Revelation 17:2
2 With [meta] whom [hos] the kings [basileus] of the earth [ge] have committed fornication, [porneuo] and [kai] the inhabitants [katoikeo] of the earth [ge] have been made drunk [methuo] with [ek] the wine [oinos] of her [autos] fornication. [porneia] KJV-Interlinear
2 with whom the kings of the earth committed acts of immorality, and those who dwell on the earth were made drunk with the wine of her immorality." NASB
Drunk means to be lacking self control, judgmentally impaired, having intense emotions.
Immorality means to do things that are contrary to accepted moral principles, ignoring that which is right and pursuing that which is wrong.
Fornication is sex between two unmarried individuals. The Bible prohibits such intimacy, of which personal intimacy is supposed to be the private right of only married couples. Therefore, taking such a right is a theft of sorts, away from the marriage relationship.
So, God being truth and man lacking truth, then there exists a natural relationship between God and man in that man needs truth in order to complete himself.
But, before man can have access to truth, he must comply with the rules set forth by God. Man has to enter into a relationship with God (marriage) through the salvation process (faith in Christ) and then grow from within that relationship through spiritual growth (daily study), while living within the boundaries of the spiritual life (fellowship by means of confession), and then be faithful to God in that relationship.
Any relationship being pursued outside of the spiritual life, is a pursuit of the carnal life, and is in fact the equivalent of cheating on the true relationship, which is or should be with God. Adultery is the act of a married person cheating on their spouse. Fornication, then, would be the act of an unmarried person (unbeliever) cheating on God by pursuing a relationship other than the one intended.
Marriage is morally right and is accompanied with many of the intimate privileges of marriage.
To pursue those same privileges while unmarried (unbelievers) is to cheat on and/or deny the entire process.
So, Babylon is the illustration of evil attempting to advance itself on its own, while rejecting truth. Anything that rejects truth is a lie and it is therefore false, not real, not legitimate, and doomed to failure.
The kings of the earth, suggests that the magnitude of the evil that exists in the world is worldwide.
The inhabitants leave little is anything untouched. The entire world is not only evil, but living their lives in pursuit of evil. And more than that, their pursuit leads everyone to total loss of self control, intoxication, lack of good judgment, ever seeking sensual lusts, and so forth. And this in turn causes people to believe that all wrong things are right and all right things are wrong or compromisable. Thus immorality prevails as the acceptable behavior for society.
By the end of the tribulation, this will be the state of humanity throughout the world. All will have made their decision for their own life. None will have any excuse for their decision to reject truth.
Since the time of Babel, Satan has tried to insert his plan or religion into human history in order to destroy humanity. This attempt will not succeed until the restraint against evil is removed, and that will not occur until the Tribulation.
From the time of Noah, he and his descendants drifted east from the mountains of Turkey, down the Euphrates River to the region of present day Iraq, where Babylon was established (the land of Shinar).
There, under the leadership of Nimrod, Noah’s great-grandson, the kingdom of Babel, Erech, Accad, and Calneh was established, Gen. 10-11. They built a monument to themselves, in order to make for themselves, a name. Something that was greater than the name of God. It also was an attempt to reach heaven based on mans own efforts, and that was the birth of religion – man by mans efforts to seek equality with or superiority over, God.
One of the meanings of the word, Nimrod, is to rebel, and that is what the anti-christ does to the maximum.
God judged the effort, confused the languages, but man took their ideas begun by Nimrod, but originated by Satan, and as man began to scatter around the world, man took their ideas with them and thus the many cults and religions and false beliefs were relocated around the world through history.
More on this when we get to verse seven.
Anyway, it took only three generations after the judgment of humanity in the flood, before humanity fell back into their bad ways and began something even worse (religion), and something that with time, will only get worse (the whole concept of an alternate faith, namely all philosophies that exist today).
Oddly enough it was Marx who said, ‘religion is the opium of the people.’
So with that in mind, if you control a religion, then you control the people. And with that, you can look around and see just how true that comment is.
All through history kings have been trying to control people through the use of military force, through violence, through politics, through social rights ideas, and all of these things have and will fail. None of them have ever succeeded, nor will they.
However, one day, a man will study history and discover that it is not politics, nor military might, nor social reform that will control the masses, but religion will. And when that day comes, well, the world will be right in the middle of the last era of its entire history – the Tribulation. And surprisingly, or perhaps not, people will flock to that leadership, in droves.
Didn’t we witness in the last election (a couple of years ago), people flocking in droves, to an unqualified leader, over nothing more than nostalgia? Imagine how much worse history is going to get, and now you should know the reason why masses of people actually pursue that course.
Both leaders and inhabitants pursuing the same evil ends, make for perfect bed-fellows.
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