The Fall of Babylon

Introduction

Good morning. What a blessing it is to be here. I feel so uplifted uh right now. Uh such wonderful songs that Brother Walcott led us in, and the earlier song service uh was so uplifting. And I’m so thankful to be here, so thankful to see you all who are here. And I’m thankful to be among you. You know, I’m not your pastor. You know that, right? Pastor is what we have in our elders. And we have four of those elder and pastor are the same thing. I’m not a pastor, I’m a sheep. Just like you. And we can be sheep together. I just happen to have the opportunity to stand before you and to preach to you. But I’m humbled to be here and humbled to be part of this flock.

I want to talk to you today about fulfilled prophecy, the fall of Babylon. Our faith is challenged at every hand. The Bible is challenged at every turn. And we live in a world of skepticism where people want to challenge everything. And so we need to, as 1 Peter 315 says, sanctify the Lord God in your hearts and always be ready to give a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear. And not only that, but we also need to be assured in and of ourselves and have confidence that our most holy faith that we have in God and in the Bible and in the Son of God is true. And one way that we can help to bolster our faith is by the study of evidences.

1. Prophecy Comes From God, Not Men

And one line of evidence is that is particularly potent is that of fulfilled prophecy. And this prophecy of the fall of Babylon is to me one of the most powerful examples that we could study of fulfilled prophecy. Peter said in 2 Peter chapter 1, at the very end of that chapter, knowing this first, that no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation. For prophecy never came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit. Well, that passage is telling us is that prophecy comes from God, it does not come from men. And that passage is sometimes misunderstood. Verse 20 is sometimes applied to mean that look, there’s only one interpretation of the Bible, and so it’s not about your interpretation versus someone else’s.

It’s about what is the true interpretation, because uh no prophecy of scripture is of any private interpretation. Well, I agree with the point being made, but that’s not what that passage is teaching us. What that passage is making the point is that when God spoke through men, that that was not a matter of their own private interpretation of what’s going to happen, or their own giving of forth of the word of the Lord. It wasn’t private in that sense. You see, it was from God who poured forth the Holy Spirit upon those apostles and prophets who gave us the words that we read in the Bible. In Isaiah 41, beginning in verse 21, God through the prophet Isaiah is challenging the Israelites to present their case of why they would choose to believe in idols, why they would think that these idols are real.

You see, this is the time of the divided kingdom, when Isaiah was prophesying, a time of terrible idolatry. And so we have reading there beginning in verse 21 of chapter 41. Present your case, says the Lord. Bring forth your strong reasons, says the King of Jacob. Let them bring forth and show us what will happen, talking about their gods. Let them show the former things what they were, that we may consider them and know the latter end of them. Or declare to us things to come. Show the things that are to come hereafter, that we may know that you are gods. Yes, do good or do evil, that we may be dismayed, and see it together. Indeed, you are nothing, and your work is nothing. He who chooses you is an abomination.

And so, if you want to choose to believe in these gods and that these gods are real, then all right, let them tell us something. Anything. Let them do something. Let them tell us something that’s happened in the past. Or in the future. You know, the Bible does both of those. Moses is the first author of books written in the Bible. He wrote the first five books in the Old Testament. So Moses wrote about the origin of the universe. And he wrote about Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel and Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, writing as it were history that happened hundreds of years beforehand. That’s because he was guided by the Holy Spirit. And we also have in Scripture prophecies of things that would be future.

Well, you and I can’t know the future. We can make educated guesses. But God knows the future, and only God can. And so this is a claim to deity that is being made here by Jehovah God. In chapter 44, in verses 6 through 8, thus says the Lord the King of Israel and his Redeemer, the Lord of hosts, I am the first and I am the last. Besides me, there is no God. And who can proclaim as I do? Then let him declare it and set it in order for me, since I appointed the ancient people, and the things that are coming and shall come. Let them show these to them. Do not be afraid. I mean, do not fear nor be afraid. Have I not told you that from have I not told you from that time and declared it?

