The Great Whore Babylon

     "The role played by the righteous in the last days.  God has put us in a position not only to be observers but agents as to what is going to go on.  It is of note, that in Revelation, the saints play both a passive and a active role in latter-day events. 

     The passive role is specifically in connection with the Great Whore Babylon.  Interestingly, the saints are to have nothing to do with her, including trying to stop or even blunt her activities.  Concerning her, their role is to flee, and interestingly, nothing more.  She is to be left alone.  She is to grow fat and sassy and arrogant, insisting that "I will see no sorrow, I sit as a queen."  She will be totally ignorant therefore that her end will come in an hour and a day, indeed her fall will not just be startling fast, but shockingly fast.  None still linked with her will have time to flee.  Thus the message of Revelation is that the saints are to flee now. 

     The passive role of the righteous is also marked by another fact.  The last days is plagued by wars and rumors of wars and yet, in Revelation the saints are absent from every battlefield, gone from every fight.  It is the wicked who destroy the wicked.  But there is something about the latter-day wicked ones that marks them as unique.  It is that they carry an insanity that drives them in ways no wickedness in the past has ever done. 

     The second coming is not just about saving the righteous.  Listen to John's testimony concerning a reason for the Lord's coming.  "The nations were angry and thy wrath has come that thou shouldest destroy them which destroy the earth."  The second coming is to stop geocide.  That is to say genocide on a worldly level.  It is interesting that the book of Revelation shows us that in these last days the wicked will have the means and the determination to carry out geocide.  Their attitude is, if we can not have the world (the earth), no one else can have it either."     Richard D. Draper