NOTES ON LEAVING BABYLON III: LAST CALLS TO DEPART FROM RELIGIOUS SYNCRETISM IN AMERICA

SCRIPTURE. “Depart, depart, go out from there [the lands of exile]! Touch no unclean thing! Go out of the midst of her [Babylon]; cleanse yourselves and be clean, you who bear the vessels of the Lord [on your journey from there]. For you will not go out with haste, nor will you go in flight [as was necessary when Israel left Egypt]; for the Lord will go before you, and the God of Israel will be your rear guard.” ― ISAIAH 52:11-12, AMPC

QUOTATION. “Missiologists have in recent years begun to think seriously about ‘Inculturation,’ and historians have begun to learn from them. When the Christian message is inserted into a cultural framework, if the messengers are insensitive to the local culture the result can be cultural imperialism. On the other hand, if they grant too much hegemony to the local culture, the result at best is ‘Syncretism’ and at worst ‘Christo-paganism.’ Things are most wholesome when sensitive interchange takes place leading to a truly critical symbiosis.” ― ALAN KREIDER, The Change of Conversion and the Origin of Christendom, 2007; edited

FIRST THOUGHTS

Some of us in this Fellowship remember a very special DC Comic Book superhero introduced in 1938 named, “Superman.” We grew up reading or hearing his standard introductory biography in various media iterations:

“Up in the sky! Look! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Superman! Yes, it’s Superman—strange visitor from the planet Krypton who came to Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men. Superman, who, disguised as Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for a great Metropolitan newspaper, fights a never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the American way!”

‘Truth. Justice. And the American way.’ After The United States successfully defeated Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and their allies in 1945 after just four bloody but comparatively short years, the nation came to believe in the Superman Narrative as a near perfect description of who we had become as a nation as a specially gifted people – the world’s truly first Superpower Nation.

Indeed, the entire Family of Nations for a time at least embraced this Modern Template as the moral, military and economic Epicenter of international foreign policy and world order. Henry Luce, founder of Time Magazine, rightly labeled this Era as the beginning of “The American Century” in 1941.

Well now, to state the obvious with still another classic American media catchphrase: “We’re not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy.” Not by a long shot.

What happened to bring us from that lofty pinnacle to the shameful, dissolute and frankly inchoate chaos that now characterizes so much of the current American condition? How did we fall so far in just 70 short years? While this section could run the length of several textbooks, I shall once again reduce to simple structure what has become increasingly, tragically clear to those of us who have been watchful.

DECLINE OF AMERICAN GREATNESS

I turn now to a superb analysis by DR. NICK BRYANT, a history graduate from Cambridge with a Ph.D. in American Politics from Oxford. He is author of ‘When America Stopped Being Great,’ published in 2017 – the very same year my own book notes as the precise Inception of our Precipitous Descent into what Leon Trotsky once predicted would be “the ash heap of history” in 1917 – exactly 100 years before.

DOMINANCE. “In those Twilight Years of the last millennium [from 1984-2000], America enjoyed something akin to the Dominance achieved at the Los Angeles Olympics. Just two years after Reagan demanded that Gorbachev tear down the Berlin Wall, that concrete and ideological barricade was gone. The United States won the Cold War. In the New World Order that emerged afterwards, it became the sole Superpower in a unipolar world. The speed at which US-led forces won the first Gulf War in 1991 helped slay the ghosts of Vietnam. With a reformist leader, Boris Yeltsin, installed in the Kremlin, there was an expectation Russia would embrace democratic reform. Even after Tiananmen Square, there was a hope that China might follow suit, as it moved towards a more market-based economy.”

SHATTERED CONFIDENCE. “The National Story changed dramatically and unexpectedly soon after. While doomsday predictions of a Y2K bug failed to materialise, it nonetheless felt as if the United States had been infected with a virus. 2000 saw the dot-com bubble explode. In November, the disputed presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore badly damaged the reputation of US democracy … The year 2001 brought the horror of September 11th, an event more traumatic than Pearl Harbor. Post-9/11 America became less welcoming and more suspicious. The Bush administration’s ‘War on Terror’ – open-ended conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq – drained the country of blood and treasure. The collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, and the Great Recession that followed, arguably had a more lasting impact on the American psyche than the destruction of the Twin Towers. Just as 9/11 had undermined confidence in the country’s national security, the financial collapse shattered confidence in its economic security.”