2. A Prophecy of Cyrus by Name

You are my witnesses. Is there a God besides me? Indeed there is no other rock. I know not one. Again, God is saying, I am the one and only God, because I can tell you the things that will come to pass. It’s a claim to deity. And of course we know that that one rock, Jehovah, is the only God and his son, Jesus Christ. Now the fall of Babylon is one prophecy that is made in Isaiah, that is to me, it is a living testament of fulfilled prophecy. It is uh the ruins of Babylon are really uh a living proof of the fact that that prophecy is fulfilled. It’s very powerful. Now I wanted to point something else out here in Isaiah, where I am. At the end of Isaiah, in chapter uh forty-four, at the end of that chapter in verse twenty eight, who says, Of Cyrus, he is my shepherd, and he shall perform all my pleasures, saying to Jerusalem you shall be built, and to the temple your foundation shall be laid.

Verse one of the next chapter, thus saith the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have held to subdue nations before him, and loose the armor of kings to open before him the double door, so that the gates will not be shut. This is a prophecy of a man who is going to come on the scene and was going to really order the rebuilding for Jerusalem, was going to bring about the return from the captivity, and this would be a king whose name is given here, Cyrus. And this is around 200 years before that man comes on the scene, and his name is given in this passage. We’re going to talk more about him. That’s why I wanted to point that out. That would be a study in and of itself, what we just looked at.

3. Babylon Was a Magnificent City

But we want to focus on the fall of Babylon that also came by the hand of Cyrus. Now, the Babylonian Empire was the world empire after Assyria. And as you see on the map here, it took a large portion of land in what is now the Middle East.

Now, to show you a modern map and where that land would be that Babylon once took, once took over and occupied, it would be modern-day Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, part of Saudi Arabia, part of a very small part of Egypt and of Iran and of Turkey. And you also have Cyprus there. So that’s a pretty good portion of land. We’re talking here about the Neo-Babylonian Empire. This is the empire that was in charge during the days of Daniel. Okay. Now, as you see Babylon there again on the Euphrates River, somewhat close to Baghdad, which is on the Tigris River, modern Baghdad. Of course, it wasn’t there back in that day. Now, the Babylonian Empire was the world empire for only about 87 years. It was an empire long before that, but this Neo-Babylonian Empire was the world empire for about 87 years from 626 to 539 BC.

The capital of this empire was, as we just saw, the city of Babylon. And it was a magnificent city. It was beautiful. You remember in Daniel 4 of Nebuchadnezzar, who is walking around looking at his royal palace, and he says, Is not this great Babylon that I have built for a royal dwelling by my mighty power and for the honor of my majesty. In Isaiah 13, 19, Babylon is called the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldean’s pride. To give you an example of how magnificent this city was, I want to show you some different images. This is a model of the procession street and the Ishtar Gate, which was the eighth gate to the inner city of Babylon. If you can picture that. Imagine that.

The eighth. The processional way was gorgeous. It was lined with walls showing about 120 lions, bulls, dragons, and flowers on enameled yellow and black glazed bricks. And the gate itself was pretty spectacular. It was covered in lapis lazuli, a precious, a semi precious stone that would have gleamed with this beautiful blue color. This that you see right now is a reconstruction of the Ishtar gate, of the smaller portion of the Ishtar Gate. And this is today located in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. And as you can see, there are portions of this that are original to what was in Babylon. And then there are new parts, new bricks to fill in the gaps and so forth, as you have the reconstruction there. If you can think about the fact that Nebuchadnezzar is the one who had these built.

This existed there in the days of Daniel. He lived most of his life in Babylon. I think there’s very little doubt that he probably would have seen these very gates. As I said, that’s only the smaller portion of the gates. In this picture, you see in the back part there the much larger portion.

And so, if you can just picture this. This eighth gate. I wonder what all the other ones looked like into the inner city. The city itself must have been beyond imagination. It was a modern marvel in that day. And within that city, there were, of course, the Hanging Gardens, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. We don’t know a lot about the hanging gardens. We know that it was some sort of a tiered garden with water that was pumped up to these plants. I don’t know what it looked like. Nobody does, but it must have been a sight to behold. This is an artistic rendering of what it may have looked something like. Or maybe something like this. That’s just an example of what a magnificent city Babylon was.

