The Merchandise of Babylon

The book of Revelation gives us this invitation to us in these last days: “Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils…. Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues” (Revelation 18:2, 4).  We have a similar invitation in the Doctrine and Covenants: “Go ye out from Babylon. Be ye clean that bear the vessels of the Lord.”  The Lord repeated again, “Go ye out of Babylon; gather ye out from among the nations, from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.”  And in case we missed it, in the same revelation the Lord said a third time, “Go ye out from among the nations, even from Babylon, from the midst of wickedness, which is spiritual Babylon” (Doctrine and Covenants 133:5,7,14).  Clearly the Lord’s call to us is to leave the wickedness of the world, the symbolic Babylon of today.

So how do we leave Babylon?  I think this same chapter in Revelation gives us one way in which we may be attached to her.  One of the words repeated several times in this chapter about Babylon is merchant or some form of it.  We read of Babylon: “The merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies.”  When Babylon falls, “the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her; for no man buyeth their merchandise any more: The merchandise of gold, and silver, and precious stones, and of pearls, and fine linen, and purple…” and the list goes on of all sorts of things that make up the merchandise of Babylon.  John recorded further that “the merchants of these things, which were made rich by her, shall stand afar off for the fear of her torment, weeping and wailing, And saying, Alas, alas, that great city, that was clothed in fine linen, and purple, and scarlet, and decked with gold, and precious stones, and pearls!”  Babylon’s “merchants [are] the great men of the earth” but they are filled with sorry when their trust in merchandise fails and Babylon is destroyed (v3, 11-12, 15-16, 23).  Thus we see that a large focus of Babylon is the things of the world, all that merchandise that can be bought with money but which will in the end perish with that great symbolic city.  The focus of those in Babylon is stuff, items that can be purchased, the modern idols that constitute ones possessions and seen by the world as valuable. 

            To leave Babylon, then, I believe we have to overcome our attachment to this merchandise of the world.  Of course we have to live in the world and use to some extend these things in daily activities, but we have to be careful not to let them become the primary thing that we seek after.  The angel described to the prophet Nephi, who also saw the same vision as John, of the great and abominable church (another representation of Babylon) that “the gold, and the silver, and the silks, and the scarlets, and the fine-twined linen, and the precious clothing” are its “desires” (1 Nephi 13:8).  When this stuff of our world today—the clothes, the phones, the gadgets, the cars, the houses, the movies, and all the rest—represents our desires above the things of God, then Babylon may still have a great hold upon us.  We must learn like Enos to instead “rejoice” in the “truth which is in Christ… above that of the world” (Enos 1:26).