By Colleen Tinker
This month the Adventist Review is presenting its sixth “core belief” of Adventism in its “Digging Deeper” series. While Adventism has 28 Fundamental Beliefs, the Review has selected seven “core beliefs” that sum up the essential concerns of Adventism. These seven beliefs are important enough that the official Adventist publication, the Adventist Review, is explaining and discussing these subjects so Adventists around the world will understand these basic building blocks of the religion’s worldview.
The first five, in order, have been the Mark of the Beast, the Trinity, Deception, the State of the Dead, and the Judgment. In light of the practices that publicly mark Adventism, such as seventh-day Sabbath-keeping, vegetarianism, and the belief in a last-day prophet, these core beliefs have been revealing. Underneath all the traditional Adventist “distinctives”, these foundational beliefs shape Adventists’ worldview. One may observe the seventh-day as the Sabbath and may practice “clean eating” and healthy lifestyles. One may even believe in modern prophetic revelation, but these things do not make a person Adventist.
While Adventists proudly hide behind these commitments, the reality of their spiritual life is that they believe that observing Sunday will be the mark of the beast, that the Trinity is not the classic Christian Trinity, that they must be perpetually vigilant against spiritual deception from counterfeit religions that will pull them into Sunday churches and away from Adventism. They believe that humans have no immaterial spirit, that no one goes to the Lord upon death. They also believe that Jesus is currently conducting a judgment of believers in heaven and that God is putting Himself on trial before the watching universe to prove He and His law are fair.
Now we will see that Adventists must be conscious of coming out of Babylon, or spiritual “confusion”. In other words, Adventists have to fight vigilantly against being seduced into compromising their Adventist beliefs and being gradually sucked into worldliness and self-centered living.
This month, six articles present the Adventist idea of “Babylon”. The first is by associate Adventist Review editors Lael Ceasar and Gerald Klingbeil and is entitled “Babylon Undone”. The second is excerpted from Ellen White’s The Great Controversy and is entitled “Babylon: the Struggle Continues”. Sikhu Daco from the Sabbath School and Personal Ministries Department wrote the third article, “Confusion: Babylon”.
Fourth, Nelu Bruce from the Department of Public Affairs and Religious Liberty wrote “Babylon and Freedom of Conscience”, and Aniel Barbe from Stewardship contributed “Babylon: The Maniuplator”. Finally, Wilona Karmabadi, an assistant editor of Adventist Review, wrote “Armor—How Can We Steel Ourselves?”
I will address each article individually and then summarize at the end.
Caesar and Klingbeil hang their article on the metaphor of salvation being an aircraft with Jesus as the “master pilot”. The “craft”, as they say, will “encounter multiple gusts of angry wind; violent, sinking, sickening air pockets,” with threats and assaults. The Captain, however, will “confront and swallow” the “violence” and consign it to oblivion. Then, they describe Jesus’ return as “His touchdown…a thing of beauty, a joy forever; just one more demonstration of His magnificent skills.”
Although the authors are intentionally being playful, the characterization of Jesus’ perfect “touchdown” demonstrating “His magnificent skills” is shallow and irreverent. The biblical Jesus is not returning in victory because of “skills”. He is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world, the perfect Sacrifice whose shed human blood paid for human sin. He returns victorious because the Father has given Him all authority and dominion over all creation because of the sufficiency of His completed atonement on the cross. His sacrifice was sufficient to atone for human sin, and He is the Substitute who paid for the lives of every single person who has ever believed God!
The Great Controversy Jesus, however, does display “skills”: skills of perfection, proper prayer, and enough trust to overcome Satan. He is the example to show us how it can be done—and His return IS the culmination of his perfectly performed skills that defeat His enemy Satan. The Adventist Jesus is not a complete Substitute who finished a sufficient atonement. Rather, He is the perfection to which all Adventists hope to attain. He is the One who will make up the difference between their best efforts and the perfection they desire.
Ironically, these authors’ point is to establish “Babylon” as “confusion”, and in a properly confusing paper, they trace the history of Babylon from the Tower of Babel to the fall of Babylon described in Revelation 18. Beginning with linguistic observations on the Hebrew word(s) behind “Babylon/Confusion”, the authors move to a brief retelling of the fall and the subsequent wickedness that caused God to weep “in brokenhearted grief at evil’s spread and entrenchment across civilization.”
The describe the universal spread of evil: “cognitive processes had sunk to the placed where ‘every intent of the thoughts of [the human] heart was only evil continually’ (Gen 6:5).”
