Today, I'm bringing some tidings of great joy which shall be to a few priviledged people. It's the news of the arrival of the newest member to our family...our first great grandchild, a beautiful little girl, QUINN COLLINS GALIOTTI...delivered by c-section on December 24...weighing in at 8 pounds and 6 ounces.
We are living in critical and volatile times. The main thoughts of today's devotional could very well be a horrible reality within your lifetime—perhaps sooner than you think. Please give this your best attention. This is definitely not a bunch of weird prophetic fantasy. It WILL happen! Listen again to how the Apostle Peter describes this final BIG BANG: “The day of the Lord will come and take everyone by surprise—as unexpected as a home invasion. The atmosphere will be set on fire and vanish with a horrific roar, and the heavenly bodies will melt away as in a tremendous blaze. The earth and every activity of man will be laid bare. Since all these things are on the verge of being dismantled, don’t you see how vital it is to live a holy life? We must be consumed with godliness…” (2 Peter 3:10-11. The Passion Translation.) Wow!
I make no claim of being a scholar relative to the interpretation and unraveling of this book of Revelation. But the question that arises within me as I read again Revelation 17 and 18 again is, “Why can’t ‘Babylon the Great’ be a prophetic description or representation of America?” I could get carried away with my impressions and reasoning. I might just suggest that America does indeed RULE THE WORLD—not politically or administratively—but America, by means of Hollywood movies and other forms of media, has profoundly impacted the entire world morally and ideologically way beyond any other nation in human history that I know of. By means of spectacular audio-video technology, that influence has worked like a “magic spell” (18:23). In that sense the description of Revelation 17:2 seems to fit—“With her the kings of the earth committed adultery and the inhabitants of the earth were intoxicated with the wine of her adulteries.” The same idea is repeated more than once within these two chapters (17:18: 18:3, 9). Consider too the speed of her destruction—a description that could not take place by means of ancient warfare. “One hour” (18:10, 17, 19) is now very feasible by means of modern hypersonic missiles bearing nuclear mass-destruction technologies.
In view of the total and horrific destruction promised concerning “Babylon the Great,” the most important practical warning is that the true people of God “come out of her.” The "her," if not America in particular, would at least be the corrupt world system in general. with her advancing anti-God orientation. That, I’m sure, does not require a physical evacuation as much as it calls for a worldview and spiritual abandonment and separation. Complying with that order requires extreme caution against contamination, compromise, and neutralization so that we do not experience the fate of the boiled frog that was cooked to death so slow by gradual increases in heat that he didn’t even know what was happening.
It helps me to reduce things to their simplest form. So here are a couple of simple determinations that can serve as standards for successfully facing the future:
In real and practical terms, this is FAITH. And, “the just shall live by faith”(Galatians 3:11).