"When Rome Became Babylon"
Babel, or Babylon was built by Nimrod. Gen.10 v.8-10. It was the seat of the first great apostasy. Here the "Babylonian Cult" was invented, a system claiming to possess the highest wisdom and to reveal the divinest secrets. Before a member could be initiated he had to "confess" to the Priest. The Priest then had him in his power. This is the secret of the power of the Priests of the Roman Catholic Church today. Once admitted into this order men were no longer Babylonians, Assyrians, or Egyptians, but members of a Mystical Brotherhood over whom was placed a Pontiff or "High Priest," whose word was law. The city of Babylon continued to be the seat of Satan until the fall of the Babylonian and Medo-Persian Empires, when he shifted his Capitol to Pergamos in Asia Minor, where it was in John's day. (Rev. 2 v.12-13)
When Attalus, the Pontiff and King of Pergamos, died in 133 BC, he bequested the Headship of the "Babylonian Priesthood" to Rome. When the Etruscans came to Italy from Lydia (the region of Pergamos), they brought with them the Babylonian religion and rites. They set up a Pontiff who was head of the Priesthood. Later the Romans accepted this Pontiff as their civil ruler.
Julius Caesar was made Pontiff of the Etruscan Order in 74 BC. In 63 BC he was made "Supreme Pontiff" of the "Babylonian Order," thus becoming heir to the rights and titles of Attalus, Pontiff of Pergamos, who had made Rome his heir by will. Thus the first Roman Emperor became the Head of the "Babylonian Priesthood", and Rome the successor of Babylon.
The Emperors of Rome continued to exercise the office of "Supreme Pontiff" until 366 AD, through the influence of the monks of Mt. Carmel, a college of Babylonian religion originally founded by the priests of Jezebel. So in 378 AD the Head of the "Babylonian Order" became the Ruler of the "Roman Church." Thus Satan united Rome and Babylon in one religious system.
What is the will of God in regard to the Babylonian system? That she be annihilated. I am not suggesting that Christians attack her and seek to exterminate her, states Tim LaHaye. Instead, our responsibility is to "come out from them and be separate, says the Lord. ‘Touch no unclean thing'" (2 Cor. 6 v.17), leaving her destruction to God, who will use the ten kings of the Tribulation period as His agents.
The true Church of Jesus Christ must not sink into the pitfall of the religious phobia of our day, which is "religious unity." I am reminded of a statement I once heard attributed to Charles Haddon Spurgeon, that "you cannot have unity without forsaking truth, and to forsake truth for the sake of unity is to betray Jesus Christ." May God help us to be faithful to Him in these last days.
Every false religion in the world can be traced back to Babylon. Even before its citizens tried to build the Tower of Babel, Satan had made that city his headquarters and introduced idolatry, the first secret societies, and many of the religious practices that continue to the present day. These eventually appeared as the foundational teachings for Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Gaia worship, and a host of other cultic systems summed up in the Bible as "Mystery Babylon".
Gaia is the name of the ancient Greek goddess of the Earth, and as a name it was recently revived to refer to the hypothesis formed by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, who postulate that the whole biosphere may be alive in that the Earth's life forms are themselves responsible for regulating the conditions that make life on the planet possible.
David Spangler recently was invited to a worship service and celebration in which Gaia was specifically incorporated as a source of spiritual nourishment and help. In ritual and song, the participants called upon the "Spirit of Gaia" to heighten their awareness of their connections with the earth and to fill them with love and compassion for all creatures and for the physical environment as a whole.
If Babylon is the mother of all false religions and Jerusalem is the mother of true faith (since Jesus Christ was crucified, buried, and resurrected there), then Rome is the mother of an unholy mixture of the two. One of the things that impress tourists visiting Rome is its incredible religious history. It existed long before the Romans rose to power and today displays the ruins of many pagan religions, all of them received from Babylon. By the time Paul and other Christians got to Rome, the city had become not only the capital of a world empire, thus the center of civilization and the most important city in the world, but also the center of pagan "Mystery Babylon" religion. Satan had moved his spiritual headquarters from Babylon to Rome even before the birth of Christ.
When Constantine made his "confession of faith" in the 4th century, (if indeed that is what it was), he turned over to the Christian leaders the temples of the pagans that, according to the official tour books of Rome, included: The Greek divinities, Athena, that had become Minerva, Ares became Mars, Aphrodite became Venus. Apollo retained its Greek name, thus the Greek god of mythology became the Roman Olympus. The temple of Isis, straight from Babylon, was there, along with the Egyptian Campus Martius, many oriental divinities including Mithras, the Persian God of the Sun.