After these things I saw another angel coming down from heaven, having great authority, and the earth was illumined with his glory. And he cried out with a mighty voice, saying, "Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great! She has become a dwelling place of demons and a prison of every unclean spirit, and a prison of every unclean and hateful bird. "For all the nations have drunk of the wine of the passion of her immorality, and the kings of the earth have committed acts of immorality with her, and the merchants of the earth have become rich by the wealth of her sensuality." I heard another voice from heaven, saying, "Come out of her, my people, so that you will not participate in her sins and receive of her plagues; for her sins have piled up as high as heaven, and God has remembered her iniquities.

(Rev 18:1-5)

Very few of us have had the benefit of learning the Sabbath and the special type of Christianity that this group shares growing up.  Most of us have had to learn it after figuring out what we had been taught growing up (or indoctrinated with, if you prefer) and what most Christians teach/believe is a little off of the mark, so to speak.

Those of you who have grown up in this lifestyle probably have had to come to grips with it as well as you have heard and experienced other beliefs from your friends.  My kids are pretty young and we are already getting questions about why we don’t do stuff that others do.  Hopefully some of you will share your experiences with the little ones and give them hints on how to cope with the inevitable awkward instances that they will experience.

Today’s message is mostly for those who have had to make the choice to change - the folks who used to be in mainstream churches, figured out we’d been steered wrong, and then had to start the process of separating the wheat from the chaff.  Those of you who are second or third generation Sabbatarians have a different perspective - you started from this foundation and then had to choose to stay.  I think choosing to stay out of Babylon is different from having to choose to come out of Babylon.

So what is it that draws people to this way of life?  How does it start?  Well, most often it is doctrine.  I read the Bible looking for stuff that I had learned growing up and didn’t find it.  Then I started researching historical material to find out what happened – how did we get here from there.

I recently made a pen-pal friend from Hungary by way of my website.  This gentleman grew up under communist rule and was by all accounts an atheist.  As he tells it, atheism was pretty much the state religion and he had been taught that Jesus was a fraud from a very young age.  The angle that the state took to show Jesus was a fraud was that they taught the books prophesying Jesus had been written after Jesus’ lifetime.  At some point, however, he got hold of a book regarding the Dead Sea Scrolls.  In this book, the author proved that the scrolls were indeed much older than Christ and it was at this point that my new friend says his atheism became uncertain.  He also mentioned that the Soviet and Hungarian censors must have been sleeping when that book came through their offices.

A few years after this, the wall had fallen and my friend was in a Sunday keeping church.  This church refused to Baptize him because he had questions about Friday/Sunday – you know, three days and three nights.  They could not answer his questions and he even wrote to the governing body, as he puts it, who told him to just keep reading their material and wait.  The poor guy stayed in this church for 5 more years after this.

In his telling, he mentions that the clergy in this church “could not be persuaded”.  Like almost always happens with folks like us, the student becomes the teacher (or the tail tries to wag the dog, if you will).  I remember sitting in church classes listening to the dogma being explained and then I had a question…. And then another, and then another.  Apparently the same thing happened to my Hungarian pen-pal.

Now, my friend, whose pen-name, is Atila, has written a book entitled “Palm Wednesday” about 3 days and 3 nights.  [HOLD UP A COPY].  It has only been published in Hungarian and it due out in English hopefully something this year, which is why the plastic is still on it!  He is absolutely convinced the traditional Friday/Sunday formula is flawed and he did a whole lot of research to come up with a very precise time of Jesus’ death and resurrection.  Just like a lot of us who find out the truth, he wanted or rather NEEDED to tell as many people as possible about such a very important truth.

The way I came to meet Atila is quite interesting.  One day I received an email about my website in reference to the 3 days and 3 nights page.  The author offered to send me an essay he had written that not only proves 3 days and 3 nights instead of Friday/Sunday, but also uses scripture to prove Jesus’ age, the day He was born, and other details.  I replied, “sure, I’ll read your essay”.  And I did.  It was a little hard to find the time, but being a guy who spends a lot of time writing theological essays and putting them out there for others to read, I figured I should probably give this guy the same courtesy that I hope others give me and take a little bit of my own medicine.  You never know when God may try to tell you something.

Guess what?  He had sent his essay to 10 people in the same manner that he sent it to me and I was the only person to not only read it, but to reply to it on its merits.  The only one.  The others either wrote back that they had no time to read it or they called him some kind of derogatory name.  I was the only person to take him seriously.

This is a very nice affirmation, I must say.  Many of us have fought against biases and prejudices and such in our path.  Lots of people like to use any old excuse to write off people who live outside of the mainstream of Christianity.  Along the way, I have tried to NOT become one of those people.  I believe that it is impossible for us to know who God is going to use to communicate with us.  And in this one small instance, I proved to myself that I was able to persevere on this point.  I gave a guy some respect.  I treated my neighbor as I would like to be treated.

And here I have arrived at my point today:  How to help people who have heard the call to come out of Babylon.

Mainstream Christianity has a lot of smooth yet complex answers for questions about why they do what they do.  These guys know the Bible very well and can cut and paste scriptures together that make what they teach sound very scriptural and very convincing.  And when the competing denominations actually agree on a point, they have no trouble piling on the dissenters.  The enemy of my enemy is my friend, so the saying goes.  

But when the dissenters come from their pews, it kind of confounds them.  When I asked him why the church hall was decked out with crosses and had a giant painting of a phony Jesus in the foyer, the Pastor who had given me a copy of “The Two Babylons” to help me sort out the wheat from the chaff told me that “well, Chris, sometimes when we come out of Babylon, we have to be careful and not upset things too much” or something to that effect.

