I Can’t Come Out of Babylon If I Don’t Know Who She Is

In my last post, we talked about where we are in prophecy right now. We also introduced who Babylon is.

“And I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast which was full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. The woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet, and adorned with gold and precious stones and pearls, having in her hand a golden cup full of abominations and the filthiness of her fornication” (Revelation 17:3-4).

And I heard another voice from heaven saying, “Come out of her, my people, lest you share in her sins, and lest you receive of her plagues” (Revelation 18:4).

“And the merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her, for no one buys their merchandise anymore: merchandise of gold and silver, precious stones and pearls, fine linen and purple, silk and scarlet, every kind of citron wood, every kind of object of ivory, every kind of object of most precious wood, bronze, iron, and marble; and cinnamon and incense, fragrant oil and frankincense, wine and oil, fine flour and wheat, cattle and sheep, horses and chariots, and bodies and souls of men” (Revelation 18:11-13).

I hope you’ll spend some time studying Revelation 17-18, because it’s absolutely fascinating. I have been seeing new things almost daily. I feel like I’ve been drinking from a fire hose, and I’m not sure how to share all of it. However, since several of my dear friends mentioned that the Ruach haKodesh (Holy Spirit) has been speaking to them about Babylon as well, I’m going to trust that this is what the Spirit is saying to all of us right now, and that if you’ll study His Word deeply, He will speak the same things to you.

So let’s get practical. Let’s talk about how to come out of Babylon.

Stop Listening to the Lies

I want to start here, because deception and trickery and lies are at the foundation of Babylon. I do believe these are being exposed in our time, and if you can see the lies, be thankful that God had so much mercy on you!

However, it is up to you to be sure you are replacing all lies with Truth! This is not easy! Babylon is a master at deceiving you. Yup, you.

So you must make it a TOP priority to be in the Word daily, and to be in fellowship with other believers. I’m so sure that this is the correct advice that I want you to read Ephesians 4-5, just to check me.

Read and study your Bible daily. Read verse by verse, chapter by chapter. Read quickly, and ask the Ruach to open the eyes of your understanding! Obey what you read.

Fellowship with other believers every Sabbath and feast day (Leviticus 23). “Let us consider one another in order to stir up love and good works, not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some, but exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the Day approaching” (Hebrews 10:25).

Check your life carefully for areas where you’ve fallen for lies. I highly recommend the video, “Battling Lies with Truth,” as well as the handout and other resources you’ll find there.

Stop listening to lies! Be especially wary of lies that come through the air (Revelation 16:13). Stop watching TV, watching the news, hanging out on social media such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and listening to godless music and other forms of entertainment. I recommend this 4-part series on ways to avoid the lying voices.

Keep in mind that your actions online are tracked — and when you use social media (or worse, pornography or other evils online), you are funding these things through the advertising dollars that are paid because you visited their websites. You don’t have to buy anything to support their causes. You just have to click. Stop clicking!

Avoid Every Form of Idolatry

It should go without saying, but since Babylon will be judged for her idolatry, we must be extremely careful to avoid all forms of idolatry as well. Here are some kinds to consider — and yes, it might step on your toes. Be bold! Take the Christmas tree down! Throw out (and even burn) all forms of wickedness.

Stop celebrating holidays that have their source in idolatry. This includes New Year’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Easter, May Day, the equinoxes and solstices, Halloween, and Christmas. I made a video about why to stop celebrating Christmas, and Jim Staley recorded the classic “Truth or Tradition” video over a decade ago.

Stop worshiping on Sunday (the day of the Sun God). The best book I’ve read on this topic is From Sabbath to Sunday, by Samuele Bacchiochi.

Those keeping the biblical feast days of Leviticus 23 should be careful not to let Jewish kabbalah, with roots in idolatry, infiltrate their practices of the feast days. Schalk and Elsa Klee have excellent resources on their website, including on the roots of kabbalah (part 2 here). Will you be celebrating Jewish holidays that are not listed in Scripture, such as Hanukkah or Purim? Read my warnings here!

Get rid of movies, books, and entertainment that have ties to magic and witchcraft. Disney would be a prime example.

Watch for idolatry to creep in through alternative, new-age healthcare practices. Be especially cautious of homepathic remedies, frequency healings, meditation and mindfulness, crystals, etc. Stay away from so-called Torah teachers who entice you into these areas!

