And he carried me away in spirit to a desert; and I saw a woman sitting upon a scarlet beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns.
An angel carries John away to show him the judgment of a great harlot. He sees her seated, riding a beast — so who is she, and what is the beast that carries her?
Where John stands to see this matters as much as what he sees. In another vision an angel shows John the bride of the Lamb. For that sight he takes him somewhere very different.
This point of view is very striking. When the angel showed John the bride of the Lamb, he carried him away "to a great, high mountain" (Rev. 21:10). To get into God's thoughts about the true Church, we must be lifted higher. We must be taken above the mists and clouds of this world into the clear air of His own blessed presence. But the seer was carried "into a wilderness" to see the great prostitute! So the Spirit of God reminds us that everything around her is barren, however great her wealth and splendour. Her grand and showy ceremonies may capture and overawe the senses, but they leave the soul unsatisfied and unfed. Ritual is not Christ, and He alone can satisfy the hunger and thirst of the soul.
The wilderness also explains how John could take in what he saw.
You can only understand it in the wilderness (v. 3), where you see there is not one green blade for the soul... The Spirit led John into the wilderness, and so he could understand it. Only revelation and the power of God can make a "MYSTERY" clear.
The posture carries the meaning. The beast is imperial power, and the woman is riding it.
The beast serves the harlot, and John shows it when he says, "I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast." The action shows the full and complete subjection of the civil power. It is a remarkable sight: the woman rules over this vast imperial and apostate power. She sits on, or beside, the nations and peoples inside the prophetic area (v. 1). She also rules the beast, the leading civil and political power on earth in that day.
Rider and beast are not one thing. They travel together, yet Scripture keeps them apart.
The strange woman is a distinct system from the beast that carries her, Rev. 17. She stands for the religious system, the beast for the political system. They may go hand in hand, yet they are distinct... The world and the professing church have much in common, but Scripture treats them as distinct systems, and God will deal with each of them separately in judgment.
Two details describe the beast itself: its colour, and the writing all over it.
The scarlet colour stands for earthly glory, and only that: the beast's reign has no link with heaven. It is full of names of blasphemy, not merely words. That means it takes titles that belong to God, and taking them is blasphemy. Of these seven heads, only one exists at a time, as we see by the angel's words. The seven are seen together for identification, not because they exist at the same time.
Commentators agree the woman stands for a religious system. They differ on how far it reaches. Some name her directly:
The beast is the revived political system of Rome. The woman is Rome's religious system, plus whatever else she may have gathered into herself before this vision comes true. She has daughters — other bodies that claim to be Christian, and hardly less evil than their mother.
Others point to the arrangement the picture shows:
If the beast means the secular and political power, how do we explain the woman seated on it? What great system do we see seated on the secular power of Europe, and held up by it? Is it not plainly the church power? Is it not the church in alliance with the state, and supported by the state?
The vision is not only prophecy about the future. The principle it names reaches Christians today.
It is important to avoid these principles and forms that lead to ruin... A heathen is not in Babylon. He cannot be there. A Christian may be found there. Whatever connects the world with religion is the principle of Babylon. The spirit of Babylon, the spirit of worldliness, is very slippery ground. That is why God warns us. May God keep us!
- Wilderness — the angel must carry John into a desert to see her. For all her splendour, nothing there feeds the soul.
- Riding — the woman on the beast pictures a religious system steering the political power that carries it.
- Distinct — woman and beast go hand in hand, yet they stay two systems. God judges each one separately.
- Scarlet — the colour marks earthly glory alone. The names of blasphemy mark divine titles the beast takes for itself.
- Warning — anything that joins the world to religion is the principle of Babylon. The call is to avoid it, not just study it.
And the woman was clothed in purple and scarlet, and had ornaments of gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and the unclean things of her fornication;
John is carried into the wilderness, where a woman sits on a scarlet beast, and now we see what she wears — her colours, her jewels, and the cup she holds out to the world. Every item is splendid, and every item is a warning: the outside is glorious, and what is inside is vile.
The two colours are not chosen for beauty alone. One writer reads them as a claim to rank, and sets this woman's dress against the bride's.
This is not the bride dressed in fine linen, white and clean. It is the showy splendour of the world, meant to attract the flesh. The colours are clearly royal — yes, imperial — so that her claims as a church rest first of all on a claim to supreme rank... But this woman, who wrongly takes that name, seeks nothing but pleasure for the flesh and worldly importance, all that people naturally want and prize on the earth.
Another writer ties the two colours to a double claim.
She is dressed in purple and scarlet, because she claims spiritual as well as earthly authority.
