Babylon & Chaldea: spiritual totalitarianism and its supportive ideation

The Church quintessentially involves the liberation of oneself and others from spiritual slavery and darkness with the application of the truths of faith to evils and excuses to commit them. But the worm of self-love ever gnaws at the vitals of anything remotely good, and that includes the Church, so that self-love and excuses for that love grow like mildew, mold, or other rot on or in the body of the Church. It is this process over time which has been dramatized in the siege of Jerusalem and the carrying away into captivity of its inhabitants to Babylon. 

Broadly speaking, Babylon involves all inversion of religion which proceeds from the love of self and the world and aims at the domination of people with the writings and credit of the Church. Obviously, it helps along the domination of other people greatly if you manage to enslave and dumb them down, so this sort of spiritual totalitarianism inevitably involves both enslavement and endarkening.

The End Times industry tends to interpret the Babylon denounced by Biblical prophecy as a political totalitarianism; but while everyone should be alert to such slave systems in natural life, the Word nonetheless has specifically a spiritual totalitarianism in mind. Since the Word aims to liberate and enlighten people, and yet Babylonian totalitarianism aims at the opposite, those who run such a system must necessarily falsify the Word in order to make it serve inverted aims. 

As the Word typically encodes good and truth and sin and error into bipartite expressions of the Heavenly marriage or of infernal adultery; so in this case does it call the evil of controlling others with religion Babylon and the falsehoods which support that control Chaldea. If the Word only mentions Babylon, then this includes the sum total of evils and falsehoods of such a system; but if the Word uses both Babylon and Chaldea, then they respectively involve the adulteration of good and the falsification of truth; which are alike profanations of the sacred. 

In Habbakuk we read of these Chaldeans the following:

"6 For, lo, I raise up the Chaldeans, that bitter and hasty nation, which shall march through the breadth of the land, to possess the dwellingplaces that are not their's.

7 They are terrible and dreadful: their judgment and their dignity shall proceed of themselves.

8 Their horses also are swifter than the leopards, and are more fierce than the evening wolves: and their horsemen shall spread themselves, and their horsemen shall come from far; they shall fly as the eagle that hasteth to eat.

9 They shall come all for violence: their faces shall sup up as the east wind, and they shall gather the captivity as the sand.

10 And they shall scoff at the kings, and the princes shall be a scorn unto them: they shall deride every strong hold; for they shall heap dust, and take it" (Habakkuk 1:6-10).

The reference to the Chaldeans' marching through the breadth of the land refers to their specifically falsifying and profaning divine truth; because breadth in the Word involves truth or falsehood even as length involves good or evil. We say -- because our proverbs and expressions have been inspired by the spiritual world -- that such a one is broad-minded or conversely narrow-minded; which comes to the same thing as the Word's use of breadth in its positive and negative senses. 

Further, we read that "their judgment and their dignity shall proceed of themselves"; that is to say, their judgement or understanding concerning spiritual matters will proceed from self-intelligence and not from divine enlightenment. Divine enlightenment will hardly interpret the Word in such a way as to facilitate slavery and darkness and to dignify these procedures.

Their horses, their spiritual understandings, have been described as "swifter than the leopards" due to the meaning of leopard as a mingling of divine truth with the spots of falsehood; and as a lust for falsifying the truths of the Word. In other words, a metaphor has been presented to us in which the falsifications of the Word exceed even those of that arch-falsifier the leopard. The mingling of captivating truths with human garbage has thus been compared to the light fur vs the spots on coat of a leopard, whence its mention in the Word. 

"They shall come all for violence": they shall do violence to divine truth. "And they shall scoff at the kings, and the princes shall be a scorn unto them" : divine truth will indeed be nothing to them in itself but only as a means to their diabolical ends.

Just as we can see some light fur when beholding the spotted leopard, so will we see some divine truth when beholding Babylon and Chaldea; and there will be much resemblance between such a spiritual totalitarianism and the actual Church on the surface. The very gold, silver, brass, etc cups and implements which previously served the worship of God in Jerusalem become serving cups in the hands of the Babylonian king and his wives and concubines; which represents the very goods and truths of the Church being profaned and made of service to spiritual enslavement. 

We see a similar kind of shutting in of evil in the description that Zechariah gives of a woman being carried away by winged women in a basket sealed with a stone of lead:

"5 Then the angel that talked with me went forth, and said unto me, Lift up now thine eyes, and see what is this that goeth forth.

6 And I said, What is it? And he said, This is an ephah that goeth forth. He said moreover, This is their resemblance through all the earth.

7 And, behold, there was lifted up a talent of lead: and this is a woman that sitteth in the midst of the ephah.

8 And he said, This is wickedness. And he cast it into the midst of the ephah; and he cast the weight of lead upon the mouth thereof.

9 Then lifted I up mine eyes, and looked, and, behold, there came out two women, and the wind was in their wings; for they had wings like the wings of a stork: and they lifted up the ephah between the earth and the heaven.

10 Then said I to the angel that talked with me, Whither do these bear the ephah?

11 And he said unto me, To build it an house in the land of Shinar: and it shall be established, and set there upon her own base" (Zechariah 5:5-11).

