Picking Up Where We Left Off
This is a continuation of the study of Revelation 17, a key passage revealing the identity of a great religio-political system which blasphemously calls itself the Church of Jesus Christ, yet is in truth nothing but a false harlot system pretending to be His bride. The world knows this system as the Roman Catholic Church. The Bible calls its head the Antichrist, and calls the church itself the great whore. The Lord gives us this knowledge because we must know the truth — knowledge that has sustained God’s people through centuries of persecution at this very system’s hands, giving them courage to speak against it even to the point of death, imprisonment, and the loss of everything. Today, in ecumenical times, the Protestant denominations are rushing to embrace the great harlot as part of the virgin bride of Christ. Satan is blinding them even now, which makes careful study of this chapter all the more necessary.
Previously we examined her name (verse 1, the great whore), her universal influence (verse 15, that she sits upon many waters — the peoples, multitudes, nations, and tongues of the earth), and the first half of verse 2, that the kings of the earth commit fornication with her. That fornication is not physical but spiritual — her sinful alliances with the ways of the world, her illicit affairs with the earth’s rulers and its wickedness in every form, dressed up and disguised as Christianity, which it is not.
Made Drunk With the Wine of Her Fornication
The second half of verse 2 says the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication. Wine makes people drunk, and this harlot’s fornication acts as an intoxicant on the world in two distinct ways.
First, there is the drug-like effect of the alliance itself between Rome and the ways of the world. Unregenerate men and women are worldly by nature, so they are drawn to a religion that is so worldly; they love power, so they are drawn to a religion allied with the military and political powers of the earth; and they love sin, so they are drawn to a religion tolerant of sin even among its own members.
Rome is the friend of the world, so it is no surprise the world loves Rome back — drunk on the wine of that sinful friendship.
Second, there is the drug-like effect of the harlot’s fornication with the inhabitants of the earth directly — that is, idolatry, the worship of other gods. Romanism is full of idols: Mary herself, worshipped as a goddess; the mass wafer, claimed to become the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Christ; and the so-called saints, prayed to as though they could hear and grant favors, functioning as little gods. Hundreds of millions commit this idolatry and so commit fornication with the harlot themselves, seduced by her allurements, her promises of wealth and power through the confessional, and every other enticement she offers. A drunk man cannot discern right from wrong; a billion Romanists today cannot discern truth from error, Christ from Antichrist, the true Church from the false one — because they are spiritually drunk, and will remain so until the Lord, for His elect among them, opens their eyes.
Consider several Scriptures that bear this out. Job speaks of the Lord causing rulers to wander and stagger like drunken men (Job 12:24–25). Christ warns of the evil servant who eats and drinks with the drunken (Matthew 24:48–49), and Luke’s parallel account shows that whoever associates with the drunken becomes drunken himself (Luke 12:45) — precisely what happens to Protestant leaders who join themselves ecumenically to Rome. And Jeremiah, speaking of literal Babylon, says the nations drank her wine and went mad (Jeremiah 51:7), language John deliberately echoes in Revelation 17:2 and 18:3, tying the ancient Babylonian mystery religion — the root of Hinduism, Buddhism, and every false religion since — to its perfection of evil in Rome.
Tragically, this drunkenness was not fully left behind at the Reformation. The Lutherans allied themselves to the kings of Germany, the Anglicans to the king of England, the Presbyterians to Scottish rulers, the Dutch Reformed to the authorities of Holland — the same evil alliance of church and state that began with Constantine, simply continued under a Protestant name. Many Protestant bodies also retained Rome’s hierarchical structure minus the Pope, her festivals of Christmas and Easter, and in the case of the Anglicans and Lutherans, her heresy of baptismal regeneration. To some degree, then, even those who forsook the harlot at the Reformation remained drunk on her wine.
Carried Away Into the Wilderness
Verse 3 says John was carried away in the Spirit into the wilderness to see the woman. This is the deliberate opposite of Revelation 21:9–10, where an angel carries John away in the Spirit to a great and high mountain to see the true Church, the holy Jerusalem descending from God. The true Church is the mystical Mount Zion of Scripture (Isaiah 2:2; Hebrews 12:22) — exalted, glorious, the city of the living God. The false church, by contrast, is shown not on a mountain but in a wilderness: a spiritual desert, with no water of life and no beauty, because it is not the true Church at all, however much its own people mistake it for one.
