The great harlot

Sermon for Midweek of Trinity 13

Revelation 17:1-18

There are too many details in Revelation 17 for us to talk about in a short sermon. And, in all honesty, it may not be possible or even wise to try to explain away every detail in this chapter. Because the overarching message is clear enough, and important enough for us to focus on: The kingdoms of the world will always be the devil’s instruments to attack the true Church of Christ, and the apostate Church, led by the Antichrist within the visible assembly of the Church, will work together with the kingdoms of the world to snuff out the true religion. But they will ultimately fail.

John sees a vision of the great harlot, the great prostitute. She’s identified as “Babylon the Great” and as “that great city which reigns over the kings of the earth.” As we talked about last week, Babylon was the great city in the Old Testament that threatened God’s people of Israel and held them captive for a time. In the New Testament era, the great city that threatened God’s people, both physically and spiritually, both from a secular government angle and from a Church angle, is the city of Rome.

There’s no doubt that Rome is being talked about here. The angel says that the woman sits on “seven mountains.” John’s readers would have had no trouble identifying that as Rome, the famous “city of the seven hills.”  And for centuries, Rome was indeed the city which reigns over the kings of the earth, again, both on the secular side in the Roman Empire and the later Holy Roman Empire, and on the spiritual side, as it eventually became (and still is!) the seat of the man who claimed to reign over all Christians everywhere, the seat of the Papacy.

So the woman in this vision, the great harlot, represents the Roman Papacy, the true Antichrist, and the beast on which the woman sits represents the secular beast, the Roman Empire itself, which evolved into the so-called Holy Roman Empire. The woman is described as THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND OF THE ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH. The “harlotry” here is spiritual harlotry or unfaithfulness, also known as idolatry. It includes every form of supposedly Christian teaching that leads people to trust in man instead of in God: to trust in man’s leadership, in man’s intercessions, in man’s works, in man’s protection, in man’s teachings and traditions. It’s every form of supposedly Christian teaching that causes people to focus on human desires, human likes, human beliefs. And so, with that understanding, it certainly includes much of what’s taught under the Roman Papacy.

But it isn’t restricted to the Roman Catholic Church. I remember when we lived in Puerto Rico, where Roman Catholicism was still very popular, there were some Evangelical churches who would print flyers and plaster them all over the cars in a parking lot—flyers with the title, Rome is the great harlot! Another popular version of that is the idea that, if it’s Roman Catholic, it’s bad! Well, the Papacy may be the great harlot, but the woman is called here the “mother of harlots.” Every false version of Christianity can be traced back to Rome, because it was Rome who taught everyone to trust, not in the Scriptures, but in man, and that’s what all false doctrine does, at the end of the day. It causes people to trust, not in the actual teaching of Holy Scripture, but in made-up human doctrines. It causes people to focus on what they do for God instead of on what He has done for us in Christ. It causes people to focus on how they like to worship God instead of on how God desires to be worshiped. Such harlotry is found, not only in the Roman Church, but throughout so-called Protestantism as well.

We see the woman dressed in scarlet, just like the beast on which she sits. We see the apostate Church dressed like the world, becoming more and more like the world, in her teachings as well as in her practices. Oh, the world thinks women should be in charge of everything? Look at the church over the past many decades ordaining women as pastorettes. Oh, the world thinks homosexuality is great? Look at the church now endorsing such practices. Divorce? Fine! Sex outside of marriage? Fine! God’s Word is fallible? Agreed! And so on.

But the woman is also dressed in purple and wears fine pearls and holds out a golden cup to the world. She is a glorious Church, a big Church, as the woman sits on many waters, that is, on many nations. She appears elegant, attractive, and beautiful on the outside. Again, that applies as much to the Roman Catholic Church as it does to the Evangelical megachurch (or megasynod). But in truth, she’s a harlot. She is not faithful to God and His Word and His teaching, and she teaches the nations that her fake version of Christianity is the truth!

For a while, the unbelievers love her and join in with her! The kings of the earth committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth were made drunk with the wine of her fornication. But eventually they grow of tired of her and the nations will hate the harlot, make her desolate and naked, eat her flesh and burn her with fire as part of God’s judgment against her. And maybe we can see signs of that in our time. The nations of the world largely followed Christianity, usually in its idolatrous form—the nations have never embraced genuine Christian doctrine as a whole. There’s still a thin veneer of loyalty to the apostate Church among the rulers of the world. But in our day, it seems that most of the nations of the world, most of the rulers of the world, are beginning to reject every form of Christianity, even the antichristian forms of it.

Now, as for the heads, and the horns, and the kings that are mentioned in this vision, some have tried to connect them to specific rulers or kingdoms in history, and maybe there’s something to that, but we don’t have time to get into it here, and it’s really an insignificant thing to match up this horn to that king. It’s the overarching message that needs to get through: that the false-teaching, man-centered, man-idolizing Church is actually the greatest enemy of mankind. Because when people are introduced to a false version of who Jesus is and what it means to follow Him, it’s the worst kind of delusion. Because when the true version of Jesus is preached, people don’t bother even listening. They think they already know what Christianity is all about. Either they hate it and want nothing to do with it, or they fall in love with the false Christ they’ve been introduced to and want nothing to do with the real one.

That’s why the alliance between Christianity and the governments of the world has never been a healthy a thing, because whole societies are led away from the true Christ to a false version of Him, to a generic God who looks something like the Christian God but isn’t.

So, again, the overarching theme of this vision is that the false-teaching, man-centered, man-idolizing Church is actually the greatest enemy of mankind, and, that the false-teaching Church which has done so much damage to the true Church over the centuries, will eventually fall. The churches that have falsely represented Christ to the world and that have gloated over and persecuted the followers of the true Christ will be put to shame.

So we should be careful, shouldn’t we? We should be on guard against the false but attractive version of Christianity. We should know the Scriptures well enough that the false but attractive version of Christianity can’t move us from the truth of God’s Word. And we should take heart, because it’s not the size of the Church or the outward glory of the Church that identifies it as the true Church. It’s the church’s faithfulness to God’s Word and Sacraments, the presence of faith in Christ alone among her members, the love her members show to one another, and the Christ-like behavior of her members in the world. Let us be about those things! Amen.