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Babylon and the End of the World
By Sean Osbourne
Is the Babylon of the Old Testament the same Babylon New Testament Scripture refers to at the ‘End of the World"? The purpose of this article is to point out why I do not believe the two are to be confused. The original, physical political entity known as Babylon was the original ‘World Empire' from the Biblical perspective and other is ‘symbolic' of the global system of government during Daniel's 70th Week.
Yes, I hold to the interpretation that there will be no resurrection of a physical or historical Babylonian Empire. The Scriptural evidence for this interpretation is the God-given vision of Daniel regarding the statue which began with Nebuchadnezzar and Daniel's vision of the distant future and the time of the end. That Babylon is gone forever into history and is the fulfilled prophecy of Isaiah 13:20-21.
The God-given sequence of empires thereafter is very specific with each subsequent Middle Eastern empire built upon the ruins of the Babylonian Empire: the Persian Empire, the Hellenic Empire of Alexander and its prophesied division into four rump empires, of which the Seleucid Empire and its Antichrist precursor (Antiochus IV Epiphanes) was most important, and finally the Roman Empire.
The physical destruction of Babylon, as prophesied also by Jeremiah 50 and 51, occurred over many years and was not complete until Seleucia, the new capital of the Seleucid Empire founded by Seleucus I Nicator circa 305 BC was literally built brick by brick from the ruins of Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon. Any Bible prophecy student can look at a detailed map of modern day Iraq and determine that the ruins of Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon lies just east of the Euphrates River near the city of Al-Hillah and Seleucia was built in the desert 20 miles south of modern day Baghdad and 70 miles to the northeast of the original Babylon along the banks of the Tigris River. Aside from the geographic differences, Babylon was an ancient Middle Eastern culture while Seleucia was very much a Western Hellenistic culture.
In addition to this we also have Isaiah 13 serving as a central prophetic theme regarding a symbolic "Babylon" and the end times "pains of a woman in childbirth" concurrent with the overwhelming fear that overtakes every man's heart, and the darkening of the stars in their constellations, the sun and the moon which was repeated by Jesus Christ during his Olivet Discourse found in Matthew 24. Isaiah's Babylon in this prophecy is a symbolic Babylon representing the utterly corrupt world government system of the Antichrist within Daniel's 70th Week.
In this day and age it is very interesting to note that Israel, in the form of its military and intelligence services has returned to northern Iraq, in the region known today as Kurdistan and in ancient times as Assyria. The Israeli's are developing an alliance with the Kurd's and providing them with state of the art military equipment and training. What the Israeli's receive in return is copious amounts of critical human intelligence regarding all manner of goings-on within western Iran, northern Syria and eastern Turkey. For their part the Iranians, Syrians and Turks are none too pleased with this alliance. Perhaps it is this Israeli-Kurdish military alliance that Jeremiah 51:6 speaks to with respect to Daniel's 70th Week, for there appears to be a direct correlation between Jeremiah 51 and Revelation 17 and 18.
In the aftermath of the soon-to-be fulfilled prophecies of Isaiah 17, Psalm 83 and Ezekiel 38/39 the global dominant kingdom of the Antichrist shall arise. Since the prophetic word of Revelation came directly from the Father to the Son to John on Patmos, circa 90-95 AD, it most assuredly speaks of future events even to our age, yet given the signs of the times we know the season is upon the world and this future is within the span of this generation. That modern Iraq will fall within the Euro-centric kingdom of "the people of the prince who is to come," that is out of the two legs standing upon ten toes. This last day's kingdom of the Antichrist is a revival of the Roman Empire, and the inclusion of modern-day, post Saddam Iraq can be seen in the events that have occurred in the past seven years since 2003 and Operation Iraqi Freedom. Iraq is now completely an integral part of the Western sphere of influence and will play a key role in the coming post-paradigm shift of the current world order.
Original Article
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