Revelation 18:18; This Great City!

Revelation 18:18 (KJV)  And cried when they saw the smoke of her burning, saying, What city is like unto this great city! 

And thus, when Great Babylon falls, it will be God’s kingdom come, as it never yet has come, and the burden of the prayer of all these weary ages answered.

The merchants of the earth full of tears and grief over the sudden collapse of their enriching trade. It was promised that the wand of the sorceress would give prosperity to nations, and that as commerce ruled all people would be blest by its administrations; and a great tidal wave of mercantile thrift and glory is indicated as having come over the world by this grand unification. There never was so great a market or so brisk a trade as that which grows up with the revival and restoration of Babylon. The whole world becomes alive with traffic in “merchandise of gold, and of silver, and of precious stone, and of pearl. and of fine linen, and of purple, and of silver, and of scarlet, and all then or citron wood, and every article of ivory, and every article of most costly wood, and of brass, and of iron, and of marble; and cinnomon, and amomum [a precious preparation from an Asiatic shrub], and odours, and ointment, and frankincense, and wine, and oil, and fine meal, and wheat, and cattle, and sheep; and merchandise of horses, and of chariots, and of bodies, and souls of men.”

The great traders all weep and mourn, not so much for Babylon’s sufferings, for man’s sympathy for man shall then have been eaten away by the common sodidness; nor yet for their great sins, for the day of repentance is then over for them. The centre of their distress is that their market is gone, that “no one buyers their merchandise any more,” that “in one hour such great riches hath been desolated,” that the scorching of the great city’s torment reaches them even at the remotest distances, Alas, alas, – woe, woe – is the cry that come from all their warehouses and homes.

Thus, from every throne on earth, and from every power behind the throne, from every seat of trade, and every city – from every continent, every island, every sea, and every ship that plies upon the sea – comes forth the voice of woe and irremediable disaster.

But whilst the chorus of lamentation, disappointment, and terror is upon the earth, a grand jubilation fills the sky. As this world’s great one’s, and rich ones, and dependent one cry Woe, woe over Great Babylon’s falls all peoples on high pour out their mightiest halleluias. Amen.

[Joseph A. Seiss, The Apocalypse – An Exposition of the Book of Revelation, Kregel Publications, 1987, 417-418, 423]