Flee Babylon

One invitation that is repeated a few times in scripture is to flee Babylon.  The prophet Isaiah wrote these words that Nephi also quoted, “Go ye forth of Babylon, flee ye from the Chaldeans, with a voice of singing declare ye, tell this, utter to the end of the earth; say ye: The Lord hath redeemed his servant Jacob” (1 Nephi 20:20).  We have a similar message from Zechariah: “Deliver thyself, O Zion, that dwellest with the daughter of Babylon” (Zechariah 2:7).  Jeremiah put it this way: “Flee out of the midst of Babylon, and deliver every man his soul: be not cut off in her iniquity” (Jeremiah 51:6).  In modern scripture the Lord said, “Go ye out from Babylon. Be ye clean that bear the vessels of the Lord….  Yea, verily I say unto you again, the time has come when the voice of the Lord is unto you: Go ye out of Babylon; gather ye out from among the nations, from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other….  Go ye out from among the nations, even from Babylon, from the midst of wickedness, which is spiritual Babylon” (D&C 133:5, 7, 14).  If the Lord would tell us three times in the same section to go out from Babylon as His parting message in the Doctrine and Covenants (this section is the Lord’s appendix), then surely it has great importance to us.

               The Bible Dictionary records that Babylon was originally Babel in the land of Shinar, the city where the tower to get to heaven was built.  Later Babylon became the capital of Nebuchadnezzar and was “an enormous city” where “the walls were 56 miles in circumference, 335 feet high, and 85 feet wide.”  According to Wikipedia, Babylon was “the largest city in the world” for a time and had a population of over 200,000.  Isaiah gave us a sense of the pride of Babylon in the chapter on the “burden of Babylon.”  He spoke saying, “I will cause the arrogancy of the proud to cease, and will lay low the haughtiness of the terrible (Isaiah 13:1, 11).  Thus Babylon seems to represent the pride and haughtiness and vanity of the world.  Surely that’s what is symbolized by the tower that the people thought they could “build a tower sufficiently high that they might get to heaven” (Helaman 6:28).  They thought that on their own they could get themselves to God’s dwelling place, and in a similar vein Babylon of old was full of pride and believed itself to be indestructible.  But as the Bible Dictionary states, “the splendor” of “the Babylonian empire was nothing more than a short epilogue to that of Assyria… and in 538 Babylon fell almost without a struggle before Cyrus.”  Babylon was full of pomp and glory and even destroyed Jerusalem, but as Isaiah said, “Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldees’ excellency, [was] as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah” (Isaiah 13:19).  Despite its seemingly incredible strength and 7-foot thick walls, it was destroyed and the place today where it was remains essentially desolate.     

             The real Babylon fell because of its pride, and the warning to us is that the world and its wickedness will likewise follow suite in the last days.  In His preface to the Doctrine and Covenants the Lord told us, “They seek not the Lord to establish his righteousness, but every man walketh in his own way, and after the image of his own god, whose image is in the likeness of the world, and whose substance is that of an idol, which waxeth old and shall perish in Babylon, even Babylon the great, which shall fall” (D&C 1:16).  So fleeing Babylon for us then is to escape the wickedness and pride of the world.  Babylon today seems to be essentially the same as the great and spacious building which represented “the world and the wisdom thereof” and the “vain imaginations and the pride of the children of men” (1 Nephi 11:35, 12:18).  Ultimately we know that the wicked in modern-day Babylon will be destroyed: “I will burn them up, for I am the Lord of Hosts; and I will not spare any that remain in Babylon” (D&C 64:24).  It will be said of both ancient and modern Babylon: “And he answered and said, Babylon is fallen, is fallen; and all the graven images of her gods he hath broken unto the ground” (Isaiah 21:9).  No matter how high her towers or how thick her walls or how great and spacious her buildings, we must flee from “spiritual Babylon” by through living righteously before the Lord.  As the hymn instructs us, we must bid farewell to Babylon and go to “the mountains of Ephraim to dwell.”