THE HANGOVER. “[Following the Obama years], it is tempting to see [Donald Trump’s 2016] victory … as an aberration. A historical mishap. The election all came down, after all, to just 77,744 votes in three key states: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. But when you consider the boom-to-bust cycle of the period between 1984 and 2016, the Trump Phenomenon doesn’t look so accidental … In the 1994 Congressional mid-terms, the Republican Revolution brought ‘a wave of fierce partisans’ to Washington, with an ideological aversion to government and thus little investment in making it work … The Birther Movement, led by Donald Trump, tried to delegitimise Barack Obama with specious and racist claims that he was not born in Hawaii … Over this period, ‘the political discourse also became shriller.’ Rush Limbaugh, after getting his first radio show in 1984, rose to become the king of the right-wing shock jocks. Fox News was launched in 1996, the same year as MSNBC, which became its progressive counterpoint … America seemed intoxicated by its own post-Cold War success. Then came The Hangover of the past 16 years.”

TRUMP’S AMERICA. “Over the past few months, I’ve followed [another new trend: Gun Violence]. Multiple shootings are not new, of course. Just days before I arrived in the States in 1984, a gunman had walked into a McDonalds in a suburb of San Diego and shot dead 21 people. It was then the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history. What’s different between now and then, however, is ‘the regularity of these massacres,’ and how the repetitiveness of the killings has normalised them … What would [young people] make of the confluence of gun violence and race, evident in the spate of police shootings of unarmed black men and in the online auction where the weapon that killed Trayvon Martin fetched more than $100,000? Charlottesville, with its torch-wielding and hate-spewing neo-Nazis, was another low point. So, too, were the president’s remarks afterwards, when he described the crowd as including some ‘very fine people’ and implied a moral equivalence between White Supremacists and Anti-racist Protesters.”

DR. BRYANT’S CONCLUSION. “There’s still truth in the adage that America is always going to hell, but it never quite gets there. But how that is being tested! Presently, it feels more like a continent than a country, with shared land occupied by warring tribes. Not [yet] a failing state but not a united states. As I’ve travelled this country, I struggle to identify where Americans will find common political ground. Not in the guns debate. Not in the abortion debate. Not in the healthcare debate. Not even in the singing of the National Anthem at American football games. Even a cataclysmic event on the scale of 9/11 failed to unify the country [nor has the Immigration issue].”

In light of this Toqueville-esque outsider’s view of an America Splintering into disparate shards, we must ask the Ultimate Question: ‘Where is all this taking the Nation?’ The very probable Answer is detailed in the next section, and beloved: It is not pretty.

III. THE TEACHING

KEY TERM: “DEPART!” ‘Sur’ [סוּר]: “To turn aside [or away from]; to eschew or leave (call back); to desert or withdraw; to quit and keep far away from; to remove; to put aside [dark, unholy compromise, as with the shedding of soiled clothing]; to depart from the way of apostasy.”

SYNCRETISM. “The amalgamation or attempted amalgamation of different religions, cultures, or schools of thought; e.g., ‘Interfaith Dialogue can easily slip into Syncretism;’ Syncretism involves the merging or assimilation of several originally discrete traditions, especially in the theology and mythology of Religion, thus asserting an ‘underlying unity,’ allowing for an inclusive approach to other faiths.”

COMMENTARY. “‘Depart ye, go ye out from thence’ —Out of Babylon into your own land, that there I may meet with you, and bless you, and perform those further and greater things for you which I have promised to do there. And this invitation was the more necessary, because God foresaw that a great number of the Jews would, upon worldly considerations, continue in those foreign countries in which they were settled, and would be very backward to return to the Holy Land. ‘Touch no unclean thing’ — Carry not along with you any of their superstitions or idolatries. ‘Be ye clean, that bear the vessels of the Lord’ — And especially you priests and Levites, who minister in holy things, and carry the holy vessels of the temple, keep yourselves from all pollution. ‘Ye shall not go out by flight’ — But securely, and in triumph, being conducted by your great captain, the Lord of hosts. ‘The God of Israel will be your reward — So that none shall be able either to oppose you in your march, or to fall upon you in the rear.” ― JOSEPH BENSON, Notes on the Old and the New Testament, 5 vols., 1811-1818; edited

DK. There is so very much here beloved that it is difficult to know where to even start, but let me try. First and foremost, this is the third time the Lord has brought me to this passage in the past three years. Second therefore, it is of the utmost importance and urgency to Him that we address this still one more time. Third, I am convinced down to my very marrow that this Admonition is the core of what God is doing as He is continuing to aggressively ‘separate Wheat from Chaff’ just before He Returns for His Church and to Judge the nations.

So, get ready for the Adventure of a Lifetime, just this one last ride into the narrowing horizon of History itself as we have known it. Selah.

