Dreaming of Babylon

It has been about fifteen years since a large number of books on the topic of Babylon were published, and the church, lacking the necessary discernment, ate them up like a starving man would a steak dinner.
Men with the spiritual insight, and foresight of a house cat went on and on about how the now recently departed Saddam Hussein was rebuilding Babylon, brick by agonizing brick, how soon it would be a central hub for global commerce, and how we still had plenty of time because well, Babylon wasn't done rebuilding yet.
I would travel with my grandfather, since I was his translator, and I could see the people shutting down every time Babylon was mentioned. They enjoyed his testimony, of how God saved him from the electric chair, they even applauded when he spoke of angels, but mention Babylon, and you could feel the spiritual yawn, and read the thoughts scrawling through their minds: "Poor Romanian, he missed the boat on that one, Babylon is being rebuilt by Saddam, and he's decades away from completing it. Surely we can put off repentance a little while longer."
I bit my tongue until it bled trying to stay loving, and understanding while reading the letters coming in saying, "see, there is a perfectly good explanation for the Babylon of Revelation chapter 18, they're rebuilding it as we speak, see, it's not America."
One would think the dreams of Babylon would have died at the end of the hangman's noose, but on the contrary, they have been revived. We've been in Iraq for over four years now, and not one picture of the newly rebuilt, remodeled, and refurbished Babylon. That's not stopping the men full of zeal but absent of discernment from rehashing what was already proven to be false, and saying "there's still time, they still have to rebuild it, they still have to rebuild Babylon."
What will it take for Christendom to face the reality of the prophetic? What will it take for this nation to realize that the Babylon of which Revelation speaks is not Iraq? Perhaps it will take a woman being ensconced in the seat of power, sitting as a queen to cause some to draw certain parallels between Babylon and America, but even then, there will be those who will say, "surely it can't be, they're rebuilding the old Babylon, and they'll flood the desert too, so that it matches the description of the Babylon which the book of Jeremiah speaks of, wherein it is surrounded by many waters."
We need to wake up before it's too late. We need to wake up and stop dreaming of Babylon, open our eyes and see that we're living in it.
So many refuse to acknowledge that America is mentioned in the Bible, because the nation the Bible describes is not a righteous nation, filled with noble souls, but a nation that has become a habitation of demons, a nation who's sins have reached to heaven, a nation whose iniquities God remembers.
As much as we love this nation, we cannot allow patriotism to blind us to reality. We must acknowledge the fact that a once great nation has fallen into disrepair, sin, and depravity, that the righteous weep, the evil revel, and truth is summarily executed every day for the sake of political correctness.
It is easy for some to live in the nostalgia of what we once were, but if we hope to redeem the time, we must awaken to the reality of what we have become. Dark days are coming upon this land, days of death and mourning and famine, because we have rejected truth, we have dismissed and undervalued salvation, righteousness, and Christ himself.
The Babylon that was, is no more, nor will it ever again arise from the ashes to become a power, or a global marketplace wherein every merchant of the earth can sell his goods. A new Babylon has arisen, one in whom God saw great promise and potential when it first began, a young nation by any standard who has risen to the status of sole superpower, but somewhere along the way it made the fatal mistake of abandoning the God who made her great, of trusting in her own strength, and of embracing death rather than life.
The cracks are starting to show, they are becoming evident like the wrinkles of a middle aged woman who can't cover them up, no matter how much foundation and makeup she applies. You can't hold a nation together with Elmer's glue and rubber bands. Eventually, it comes undone, eventually the rubber bands snap, and the churning waters that have been building will leave a dark swath of chaos and destruction once the dam breaks. At the end of the day, one thing is certain, we have brought this upon ourselves.
There is a refuge and a place of safety in the midst of all that is to come, and that is Jesus. Yes, I know, that was an obvious and simple statement, but truth is usually obvious and simple isn't it?

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea Jr.