4. The Prophecy of the Fall of Babylon

Now, we have two prophecies of the fall of this great city and of the fall of the empire itself. One of them is in Jeremiah 50 and 51. That’s a pretty long reading. I do encourage you to read it. We’ll find a lot of things that we’re going to find in Isaiah, but we’re not going to be turning there to Jeremiah today. I’ll refer to it some later. We’re going to be focusing more on a portion of this prophecy from Isaiah 13 and 14. Now, Isaiah did his prophetic work from about 730 BC to about 690 BC. I know that well because Greg and I are having a class with Mr. Bob on Isaiah that has lasted all year. And he drills us on these things over and over, so they they will never leave my mind.

This prophecy of the fall of Babylon. Now, if you remember from earlier, I told you of when Babylon became a world power, and that was in about that was in 626. So that’s about a hundred years after this, before Babylon is even going to become a world power. And then not quite a hundred years from then that Babylon was going to have its fall. So we’re looking here at a prophecy of the fall of Babylon, which is going to happen in a little shorter than 190 years in the future. It’s pretty amazing. Now, we’re going to read starting in verse 17 of chapter 13. So go to Isaiah chapter 13, and we’re going to read beginning in verse 17 through the end of that chapter. This is going to be the focus of the text that we look at today.

Behold, I will stir up the meads against them who will not regard silver. And as for gold, they will not delight in it. Also their bows will dash the young men to pieces, and they will have no pity on the fruit of the womb. Their eyes will not spare children. And Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldeans’ pride, will be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah. It will never be inhabited, nor will it be settled from generation to generation, nor will the Arabian pitch tents there, nor will the shepherds make their sheepfolds there. But wild beasts of the desert will dwell there, and their houses will be full of owls, ostriches will dwell there, and wild goats will caper there. The hyenas will howl in their citadels, and jackals in their pleasant palaces.

Her time is near to come, and her days will not be prolonged. So, to kind of summarize that, we see that Babylon would be defeated by the Medes. And as we’re going to see, it was the Medo-Persian Empire led by Cyrus that would bring forth that defeat. Babylon’s overthrow would be as Sodom and Gomorrah. Now that doesn’t mean it would be destroyed in the same fashion, because Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed with fire and brimstone from heaven. But it would be such that it would not be inhabited again. That was the similarity. And that’s the next point that we see that Babylon would never be inhabited again. Now this is pretty fantastic. This was very unique, unusual. Because what would normally happen for an ancient city that was cleared out?

I mean, it would be cleared out by war, or maybe there was famine or a drought, or uh some kind of natural disaster like an earthquake. And so the town is sort of emptied. Well, then the next uh group of people that come in, the next civilization that comes and takes over that land, um, takes ownership of it, they typically are gonna just clear what’s there and build on top of it, and then when that civilization is gone, the next one comes and builds on top of it, and you have eventually this tail, this mound. And so you might find sometimes 20 or more civilizations just built one on top of the other, just like that. That’s what was done in those days. So it’s very unusual that Babylon, this great city, was said to never be inhabited again.

That would not be expected at all. That would be a very bold thing for Isaiah to say if he were not led by the Holy Spirit. How would he be able to guess that this city would never be inhabited again? And if it did not happen as he said, then he would be proven to be a false prophet. The Arab would not pitch his tent there, and shepherds would not pasture their sheep there. Uh Harold Jenkins, who has done extensive uh research and and done a lot of visiting to the Bible lands and so forth. Um, he visited Babylon in 1970 or 71. And uh he said that the locals there have some sort of uh, might you call it superstition or whatever it might be.

They won’t drive their sheep there. They just don’t do it. And he heard people talking about how uh there was someone who wanted to just uh shoot some footage of someone driving their sheep there or having a sheepfold there in the ancient city of Babylon and it couldn’t be done. People were unwilling to do that. And some of that’s kind of mysterious of why that happens. But the Bible says it will never be inhabited again. The Bible says that the Arab would not pitch his tent there, and the shepherds would not pasture their sheep there. That’s pretty amazing. Wild animals would inhabit the city and sort of take over those royal palaces. It’s interesting. It doesn’t say that the city itself is going to be devastated and destroyed.

