The Woman Who Rides The Beast

 

I was leading a Bible study once many years ago and we were looking at Revelation and I read this passage,

“17 The seventh angel poured out his bowl into the air, and a loud voice came out of the temple, from the throne, saying, “It is done!” 18 And there were flashes of lightning, rumblings, peals of thunder, and a great earthquake such as there had never been since man was on the earth, so great was that earthquake. 19 The great city was split into three parts, and the cities of the nations fell, and God remembered Babylon the great, to make her drain the cup of the wine of the fury of his wrath. 20 And every island fled away, and no mountains were to be found. 21 And great hailstones, about one hundred pounds each, fell from heaven on people; and they cursed God for the plague of the hail, because the plague was so severe.

1 Then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and said to me, “Come, I will show you the judgment of the great prostitute who is seated on many waters, 2 with whom the kings of the earth have committed sexual immorality, and with the wine of whose sexual immorality the dwellers on earth have become drunk.” 3 And he carried me away in the Spirit into a wilderness, and I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was full of blasphemous names, and it had seven heads and ten horns. 4 The woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet, and adorned with gold and jewels and pearls, holding in her hand a golden cup full of abominations and the impurities of her sexual immorality. 5 And on her forehead was written a name of mystery: “Babylon the great, mother of prostitutes and of earth's abominations.” 6 And I saw the woman, drunk with the blood of the saints, the blood of the martyrs of Jesus” (Rev. 16:17-17:6).

I asked the Bible study who they thought this woman, the great grostitute, was and what does her description sound like? One woman in the Bible study said something interesting, she said, “It sounds like feminism to me.” I found this interesting. Many people think this is the Catholic Church, or Rome, or Apostate Israel (I am in the third category myself), and this is what people generally say. The most common answer is the Catholic Church amongst Baptists and Pentecostals, for obvious reasons.

At first I thought she was joking and then she explained her position a little better, and I sat back and thought, I can see that. I don’t think it is the full picture, because there are many other things said about this city that need to be accounted. But I can’t help but think there is something in the fact that the Bible uses a woman to represent this false religious force.

Many people think that the Bible does not explicitly address feminism very much, but this is far from the truth. We know all the ways it counters it by emphasizing Patriarchy, but its references go beyond even this. Many times we see reference in the Bible to Baals and Asherahs. The Asherahs are a reference to the totem pole worship, and the worship of the feminine consort of Baal, Asherah, who was a chief deity among the Sidonians (Phoenicians). Jezebel was famously a proponent of Asherah, and the Baals. In the Sidonian mythology Asherah had usurped the power of El, the true chief God of the Sidonians and replaced him on the throne with Baal, who is clearly a form of the devil. The feminist undertones of this false religion are obvious. It is, therefore, not surprising that the chief proponent of this religion in the Bible, Jezebel, would usurp the authority of her husband’s throne and replace the worship of El Shaddai, or God Almighty, with this usurper Baal, or Molech. Ahab failed to contain his wife, though he was not the first man to do this.

Adam too, failed to contain his wife. When Eve was speaking to the devil all that Adam needed to do was tell the devil to be gone, and then explain to his wife again why eating of the apple was a dangerous sin. But instead he stood silent and ate of the fruit that she gave him. What is fascinating is that one of the most ancient symbols of the religion of Asherah is a woman standing next to a tree, holding a piece of fruit and offering it to the man, or to a king, sometimes with even a serpent wrapped around the tree. This religion obviously harkens back to the sin that Eve committed with the devil, and that is why Paul references this in 1 Timthy 2 about women teaching in the church. It's an ancient biblical thread rebuking what we today call feminism, or egalitarianism. 

So, the association with the harlot, the adulterous woman, whether literally in the sense of sexuality, or metaphorically in the sense of idolatry, is an ancient theme in the Scriptures and goes back to the very sin recorded in Genesis 3. Though it must be stated that in Genesis 3 this was immorality in the sense of idolatry, not sexually, however, in the ancient world these became intertwined after some time. It stands to reason, then, that this same sin would have something to do with the final representation of evil in the world, the Mystery Babylon of Revelation 16-18. It stands to reason that there is some connection with the Harlot and the Apostate Israel, or Apostate Church, or Apostate religion of Revelation 18. It is hard not to see feminism as at least a branch of this evil, and therefore where we see it influencing the church we should be very concerned, because this sinful force brings with it great danger. A danger that is warned about again and again in the Scriptures.