‘And a strong angel took up a stone, as it were a great millstone, and cast it into the sea, saying, “Thus with a mighty fall shall Babylon the great city be cast down and shall be found no more at all”.'
This is a further interesting example of how quickly the scene can move forwards and then backwards. We have seen the great city destroyed, now we see an angel forecasting its future destruction. We might have expected this to come earlier but John is not so much concerned with chronology as in painting each picture fully. The picture of the great stone crashing into the water symbolises the speed of Babylon's destruction.
Compare with this scene how in Jeremiah 51:60-63 Jeremiah wrote about all the evil that would come on Babylon, and then gave it to Seraiah who was taken captive to Babylon with Zedekiah the king, and told him that when he had read it he should ‘bind a stone to it and cast it into the middle of the Euphrates, and you shall say, “Thus shall Babylon sink and shall not rise again because of the evil that I will bring on her”.'
So Babylon the Great is destroyed, none shall ever rise like her again. The earth is freed from her idolatry, uncleanness and occult practises. No great city will ever again dominate an empire. But only because the scarlet beast from the abyss has destroyed her in order to replace her with his own monotheistic religion inspired by Satan. The end will not be long.
Thus the building of a city (Genesis 4:17) and of the tower of Babel (Genesis 11) has been reversed, and as in the Garden of Eden we come back to a face to face confrontation between God and Satan with man caught in the middle.