While Genesis does say “every intention of the thoughts of [man’s] heart was only evil continually,” it does not stress that this evil was centered in debased cognitive function. Of course men’s minds were evil, but their spiritual death was what drove their cognitive evil. Because of Ellen White, however, Adventists must present debased humanity as being physically, cognitively degenerate.
For Adventism, sin and evil are centered in the mind because man has no immaterial spirit. Thus the description of primordial evil has to be portrayed as grounded in the mind rather than the spirit.
Next the authors briefly mention the flood and the subsequent building of the Tower of Babel. They explain that humans built Babel to “guarantee their own protection from any future ‘act of God’!” This is the story which Ellen White taught us. Babel, she said, was man’s attempt to find protection from any subsequent flood.
Scripture, however, presents a different rationale for Babel. Genesis 11:4 says, “They said, ‘Come, let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let us make for ourselves a name, otherwise we will be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.”
God, however, had instructed Noah and his sons after they exited the ark, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth.”
God gave Noah essentially the same command He had given Adam at creation. His intention was for man to scatter and fill the earth.
The builders of Babel, however, rebelled against God’s command and centralized. They even stated that they were building a city and a tower to “make a name for themselves” and to prevent their being scattered over the earth. They wanted to make themselves powerful and dominant. They refused to take God’s command to mankind seriously.
Ceasar and Klingbeil, however, say that “God responded to their progress with two actions: confusing the workers’ language and dispersing the concentrated population globally.” To be sure, God did do those two things, but He was accomplishing His will for humanity in judging Babel’s arrogance. The dispersion was His sovereign overruling of their rebellion to accomplish the filing of the earth.
His confounding of their language was a judgment as well; He stopped them from perpetuating their evil intentions with the ease they could have had if they had been able to collaborate. The fragmenting of the nations became the fruit of God’s judgment on Babel even as it was His means of filling the earth. Humanity was fractured just as its connection with God had already been fractured.
The authors then briefly walk through the coming of Jesus. While they say that His “sinless sacrifice” clearly showed what “Moses and the prophets had long spoken about and what had been foreshadowed in every sacrificial animal that had died on the altar of God’s earthly sanctuary,” they never say that His death paid for sin. They say He dispelled wrong ideas about the Father, that His healings were demonstrations of grace, and “His preaching filled the hole in our souls.”
They miss completely, however, the fact that is wasn’t His preaching but His penal substitutionary atonement that filled the hole in our souls. Only His atonement for sin could remove that hole and give our dead spirits life.
The authors further say that at Pentecost, “the Word, human language, becomes what it was always meant to be: a vehicle to communicate the good news of divine love.” They miss that the coming of the Holy Spirit was the consequence of Jesus’ completed atonement, and it undid the curse of Babel. In Jesus, fragmented humanity is made one.
Adventism, though, cannot “see” this fact, because they believe Pentecost is only the “early rain”, and they do not understand the new birth and the fact that the dividing wall of hostility, the law of commandments (see Eph. 2:14–16), is broken down. The Spirit replaces the law in the hearts of believers, and Jesus’ resurrection life brings our spirits to life when we believe.
Ceasar and Klingbeil end with the assurance that Babylon, which they identify on Ellen White’s authority as papal Rome, “does not have the final word.” They declare that “God’s character had been questioned by Lucifer,” but now the multitudes roar at “the Lamb’s great touchdown”. Jesus’ character, they say, “is magnified by that countless multitude shouting ‘Hallelujah!’”
To the end, the authors remain true to the Great Controversy paradigm, that those who follow the Lamb and obey the commandments will help to vindicate God and will provide the evidence that gives Jesus the winning edge over Satan’s accusations.
This article demonstrates that Ellen White’s idea of Babylon as religious confusion remains one of the seven points of Adventism’s central beliefs, because from the Adventist perspective, Babylon is everything that attempts to deceive people away from the Adventist “truth”.
This article which is excerpted from Ellen White in The Great Controversy, leads with her explanation of Babylon. She inaccurately describes Christ’s church with words which explain to me why I did not understand, as an Adventist, that the New Covenant is an unconditional promise by the Lord God Himself. She says:
In the Bible the sacred and enduring character of the relation that exists between Christ and His church is represented by the union of marriage. The Lord has joined His people to Himself by a solemn covenant, He promising to be their God, and they pledging themselves to be His and His alone…
A two-way agreement between God and man describes the agreement between God and Israel. The Mosaic covenant was a CONDITIONAL covenant between man and God, with God promising blessing for obedience and curses for disobedience. The people responded, “All that the LORD has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient” (Ex. 24:7).