SLOUCHING TOWARD BABYLON. I carefully borrowed this phrase by combining two others: “Slouching Toward Gomorrah,” penned by Robert Bork’s lamentation over American Liberalism published in 1996. And “Slouching Toward Jerusalem” (2012) by John Maher, in his penetrating look at what he calls, “Reactive Nationalism” that is fiercer than ideology, since it is housed in ones’ raw emotions and thus nearly devoid of any rationality.

And that is what I see happening in America, beloved, not so much even “slouching” anymore, but now ‘racing’ to become the Biblical Babylon of the Book of Revelation (Ch. 16-18): A Last Days World Superpower in its waning years, literally hellbent on maintaining its grip on world domination by Draconian measures so diabolical that it deserves God’s most violent punishment in all of human history.

DR. STEVEN ANDERSON. I borrow now from this highly regarded authority on the Book of Revelation who holds three seminary degrees and the Ph.D. from Dallas Theological Seminary. A career Bible teacher, scholar and author, this section is from his article, “The Case for Identifying Babylon the Great with the United States of America” (Truth Only Bible, July 29, 2021; edited).

“Traditionally, most (not all) Pre-Tribulation [and Pre-Wrath] interpreters have differentiated the Babylon the Great of Revelation 17 from the Babylon the Great in Revelation 18, arguing that Revelation 17 speaks of an Apostate Church symbolically as a prostitute, and that Revelation 18 describes a literal City. However, an analysis of Revelation 17–18 shows that both chapters refer to the same entity, and that this is [primarily] a ‘Political Entity,’ not an Apostate Church … The main difference between the Revelation 17 and Revelation 18 is this: Revelation 17 portrays Babylon the Great and its fall by means of heavenly signs and symbols, whereas Revelation 18 portrays the impact of Babylon the Great’s fall on the earth in a largely non-symbolic fashion.”

“Virtually all writers refer to Babylon the Great as ‘Babylon,’ which tends to leave the impression that Babylon the Great is the old city of Babylon, rebuilt. However, an examination of the occurrences of this name in Revelation reveals that John never follows this practice. The Book of Revelation calls this entity ‘Babylon the Great,’ ‘the Great City, Babylon,’ and ‘Babylon, the Great City,’ but never ‘Babylon’ absolutely, alone and without modifiers (Rev 14:8; 16:19; 17:5; 18:2, 10, 21) … If a rebuilt city of Babylon were in view in Revelation, it ought to be called ‘Babylon’ without modifiers at least once, if for no other reason than to make it clear that Babylon the Great is indeed the old city of Babylon, rebuilt. Instead, the consistent use of the descriptive adjective ‘Great’ accompanied by the definite article indicates that a different entity is in view in the Book of Revelation. Following the Biblical terminology, this article always uses ‘Babylon the Great’ for the eschatological entity in Revelation 17:1–19:4.”

“According to Revelation 17:16-17, Babylon the Great is destroyed by the Antichrist and the Ten Kings in the European Alliance that comprise his base of power (cf. Dan 2:42; 7:7-8, 24; Rev 13:1). Prior to this time, Babylon the Great has dominated world politics and has controlled the world economy. Since Revelation 13:3-7 presents the Antichrist’s kingdom as the dominant world power during the second half of the Tribulation period, and Revelation 13:16-17 shows that he controls the world economic system throughout the second half of the Tribulation Period, Babylon the Great must be destroyed before the Midpoint of the Tribulation Period. Certainly the fact that Babylon the Great is destroyed by the Antichrist’s militaries, rather than directly from Heaven, argues strongly for its fall occurring before the Second Advent.”

A study of Revelation 17:1–19:4 shows that Babylon the Great is the world’s Great Superpower in the End Times. The following facts emerge from an analysis of this section of the Book of Revelation: (1) Babylon the Great has the largest economy of any entity in the world. It is the center of wealth in the world, and it is responsible for an extended period of global wealth creation in the End Times. (2) Babylon the Great has shaped global culture in the End Times, in a directly Antichristian manner. (3) Babylon the Great has the greatest political power of any entity in the end times. (4) Babylon the Great is considered to have the strongest military in the world of the End Times. All of these characteristics uniquely and definitively match THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.”

“In Summary: The Book of Revelation describes Babylon the Great as the Dominant Superpower in the world of the End Times—so dominant, that it actually shapes the culture and economy of the world as it exists at the start of the Tribulation period. The nature and scope of Babylon the Great’s dominance is such that only one such entity could ever exist in the history of the world, and there is no doubt that the United States of America is this entity. While some aspects of the Prophecy remain to be fulfilled—most notably the prophecies of Babylon the Great’s attempts to put Christians to death worldwide (Rev 17:6; 18:20, 24; 19:2)—enough aspects already match so as to leave no doubt as to the fulfillment of the rest.”