First of all, the term Shinar has been used as a marker indicating that the passage refers to Babylon and spiritual totalitarianism. The tower of Babel in Genesis -- which represents an abortive system of spiritual totalitarianism which the Lord destroyed -- was built on the plain of Shinar; so that references to Shinar have the same significance as do Babel and Babylon.

An ephah -- a basket -- will refer to good or evil; and lead refers to evil. Stone, being truth reversed, refers to falsehood; and since the stone has been identified as lead, we have to do with falsehood which originates in evil. The woman identified as wickedness has been sealed inside the basket with such a stone to indicate that wickedness has been hidden in an appearance of good; the kind of appearance which would be involved in using the same cups and utensils from the temple of God but for profane purposes.

The two winged women who bear the basket to Shinar represent Churches who recognize the evil pent up in that basket -- in that Babylonian and spiritual totalitarianism -- and identify it by name, that is by quality, by thus conveying it to a place with that significance.

We will now jump to the fall of Jerusalem to Babylon and Chaldea described at the end of Jeremiah, a conclusion which dramatizes the profanation of good and truth and the inversion of religion of those in the Jewish Church. The enemy there is not some foreign nation, though it appears as such on the surface, but the process within the Jewish Church of becoming a little Babylon in which the control of those in charge counts for more than the liberation of the powerless and the ignorant from spiritual enslavement and darkness. 

In Jeremiah we read:

"6 And in the fourth month, in the ninth day of the month, the famine was sore in the city, so that there was no bread for the people of the land.

7 Then the city was broken up, and all the men of war fled, and went forth out of the city by night by the way of the gate between the two walls, which was by the king's garden; (now the Chaldeans were by the city round about:) and they went by the way of the plain.

8 But the army of the Chaldeans pursued after the king, and overtook Zedekiah in the plains of Jericho; and all his army was scattered from him.

9 Then they took the king, and carried him up unto the king of Babylon to Riblah in the land of Hamath; where he gave judgment upon him.

10 And the king of Babylon slew the sons of Zedekiah before his eyes: he slew also all the princes of Judah in Riblah.

11 Then he put out the eyes of Zedekiah; and the king of Babylon bound him in chains, and carried him to Babylon, and put him in prison till the day of his death" (Jeremiah 52:6-11).

v.6 The famine being so sore in the city that there was no bread represents an absence of spiritual nourishment in such a spiritual totalitarianism as 'falls to Babylon'.

v.7 The doctrine of the Church was destroyed by this profanation such that successful spiritual combat could no longer be waged thereby. The men of war who would ordinarily stand firm against evil and falsehood cannot stand, therefore flee; they do so in the night, when there is no more faith, no more enlightenment, in the Church. They flee by way of the king's garden, which would ordinarily represent a place of truth and wisdom; but here represents the absence of these leading to flight. We then see the Chaldeans referred to as surrounding the city because falsifiers of the Word likewise 'surround' the doctrine of the Church. 

v8 The falsifiers and profaners of divine truth and the Word pursued after what little truth remained in the Church and captured it, with so little truth remaining that the army which represents truths combatting falsehood was instead scattered thereby.

v.10 The sons of Zedekiah represent the truths of the Church, and their being slain before his eyes represents the way the perverted understanding of truth is itself the murder weapon by which such truths are slain. Of course, if we use our understandings to oppose understanding, a dangerous enterprise, then we risk destroying our understandings themselves. And that has been represented by the king of Babylon putting out the king's eyes. It is the same in natural life: if people continually use their intelligence to lie and deny and pervert, then it can less and less be of use to healthier objects of intelligence. 

v.11 This bringing away of the blinded king into captivity represents the enslavement of divine truth in the service of enslavement of people's souls rather than the liberation of these.

We see the same kind of symbolism in the long list of products mentioned as no longer in circulation because of the destruction of Babylon from the camera angle of Revelation:

"12 The merchandise of gold, and silver, and precious stones, and of pearls, and fine linen, and purple, and silk, and scarlet, and all thyine wood, and all manner vessels of ivory, and all manner vessels of most precious wood, and of brass, and iron, and marble,

13 And cinnamon, and odours, and ointments, and frankincense, and wine, and oil, and fine flour, and wheat, and beasts, and sheep, and horses, and chariots, and slaves, and souls of men" (Revelation 8:12-13).

The fact that all of these things involve, in the end, the spiritual enslavement of mankind has been made quite clear by the tail end bit about that specific item of merchandise the "souls of men".

Much more might be said about Babylon and Chaldea, but this in broad outline is the significance of that Whore and her wine in the Word. Divine truth has specific functions, to facilitate the shunning of sin and error and the implantation of good and truth. If we twist the Word of truth in order to enslave and dumb people down, wishing out of love of self and the world to dominate people using the holy things of religion, then we make ourselves the enemy of everything holy, true and good; and the quintessential opponents of the actual Lord of Heaven whom such dominators of the spiritual poor claim to represent.

Let us remember the purpose of the goods and truths of the Church; and apply these to our liberations and those of others, refusing all temptation to set ourselves up as petty dictators or to subject ourselves to any such. Amen.