The new covenant, however, is not a two-way agreement. God declared in Jeremiah 31:31–33 and repeated in Hebrews 8:8–12 that He would establish a new covenant with Israel and Judah, not like the covenant He made with their fathers when He led them out of Egypt. This new covenant was that He would put His laws into their minds and hearts, He would be their God, and they would be His people. They would all know Him, and He would remember their sins no more.
The new covenant involved no promise on the part of the people; it was a unilateral promise, and God declared He would do it without any reciprocal behavior from the people.
The church is God’s new covenant people. It is the body of Christ, and we enter that body through believing in the Lord Jesus and the finished work of His death, burial, and resurrection. We enter on the basis of the work of our Substitute, Jesus.
God does not give us the new covenant blessings based on our kept promises. Rather, He gives them to us on the basis of God the Son’s kept promises. When we are in Christ, Jesus’ own righteousness is credited to our account; we are made God’s children and counted righteous on the basis of Jesus, not in any way on the basis of our promises to Him.
Ellen White continues by declaring that “Protestant evangelical denominations have so tied up one another’s hands, and their own, that, between them all, a man cannot become a preacher at all, anywhere, without accepting some book besides the Bible…”
Ironically, EGW attributes to Protestant Christians the error of her own organization. Seventh-day Adventism clutches Ellen’s writings and uses her as the interpretive grid for their understanding of Scripture. It is Adventism, not Protestant Reformation Christianity, that clings to “some book” besides the Bible!
She states that the fall of Babylon will be complete when “the union of the church with the world shall be fully accomplished throughout Christendom.” Babylon, according to EGW, is the union of Protestant Christianity with Catholicism and the world. She says that there are still some true followers of Christ in the churches that constitute Babylon because they haven’t yet “seen the special truths for this time.” They will, however, finally leave those apostate churches.
She says that the ultimately “the people of God still in Babylon will be called upon to separate from her communion.” They will then “heed the call: ‘Come out of her, my people’ (Rev. 18:4).”
Interestingly, neither the EGW excerpts nor the other five articles ever refer to worshiping on Sunday as the hallmark of Babylon. To be sure, the first Core Belief discussed in the Digging Deeper series (June, 2018) identified the mark of the beast as Sunday worship, but Sunday is not identified as the external mark of Babylon in this month’s articles. Instead, “confusion” is the issue, and the EGW excerpts in this article likewise focus on supposed Christianity merging with worldly and apostate practices and beliefs without identifying them.
Sikhu Daco develops the idea in the third article that confusion results from rejecting truth. That statement is true on its own, but the author’s underlying point is veiled.
If the foundation of confusion is rejecting truth, Daco says, “then Christianity today is riddled with confusion. From Roman Catholicism’s outright assertion of tradition above Scripture to Protestantism’s failure to protest, Babylon is an apt descriptor of the state of Christianity.”
This statement is confusing as best! The entire point of Protestantism, of the Reformation, was rejecting the extra-biblical authority of papal Rome and the religious bondage exacted upon the people.
Catholicism DID outright embrace tradition above Scripture. It did use the Magisterium and its interpretations as the grid through which they interpreted Scripture to the people. Protestatism rejected that practice and took up the cry of the Five Solas: Scripture Alone, Faith Alone, Grace Alone, Christ Alone, and for the Glory of God Alone.
For this author to say Protestantism did not protest Catholicism’s embracing of tradition over Scripture is patently untrue!
What this confusing and obviously false statement suggests to me, however, is that the author was not thinking of the Reformation or of Protestantism’s upholding of God’s word as the central issue. Rather, the underlying meaning of his words lies in the Adventist belief that Protestantism does not protest what Adventism believes to be heresy: the act of worshiping on Sunday.
Ellen White taught that “apostate Protestantism”, or the Sunday churches that refuse to give up Sunday as a day of worship and adopt the seventh day, thereby align themselves with Rome and become part of the beast power that ultimately will legislate the death of Sabbath-keepers. Protestantism, in Adventist eschatology, will persecute and kill the loyal Sabbath-keepers; the Protestants will thus have taken the mark of the beast, and the Sabbath-keepers will have the seal of God.
