9/11 terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui is said to have smiled broadly when prosecutors in his sentencing trial yesterday showed film clips of the World Trade Center’s collapse.

During a morning break in the trial, he shouted, "Burn in the U.S.A."

According to Islam, the United States is the “Great Satan.” They have God on their side and we have Satan.

Of course, this kind of thinking is just a small shadow of the reality coming in the tribulation period when the Antichrist deceives the whole world into believing he’s God and Jesus Christ is the devil.

In this time period, the rebuilt city of Babylon (inside present-day Iraq) will once again be a mighty world power and Satan, as the Assyrian Antichrist, will take it as his seat of power, or the capital of his kingdom, just as God chooses for Himself Jerusalem, centering the whole of the skirmish for Planet Earth on these two cities!

“It really will be the Tale of Two Cities—the city of Babylon and the city of Jerusalem,” says my pastor, Richard Jordan (Shorewood Bible Church, Rolling Meadows, Ill.), in a study he gave sometime around Sept. 11. “Those two cities are key to understanding what the Scriptures have to say about God’s outworking of His purpose and the focal point in the ‘last days’. ”

The land of the ancient city of Babylon is site of the modern city of Hilla, Iraq, which is 40-50 miles south of Baghdad and on the Euphrates River. Its name was changed back around the 10^th century.

Now, one of the ongoing problems in understanding the Bible’s prophecy regarding future Babylon is the insistence upon making it a mystical city that represents Rome and the Roman Catholic system.

“You’ll hear that constantly,” says Jordan, “and it’s almost a standard accepted thing that Rome is Babylon and Babylon is Rome—in fact, so much so that in I Peter 5:13, when Peter talks about the church in Babylon, the standard interpretation seems to be that he’s really talking about Rome.

“If he had wanted to say Rome, he would have said Rome. If he said Babylon, he meant Babylon. It’s fascinating that Rome is never mentioned in the Scripture in any of these connections, but it’s always Babylon.

“. . . I can understand, you see, why they want to make it Rome. Because there Rome is today as the modern manifestation of Baal worship.”

The reality is there is both a “mystery Babylon” and a literal city of Babylon in the Bible. References to the literal city can be found, in part, in Rev. 14:8, Rev. 16:19 and Rev. 18.

In Rev. 17, John reports on mystical Babylon, “And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication:

“And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.

“And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus: and when I saw her, I wondered with great admiration.”

As Jordan explains, “That mystery Babylon is the religious system that we know in the Bible as Baal worship. It goes all the way back to Nimrod. Baal worship has specific characteristics (Jer. 7, Jer. 44), and you can go out in the world today and identify the modern-day manifestations of it. . . It’s no mistake and it’s no accident that you can go down the street here in Chicago and come by the Queen of Heaven Church and go to (worship houses) around this area and have people praying to the Queen of Heaven and bowing down to statues and calling it a representation of the Queen of Heaven. It’s that religious system.”

In Isa. 47:5, Babylon is called “the lady of kingdoms,” and she’s the mother of harlots who goes out and prostitutes all of the cities of the earth. But that doesn’t eliminate the literal Babylon, which will actually be the headquarters for mystery Babylon, the religious system, in the “last days”.

While theologians refer to Rome and/or the European Common Market as playing into the “last days” prophecy, the ten nations through whom the Antichrist gains his ascendancy are in Palestine. They’re in the Mediterranean, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Persia, and that part of the world, not in Europe. There are no Europeans at all!

Theologians get the idea Babylon will never be rebuilt from Isa. 13:19, which reads, “And Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldees' excellency, shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah.”

Bt as we know from history, ancient Babylon wasn’t destroyed suddenly, it just sort of wasted away and fell into oblivion and disrepair.

The Bible says in three different places (Jer. 49:18 and Jer. 50:40 are the other two verses) that when God overthrows Babylon, it will be like when He overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah. Obviously this predicted overthrow hasn’t yet been fulfilled.

“When God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, he didn’t just let them gradually disintegrate into nothing,” explains Jordan, “He rained fire and brimstone down and got them in one day, and when they went down, they went down in absolute flaming destruction.