DK. Well now, you and I need not agree with every single aspect of this interpretive framework, but after eight years study of these matters I am effectively convinced that Dr. Anderson’s analysis is nearly unassailable. It is what I intend to teach for the rest of my Mission.

IV. FINAL THOUGHTS

So, beloved, here we are: If America is Babylon the Great as we have argued, then what does “Leaving Babylon” mean? This may constitute the most important theological question I have ever addressed in my over 40 years of teaching the Scriptures. So let me be both properly fearful and careful at the same time, as we conclude our discussion.

“COME OUT OF HER, MY PEOPLE!” I cannot emphasize strongly enough how emphatic Christ’s Words are in both the Old Testament Canon and the New Testament Commandment. This is not Sunday school. This is not just another study group. This is not negotiable, beloved! Indeed, it is the difference between life and death for all, believer and nonbelievers alike, to this point:

All who choose to remain in Babylon shall perish! All.

For my last thoughts then I turn to a blogger whom I consider very nearly an old friend, a Jew who was born into a Christian, Torah-honoring family and who holds degrees from three universities, and writes under the name, “NATAN.” His essay, “What it Means to Come Out of Babylon the Great,” was published by Hoshana Rabbah on December 20, 2014 (edited).

After carefully specifying Seven Doctrinal Criteria for who qualifies as a true follower of Yeshua, he then addressed Francis Schaeffer’s famous question: “WHAT THEN SHALL WE DO?”

“‘Repent of sin,’ which is the violation of YHVH’s Torah-instructions (1 John 3:4), and get back to the Torah-instructions in righteous living (2 Chron 7:14, 17, 19). Return to the ancient and good paths of the Torah (Jer 6:16; 18:15).

‘Read and study the Bible’ (from Genesis to Revelation) anew asking the Holy Spirit to lead you into all truth. Be resolved ahead of time to do what ever YHVH tells you to do to bring your life into conformity with his Word no matter the cost. View the instructions of the Bible through a different spiritual lens. Don’t view it from a Minimalist point of view but from a Maximalist point of view. That is, what can and must I do as opposed to what don’t I have to do (i.e., what can I get away with and still be a disciple of Yeshua).

Once you start discovering the truth of the Bible from a fresh perspective, start conforming your life to the truth of it. ‘Start living a holy or set-apart life’ (Lev 20:4; Heb 12:14). YHVH’s people are to be holy or set-apart unto him, not a people who have been made profane by worldly, polluted or defiled pagan customs and traditions of this world (Ezek 22:26; 44:23).

‘Let go of religious or other non-biblical traditions of men’ that violate or have superseded the Word of Elohim (Matt 15:7–9; Mark 7:7, 9). Don’t make excuses. Just do it! Just obey YHVH Elohim and his Word. If you follow these points, you will be heeding YHVH’s call to come out of Spiritual Babylon by first getting the Leaven of Babylon out of your heart and mind (Rev 18:4). Once this is done, all the other Babylonian practices you have been engaged in will begin to fall out of your life like chaff blowing in the wind or dross bubbling up out of the gold to be skimmed off.”

CODA. Of the many sins in the Decalogue an individual might continue to practice that could condemn him or her to Perdition, there is one that will assure Eternal Destruction:

Idolatry: “And God spoke all these words, saying: ‘I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before Me.” – EXODUS 20:1-3, NKJV

I have argued for over three years now that those willful followers of Donald Trump’s Maga Christian Nationalism movement, QAnon Cult worship and all the rest of these Doctrines of Demons that supplant Christ and Canon with earthly political power, shall be consigned to The Flame.

This Scriptures are absolutely, relentlessly clear on The Penalty for sustained, unrepentant idolatry, no matter what label the sinner claims:

“The first and most important Commandment was that they must not worship any god other than the Lord. ‘Whoever violated this commandment should be killed,’and Exodus 22:20 reads “Whoever sacrifices to any god other than the Lord must be destroyed.” – EDITORS, “Biblical Narrative,” Wikipedia, Sep. 16, 2023; edited

Since many in the American Church deny that this Old Testament warning applies to them, perhaps the Voice from Heaven will persuade: “But the cowardly, unbelieving, abominable, murderers, sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.” – REVELATION 21:8, NKJV

Beloved, I simply can add nothing more to admonish and shout if I must, to many people who I know and love to come out of Babylon, which shapeshifted into the contemporary American form of a vicious Political Ideology that is the very center of the Antichrist System described in the Canon. If you truly love Jesus, if you truly are a follower of His, then only one searing Command from your Sovereign:

Stop it! Stop it now!

YOUTUBE: https://youtu.be/s4d__S3xfB0