Avoid adding to the Scriptures with extra-biblical books (like the so-called books of Enoch or Jasher, gnostic “gospels,” etc.) or teachings that dabble in the occult or evolution or charismatic “miracles.” Beware of “prophetic words” and visions that do not line up with Scripture in every way. The occult is real! Witchcraft, gods, and goddesses are alive in our world, and I’ve seen many Torah-observant friends fall into the never-ending rabbit hole of exploring “mysteries.” Close the books, turn off the videos and podcasts, and stop reading those websites. Satisfy your hunger for truth by reading the Word of God!

Stop Enabling Greedy Merchants

Last time we mentioned the vast slave trade that has shaped the economy of our world. Allow me to quote extensively from Revelation 18:

“The kings of the earth who committed fornication and lived luxuriously with her will weep and lament for her, when they see the smoke of her burning, standing at a distance for fear of her torment, saying, ‘Alas, alas, that great city Babylon, that mighty city! For in one hour your judgment has come.’

“And the merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her, for no one buys their merchandise anymore: merchandise of gold and silver, precious stones and pearls, fine linen and purple, silk and scarlet, every kind of citron wood, every kind of object of ivory, every kind of object of most precious wood, bronze, iron, and marble; and cinnamon and incense, fragrant oil and frankincense, wine and oil, fine flour and wheat, cattle and sheep, horses and chariots, and bodies and souls of men.

“The fruit that your soul longed for has gone from you, and all the things which are rich and splendid have gone from you, and you shall find them no more at all. The merchants of these things, who became rich by her, will stand at a distance for fear of her torment, weeping and wailing, and saying, ‘Alas, alas, that great city that was clothed in fine linen, purple, and scarlet, and adorned with gold and precious stones and pearls! For in one hour such great riches came to nothing.’ Every shipmaster, all who travel by ship, sailors, and as many as trade on the sea, stood at a distance and cried out when they saw the smoke of her burning, saying, ‘What is like this great city?’

“They threw dust on their heads and cried out, weeping and wailing, and saying, ‘Alas, alas, that great city, in which all who had ships on the sea became rich by her wealth! For in one hour she is made desolate.’

“Rejoice over her, O heaven, and you holy apostles and prophets, for God has avenged you on her! Then a mighty angel took up a stone like a great millstone and threw it into the sea, saying, ‘Thus with violence the great city Babylon shall be thrown down, and shall not be found anymore. The sound of harpists, musicians, flutists, and trumpeters shall not be heard in you anymore. No craftsman of any craft shall be found in you anymore, and the sound of a millstone shall not be heard in you anymore. The light of a lamp shall not shine in you anymore, and the voice of bridegroom and bride shall not be heard in you anymore. For your merchants were the great men of the earth, for by your sorcery all the nations were deceived’” (Revelation 18:9-23).

I would have preferred to make the heading to this section, “Stop buying the merchandise of Babylon.” However, I personally don’t know how to do that completely — and I’ve been really pondering it! Indeed, I have been absolutely shocked by what I have learned. Truly, almost every purchase a family makes goes to enable human slavery in some way.

Babylon has made herself wealthy through merchandise, and when she cannot get rich through ordinary means, she has resorted to using the “bodies and souls of men” to increase her profit.

Bodies are sold through the child sacrifice of abortion, where the sale of fetal organs is made to the highest bidder. These are the dead bodies children! This is murder!

The souls (or lives) of humans are merchandised through the sex-trade industry, pornography, through advertising that makes a commodity of the bodies of children and women, to entrapment in the LGBTQ lifestyle, to addictions, to vaccinations filled with abominations, to the human trafficking and slavery that make possible the Nike tennis shoes and Apple iPhones and Microsoft technology (and so much more) that we use every day. This is kidnapping, which carries the death penalty in Torah.

It’s literally everywhere!

These horrific crimes happen so that we can have the stuff — the jewelry, sparkly makeup containing unclean ingredients and mica mined on the backs of young children in dangerous mines, fashionable clothing made in sweat shops in China, fine furniture and building materials (metals like steel, supplies for the developments of new buildings and cities), perfumes and essential oils, luxurious foods, agriculture and factory farming on a massive scale, electric cars and other transportation, and especially the electronics that support the “unclean spirits like frogs” that speak into the airways constantly.

And yeah, China. And a lot of other third-world countries, too. Their inexpensive products get to us by way of the “ships on the sea,” who have become “rich by her wealth.”

I’m not sure how to fix this. Let’s just take the fashion industry. Almost all the clothing in the world is made underpaid workers, often people who are literally enslaved. And even if I could sew all my own clothes, I’m not sure where to even buy the fabric!

So let me share our family’s logic, and please feel free to share your ideas with us in the comments below.

