I heard the story of a little boy who liked to visit his grandparents. One of his favorite things about his grandparents’ house was a beautiful antique grandfather clock. He loved to hear it chime on the hour. In fact, his favorite time of day was noon, when the clock would chime and chime and chime.

One day he was in the living room, playing on the floor with his toys, when noon arrived. The little guy stopped playing to listen to the clock and count its chimes.

One, two, three, four, five, six . . . the boy counted each chime.

Seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve . . .

But then, the clock kept on chiming.

Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen.

The clock chimed sixteen times. Evidently something had gone wrong with the old clock’s inner mechanism, but the little boy didn’t understand that.

He ran into the kitchen where his grandmother was making lunch and said, “Grandma! It’s later than it has ever been before!”

In his book on Revelation, the late Adrian Rogers wrote, “I believe that the shadows of the end of the age are lengthening, the sands of time are running low, and we are standing on the threshold of the second coming of Jesus Christ and the rapture of the church.”

As we noted early on in this book, the purpose of the book of Revelation is not to conceal, it is to reveal. In fact, the very word revelation means the unveiling. God wants to unveil and make understandable to us the images that are before us in this final book of the Bible.

Babylon is a picture of man’s kingdom on earth. In many ways Babylon is what we might call a code word in the Bible, representing something more than its name. For instance, when we say “Madison Avenue,” we are not talking so much about a particular street in New York City. We’re speaking more about advertising executives or publicity or promotion. When we use the word Hollywood, we aren’t necessarily talking about the actual city of Hollywood. We’re speaking about the movie industry as a whole. It’s the same when we say “Wall Street.” There really is an actual Wall Street in New York City, but for the most part we’re speaking of commerce or the stock market.

The Tower of Babel is a classic example of man trying to reach God rather than acknowledging that God has reached down to man. Man trying to reach God . .

Babylon was the beginning of humanism. Though the Lord told the people to spread out, instead they pulled together to worship—not God, but themselves. They wanted to be unified in a global community.

I love how the text in Genesis says that God “came down” to see the city (see Genesis 11:5). He came down. It’s as though He had to stoop very low to even see it. It’s like when a little child speaks to you, and you squat down or bend over to look him or her in the eyes and listen.

A better analogy might be a bunch of ants laboring away at an inch-high ant hill. That’s how that so-called mighty tower appeared in Heaven’s perspective. It was as though God said, “I’m going to have to go down there to the plain of Shinar, get on My hands and knees, and take out my magnifying glass so I can check out this thing you guys have been working on!”

This false religion might be very appealing to a wide swath of people, but it is also deadly. G. K. Chesterton said, “People think that when they do not believe in God they believe in nothing, but the fact is they will believe in anything.” That is true, and in the Tribulation period, this one world religion takes the form of a great prostitute draped in red.