When one understands the underlying Adventist assumption, it becomes clear that the author is referring to the Sabbath when he talks about Protestants who fail to protest Rome’s loyalty to “tradition”—the observance of Sunday as a day of worship.
Thus, in an ironic appeal to people to “avoid all confusion” and “to take our eyes off of self and turn them upon Jesus,” this author has delivered an ultimately confusing argument for the Adventist worldview. Without ever mentioning the Sabbath or the Law, this article nevertheless reinforces Adventists’ fear of abandoning their own “tradition”, their marriage to the seventh-day Sabbath that for them is the mark of their worthiness of salvation.
Only those who understand the Adventist worldview would know what this author was actually saying—but for the initiated, his arguments are familiar ad corrective. The guilt of contemplating ever leaving Adventist tradition is powerful, and this article plays on that guilt and reinforces Adventists’ commitment to the Adventist worldview without questioning its assumptions.
Babylon and Freedom of Conscience
Author Nelu Burcea develops an argument in this fourth article that established the Ten Commandments as the reflector of love and freedom, and Babylon as the generator of “hatred, killing, and captivity”.
He says, “Life’s fundamental struggle involves those who choose God’s rules for freedom—the Ten Commandments—against those whom Babylon deceives and enslaves.”
Burcea develops the idea that the spirit of Babylon is against human rights and freedom, but the Ten Commandments are God’s rules of freedom.
Scripture, however, characterizes the Ten Commandments very differently. In Ephesians 2:14–15, Paul calls them and the whole Mosaic law “the dividing wall” which Jesus abolished “in His flesh”, destroying the “enmity, which is the Law of commandments contained in ordinances.”
In 2 Corinthians 3 Paul says “the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (v. 6). He continues, “But if the ministry of death, in letters engraved on stones, came with glory, so that the sons of Israel could not look intently at the face of Moses because of the glory of his face, fading as it was, how will the ministry of the Spirit fail to be even more with glory?” (v. 7–8).
Again in verse 15 Paul say, “But to this day whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their heart; but whenever a person turn to the Lord, the veil is taken away.”
Hebrews 10:1, moreover, calls the Law “a shadow of the good things to come and not the very form of things.”
In other words, Burcea is creating a straw-man argument. The Ten Commandments are not the means nor the source of freedom and love. Rather, according to Scripture, they are the shadow of the reality found in Christ (Col. 2:16–17, Heb. 10:1), and Christ Himself is the realization of freedom and love. Liberation came with Jesus, and life in the Spirit is the result of those who believe in Jesus’ finished work on the cross culminating in His resurrection from death.
Shockingly, Burcea concludes with an account of how Judah’s 70-year captivity in Babylon ended. The author acknowledges that God has to rescue His people from bondage, but he identifies the liberator of Judah as Cyrus, the king who came to power at the end of the captivity.
Indeed, God did raise up Cyrus to liberate His people from Babylon. A pagan king, he nonetheless served as God’s appointed agent for the release of God’s people from exile. The author explains that “Cyrus the liberator points us to his antitype, Jesus Christ, King of kings and Lord of lords (Rev. 1916), who Himself will one day change the course of all things when He liberates God’s children forever from the prison house of mortality. Freedom of conscience is His gift for which we must contend, for ourselves and for everyone else.”
This conclusion, however, is not the way the Bible explains God’s liberation of His people from bondage. It is not the second coming that marks our freedom but His first coming. The second coming marks our physical redemption, but His first coming brought about the end of the law for righteousness for those who believe (Heb. 10:4) and ushered in the new covenant and the new birth.
Our freedom comes now when we believe in the Lord Jesus. He gives us a new heart and a new spirit, and He seals us with His Holy Spirit (Eph. 1:13–14). When we believe we pass from death to life (Jn. 5:24), and we can know we have eternal life (1 Jn. 5:11–13).
Burcea, just as did the other five authors, fails to mention the gospel. In his denunciation of Babylon and its confusion, he never presents the antidote to religious confusion: the truth of Scripture alone and belief in the Lord Jesus and His finished work.
Instead he points to a human, unbelieving leader who released God’s people and used him as a type of the Lord Jesus who will one day bring freedom from mortality. Burcea utterly fails to acknowledge that our mortality is over the moment we believe. From that moment we are eternally alive, and not even death can cause us to cease to exist. We will always be with the Lord.