The jewels themselves stand for good things. That is what makes her use of them so serious: she turns them into decoration, and into bait.
She is also decorated with gold, precious stones and pearls. These stand for truths that are truly divine and spiritual. But she uses them only to adorn her outside, and to make the cup of her intoxication more tempting.
The whole picture works by surfaces. The gold goes no deeper than the skin, and one writer says the Pharisee's sin worked the same way.
Elsewhere gold, precious stones and pearls stand for all that is beautiful and of God. Here she is only "decked," or gilded, with them. It is all surface. These things are excellent in themselves, but she twists them to low uses. Her cup is golden too, as anyone can see from the outside, but inside it is full of filth. The Pharisee's sin was like this, as we see in Luke 11:39, but here it reaches its highest pitch of evil.
Two words name what is in the cup, and each has a settled sense in Scripture. One means false worship, the other a rotten life — and the shock is where both are found.
These two evils, idolatry and corruption, mark the last phase of the professing Church on earth. "Abominations" refers to idolatry (2 Kings 23:13; Isa. 44:19; Ezek. 16:36), and "fornication" to gross corruption (Rev. 2:21; Rev. 9:21). Idolatry and the worst forms of wickedness are what this woman is known for. Her cup is full of horrible evils. This is the climax. You might expect such things among pagan nations. But Christendom is now the scene of light, grace and truth, and for it to become the very hotbed and cesspool of all that is filthy and vile in religion is truly astonishing.
She holds the cup herself. One writer weighs what that means, and where it ends.
The golden cup was in the prostitute's hand; she was not herself a golden cup in the Lord's hand. She governed and rode the beast with ten horns. That was her general character for a long time, but not her final one. She became the prey and spoil of the kings who held their power along with the beast.
Set this woman next to the Lamb's wife and the two outfits explain each other. One dress wins the world's applause; God grants the other.
What a contrast! The prostitute dazzled the eyes of the world with scarlet and purple, with gold and precious stones and pearls. The wife is granted a white robe, the mark of God's approval, to wear when Jesus Christ is revealed. The splendour of the prostitute may be "exalted among men," but it is "an abomination in the sight of God." On the other hand, God owns the very deeds that brought down the scorn, the hatred and the persecution of the world, and gives them to adorn the Lamb's wife for ever.
- Gilded claim — Purple and scarlet are royal, even imperial colours: a bid for supreme rank, and a claim to spiritual as well as earthly power.
- Gilded gifts — Gold, jewels and pearls stand for divine and spiritual truths. She only wears them, and good things are put to low uses.
- Gilded cup — Gold on the outside, filthiness inside: the Pharisee's sin at its highest pitch.
- Gilded poison — "Abominations" means idolatry; "fornication" means corruption. The marvel is that this fills Christendom, where you would expect it among pagan nations.
- Gilded and doomed — She holds the cup herself; she is not a cup in the Lord's hand. She ends as the spoil of the kings who shared the beast's power, while the bride's white robe is granted by God.
and upon her forehead a name written, Mystery, great Babylon, the mother of the harlots, and of the abominations of the earth.
John sees a name on the woman's forehead, and the name tells us what she is. Commentators read it as the exposure of a religious system that wears Christ's name yet is false to Him.
The first word of the title has a precise sense in Scripture.
In Scripture the word "Mystery" does not mean something mysterious. As has been said, it "points to something the natural mind of man cannot discover, a secret that needs the distinct and fresh light of God to unravel." Without this revelation, John would never have imagined that a great system would grow up in the Christian world that professes the name of Christ, claims to be the church, and yet becomes completely corrupt.
God had already revealed one mystery: Christ and the church. This woman is the counterfeit of it.
There was a great claim to truth — the enemy's masterpiece of counterfeiting the revealed ways of God. God had revealed the mystery of Christ and the church. Now there is the mystery of this anti-church. It is not the mystery of faith and godliness, but of lawlessness — Babylon the great seated on the beast, the terrible opposite of the church, which is subject to Christ. Here she rules the beast.
The name looks back to the Babylon that once enslaved God's people.
The old Babylon was great and evil. It enslaved God's people long ago, and its doom can never be reversed. Yet its spiritual counterpart, the great Babylon of Revelation, goes far beyond it. In Babylon the Great we see one vast system gathering up all the evils that have wrecked the church in past times. This is the peak. Every evil that has ever troubled the Christian world comes to a focus here. The last days of the church on earth are her worst.
The charge goes past her own unfaithfulness: she has children, and resemblance is the test of kinship.
