Terminal Salvation

The whore of Babylon is a mindset, an ideology of man-made religion. It’s an ideology that holds many captive. I took artistic liberties to describe how I perceive it within the Biblical framework (mainly Rev. 17, 18). This is not an expose or criticism of any organization, or group of people.

However, this mindset can be expressed both individually and institutionally. Therefore, I won’t say that any resemblance to existing religious ideologies is purely coincidental. Most likely, it is not. If the shoe fits – wear it. (Of course, that goes for me too.)

The whore of Babylon is beyond redemption, but she always masquerades as the bride of Christ. Seductive and sultry, she’s spread out on her luxurious linens, singing the siren songs of passivity, complacency, and either sin-tolerance, or sin-management for those with sensitive consciences. It’s her religious lovers who crucified my Lord Jesus Christ.

She is the succubus of man-made religion. If you fall for her charms, she will engulf you with the heavy smoke of mysticism until your turn off your reason. She will slowly but surely get you drunk on her toxic wine of rules and regulations, of dos and don’ts. She will slowly immobilize you in her well-trained embrace until all you have left to guide you in life is an eclectic assortment of cookie-cutter Bible one-liners that strangely seem to fit everything she wants you to do.

At first you don’t like how any of it feels. No one does at first. But then you slowly get used to it. After all, you are told that this is the only real deal.

She promises so much, but she never delivers. She gradually takes over your mind and your heart, while slowly sucking the very life out of you. And then she demands payments for her “services”. She thoroughly corrupts those who get seduced by her charms, inducts them into her hall of shame, and sends them out on recruiting missions to bring more fresh meat for her ongoing flesh feast.

She is not stingy with ecclesiastical titles and religious accolades. She wants her slaves to find identity and significance in those things. After all – where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. And once you go all in, it will be very hard to get out.

She is the black widow of do-it-yourself religion. Her trophy wall, decorated with the souls of men, women, and even children, stretches out for countless miles.

Perhaps the worst deception of all is that she always presents herself as the true bride of the Messiah. She seduces the sincere but ignorant into her fold by all her magnificent religious displays. She doesn’t mind you coming to a steepled religious building every Sunday, listening to hour-long orations, and always learning but never getting to know the real Jesus, and never doing his works.

She trains you to be obsequious and servile, always afraid to speak up, always afraid to question human authority and the traditions of men. The opium smoke of her theology enters deep into you, perverting the notions of true character, Godly humility, and real God-obedience. It substitutes those with insidious religious counterparts that will eat away at your dignity and identity like cancer. She turns legitimate sons of God into fearful religious slaves.

She turns your destiny from being a vocal fighter for God against the injustices of the world and the defender of the unprivileged to being a powerless religious doormat. She will let you softly sing “Kumbaya” in awkward hand-holding circles and pray quiet little prayers in your closets, as long as you never have any impact for Jesus in the real world.

Many great political revolutions of the world aimed to throw her asphyxiating yoke off of their nations. Ironically, she managed to deceive even those nations in convincing them that she is the true bride of Christ, a reflection of his true character. So, naturally, after getting rid of the “bride”, they didn’t want to have anything to do with the bridegroom. How very tragic and heart-wrenching!

And today, she is trying to convince us that Jesus Christ shows up only once a week in specially zoned religious buildings. She caricatured the Lord of 100 million galaxies into the lord of Christmas pageants, ladies brunches, and bake sales. She managed to convey to the world that the Lion of Judah has finally been impounded, defanged, declawed, neutered, and domesticated.

She convinced the world that the greatest economical and political mind that has walked this earth, who taught way more about governance and money than about prayer and fasting, has now turned into nothing more than a tired, grumpy moralizer sporting a rather pathetic track record.

And so she poisoned the hearts and minds of academic, cultural, political, and business elites. Now the world asks the lamb of God to keep to his little cage in his cute little religious petting zoo, while the stable grown-ups not needing the crutches of religion go look elsewhere for real answers to the big questions.

And so, here are the words of Jesus: “Come out of her, my people, so that you will not share in her sins, so that you will not receive any of her plagues”.

The whore of Babylon is not your mother, nor your friend, nor your lover. She is your total nobody. You don’t want any part or parcel of that filthy wretch. She is Babylon the Great, the Mother of Prostitutes and Abominations of the Earth. She is drunk with the blood of the saints, which she slowly sucks out of them without them even being aware of it. It is her religious army that crucified our Lord Jesus Christ. She is our mortal enemy. And we know how she will end up. It’s in the very end of the Good Book. And the real bride of Christ will stand on her grave.

We are called to be part of the church of the firstborn, which is registered in heaven, and headed personally by Jesus Christ. We called to be part of the magnificent, shiny, spotless warrior bride of Christ. The one without a spot or wrinkle, without a single blemish. The real and genuine one.