The Revelation 17:1 | Episode # 1133

February 18, 2026

Hope Alive: Applying God’s Word to Your Daily Life

The Revelation 17:1

I am Chad Harrison, and I am the teaching pastor of Lake Community Church and had been serving as a pastor for 25 years. I'm also a practicing attorney. This podcast is designed to help you study God's word and find God's will for your life. The purpose of studying scripture is that you might know the character of Jesus Christ, and that you might see the world from the Father's perspective. That you gain wisdom that changes your life. I pray in the name of Jesus right now that God would open His word to you and allow you to see Him and to know Him. To know His will, that you might glorify Him and that you might walk in faith and power each day, especially today. In Jesus name.

If you would like to revisit today’s Bible study, please visit our website at https://hopealive.buzzsprout.com/ to download the transcript. 

If this podcast ministered to you, please subscribe, and leave us a review on Apple podcasts. Reviews help us reach more people and spread the wisdom of God. 

Please follow us:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hopealivewithgod/

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/hopealiveministry/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LakeComChurch/ -Lake Community Church

Transcript

This is Chad Harrison and you're listening to Hope Applying God's word to your daily life.

Hi, this is Chad Harrison and I am the teaching pastor of Lake Community Church and have been serving as a pastor for 25 years.

I'm also a practicing attorney. This podcast is designed to help you study God's word and find God's will for your life.

I pray in the name of Jesus right now that God would open up.

His word to you and allow you.

To see him and to know him and to know his will, that you might glorify him and that you might walk in faith and power each and every day, especially today in Jesus name.

So all the way back to the book of Genesis. And so as we're studying through this,

I want you to realize that as you,

you know, watch TV shows and as you, as you hear people talk about this and that and the other,

that many times you're hearing people talk about something that maybe they don't have a clear understanding of in the sense of they're speculating about things that are actually, you know, have some relevance, have some truth to them.

They just,

they just don't understand how they're, how they fit together spiritually because they don't have the spiritual eyes to see. But we're in Revelation, chapter 17,

and it says, Then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and talked with me,

saying to me,

come,

I will show you the judgment of the great harlot who sits on many waters.

He says, I will come, I'm going to show you the judgment of the great harlot that sits on many waters. Now, as we've gone through the book of the Revelation, you know that, that different chapters and different parts of the Revelation are telling a story.

It's much like one of these large novels that historical novels where you have this storyline going on and then you have that storyline going on and then you have the others.

And sometimes they overlap and sometimes you go from one chapter to the other and it's actually in the timeline. It's exactly right. Sometimes there's a jump back.

This really is, is one of those times where you get a,

A jump back in the sense is going to talk about a, a thing that has been happening ever since Satan tempted Adam and Eve in the garden. Okay? And the effort has always been because Satan desired to be worshiped.

The effort is if he could not get man to worship him directly,

then he tricks mankind into worshiping him indirectly. And we know that human beings worship one of three things we always do, we always will. Everybody does. I say it over and over again.

You either worship God,

the one true God, you worship something he made,

and that includes fallen angels and the devil and all those things,

or it concludes something in your life,

or you worship the pinnacle of God's creation as far as you're concerned, and that is yourself,

okay? And so you worship yourself.

And so Satan has set up what in essence is a pagan idolatry system in which most of the world has been engaged in it.

In fact, it says,

he said to me, come,

I will show you the judgment of the great harlot who sits on many waters. Okay? Now remember, waters or, or, or bodies of water stand for what?

The Gentiles. That's exactly right. So this harlot, she is sitting, which means she is not only ruling over, but she is controlling many nations. And it is a bunch of nations.

Now let me take you back a little bit historically, okay? Because the woman who sits on then this we're going to see in verse 6 is called mystery Babylon or,

or the Babylonian pagan religion of, of history, okay? And, and so, huh,

Somebody asked something,

okay,

he says here,

all right, so all the false worship and occult practices have their origin in Babylon,

okay? In actually the city called Babel where the Tower of Babel existed.

All right?

In the Bible it says Isaiah 47 is a whole chapter, and I'm not going to read it tonight, but Isaiah 47 is a whole chapter of God's judgment of Babylon,

all right?

Now this person, this, this harlot that sits on many waters, it's a, is a singular false religion. But you're going to see that it plays out in a lot of different contexts in a lot of different ways.

In fact, the word Babel, the word Babylon is mentioned in the Bible 290 times.

Did you know that? It's mentioned in the Bible 290 times.

Every time you see it.

Every time you see it, it represents false religion or idolatry, okay? It represents the worship of something other than the one true God.

The land where Babylon was built is called the plains of Shinar.

Now in that part of the world there were two kind of centers of civilization at the very beginning, okay? You had a civilization that grew up in the Nile Delta, in the Nile Valley,

near the Mediterranean Sea. And then you had ancient civilizations that were built up in what we would call today modern day Iraq,

where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers run on the north and the south side, they run parallel down to the Persian Gulf, okay? In that river valley,

near the bottom of the valley,

near the mouth of those two rivers where they pour into the Persian Gulf, within 100 miles, a little north of there is the ancient city of Babel,

which ultimately became Babylon. Okay?

It's not a city. Now,

there may be people that live there, maybe a small village or something like that, but it's not a city or a town, but the ancient ruins are there.

The ancient city of Babylon exists to the extent that the Muslims have allowed it to exist because they tend to destroy everything that doesn't have to do with Islam in the areas that they take over, okay?

So if you have a fundamentalist Islamic regime that takes over an area, they're going.

