The vision of the Harlot is a figurative and profoundly significant view of the world’s sin as unfaithfulness to God, described under the analogue of unfaithfulness to the marriage relation, according to the familiar method of Hebrew thought. The world is presented as a spiritual harlot, one that has proved untrue to her Lord and that merits condign punishment.
(1) The Judgment of the Harlot Announced, Ch. 17:1‐2
One of the seven angels having the seven vials, calls John in order to show him the judgment about to be inflicted upon the great Harlot. The agency of a vial‐angel in revealing this vision, indicates a connection between the vial‐judgments and the fall of Babylon; and, as stated above, it is an elaboration of those judgments, especially that of the seventh vial.
The angel carries John in the Spirit away into a wilderness where he sees in the vision an impure Woman arrayed in purple, the royal color, and in scarlet, the sign of bloodshed, while she is decked with gold and jewels, the tokens of her wealth, and has in her hand a golden cup, full of the abominations of her fornications; and she is seated on a scarlet‐colored Beast that is covered with names full of blasphemy, i. e. she rests upon and is allied with the world‐power, for the scarlet Beast is the same as the Beast from the sea in chapter thirteen (v. 1‐10); and upon her forehead her name is written,(514) “MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF THE HARLOTS AND OF THE ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH”, and she is “drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus”.
(3) The Interpretation Given, Ch. 17:7‐18
The angel declares the mystery of the Woman of Sin to John’s waiting ears. The Harlot whose home is in the wilderness, i. e. in this world (perhaps so called from the thought of the wilderness as the place of temptation of Israel, of Elijah, and of Christ, and as the haunt of demons where the scapegoat was sent forth to Azazel), is definitely identified with Babylon (v. 5 and 18), the great World‐City, the dwelling‐place and representative of corrupt society tempting men to evil. The great Harlot is the ideal personification of the great city. There is in fact a double symbolism; the great Harlot symbolizes the great city, as the great city symbolizes the great world, for the Harlot, the city, and the world are one and the same in the wider thought of the Revelation. She is the combined incarnation of commercialism, lust, and irreligion,(515) the unbelieving world and not the apostate church, humanity untrue to God, the social life of men adverse to the kingdom.(516) The Harlot is the manifest impersonation of lust and sexual impurity, a form of the world’s sin that has always been the source of ruin to a multitude of souls—her traffic, we are told, is in the “souls of men” (ch. 18:13). She represents the world tempting men through the sexual appetite, though the figure does not stop with that, as the story of the fall of her wealth and the punishment of her irreligious life clearly shows. All the social side of life that tends to sin is represented by this impressive figure before which the Apocalyptist “wondered with a great wonder” (v. 6).