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النشر الإلكتروني

EVIDENCE FROM SCRIPTURE RESPECT

ING THE FUTURITY OF THE FINAL
JUDGMENTS ON BABYLON.

THERE are few names from which we more instinctively shrink than that of BABEL or BABYLON. The very occasion of the name was an act of God's judgment upon evil. And it is so connected with the history of human iniquity; the locality which it designates has been so fearfully marked as a place of manifestation-manifestation of evil on the part of man and of judgment on the part of God, that it stands peculiarly as a memorial of proud ungodliness met by the visitation of righteous vengeance from above. Whensoever Babylon is mentioned in the Scripture, its name is a symbol of concentrated iniquity. Evil may and does exist in scattered elements everywhere. But there are occasions on which God permits its concentration. He may allow it to be concentrated either in individual men or in places. Babylon is one of the places which exhibits such concentration: and as God marks the history of Babylon in His Word, and reveals the special form in which evil will be there exhibited, and how He

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will in judgment deal therewith, we learn the more easily the lesson He intends to teach. The pattern is, as it were, before our eyes, and we discern more simply the ways of Satan, and the ways of God.

The earliest mention of Babel in the Scripture is in connection with the name of him who first after the flood attained to greatness in the earth-greatNimrod was the grandson of called forth his father's curse.

ness apart from God.

Ham, whose sin had

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"The sons of Ham," it is said, were Cush . . . and Cush begat Nimrod: he began to be a mighty one in the earth. He was a mighty hunter before the Lord: wherefore, it is said, Even as Nimrod the mighty hunter before the Lord. And the beginning of his kingdom was BABEL, IN THE LAND OF SHINAR." (Gen. x. 7-10.) Thus mightiness in the earth and commencement of kingly rule are first mentioned in connection with one, the seat of whose power was Babylon and the land of Shinar. Nimrod Nebuchadnezzar - Antichrist, are, as we shall see, the three great names connected with that region and with that city.

Immediately after this, the land of Shinar is again mentioned as the place where men first united in confederate action against God. God had commanded diffusion. He willed that they should spread over the earth. But they preferred to settle and to centralize. They wished to make themselves a name, and disliked, as they said, " being scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth." "And

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