True freedom is not the protection of religious liberty and human rights, although these things are values which God’s people are to defend. Rather, true freedom is being released from our natural spiritual death and being made eternally alive, free from the law and free from the slavery to sin which dominated us. True freedom is being alive in Jesus and sealed with His Holy Spirit, knowing that even death cannot take us from the Lord’s love and presence!
Aniel Barbe develops the argument that Babylon, which he leads us to understand is nearly synonymous with Satan, is a master manipulator which finds hooks in our desires and leads us astray.
He warns that “earth’s last-day generation would be characterized as ‘lovers of themselves’.” He further says that Babylon promises riches, but people who follow Babylon will end up with “dual allegiance, where money competes with God for worship.”
He concludes with the idea that “real happiness is in the happiness of those we bless and help,” and he urges the reader to “resist the charms of Babylon and of its king.”
Once again, this argument is classic Adventism: be careful of greed and promises of money; remember that your money is to serve other people…and there is absolutely no mention of the gospel! The new birth, a fact which must precede any discussion of resisting Babylon or how one escapes it, is utterly missing. Instead, the reader is instructed as to how he is to personally resist Satan’s deception.
The last article by Wilona Karimabadi describes the armor of God detailed in Ephesians 6:14–18 as the protection against the coming assault from Babylon. From the standpoint of a believer, this understanding makes sense. From the position of a person who holds to a counterfeit gospel, however, this argument lacks power.
Again, this article is driven by unstated assumptions. The author develops the belt of truth as “the truth” which is anchored in both the heart and the mind. While she doesn’t define “the truth”, the clear assumption is that “truth” in this context refers to Adventist doctrine.
She explains the breastplate of righteousness as the thing that protects “our tender hearts (in the spiritual sense).” She says, “Seeking the righteousness of Christ on a daily basis is the way to guard our hearts against sin. It is a daily discipline.”
In this statement the author reveals the Adventist misunderstanding of “righteousness”. Philippians 3:9 identifies the righteousness of Christ as a completely alien righteousness. It is NOT His power helping us become obedient. It is NOT imparted strength and goodness that makes us able to obey.
No! True righteousness is the personal righteousness of the Lord Jesus credited to our account!
That one deviation from biblical reality changes the application of the entire passage of Ephesians. The armor of God only “works” when it is worn by a believer. Someone believing in a false gospel is not understanding or applying Scripture accurately.
So, while the reminder to wear the armor of God (the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, the shoes of the gospel of peace, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit bound by continual prayer) is timely, it is not grounded in truth when it is applied to an Adventist foundation. Adventists will not be able to escape “Babylon” by clinging to their Adventism and praying for help.
They will only be able to escape by asking the Lord to reveal reality and truth to them.
Summary
The Adventist Review correctly identifies Babylon’s meaning as “confusion”. Ironically, however, they utterly miss the fact that their own religion is confusion.
Masquerading as the remnant church with the true gospel, they were built on a foundation of Arianism and anti-trinitarianism. They created the unbiblical doctrine of the investigative judgment because they refused to repent of their 1844 date setting, and in so doing, they have portrayed our Lord Jesus as an old covenant high priest applying His blood in ongoing atonement in a physical heavenly sanctuary. They have made our Lord Jesus’s blood the vehicle that transfers our sins into heaven and thus defiles it, and they have designated Satan as the scapegoat that carries the sins of the saved into the lake of fire.
Adventism clings to the old covenant law and refuses to admit that the Lord Jesus fulfilled every bit of it, including the Sabbath. In fact, Adventism claims that the seventh-day Sabbath will be the sign of the seal of God marking every person who is safe to save when Jesus returns.
Moreover, Adventism claims that man is merely physical with no immaterial spirit. This belief negates the biblical reality of the new birth and of the new covenant and keeps people striving to be worthy to enter the kingdom instead of trusting in the finished atonement of the Lord Jesus.
In public, however, Adventists use Christian-sounding words that deceives evangelicals into thinking they believe the same way with the minor difference of a day of worship.
In reality, they do not believe the biblical gospel. They are a counterfeit, a deception, and Seventh-day Adventism is actually part of Babylon. It is in the world out of which the Lord Jesus calls His sheep.
By defining Babylon as a false religion that refuses to practice the Ten Commandments and that stirs up dissension and hostility, Adventism blinds its members to the gospel truth that true Christians may speak.
Because Adventists assume that Christians that worship on Sunday are suspect and cannot tell the whole truth, they categorically reject their gospel teaching.
In consummate irony, Adventists are set up to look in the wrong direction for “Babylon”, and many will miss the fact that they themselves are caught in a Babylonish deception.