The image of Christianity that is presented to most people is very attractive. There are various systems that are mostly similar from my perspective.  Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, and the new-age mega-churches all share most of their key doctrines.  Sunday, Christmas, Easter, the Trinity, dead people not really being dead but “looking down on us” from heaven, hierarchal government that requires tithing even while teaching (erroneously) that there is no more law, etc., etc.  I believe this image that is presented to us may very well be the harlot of Revelation.  Let’s look at this harlot:

Then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and spoke with me, saying, "Come here, I will show you the judgment of the great harlot who sits on many waters, with whom the kings of the earth committed acts of immorality, and those who dwell on the earth were made drunk with the wine of her immorality."

(Rev 17:1-2)

And he *said to me, "The waters which you saw where the harlot sits, are peoples and multitudes and nations and tongues.

(Rev 17:15)

This harlot of the end times sits on many waters which represent, many, many people of different cultures.

Now, flip over to Judges, but don’t lose your place in Revelation:

Yet they (Israel) did not listen to their judges, for they played the harlot after other gods and bowed themselves down to them. They turned aside quickly from the way in which their fathers had walked in obeying the commandments of the LORD; they did not do as their fathers.

(Jdg 2:17)

Throughout the Old Testament, the word ‘harlotry’ is used when the Israelites or Judah, or anyone for that matter, who was supposed to be a believer in the One True God, went after false gods or mixed the worship of the false gods with the worship of the True. 

This is the ultimate and unfortunate reality of modern day Christianity.  It is a system of Babylon or harlotry or syncretism.  Syncretism means the amalgamation (or blending) of different religions, cultures, or schools of thought.  Babylon is a word used to describe confusion because it was at the Tower of Babel where God confused men’s languages and scattered the people across the world.  God is not the author of confusion even though he did that.  The author of confusion, yes, of course, is Satan, which is why the present state of Christianity is so mixed up.  Harlotry or “the whore” is used to indicate a false church or a false religion.  We know this from various scriptures, but mostly because it is the opposite of Paul’s goal at 2 Cor 11:1-2.

I wish that you would bear with me in a little foolishness; but indeed you are bearing with me. For I am jealous for you with a godly jealousy; for I betrothed you to one husband, so that to Christ I might present you as a pure virgin.

(2Co 11:1-2)

Paul is analogizing the pure first century church as a Bride for Christ and he wants to present this Bride as a virgin, unspoiled by the sins of the world.

Let’s look back to Revelation 18, where I started this all off and pick it up at verse 6:

"Pay her back even as she has paid, and give back to her double according to her deeds; in the cup which she has mixed, mix twice as much for her. "To the degree that she glorified herself and lived sensuously, to the same degree give her torment and mourning; for she says in her heart, 'I SIT as A QUEEN AND I AM NOT A WIDOW, and will never see mourning.' "For this reason in one day her plagues will come, pestilence and mourning and famine, and she will be burned up with fire; for the Lord God who judges her is strong. "And the kings of the earth, who committed acts of immorality and lived sensuously with her, will weep and lament over her when they see the smoke of her burning, standing at a distance because of the fear of her torment, saying, 'Woe, woe, the great city, Babylon, the strong city! For in one hour your judgment has come.'

(Rev 18:6-10)

It seems pretty easy to figure out that the harlot and Babylon are referring the same person or system in Revelation 18.  A system of confusion and spiritual harlotry that Jesus is going to call His people out of….. or He is doing it now and has been doing it in every era since the ascension of our LORD.

What is absolutely amazing and miraculous is that NOTHING can stop the call from being made.  Jesus will be heard.  A man who was meant to be called to service living behind the Iron Curtain, isolated from almost all freedom – certainly religious freedom, gets the call.  And he starts down a path.  A path that most, if not all of us, are on.

The only place where the call can be stopped is at the hearer.  The hearer can refuse it, the hearer can decide that the ways of this world are more appealing than the ways of the LORD.  The hearer can decide that the information the LORD has presented to them is not that important.  But the call has to come from Jesus, and it does, often.

Our challenge is to be here, to be visible, and to be ready to receive those who are called out.  It is a tough path that we are on, and if you recall the beginning of your journey it was probably very, very tough, at least it was for me.  The perfect system of Christianity that many of us had been taught had a chink in the armor.  Whether it was the Sabbath, Christmas, the Holy Days, the Trinity, 3 days and 3 nights, governance, or whatever it was, we started to pick at that chink in the armor.  And it fell off.  So we picked at the next chink and, uh-oh, that one was loose, too.  Before I knew it, I was left with just a pile raw material.  Then I had to make a choice that I bet some of you did, too.  Put it back together according to God’s blueprints or discard it.  I personally felt alone and I bet that happens a lot.  Much like my friend from Hungary contacted me, I found a friend through the internet who helped me along.  His name is Wayne and he has a website, much like mine.  He didn’t try to indoctrinate me or anything and he listened to my rants – even though he had come to those same conclusions years prior.  He provided me with some non-denominational research materials and, the more I learned, the more I became convinced that I was on the right path.  My family and friends wanted nothing to do with my new found knowledge, and I needed a new family.  As if on the Spirit’s cue, Wayne met Rick and Paula at one of the Feast of Tabernacles meetings and he told me by email that I should try their church.  Well, the rest is history.  But the point of my telling this testimonial again (oh, and I am sure I will tell it again and again) is that I’m now playing the part of Wayne.  The cycle continues.  And the more I live this life, the more I am blessed to see the Spirit work in people and see Jesus call His people out, and the more I understand what Jesus said at Matthew 12:48-50.

But Jesus answered the one who was telling Him and said, "Who is My mother and who are My brothers?" And stretching out His hand toward His disciples, He said, "Behold My mother and My brothers! "For whoever does the will of My Father who is in heaven, he is My brother and sister and mother."

(Mat 12:48-50)