Every system that copies the ways of the woman and imitates her actions, takes in her doctrines, adopts her forms of worship, and generally borrows from or conforms to the Church of Rome, now or then, counts as her offspring. She is the mother, or source, of every evil religious system.
Commentators name Rome here, but the likeness reaches wider. It shows in what a system does to the heart. Any system "that tends in any measure to lead souls away from Christ, to engage their affections with objects that come between the heart and the Man in the glory, is related to this great parent of spiritual iniquity" (Church History).
The last word of the title is a specific charge, and Scripture fixes its meaning.
She also produces "abominations." Now, "abominations" is a well-known scriptural word for "idols," so Rome is a parent of idolatry. Who does not know it? And yet people are willing to be blinded, to listen to her claims of innocence, and to accept her embrace.
A name on the forehead marks who someone belongs to. Revelation uses the same picture for God's own people.
The terrible name written on the woman's forehead for all to see stands in contrast to the 144,000 in Revelation 14:1, who have the Father's name on their foreheads, and to the saints of the heavenly city in Revelation 22:4, who have the Lamb's name on their foreheads. Great Babylon advertises herself, not the Lord. "Mystery" tells us how she hides her real character: she keeps her victims ignorant of the Word of God and in bondage to mysterious rituals and man-made teachings.
If the name is that public, missing it says something about the reader.
Her name was written on her forehead. A drunken world does not see it, but a believer should not mistake it. We should judge it from outside it. If we are in our right place, in the Spirit, in the wilderness, we will not mistake it. But if we tamper with it, we have lost the sense of it: if we do not see it for what it is, we have drunk some of her wine.
Given such a name, the response Scripture calls for is not repair work.
Babylon means "confusion," and no word could better describe the result. Something that professes the name of Christ has taken up friendship with the world, and the world is at enmity with God. It ends with the outward form of religion used as a cloak to cover "the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life." We are not called to reform it or to overthrow it, but to come out of it, so that we do not share in its sins.
- Mystery — the name begins with a secret only God could reveal: a system that claims to be the church and is corrupt to the core.
- Counterfeit — against the true mystery of Christ and the church stands this anti-church: not subject to Christ, but riding the beast.
- Babylon — the name means confusion. It gathers into one system every evil that ever wrecked the church, and the last days are the worst.
- Mother — her guilt spreads through her children: every system that copies her ways, and idolatry too, since "abominations" means idols.
- Forehead — she advertises her own name where God's people bear the Lamb's. A drunken world misses it, and a believer who cannot read it has already drunk her wine. The call is to come out, not to reform.
And I saw the woman drunk with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the witnesses of Jesus. And I wondered, seeing her, with great wonder.
John has just seen a woman dressed in purple and scarlet, holding a golden cup; now he sees what she has been drinking. A figure who claims to represent Christ is soaked in the blood of His people. The sight leaves John astonished.
This is not a system with a troubled conscience. It has lost all sense of what it is doing. One writer explains what the picture of drunkenness says about her:
"Drunk with the blood of the saints, the blood of the martyrs of Jesus" (v. 6) is a graphic picture of how little she feels. She has no sense of the enormous guilt of her persecution of the true saints of God. Like a wild beast that has tasted blood, she has become the more callous and unrelenting. John, in seeing her, wonders with great wonder. Probably it was hard for him to imagine a woman being so exalted and yet so callous. Who could have imagined beforehand that the professing "church" would take on such a grotesque character?
One writer traces this bloodshed back to the character of Satan himself. He also weighs the names given to her victims:
Then the next thing is murder. Satan is a liar, the "father of lies." He is also a "murderer from the beginning." So in the working of Satan we find first idolatry, and then it leads to murder... This is the time of prosperity to her. She is drunk. There are two marks given of those whose blood she is drunk with... The terms saints and martyrs of Jesus, witnesses for Him, describe them. They are not described as people settling down here on earth.
The word behind "martyrs" carries that same idea of testimony, and it points back to One who bore it perfectly:
The Greek word is μάρτυς, and is very often translated 'witness'. A martyr is one who dies because of the witness he bears... Christ Himself was the faithful and true witness. So the Lord Jesus was the true Martyr, though His death included much more than dying as a martyr — it was atonement.
Why is blood on a religious system more shocking than blood on a pagan one? One writer answers from what religion was given for:
He could well understand a religious system becoming corrupt... But that the woman should be drunk with the blood of the saints was what filled even John's mind with great astonishment. Bad as passion is, it is not the worst thing that the heart of man is capable of. In the deceiving power of false religion, Satan displays his direct power. God gave that very thing for light and blessing, to win the heart and to bring people into fellowship with Himself. The enemy twists it to make a man worse than ever.