Only prayers for truth and trust in the sufficiency of God’s word can lead such a person to the way of escape: the cross of the Lord Jesus and belief in His finished work. †
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In my view, Colleen, no critique of Adventism’s outrageous accusations against Catholicism and “apostate” Protestantism, equating such religions or aspects thereof with Babylon, can be complete without addressing what Babylon actually means in Revelation. Historicism and other forms of futurism take it for granted that their audience will purchase the notion that Babylon is some kind of religious (or specifically [pseudo] Christian) construct that has somehow been in existence for many centuries and which is about to acquire renewed virulence in one formidable, impending, last crisis just ahead of whatever generation listens to such claims. The Scriptural reality is that Revelation’s Babylon was the city in whose streets “was found the blood of prophets and of the saints, and of all who have been killed on the earth” (18:24). That, by itself, rules out all malicious identifications of Babylon with Washington, New York or Rome. No. Evil though they might be, Washington, New York and Rome never shed the blood of the prophets, but we certainly know of one city in particular that, for centuries, had the ugly custom of killing God’s envoys. It seems to me Matthew 23:27-37, Luke 13:33 and similar passages should forever lay to rest all fables linking the dissolute woman of Revelation 17 with the Middle Ages or more modern times. The not-so-mystical Babylon is long gone.
EMR, I have a couple of observations. First, if you are saying that Jerusalem (or the Jews/Israel) are the “Babylon” that is long gone, I’m afraid the context of Babylon in Scripture doesn’t support that conclusion any more than it supports Rome or New York. In fact, God used Babylon in the OT as His means of judgment against His people when Judah was utterly apostate. His exile of Israel was His keeping the terms of the Old Covenant He had made with them. In fact, His removing the vineyard from them and giving it to others is a continuation of His judgment of them.
Simply using the terms of Scripture shows us that Babylon cannot be equated with Jerusalem.
Second, Revelation 18 makes it clear that the ultimate fall of Babylon is yet in the future. Revelation 18 describes a world economic power; the entire earth, all the merchants both in the nations and on the seas, will weep when Babylon falls. Scripture doesn’t clearly reveal the identity of Babylon, but it does clearly reveal the nature of it.
“Babylon” has been the title of ultimate apostasy throughout the Bible, and whatever the final incarnation of Babylon will be when Revelation 18 is finally fulfilled, we can know that it is utterly opposed to the ways of God and to the finished work of the Lord Jesus. We can also know that it is the power that somehow participates in financial matters among the nations; all nations profit because of and perhaps through Babylon.
I do not personally know what or who or how “this” will play out. I only know what Revelation 18 describes. It is not describing Israel or Jerusalem per se; I believe, however, that it does describe all who oppose the ways of God and the worship of His Son. Those who profit from worldly concerns at the expense of turning away from trusting God and His eternal provision through the Son will participate in Babylon’s ruin.
There are only two “places” for humans to be. We are either in Christ and alive through our spiritual rebirth, transferred from the domain of darkness into the kingdom of His Beloved Son (Col 1:13)—or we are dead in sin, still children of wrath by nature (Eph. 2:3), and the inheritors of worldly power, deception, and destruction.
There is only one way to escape participating in Babylon, and that is through belief and trust in the finished work of the Lord Jesus.
Oh, I beg to differ. Babylon can indeed be equated with old Jerusalem. That’s precisely why a “New Jerusalem” is introduced. I don’t see any “announcement” of any “ultimate apostasy” embodied in a future Babylon anywhere in Revelation. “Babylon” was an existing reality when Revelation was written (obviously, before AD 70). As to the assumed “universality” of Babylon’s domain and the purported support this might yield to a globalized contemporary or future scenario, that’s nothing but a dream that doesn’t take into account the actual context of Scripture. Speaking of Nebuchadnezzar’s domain Daniel 4:11 (cf. v. 20) says it was “visible to the ends of the earth” (NIV), which, surely, will not include Japan or Mexico. The seer explained to the king that “your majesty has become great and reached to the sky and your dominion to the end of the earth” (verse 22, NAS). Nebuchadnezzar’s empire is long gone. So is his Babylon, and so is Revelation’s Babylon, old Jerusalem. The entire historicist/futurist eschatology is one huge hoax. The sooner former adventists get rid of it in toto, the better. Revelation’s Babylon ended its existence in AD 70 and is not about to reappear one of these days.