Revelation Chapter 18 Verses 4-5

4 Then I heard another voice from heaven saying, “Come out of her, my people, lest you take part in her sins, lest you share in her plagues; 5 for her sins are heaped high as heaven, and God has remembered her iniquities.

In verse 4, God calls for his people to come out of the city lest they follow Rome’s evil example and share in Rome’s destruction. This call is one that is made many times in the Old Testament. It was the call that Lot heard in Genesis 19:12-14. It was the call that Moses heard in Numbers 16:23-26. It was the call that the exiles in Babylon heard many times —

Isaiah 48:20 Go forth from Babylon! Flee from the Chaldeans!

Jeremiah 50:8 Move from the midst of Babylon, Go out of the land of the Chaldeans; And be like the rams before the flocks.

Jeremiah 51:6 Flee from the midst of Babylon, And every one save his life! Do not be cut off in her iniquity, For this is the time of the LORD’S vengeance; He shall recompense her.

Jeremiah 51:45 My people, go out of the midst of her! And let everyone deliver himself from the fierce anger of the LORD.

Was this call in verse 4 a call for the people to literally leave the city? No, and once again we should consider the example of ancient Babylon. Were the exiles in Babylon being told to literally flee that city? No, and, in fact God told them in Jeremiah 29:7 to “seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.”

Although the Jewish exiles in Babylon did eventually return to their homeland, they did not flee there. Instead, they returned in three groups. First, some of the exiles returned in 539 BC when Cyrus gave a decree that the Jews should return to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple. (That decree can be found in Ezra 1:2–4 and 2 Chronicles 36:23.) Second, others returned in 458 BC when Ezra led 1500 men with their families to Jerusalem. And third, yet others returned in 445 BC when Nehemiah, a cup bearer in the court of Artaxerxes, asked the king to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. And these returns happened after the judgment of Babylon by the Persians that Jeremiah wrote about in Jeremiah 50-51.   

Likewise, the Christians in Rome are not being told to literally flee that city. Throughout this book the church has been pictured in Heaven. God is simply telling them to live that way. It is what Paul told us in Colossians 3:1-2 — “If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth.”

Barclay explains it well:

[T]his cry and challenge [to come out] do not involve a coming out at a definite moment. They imply a certain “aloofness of spirit maintained in the very heart of the world’s traffic.” They describe the essential apartness of the Christian from the world.... The Christian is not conformed to the world but transformed from the world (Romans 12:2). It is not a question of retiring from the world; it is a question of living differently within the world.

We are reminded of 2 Corinthians 6:16-18 —

What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God; as God said, “I will live in them and move among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Therefore come out from them, and be separate from them, says the Lord, and touch nothing unclean; then I will welcome you, and I will be a father to you, and you shall be my sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty.”

“Come out from among them and be ye separate!” That is a central theme of this book and one that we desparately need to hear today. God is always calling upon his people to cut their connection with sin and to stand with him and for him. Dwight Hervey Small in his book The High Cost of Holy Living wrote:

Wherever the Christian finds himself, and whatever his calling in life, his life must stand as a radical protest against the world and its standards.

C. S. Lewis wrote:

Hope means a continual looking forward to the eternal world. It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is. If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.

The church has a lot of problems today. Why? Heresy is inevitable when men become more interested in pleasing themselves and in pleasing the world than in pleasing God. Why are some today advocating leadership roles in the church for women? Because they think it pleases God, or because they want to please the world? Why are they bringing instruments into the worship? Because they think it pleases God, or because they want to please the world? Why are they watering down baptism?

Is the church becoming more like the world, or is the world becoming more like the church? Is the world setting our agenda or is God? Perhaps as Wordsworth once said, “The world is too much with us.”

Verse 5 tells us that Rome’s sins were heaped high as heaven. Yes, God is longsuffering, but at some point sin reaches a level that is intolerably high, and judgment falls. In Ezra 9:6, Ezra said of the people in his day, “I am ashamed and blush to lift up my face to thee, my God: for our iniquities are increased over our head, and our trespass is grown up unto the heavens.” How high are our own sins? How close is our own country to that divine tipping point? How many are left in our own land who are ashamed and blush to lift their faces to God? “Were they ashamed when they had committed abomination? nay, they were not at all ashamed, neither could they blush: therefore shall they fall among them that fall: in the time of their visitation they shall be cast down, saith the LORD.” (Jeremiah 8:12)

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