Introduction to the book "Babylon is the USA"

When I was a junior in High School in 1976, I had a friend I played basketball with.   He invited me to go to Sunday school with him.   At that time, I was part of the debate team in my High School.   I didn’t know anything about Christianity, so I decided to begin researching Christianity as I would a debate case.   I started to go the Sunday school, but simply to learn.   I was interested in three areas of Christianity.   First, I studied evidences for the resurrection of Jesus.   Second, I studied fulfilled prophecy; scriptures that predicted the coming messiah.   And finally, I studied creation versus evolution issues.   After several months, I became intellectually convinced that Jesus did indeed rise from the dead.

So one afternoon, while reading a popular commentary of the book of Revelation by Hal Lindsey “There’s a New World Coming”, I prayed to receive Jesus as my savior.   I was alone expecting some great religious experience, but I didn’t experience anything.   Still I knew my commitment was true and I had a mental vision.   It was like Jesus was there and I fell down and grabbed the edge of his robe.   And I said, “I don’t care if you give me a religious experience, but I am going to go wherever you drag me”.   As a new Christian, I continued to study.   In the area of Biblical prophecy, one of my favorite authors was Arthur E. Bloomfield.   His books were very engaging with pretty charts.   He seemed to have novel ideas that other Christian authors did not have.   He postulated a 10 year tribulation period.   More importantly, he stated that were no parenthetical chapters in the book of Revelation.   The common evangelical view of the book of Revelation has it filled with parenthetical (out of time sequence) chapters.   This makes the book chaotic to read in terms of a timeline.

The other major influence in my view of Biblical prophecy I encountered many years later.   Marvin Rosenthal wrote a sort of mid-tribulation rapture book called “The Pre-wrath Rapture of the Church” published in 1990.   He eloquently presents an argument for the rapture preceding the Day of the Lord.   But working within a seven year tribulation framework, he was forced to place the rapture about four years into tribulation, after the midpoint.   By stretching the end-times to 10 years (or longer), the rapture can now be located at the start of the seventieth week of Daniel.   I consider my view to be a mix of Bloomfield’s 10 year tribulation and Revelation timeframe with Rosenthal’s pre-wrath rapture.

A few years ago, I attended a men’s bible study. We would study different Bible books, chapter by chapter.   After studying the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis, we decided to study the book of Revelation.   This decision gave me the opportunity to return to the study of biblical prophecy.

So, after many years, I have returned to my first love; biblical prophecy.   This study has led me to some startling conclusions.   Most Christians are looking for rise of the antichrist and the mark of the beast, but that is not what we should be concerned with.

Instead, we should be focused on identifying the mystery city/nation Babylon.   The antichrist will be a politician, and politicians can rise and fall quickly.   But city/nations are not like politicians, city/nations take generations to rise or fall in prominence in the modern world.   The USA has been a world power for over 150 years.   Over ten percent of the book of Revelation deals with a great end-times Gentile city/nation.   It is my contention that this future city/nation did not exist when the book of Revelation was written.   Furthermore, the author John did not know the real name of the city/nation in Aramaic or Greek, so he called it by a descriptive name that matched its characteristics.   He called it “Babylon the Great”.

If we truly believe in the imminent return of Jesus, then this city/nation exists today.   For Babylon the Great will be the sole superpower in the world at the start of the end-times.   Nation boundaries have been remarkably stable for the last seventy years; since the end of World War II.   Putin’s annexation of Crimea and his current land war in Ukraine is the largest attempt to change European nation boundaries by military conquest in my lifetime.   If our Lord Jesus returns in the next decade, then surely Babylon the Great is the United States of America.