5. The Fulfillment of This Magnificent Prophecy

The royal palaces are still going to be there. The animals are going to be dwelling in them. So we’ll see if that came true. Now let’s take a look at the fulfillment of this magnificent prophecy. We’re going to just trace through history what happened in the ancient city of Babylon. Cyrus the Great, the king of Persia, Medo-Persia. He captured Babylon in year 539 BC, ending the captivity and ushering the return of the remnant that would go back to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple and rebuild the city. But he uh Cyrus did not make Babylon uh the capital. Now we have the story in Daniel 5 recorded. You remember Belshazzar. He uh he was the king of Babylon, but actually he wasn’t the king of Babylon. His father, Nabonidus, was the king.

And uh his father was not there. His father was away a lot. And so his son Belshazzar was acting as king. And you remember that he’s having this drunken feast and using the vessels from the house of the Lord. And then suddenly there’s this hand that appears and begins writing on the wall. And that Belshazzar says, if somebody can interpret this, then I’ll make him third ruler in the kingdom. People have wondered about that. But we understand that Belshazzar was only second in charge, because really his father, Nabonidus, was king. So what was the next position to offer? Third. Now all that isn’t explained in the scripture there. But we know from history what the explanation is. And so Daniel interprets the writing. And the basic interpretation is the kingdom’s going to fall to the Medes and the Persians, and that very nigh that happened.

And so we have a record historically in the Cyrus cylinder. This chronicle that the cylinder records that is only about nine inches long, so this thing is tiny. And it gives the praise to the Babylonian god Marduk. Where it says that Marduk had Cyrus enter without fighting or battle right into Shuana, which is Babylon. He saved his city Babylon from hardship. He handed over to him Nabonidus, the king who did not fear him. So there wasn’t much of resistance, according to this chronicle here. In the writings of Herodotus, who was a Greek historian, sometime near uh just just after the time of Cyrus. He talks about how Cyrus took his armies and diverted one of the canals of the Euphrates River that ran right under the city.

And because this was a walled city, it’s not easy to get in there. So by diverting these waters, the army could go right under the walls and come right in unawares, and the people inside the walls were just sitting ducks. That would certainly corroborate with the Cyrus cylinder or with Daniel 5. Modern scholars have a lot of doubt about Herodotus’ writings, but it certainly lines up with what we’re reading there. Well, we move forward some. Persia falls to Greece, led by Alexander the Great, this great Grecian Empire. And Alexander the Great really wanted to, he wanted to rebuild Babylon. He wanted to make it a new commercial capital. He saw it as a gateway to the east, a gateway to the Orient, the Orients. And so he wanted to do that.

But he died in 323 BC in Babylon before he could realize his dreams with Babylon. Well, God said the city will never be inhabited in again from generation to generation. Even Alexander the Great would not be able to do something that God said would not be able to happen. Alexander’s successor, Antiochus I, made the capital of that region, Seleucia, which is located on the Tigris River and is, oh, it’s less than 100 miles from Babylon. And so Babylon was ignored and passed over. And what happens when you ignore a place long enough? Animals start to come in, corruption of the actual land and of the actual buildings would take place. The Parthians settled there in 124 BC, but far from reinhabiting it in the sense of the prophecy.

The last mention of Babylon in any inscription was 10 BC. And then the land is just neglected. For over 1900 years, and we get to the time of the early 1900s when German excavators opened the site to tourism. And this was little more than making it a state park. It was a tourist attraction. In 1983, Saddam Hussein began to reconstruct the city. The president of Iraq. He saw himself as the successor of Nebuchadnezzar himself. I mean, you think about that ancient Babylon was the world power. That ancient Babylon defeated Israel. And that’s uh that’s exactly what Saddam Hussein wanted to see himself doing. So this was a very symbolic act to rebuild the city of Babylon. So he started to. And some work was done. You see this building here that was somewhat rebuilt.