They're going to kill the Christians, they're going to kill the Jews, or they're going to drive them out and they're going to destroy everything that has to do with anything that they perceive not to be Islam.

And so a lot of these places,

if they're not deep under the ground,

they've been destroyed and they've been torn apart. Okay?

The place is.

Was founded by a man named. And I talked about this last week, a man named Nimrod, okay? In fact, we use that word to mean somebody who's a. What,

not very smart? That's exactly right. Okay. Well, that's actually.

It is a terrible misstatement of who Nimrod was. Nimrod was the grandson,

or the great grandson of Noah.

He was the grandson of. Of Cush,

okay? Cush being one of the sons of Noah and his grandson. He was the son of Cush. He was the grandson of Ham.

He's grandson of Ham, okay? And so he. The Bible says of him,

and this is in Genesis, chapter 10,

that he was a great hunter before God.

And that word in the Hebrew means a hunter of men,

which means he was a great killer of human beings, okay? In fact,

in as far as the early Mesopotamian civilization,

the civilization that existed in what is modern day Iraq,

he was the founder of that,

okay? And he was.

He was a killer.

He was a murderer. He. He was. He was. He was a. He was a. He was an authoritarian king who destroyed anybody who did not live by his will.

All right?

Nimrod founded Babel.

And after the Tower of Babel,

the first place of false worship. And I told y' all that the Tower of Babel, many people think it was this round tower that they tried to build to heaven, right?

That's not what the Hebrew says. The Hebrew says that they built this tower to the Heavens,

meaning it was really tall,

okay? Now, if they had shown up to New York City or if they'd gone to Dubai or a place like that, they would have said that those towers reached to heaven, okay?

Or reached to the heavens, which means they were super, super tall, all right? But the reason the Tower of Babel, the reason scripture tells us that the Tower of Babel was built,

and that's found in chapter 10, I think, also, or either chapter 8,

is so that they could make. Now, don't you hear me? So that they could make a name for themselves.

Now, I want you to think about that.

Remember, name represents who you are and your character. And they wanted to make.

Nimrod wanted to make a great name for himself,

okay? Which means he wanted to be what?

Worshiped. He wanted to be worshiped, all right?

Like I said, we either worship something God made,

we worship God himself, or we worship ourselves.

Nimrod wanted to be worshiped by him for himself.

The Towers of Ziggurat,

which is a.

It is. It is like a pyramid, except it's built to actually live in, okay?

All right? And if y' all Google ziggurats, you'll see that it's. It's a city wall that is that. That. That slopes down, and then on top of it is usually a palace or a place for people to dwell.

Now, they built this ziggurat really, really tall, really, really high to make a great name for themselves,

for everyone in the world.

Now, you got to remember, this is not too long after Noah.

So there's not a lot of people in the world,

okay? This is only a few,

a few hundred years after Noah. Now,

there was a good bit, but not a tremendous amount of people in the world.

It says that.

Now, we understand that this Ziggurat was made to worship the stars.

So you have this pagan idolatry which is also linked to. And I want you to hear me,

astrology,

okay? Now, there's a difference between the two.

Astronomy is the study of the heavenly bodies,

the planets, the stars, the galaxies, all the things that you can see now that we've got these neat telescopes, all the things you can see from those telescopes. It's a study of that.

Astrology is the effort to study the stars so that you can tell the future from the stars,

okay? Now, I want you to listen to me.

God created everything, and everything that he made,

okay,

comes from Him.

Now,

I believe this.

I believe that there is something to trying to figure out the future by studying the stars,

because I believe God wrote His creation in the stars.

Now,

how much you know about that, you could only get from somebody who was there when it was made.

Which means the only people you're going to get that from are fallen angels,

okay?

So you're not going to get the proper view of those things.

God says, don't do that.

In fact,

he calls that witchcraft. He says, have nothing to do with it. Not only does he say, have nothing to do with it, there's a reason for that. You go, well, if it's true that you could actually know some things by studying the stars,

why does God tell us not to study the stars?

Because what you could learn from studying the stars, you can get from Him.

You don't need the stars to do that. Why would you try to get knowledge of God from His creation when you can go to Him Himself?

Does that make sense? Just because the Bible says that what may be known about God, and it says this in Romans 1, what may known about God, his divine qualities,

his eternal nature can be clearly seen in that which he made.

But that's not telling us that we should go to creation and try to find out, find God.

He's saying, you're without excuse if you say that there is no God because it's obvious that there is one.

Okay?

But he doesn't want you.

He doesn't want you to seek him out.

He don't want you to seek him out in what he made. He wants.

He wants you to seek him out in His Son,

in his full revelation, the complete revelation of God, which is found in Jesus Christ and which is expressed to us in human language form in the word of God.

Are y' all following me?

The Bible is the verbal expression,

the written expression of the Son,

who is the fullness of God.

All right?

He is the fullness of God.

And so they worship the stars and they sought to divine out the future by worshiping the stars. God says, don't do that.

Okay?

And not only did they do that,

well, they started a world religion, all right?

By the way, in the Bible, when the Bible talks about they tore down the high places,

those are places on top of mountains where they would worship stars and they would build things on top of those mountains or those high places in order to study the stars.

By the way,

those places are all over the world.

Those places are all over the world.

They're ziggurats.

They're astroph,

okay?

They are.

They are. There are these things that look like the Washington Monument,

okay?

Which, by the way, I hate to tell you, is a straight up pagan symbol.

Okay. It's straight. It's. It's studying the stars.

Okay.

All right.

As you go today, I pray that.

The Lord will bless you and keep you, that he'll make his face to shine upon you, and that he will give you hope and peace today in Jesus name.