Quotes about Babylon

And the sound of harpists and musicians, of flute players and trumpeters, will never ring out in you again. Nor will any craftsmen of any trade be found in you again, nor the sound of a millstone be heard in you again.

Nebuchadnezzar spoke, saying, "... I make a decree that any people, nation, or language which speaks anything amiss against the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-Nego shall be cut in pieces, and their houses shall be made an ash heap; because there is no other God who can deliver like this." Then the king promoted Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-Nego in the province of Babylon.

Ms. Babylon has thus come to see herself as God: "I shall always be here, mistress forever... I and I alone am still here" (Is 47:7, 8). No superpower can ever imagine it will cease to be in power, but this means its pretension is quasi-divine and must be corrected.

The Babylon whose fall is described is then not merely the historical Babylon, Israel's conqueror, but also the symbolic Babylon. Its fall signifies the dethroning of every power opposed to God.

They have failed to understand the timelessness of Babylon, that Babylon is always with us. One careful reading of the major chapters about Babylon is all one needs to form a Babylonian hermeneutic that provides discernment of Babylon in America and in its churches. Yet repeated failed readings of Revelation have today led to a failure to discern Babylon.

The ways of reading Revelation that spend time speculating about the questions When will all this happen? and Who is the antichrist? fail the church in discipleship. Instead of a discipleship that teaches us to discern Babylon among us and shows us how to live in Babylon as dissidents instead of conformists, these speculative questions teach Christians how to wait for the escape from Babylon.

Babylon was and is a timeless trope for empires and nations and powers that systematize injustices, oppress the people of God, and suppress the truths of liberation. Babylon is no more a city of the future than it is a city of the here and now.

The heart of Babylon will always be arrogant self-sufficiency that has no need for God, no care for the people of God, and no commitment to the ways of God.

Hebrew for "poor, humble." The "pious poor" of Judaism. After the Exile in Babylon (587 BC), a social class of Jews who returned were known as much for their commitment to the Torah* and the temple as for their economic poverty. Their situation led them to trust in God and to pray for him to establish his justice in the Land. Accordingly, this group was one in which hopes for the Messiah flourished

The might that made Rome an empire will bow to the might that makes God God and the Lamb the Lamb. Brian Blount sums it up best: Babylons will be "sLambed.

Our churches have not discipled people in the last forty years in Christoform power but have instead discipled them into playing Babylon's power games. They have decided who might be their next king, only to realize that kings become wild things. Instead of giving more and more power to presidents, to senators, to representatives, to Washington DC and states and cities and villages and towns, we need to search again for Christoform power.

Babylon will never be the new Jerusalem; it cannot be Christianized.