You look all around it, what do you see? A bunch of dirt. The city was far from rebuilt. A few things were rebuilt. But you see, Saddam Hussein could not do something that God said could not be done. Today, Babylon is an uninhabited, unrebuilt wasteland. It is a heap of ruins. Show you just a couple of pictures. Now, keep in mind that any pictures you see of any of these structures in ancient Babylon were things that were under the dirt and had to be dug up. And when you look at them, it’s still just kind of a pile of rubble of what was at one time magnificent. I don’t know where the hanging gardens were, but this picture was supposedly a picture of the remnants of the hanging gardens.

6. When God Says Something, We Can Bank on It

Nobody can know that for sure. But what is one of the seven wonders of the ancient world that at one time was such so grand and mighty and magnificent? Wherever it is, it’s just a pile of rubble now. This is what you might see when you go to Babylon. This is the first sight that Pharaoh Jenkins saw when he went there back in 70 or 71, and he took a picture of this. It’s not the whole city, but what better catching could you have for this than Jeremiah 51, 37, and Babylon will become a heap of ruins. Now, what does this mean for you and for me? Well, it means that when God says something, then that something is going to take place. When God says something is going to happen, we can bank on it.

It’s going to happen. This is just one example. And when we can see it just once, that’s impressive enough. But when you see it over and over again, you can see it in the prophecy of other nations. You can see it of Tyre. You can see it of Nineveh, which interestingly, on that in Zephaniah 2, it says that the flocks will lie down in Nineveh. But we know that shepherds would not leave their flocks in Babylon, because that’s what God said. Very specific. You can look at Daniel 2 at the rise and fall of the nations that would come in the years to follow after Babylon. All the way to Rome. You can look at prophecies of the establishment of the church that were made all throughout the Old Testament.

You can look at prophecies in the New Testament of the falling away that would come. You can look at prophecies of the Messiah. In the last evidences class that we did on Wednesday.

But all of those were fulfilled in one man, Jesus Christ. His virgin birth, the place of his birth, where he would do his work, the manner of his work, the manner of his life, the manner of his death, his own resurrection. How could anyone have known all of that would be fulfilled in one man? How could one man fulfill all that without being the Messiah, the Son of God? That’s just another line of evidence we could look at in this whole study of fulfilled prophecy. And so what we need to rest assured of is the fact that when God says something is still yet to come, that we can know that it will happen. Now, the Bible says that Jesus is going to return. That there is going to be a resurrection of both the righteous and the wicked, the righteous to a resurrection of life, and the wicked to a resurrection of condemnation.

That there is going to be the destruction of the heavens and the earth, this whole universe with great fire, the elements will melt with fervent heat. There’s going to be the judgment of this world, and then there is going to be the eternal era. Someone says, but there’s no evidence of that stuff. There’s no evidence of heaven. There’s no evidence of hell. But there is evidence that the God, the things that God has said to come to pass that have happened. There is plenty of evidence that those things have happened. So we can rest assured that the things that are still yet future will be fulfilled. Our God can be relied upon. He can be trusted in. Thus says the Lord the King of Israel and his Redeemer, the Lord of hosts.

I am the first and I am the last. Besides me, there is no God. And who can proclaim as I do? Then let him declare it and set it in order for me, since I appointed the ancient people, and the things that are coming and shall come. Let them show these to them. Do not fear nor be afraid. Have I not told you from that time and declared it? You are my witnesses. Is there a God besides me? Indeed, there is no other rock. I know not one. We can stand with confidence that there is a God and that He has taken part in the history of mankind. He has interfered with the affairs of man. And he has revealed Himself to us. And the most visible way that He has revealed Himself to us is in His Son Jesus Christ, who showed us what God in the flesh is like.

Conclusion

Hope this lesson has been helpful in building up building to your faith. If you’re not a Christian, I encourage you to become one today, to submit to that one and only rock that is Jehovah and His Son, who is the chief cornerstone that was rejected by the builders. And to become a Christian. You can do that today by believing in the Lord, repenting of your sins, confessing his name, and being baptized. Continuing to follow all the commands of Jesus until the day you die. And in the end, you will be saved by the grace of God, through his mercy, and by the power and the regeneration of the Holy Spirit. Would you like to become a Christian today? Would you like to be saved? I hope that you will come as we stand and sing the song of invitation.