The merchants of the earth shall bewail her, and lament for her.
The fall of the corrupt in human life
Wrong, including all that is morally evil ill human thought, feeling, and action is constantly falling. Though it has a very slow death, it will by the eternal law of moral disintegration be one day brought down.
I. The lamentation of the bad.
1. The ruling class. True kinghood is the majesty of intellect and goodness.
2. The mercantile class. When the grand altruistic truth of Christian socialism becomes realised by the masses--“Let no man seek his own, but every man another’s wealth”--then the every-man-for-himself principle will fall, and with its fall what will become of the enormous possessions which they have obtained merely by working for themselves?
II. The jubilation of the good.
1. Because the fall is just. Evil has no right to exist.
2. Because the fall is beneficent. It is the uprooting of those thorns and thistles and noxious weeds that have turned the paradise of our being into a howling wilderness.
3. Because the fall is complete. Destroyed once, it is destroyed for ever. (D. Thomas,D. D.)
The commercial Babylon
1. We should first of all learn that the hold of God on all that we have and are is absolute. We are but tenants-at-will. The proud and conceited talk as if the world were ours--“My river is my own, and I have made it for myself”--is an abomination to the Lord. God has never waived His rights in entrusting to us His loans. Let merchants, stockbrokers, bankers, bondholders, traders learn this lesson. At any moment God may bring all our possessions to nought; and He will do that at His own time, not waiting for ours.
2. It may well yield us matter for lamentation that the use of so much earthly capital is a perverted one. Many of God’s gifts are put in alliance with overreaching, corruption, and fraud. But when things of wealth and beauty become the instruments of apostacy it is sad indeed.
3. Let us learn to look at whatever is beautiful and costly and artistic as precious in the truest sense only as it is allied to or in harmony with righteousness. Beauty and wealth are only of genuine value when employed in accordance with God’s will and Word.
4. Let us take care that, so far as we are concerned, we have no share in this heart-apostacy of Babylon the great, even in the commercial world. The voice cries now, “Come out of her, my people” (Isa_48:20; Isa_52:11; Jer_1:8; Jer_51:6; Jer_51:45; 2Co_6:14-17). If we would not share her plagues we must not share her sins. There are those who are in Babylon the great, the slaves of godless gain or godless pleasure. There are those who belong to the new and eternal city, the New Jerusalem, who engrave on the bells of the horses, “Holiness to the Lord,” and whose daily toil is being sanctified for Him. It may cost something to renounce all fellowship with Babylon. But it is worth infinitely more than it costs. Yea, to be right is so transcendently great, that the question of cost should scarce be deemed worth a thought. Better die with Christ than reignwith Caesar. (S. Conway,B. A.)
