<     —div class="scripture">“And the twelve gates were twelve pearls; each one of the gates was a single pearl. And the street of the city was pure gold, like transparent glass. I saw no temple in it, for the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.”
    —Revelation 21:21-22 (NASB)

Even in the course of the book of Revelation, much less the whole of the Bible, there has been significant focus on the temple. Chapter 11 opened with John having to measure the earthly temple — something God does when He claims possession of something, and ends with the reappearance of the ark of the covenant in the parallel version of the temple in heaven. And yet this is something which is not found in eternity in the New Heaven and New Earth. This is because the greater spiritual meaning of biblical temples is literally fulfilled. They represent how to access and come into God’s presence.
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A sad truth is that once you believe or put into practice one error, other biblical errors are sure to follow. So I think it’s worth reading this chapter very carefully several times asking yourself, “Does anything about the Millennial Reign of Christ sound less than literal?” Does this come across to you somehow as symbolic or representing something spiritual with no physical parallel? These are not odd questions because one of the ways you can know that a person or organization has fallen into doctrinal error is the lengths they go to in denying there will ever be a literal, thousand year reign of Christ.
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Chapter 17 is primarily devoted to the destruction of spiritual Babylon, chapter 18 to the destruction of economic Babylon. Throughout the whole of human history, even up to and including this present hour, spiritual deception and unfaithfulness have always gone hand in hand with the pursuit of personal wealth. It’s been as obvious as the Catholic Church taking competing bids for the right to fill the papacy to the modern use of television and books to preach the false prosperity gospels purporting to connect financial wealth with spiritual health. But in a world where we argue about different economic models and how they’re applied politically, there’s a greater accountability coming for how they’ve been employed spiritually.
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The topic of Babylon teaches us a great deal about the way the Bible uses prophecy, which is not always about fulfilling a single, future date but often repeated events foreshadowing an ultimate fulfillment. There was the literal Babylon which has been extinct for many centuries but in the mean time there have been many repeated types of Babylon. The Early Church understood quite clearly that the mystery religions making up spiritual Babylon had migrated to Rome by their time. ^[1] But ultimately it has a final fulfillment in the Last Days as both an economic and spiritual surrogate for the Antichrist.
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Here we have an example of something we’ve talked about repeatedly throughout the book of Revelation: you’re most likely to behave exactly the same way during times of trial as you normally behave in times of peace and prosperity. Why do they blaspheme and refuse to repent when the wrath of God is poured out upon them? Because that’s exactly what they did when His love was offered.
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We have to remember that the book of Revelation did not originally come with chapter and verse markings. It’s actually one, contiguous letter. And the context for which the final display of God’s wrath is about to come has first been established in the preceding verses in Revelation 14:14-20 of the harvest of believers versus that of non-believers. Because it certainly explains what we find in the verse immediately following this that already standing in heaven are “those who had been victorious over the beast and his image and the number of his name“.
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