Christ offers living water that satisfies forever — “he that believeth on me shall never thirst” (John 6:35), a well of water springing up into everlasting life for whoever drinks of Him (John 4:13–14; 7:37). Roman Catholics, by contrast, are kept perpetually thirsty, forced to keep drinking water that never satisfies: the Mass and the other sacraments, pursued in the vain hope that keeping them earns salvation; confession to a mere man who cannot actually forgive sin; the worship of images that cannot save. None of it is the water of life, because Rome is a worldly system, full of heathen doctrine, sitting in the wilderness of the world — the very opposite of the glorious city on the mountain described in chapter 21.
The Woman and the Beast She Rides
The woman sits on a scarlet-colored beast, full of names of blasphemy, with seven heads and ten horns (verse 3). The woman symbolizes Romanism’s religious power; the beast symbolizes its political power — two sides of the same coin, since Romanism, unlike Hinduism or Buddhism, has always been both a religion and a political force. Political powers have long been pictured as animals in Scripture and in ordinary speech alike (Russia as the bear, America as the eagle), and this same beast appears earlier in Revelation 13, unmistakably tied there to Rome’s political power, its horns crowned as symbols of kingship.
Scarlet was the color of imperial Rome’s authority, later transferred to the popes, and scarlet is also the color of blood — fitting, given the massacres Rome has carried out through the centuries by the hand of secular power she controlled. And the beast’s seven heads are identified for us directly: “the seven heads are seven mountains on which the woman sitteth” (Revelation 17:9). Rome has been called the seven-hilled city since ancient times, built on seven hills — a description confirmed even by a coin issued under the Roman emperor Vespasian around A.D. 70, depicting Rome as a woman seated on seven mountains, and by the Catholic Encyclopedia’s own description of Rome as the enduring "center of all Christendom." This rules out any claim that the passage refers to literal Babylon, which Genesis places not on seven hills but on the flat plain of Shinar (Genesis 11:2, 9). The seven heads fulfill her name Roman (local); the many waters of verse 15 fulfill her name Catholic (universal).
The ten horns, we are told plainly, are ten kings (Revelation 17:12) — fulfilled when the Roman Empire was overrun in the fifth century by the Goths, the Vandals, and other barbarian nations, and divided into roughly ten kingdoms. The woman riding the beast pictures the religious power controlling the political power, not the other way around — a pattern beginning in the fourth century when the Emperor Constantine professed conversion to Catholicism, after which the bishops of Rome came, over time, to control the very empire that had once ruled them, inheriting Caesar’s seat and Caesar’s power. That same pattern of a red or scarlet political ideology allied to and used by the papacy has continued since, visible in Willcock’s own reading of history in the rise of communism, which he characterizes as an ally and, in a real sense, a child of that same Roman system.
Names of Blasphemy
Verse 3 closes by calling the beast “full of names of blasphemy” — fulfilled in the titles heaped on the Pope himself: Vicar of Christ (meaning, in effect, “Vice-Christ” or deputy Christ), “God on earth,” “Christ on earth.” Mary, too, receives blasphemous titles — Queen of Heaven, Gate of Heaven, and Mediatrix — though Scripture allows no Queen of Heaven, names Christ alone the door to heaven (John 10:9), and declares plainly, “there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5). The images and so-called saints of Rome bear still more such names. This city, and the system that reigns from it, is truly full of the names of blasphemy the angel described.
Closing
The true Church’s only inhabitants are those who have come to Christ by faith and drunk of Him, never to thirst again. But a thousand million people alive today sit in a spiritual wilderness, believing all the while they belong to the true Church — a tragedy of immense proportions that should stir every believer’s heart to take the Gospel to them. Of all the false religions on earth, this is the greatest, the most deadly, the most persecuting, the most powerful — Satan’s masterpiece — and in an age when Protestant denominations are rushing to embrace the Mother Harlot as a sister church, believers must not be deceived.
Come out of her. Have nothing to do with this great harlot. Divine judgment is falling upon her, and the Lord’s people must remain wholly separate from her false and evil doctrines and practices — known to the world, if need be, simply as Bible Protestants, who protest her lies because the enlightenment God has given through His Word is crystal clear, however drunk and however loving of her the world remains.