I visit everywhere virtually on YouTube and GoogleEarth, but I don’t have much appetite to travel.
There’s a legend that Saint Patrick chased snakes out of Ireland, but most other countries have snakes. I did once touch a snake in Dublin Zoo, but I don’t entirely trust them 😀. So maybe I’m better off staying here.
I’m reluctant to mention current countries in case I offend people. I’d find some counties in Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East quite scary. Yet, my kids have friends in some of these places, and their lives aren’t all that different from our lives here. And you get lovely people everywhere. For example, I shouldn’t assume that everyone in Gaza supports or sympathizes with Hamas. There’s even a little Baptist church in Gaza. And one of the most prominent evangelical leaders in my lifetime, R.T. Kendall, was quite friendly with Yasser Arafat, the longtime leader of the PLO. People in my church have a wide range of political views on the Middle East. I would love to see peace in my lifetime, as has happened in the Irish conflict.
And there’s huge church growth in some of these scary places. In fact, the church has always thrived in hostile environments. When everything is fine, perhaps people get so indulged with the pleasures of this life that they put God out of the picture.
So why Babylon? It was a huge power in Old Testament times, and though Israel had successfully fought off hostile nations on other occasions, God disciplined Israel by allowing them to be overrun by Babylon. The temple was destroyed and the Jews were exiled to Babylon. I first heard about that back in 1978 from Boney M 😀. And Don McClean had a song about the exile too, based on Psalm 137:
Some Jews did return to their homeland after the 70 year exile, and some things improved, but then you had Persia, Greece, and Rome.
From a Christian perspective, Babylon often represents a world hostile to God, particularly in the Book of Revelation. Spiritually, Zion and Jerusalem represents heaven merged with earth, and Babylon represents a godless world. In the Old Testament, God manifested His presence in a special way in a physical location – the tabernacle and later in the temple at Zion. But Jesus spoke of a time, when locations would no longer be significant.
John 4:22-24
22 You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23 Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. 24 God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”
I would hope that people of all religions, including Christians and Muslims, would be happy to see the Jews able to dwell in their historical land. But I also think that spiritually, it was always God’s intention that the whole world would come to know and love him, and that He could be worshipped anywhere. So we think of Jerusalem as God’s will being done on earth and His kingdom coming, and Babylon as that aspect of the world that is hostile to God. You can read all about that in the closing chapters of the Book of Revelation. People debate how literal to take it, but either way, Babylon symbolizes the “baddies”.
So, spiritually, I want to delight in God and I don’t want to spiritually dwell in a world without God.
Hibernia Gospel 