelation, making it easy to replay a message you enjoy or catch what you miss on the radio. Again, we're at hisperfectlove.org.