Another writer turns the same point against reading the woman as pagan Rome only:
John was banished on Patmos. Why would he wonder that the heathen world persecuted the saints? But that this same Rome, now professing Christianity, should do it — that would be a marvel indeed... Here, just before her judgment, the apostle pronounces her condemnation. She has never repented of murdering God's saints.
So whose hand sheds the blood? One writer separates the hand from the will behind it:
Papal Rome far exceeded pagan Rome in cruelty and bloodshed. She is also far more guilty, because she knew better. She claimed to be the spouse of Christ, and yet murdered at will those redeemed by the blood of the Lamb... What amazed John was not the Beast's persecution (Rev. 13:7), but the woman's — the professed spouse of Christ. Yet it is the Beast, not she, who puts the saints to death. The woman is the power behind.
Suffering that looks forgotten is not forgotten. God keeps the record:
What a day of reckoning is at hand! The sighs and tears of the helpless and the suffering have gone up to God. He records it all in His book, and the tears are in His bottle. Righteous retribution will yet fall. Babylon will be overthrown and judged, to recover herself no more forever.
- Cup — Idolatry comes first, murder follows; the golden cup and the blood belong to the same story.
- Blood — "Drunk" pictures a conscience past feeling: the more she has shed, the less she is troubled by it.
- Witnesses — Her victims are called saints and martyrs of Jesus. A martyr is someone whose testimony costs him his life.
- Wonder — Persecution by pagans would not have amazed John. Persecution by what claims the name of Christ did. What God gave for light, the enemy turns into harm.
- Reckoning — The beast holds the sword, but the woman is the power behind it. God has recorded every tear, and He is about to answer that blood in judgment.
And the angel said to me, Why hast thou wondered? *I* will tell thee the mystery of the woman, and of the beast which carries her, which has the seven heads and the ten horns.
John has just seen a woman drunk with the blood of the saints, and the sight stuns him. The angel does not leave him there. He asks why John wonders, and promises to explain. Two questions follow. What astonished John so deeply? And why are the woman and the beast spoken of as one joined mystery?
The angel does not simply decode the picture. Commentators note that divine explanations always enlarge the subject rather than merely restate it.
Then comes the angel's explanation, and we shall find that it gives fresh information of the most important kind. It is always like this in the interpretations of Scripture. Man's explanations rest only on the thing to be explained. God, out of His fullness, loves to give us more, and of even deeper importance.
The shock was not that evil exists. It was the disguise this evil wore, and where it aimed its violence.
But it was no such evil that astounded the prophet. What filled him with astonishment was this. A mysterious form of evil, the enemy's counter-testimony — not antichrist, but antichurch — should appear to be, and be widely accepted as, the holy catholic (that is, universal) church of God. And Christendom, if not Christianity, should at the same time become the bitterest of persecutors. It was more savagely enraged against the witnesses of Jesus and the saints of God than paganism had ever been in any country or in any age.
The angel's "why do you marvel?" is not only a preface to teaching. One writer hears in it a principle about corruption that should have removed John's surprise.
The angel questions John as to why he marvels (v. 7). Is it so hard to understand that when the best thing on earth (the true Church of God) is corrupted, it becomes the worst corruption?
The angel names two things to explain, not one. One writer sets the pair against the mystery of Christ and the church in Ephesians.
Then the second part of the chapter explains the "mystery of the woman and of the Beast which carries her." It is a double mystery — the woman and the Beast. It is a mockery of the New Testament mystery "concerning Christ and the Church." In the mystery of our chapter the woman is named first. In the mystery of Ephesians Christ is named first, and rightly so.
The word "mystery" is not decoration. The reason the angel must interpret her is that she has been misread for centuries by sincere people.
For she is a mystery. She is not like the Babylon of old, the plain and open enemy of the people of God. She is a riddle, so hard to read that many of God's people in every age have taken her — prostitute as she is — for the pure bride of the Lamb. Yet here, for all ages, the riddle is solved for those who are close enough to God to understand it.
The angel names the woman and the beast as two things. One writer shows they cannot be the same.
This is in fact the main subject of the chapter. It describes the woman above all, and her connections with the beast, the Roman empire. For beyond all denial, the woman and the beast are two distinct things. If the beast is the Roman empire, the woman cannot be. She may be seated on the beast, but for that very reason she is not the same thing. And the woman is not only distinct from the beast. Later we find that the beast turns against the woman and takes his part in destroying her.
The phrase "that carries her" describes a working arrangement, and writers read the arrangement as temporary.
She sits upon the many waters (see verse 15), and she rides upon the beast. For a time he is under her control. Religion then rules politics and uses them for the expansion of her own power.
