The Angel’s Revelation: A Whore to Be Judged
Having already studied what Bible prophecy says about the Antichrist — that vast evidence of recorded history leaves no doubt that the Antichrist can only be the Pope of Rome, every Pope of Rome, each one coming in the name of Christ and blasphemously exalting himself above all that is called God — it is now time to study what the Bible says about the religious system itself over which he rules. Revelation 17 is the key passage of Holy Scripture for identifying this false religious system. Throughout the eighteen verses of this chapter, God the Holy Spirit has given the most perfect revelation of the Roman Catholic institution to be found anywhere.
In verses 1 to 6 a picture is presented to John the Apostle: a woman, a prostitute, dressed in purple and scarlet, decked in gold and precious jewels, sitting upon many waters, committing fornication with the kings of the earth, and making the earth’s inhabitants drunk. She sits upon a scarlet beast with seven heads and ten horns, her forehead emblazoned MYSTERY BABYLON THE GREAT, and she is drunk with the blood of the saints. It shocked John, and caused him to marvel with great wonder — not admiration in the sense of approval, but wonder, even marveling, at what a revelation had been given him: a false, evil, bloodthirsty religion that dared to impudently claim to be the very Church of the Lord Jesus Christ. A harlot pretending to be a virgin.
Not a Woman, But a Counterfeit Church
The language of Revelation is highly symbolical, and this whore is not a literal woman. She is a symbol — not of just any religion, but of a false church. Scripture must interpret itself here. Throughout the New Testament, the Holy Spirit consistently depicts the true Church of Jesus Christ as a woman — a chaste, holy woman, a virgin, the bride of Christ Himself.
Paul, writing to the church at Corinth, calls them a chaste virgin, espoused to one husband — the Lord Jesus Christ, the heavenly bridegroom. The true Church, consisting of all the true saints of God, is pure, undefiled, holy.
Christ gave Himself for His Church; He nourishes and cherishes it; it is inseparably joined to Him. This passage also shows that Christ died for a particular people — not for every human being without exception, but for His elect, His sheep, not the goats.
The wife of the Lamb is the church — the elect of all ages, dressed in the perfect righteousness of Christ imputed to them. Now compare that with the almost identical wording used to introduce the great whore:
The similarity to Revelation 17:1 is deliberate, not coincidental. The Lord wants us to see that the great whore is, in some respects, externally similar to the true bride, yet something completely and radically different — a counterfeit. A virgin bride and a prostitute are both women; they dress differently, but externally both are women. In precisely that way, the Roman Catholic institution may appear to some to be a church, but internally it is a filthy, defiled harlot — the very opposite of the true Church, not in any sense part of Christ’s true virgin bride. Roman Catholics are not true Christians, though they call themselves such; they are members of the great harlot religion.
Rome’s Many Gods: A Harlot Indeed
Why is she called a harlot? With whom has she prostituted herself? One important sense is by playing the harlot with the kings of the earth — addressed later in verse 2. But there is another sense first: the true Church is married to Christ and faithful to Him; this false church, though claiming to be married to Christ, plays the harlot by worshipping other gods — and idolatry is repeatedly depicted in Scripture as spiritual adultery.
The gods of Romanism are many. First, the wafer-god of Rome — a piece of bread worshipped as Christ, as God the Son, by a billion Roman Catholics, believed after its consecration by the priest to be the actual flesh, bones, body, and divinity of the Lord Jesus. That is idolatry of the highest order. Second, the goddess Mary — and she is that, deliberately, whatever Rome would call her — to whom more hymns are sung and more prayers offered than to almost anyone else, whose intercession is sought and in whose honor churches are built around the world. Third, the so-called saints of Rome, worshipped as gods, along with their images and statues. A Christian, in Scripture, is simply any believer — but for Rome, “saints” are especially holy people who may be prayed to after death. She has many gods, and she is a harlot indeed, claiming to love only the Lord while truly loving and serving so many others. Even a priest of Rome once admitted: “If the Church of Rome be not the Church of Christ it is the masterpiece of the devil; it can be nothing between.” By her own priest’s admission — and she is not the Church of Christ — that is exactly what she is.
She Sits Upon Many Waters
The chapter interprets its own symbol: the many waters represent the peoples, multitudes, nations, and languages of the earth. Only one religious system fulfills this — Roman Catholicism, ruling and reigning from the city of Rome.
In John’s day, only the city of Rome reigned over the whole world; and no other city has, ever since, remained so consistently at the center of world politics and religion for over two thousand years. Only one world religion has its headquarters in Rome — Roman Catholicism. Even the present Antichrist of that day, Pope John Paul II, told Rome’s politicians on January 29, 1987, not to forget “the proper mission of Rome… which make it the city established on the mountain to which are turned the eyes of the entire world” — unknowingly confirming Bible prophecy in his own words.
Today over a billion people — more than one in five of the world’s population — are Roman Catholic, found in almost every nation, speaking almost every tongue, exactly as verse 15 describes: peoples, multitudes, nations, and tongues. Even her own chosen name fulfills the prophecy — “Catholic” means embracing, universal. And note the word Scripture chooses: she sits upon these waters. Not stands, not holds — sits, a picture of total, suffocating, oppressive dominion. Wherever Roman Catholicism has conquered, it has come with crushing tyranny, stamping out opposition, stifling human progress — Galileo is the classic example — and ignorance and superstition have followed in its wake, exactly as history from the last two thousand years bears out.
Fornication with the Kings of the Earth
This cannot mean physical fornication, since the woman is not a literal woman but a mystical, institutional one. It means spiritual fornication — sinful alliances, pacts, and treaties between earthly rulers and this evil religious system, unions rightly compared to a man joining himself to a prostitute. The very first king to commit this fornication was the Roman Emperor Constantine in the fourth century, who, claiming conversion, declared the Catholic religion the state church of the entire Roman Empire, uniting political power to false religion and beginning centuries of persecution against true believers.
He was not the last. Even in the twentieth century, some of the very worst such unions occurred: Adolf Hitler, himself a Roman Catholic who fashioned the Nazi party along Jesuit lines, entered a concordat with the Vatican that played an immense part in the Holocaust; various communist governments likewise committed fornication with her, with millions dying as a result; and the United States has formed its own powerful alliance with the Vatican, one president after another courting Rome’s approval. Today most of the world’s nations maintain diplomatic relations with the Vatican, because their rulers know they need her influence over the billion Roman Catholic citizens scattered across nearly every nation on earth — citizens who, in practice, owe their first allegiance to Rome rather than to their own governments.
Rome has always been a friend of the world, and the kings of the earth have bowed to her, entered alliances with her, and been fascinated and seduced by her — adulterers and adulteresses finding friendship with a world at enmity with God.
Why This Matters
The devil has his own church — a satanic counterfeit of Christ’s true Church, a vast and powerful organization that leads millions astray. There are other false churches — the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Mormons — and other false religions entirely — Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam — and believers must know something of all of them in order to evangelize those who follow them. But none of them, not one, poses the threat to the true Gospel that Rome does. This is Satan’s masterpiece, his crowning glory. As dangerous and fanatical as Islam is, and it truly is a satanic religion, Romanism is worse still — a more subtle, more vile evil, precisely because it wears the name of Christ while denying His finished work.
Know as much as can be known about this great harlot — but then turn your eyes away from her, and behold instead the true virgin bride of Christ, and Christ Himself. The devil has his church, but Christ Jesus has His own true bride, and every believer is part of it by grace alone. He is our Shepherd; the Pope is not. We follow Him, we are taught by Him, and we are kept by His almighty power unto the end.