Who is the chief chaos agent today to the program of God?
If you want to extrapolate it to modern times, that's the question you need to ask.
Is the USA part of the biblical worldview?
I hear so many online believers saying that the USA is Mystery Babylon.
What city in the Middle East could possibly be Mystery Babylon?
Well, I would suggest Babylon.
The USA is not part of the biblical worldview.
How do we know that? Because all the nations that descend from Noah,
and it literally is Genesis 9, see if I can remember,
I always have to look up this verse because I always forget precisely where it's at here.
I hope I don't have to search for it here.
All right here, Genesis 9:19.
Now we got to look up to verse 18.
«The sons of Noah who went forth from the ark were Shem, Ham, and Japheth.
(Ham was the father of Canaan.) These three were the sons of Noah,
and from these the people of the whole earth were dispersed.»
So the question is, who are the descendants of Shem, Ham, and Japheth
that comprise, in the biblical worldview, the whole earth?
And Genesis 10 answers that right here:
The nations descended from Noah and his sons right here.
Genesis 10 is the answer to that,
and you will not find the United States of America in Genesis 10.
They're all nations of the ancient Eastern Mediterranean,
North Africa, all the way as West to Tarshish, which is Spain.
It's the Mediterranean and the Middle East.
Those are the nations of the biblical worldview.
That's what the biblical text says.
People who have America in there are simply just doing bad Bible study.
That's the only way I can put it.
It's a very American-centric worldview, but that's not the biblical worldview.
The biblical worldview is Israel-centric.
Israel is the nation at the center of the world in biblical thought,
and that's not literal geography either. That's conceptual.
That's doing theology with your geography there.
Mystery Babylon, again, my suggestion is Babylon.
And what about Rome?
Because Babylon wasn't relevant during the time of John.
By the New Testament time, it is Rome.
But the ultimate referent is Babylon itself, because Babylon in the Old Testament
is the chief symbol of chaos in the biblical world for very obvious reasons.
They destroyed Jerusalem.
They destroyed the temple.
They carried the people into captivity.
They're the big bad guy by the end of the story,
the chief chaos agent that disrupts the plan of God for the world.
It destroys Israel because of Israel's sin.
And so Rome, because of Rome's domination in the New Testament period,
Rome begins to occupy that status.
And so you get these Babylon references, like in the book of Revelation, to Rome.
Again, the best thing I can give you there in a Q&A like this
is to go up to Google, Google nakedbiblepodcast.com, Revelation,
Old Testament, Babylon, and you will find the episode or episodes
that we discussed Mystery Babylon on the podcast.
That would go through the passages in the book of Revelation
that reference the Old Testament Babylon to talk about Rome.
Who is the chief chaos agent today to the program of God?
You know, if you wanted to extrapolate it to modern times,
that's the question you need to ask.
Because then whatever nation that is would follow Babylon and Rome
and then, you know, up until now, but it always changes
because the whole focal point is; who is the chief opposition
to the plan of God and the people of God.
Every generation tends to take the geopolitics of their time
and impose it on the Bible.
If you're looking at the context of the book of Revelation,
that context is Rome.
And there isn't much more that John could do to communicate that
other than to use the Babylon cipher.
But I would say go up and listen to the episode where we discuss that.