- Wonder — John was not shocked by open evil. He was shocked by a system welcomed as the true church of God while it killed Christ's witnesses.
- Question — The angel's question holds the answer. The best thing on earth, once corrupted, becomes the worst corruption.
- Mystery — She is a riddle. Every age has mistaken her for the Lamb's own bride. Only those who stay close to God can read her.
- Double — The angel explains two things, not one. Together they counterfeit the mystery of Christ and the church.
- Distinction — The woman rides; the beast carries. Religion uses political power for a season — and the same beast will later turn and destroy her.
The beast which thou sawest was, and is not, and is about to come up out of the abyss and go into destruction and they who dwell on the earth, whose names are not written from the founding of the world in the book of life, shall wonder, seeing the beast, that it was, and is not, and shall be present.
An angel is explaining John's vision, and he starts with the beast's strange life story: a past, a gap, and a return. Two questions follow: which power is this, and why does its return leave the world amazed?
The clause "was, and is not" is not a puzzle but a timetable. Commentators identify the beast as the Roman empire and trace three phases of its history.
The Roman empire was to have three stages. The first is its original imperial form, when John suffered under the last of the Caesars. Next comes its state of non-existence, from about the fifth century, when the Goths and Vandals broke it up. That is its condition now. But then there is a third stage, and it is in that last condition that it is to be found in open opposition to God and the Lamb.
That middle stage answers a common objection: no such empire exists today.
It may be alleged that the Roman empire does not exist in our days. That is one more proof of what we have been saying... It existed; next, it exists no more; then, it will come out of the pit. It will have a really diabolical character; it will be a full expression of the power of Satan.
The verse names where the beast comes back from: the abyss. Commentators stress that this is worse than anything the empire ever was before.
Even when it rose up against the Son of God, Scripture did not say then that it had come up out of the abyss. When the empire finally reappears, it will wear a still more clearly devilish character than it ever had of old.
Chapter 13 already showed Satan backing the beast. This verse pushes the point further, to its very origin.
Revelation 13 showed us that Satan would support and direct the empire in its revived form. Here we discover that Satan will produce it. And it will enslave the minds of all those false religionists who have dragged the faith of Christ down to a mere religion of earthly things.
God's providence has always stood behind human government. This last form of the beast ends that arrangement.
There is a time coming when power will cease to be ordained of God. This is the point to which the last phase of the Beast refers. In His providence God did authorize the world-empires of old. That principle continues as long as the church is here below... But the day is at hand when Satan will be allowed to have things his own way. For a short time (what a mercy that it is to be only so!) Satan will bring forth an empire suited to his purposes.
Older English Bibles end the verse with "and yet is," which sounds like a contradiction. Commentators differ. Kelly blames a faulty Greek text and reads a simple future — "and shall be present," with no paradox intended. A. J. Pollock keeps the older wording and reads it of the present moment:
The verse ends with the remarkable expression, "Behold the beast that was, and is not, and yet is." This shows that the Roman Empire does not exist right now, yet all the elements for its revival are at hand. It exists potentially.
What separates those who marvel from those who don't is not intelligence but grace.
Divine grace is that alone which makes any to differ; and of this we are reminded here. The power at work in the revival of the beast is clearly beyond the power of man. And how many today seem to assume that any power greater than man's must be divine! This is the essence of the "strong delusion" which God sends upon those who have not received the love of the truth, that they might be saved.
Revelation mentions more than one register, and they are not the same. One can lose names; this one cannot.
The elect had their names written in the book of life from the foundation of the world. Ah! these future times were all thought of and provided for in the foresight of God... We read of another book of life in Revelation 3:5. There it is the book of Christian profession, true and false. So some names will be erased and others will stand. But in our chapter the book, or register of life, is the book of reality. So no name can be blotted out.
The verse names the beast's doom in the same breath as its rise.
"Goes into destruction," or perdition. This happens at the start of the millennial reign, and Revelation 19:17-21 describes it vividly... The two great chiefs — the head of the secular power and the head of the religious power — are thrown alive into the lake of fire.
- Was — the empire had a real past under the Caesars, and it rose up against the Son of God.
- Is not — its collapse is not a failure of prophecy but a stage in it. Its absence today confirms the prophecy.
- Rises — it comes back up out of the abyss. Satan does not just back it now; he produces it, and government breaks loose from God's ordering.
- Wonders — the earth-dwellers marvel. They assume that any power greater than man's must be divine. Only grace makes anyone differ.
- Perishes — the same sentence that predicts its rise names its ruin. Yet the names written from the foundation of the world can never be erased.