“Notice from Jer. 51: 62, Babylon’s going to be desolate, inhabitable. All these passages say, ‘Ain’t nobody gonna live here anymore.’ God’s going to wipe this thing out suddenly in a moment of time and it’s just going to be gone. Babylon is just going to sink down into the earth and never rise again.” (Rev. 18:21)

In the Millennial Kingdom, when Jesus Christ reigns on the planet from Jerusalem, the area of destroyed Babylon will literally be a shaft that runs from the surface of the earth down into hell itself, and the people of this time are going to be able to walk up to it, look down into it and see the damned of the ages held in it.

“Isaiah 66 talks about how they go to Jerusalem and worship, and they travel across the dessert to Babylon and look down into that pit where Babylon has sunk in the fiery indignation of God, and it will be a monument throughout the Kingdom of God’s attitude and judgment against sin and idolatry,” says Jordan. “The place where the first idolatry took place, and where the last apostasy took place, is judged and made a monument against God’s judgment against that kind of apostasy. You see anything like that over there now? No. That’s what Christ is talking about in Mark 9 when he says Gehenna.”

It is precisely because we currently live in the dispensation of the mystery, as laid out by the Apostle Paul, that the prophetic program is not working itself out today. After the Rapture, the prophetic clock will again begin ticking.

“We live in a mystery age and that’s why Babylon has gone into a ‘mystery’ form,” explains Jordan. “The reason you find Babylon disconnected from its literal city form, the city-state, is because God changed the program and has gone into a mystery form.

“Satan knows what God’s doing and he works his program to counterfeit and attack what God’s doing. So when God’s program went into a mystery form, Satan took his program of opposition and moved it into a mystery system that doesn’t have an outward form to it, and that’s where ‘mystery Babylon the great, the mother of harlots,’ comes from. “That’s why it’s that way in Revelation when it wasn’t that way back in the Old Testament, because God’s changed the program, and in the ‘last days,’ Satan brings his two things back together and makes that literal city the seat of the mystical Babylon.”

The final overthrow of Babylon is repeatedly synchronized in prophetic Scripture with the restoration of the nation Israel by God into her kingdom. In Jeremiah 50, for example, the description of Babylon’s future destruction is connected with the fact God’s going to bring Jerusalem back and establish it as His city. As God destroys Babylon, He Himself comes to reside in Jerusalem.

To know just what kind of dominant world power Babylon will become, many insights can be found in Rev. 18. Verse 3 says, “The merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies.” Verse 9 says the kings of the earth have “lived deliciously with her.”

“And the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her; for no man buyeth their merchandise any more,” reads the chapter starting in verse 11. “The merchandise of gold, and silver, and precious stones, and of pearls, and fine linen, and purple, and silk, and scarlet, and all thyine wood, and all manner vessels of ivory, and all manner vessels of most precious wood, and of brass, and iron, and marble,

“And cinnamon, and odours, and ointments, and frankincense, and wine, and oil, and fine flour, and wheat, and beasts, and sheep, and horses, and chariots, and slaves, and souls of men.

“And the fruits that thy soul lusted after are departed from thee, and all things which were dainty and goodly are departed from thee, and thou shalt find them no more at all.

“The merchants of these things, which were made rich by her, shall stand afar off for the fear of her torment, weeping and wailing,

“And saying, Alas, alas, that great city, that was clothed in fine linen, and purple, and scarlet, and decked with gold, and precious stones, and pearls!

“For in one hour so great riches is come to nought. And every shipmaster, and all the company in ships, and sailors, and as many as trade by sea, stood afar off,

“And cried when they saw the smoke of her burning, saying, What city is like unto this great city!

“And they cast dust on their heads, and cried, weeping and wailing, saying, Alas, alas, that great city, wherein were made rich all that had ships in the sea by reason of her costliness! for in one hour is she made desolate.”

Obviously, Babylon’s going to have concourse with the kings of the world and be a mega-political power and commercial center that pumps wealth into the earth.

As Jordan summarizes, “The first worldwide apostasy (Gen.10) started from there, and the last one centers up there. You name it, they got it. They’ve got everything from gold to the souls of men.”