In our home, we have tried to make an action plan based on priorities. We own a business where we sell homeschooling curriculum to families who want to use the Bible as their primary textbook. We use the Internet as our virtual store, rather than needing to have a brick-and-mortar store that can only sell locally. Customers purchase curriculum in the store, and we process their payments through PayPal. We run our web servers through Amazon. We design our curriculum with software by Microsoft and Adobe. We contact customers, schedule appointments, keep track of our study notes, and share files through Google. We advertise through companies like Facebook. These are just some of the “merchants” we depend upon to keep food on our table and be a blessing to other families who want to teach their children from Scripture.

But when we started to look into the business practices of companies like PayPale, Amazon, Microsoft, Adobe, Google, Facebook, and others, we started to realize that a percentage of every purchase made in our “store” was going to fund things like Black Lives Matter and Antifa, abortion and fetal-cell research, forced vaccinations with unclean ingredients and mass sterilization of women in third-world countries, breeches of privacy and censorship of the gospel and truth online, and the use of human slavery to manufacture and ship products, not to mention the dollars supporting pornography, prostitution, and pedophilia, as well as donations to support homosexual groups and even funding for immoral textbooks and curriculum used in schools worldwide.

It was a sickening realization.

Even more so, when we looked at Revelation 18 and see that God is planning to judge the merchants of the earth who support such practices, we began to realize that we needed to “come out of Babylon,” lest we share in her judgment.

Or as I said in my previous post, the “cows” that put food on our table were out in the fields that were about to be hit by a massive hailstorm of judgment. The clouds of judgment are on the horizon, and if we didn’t move to get our cows safely to Goshen, we would suffer the same wrath as “Egypt” — and so would the families depending on us.

We have three children who are in their twenties and have skills in computers, programming, and business, so we all sat down to make a plan to get away from these “merchants.”

Every time a person uses a credit card for a purchase, a transaction fee plus a percentage of the purchase (usually 3%) goes to the credit-card processor. For our company, the processor is PayPal. PayPal holds the entire amount of the purchase for 12-72 hours, investing it worldwide, then they deposit it in our bank (which is also a questionable organization). Since this is one of the largest sums that goes to Babylon from our company, this is our top priority for change. However, it’s not so easy. The entire software that runs our website is built on computer code that only uses PayPal. There is no other option! So we have contacted computer programmers and have started rebuilding our  business websites from the ground up. This is a huge job, and we bless and thank YHVH for the talented people helping us! The new websites are still in the testing phase and are not yet functional, but we hope that it won’t be too many more months before we can launch those sites.

We don’t know that any banking system is perfect, and we suspect that the economy of the entire world could fall when Babylon falls. However, in the meantime, our goal is to stop letting any money that goes through our company be used in wicked investments. We found ECCU, a Christian credit union that funds missionaries and church planters, and while they aren’t Torah-observant, they would still be included in what I would call “Ephraim.” They can process credit-card payments through a company called Cornerstone, so we have asked our software designers to help us incorporate that into the payment gateway.

Our office computers run on Microsoft Windows, so our son is gradually installing Linux Mint for our operating systems instead. It doesn’t look easy to do this, from my non-technical perspective, so he is hoping to make an easy, plug-and-play solution that just about anyone could take and install on their computer. The best part is that Linux operation systems are open source and free! Keep your eye on this website for more information in the future.

Once we are using Linux Mint, we are considering the following software alternatives:

• • Libre Office instead of Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, etc.
  • Scribus instead of Adobe InDesign.
  • Gimp instead of Adobe Photoshop.
  • Darktable instead of Adobe Lightroom.
  • Inkscape instead of Adobe Illustrator.
  • Foxit PDF Editor instead of Adobe PDF Creator.
  • Davinci Resolve instead of Adobe Premiere.
  • Pinegrow instead of Adobe Dreamweaver.
  • Tutanota or Protonmail instead of Google Gmail, Contacts, Calendar, and Tasks.
  • Standard Notes instead of Google Keep.
  • Rumble instead of YouTube.
  • Nextcloud instead of Dropbox.
  • Calibre instead of Amazon Kindle.
  • One Hub instead of Amazon Web Services.
  • These alternatives instead of other Amazon products (please research each)
  • More Ideas to replace Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Amazon (please research each)

And with that, I’m going to stop for today. It’s all a huge, overwhelming, and often daunting task — and we all need to be patient, helpful, encouraging, and filled with grace for each other as we attempt to make this exodus.

What one step can you do today?

I’ll come back with more ideas next week.

Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture in this blog post taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.