And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.
Come out of her, my people. From Jeremiah 50:8; Jeremiah 51:6; Jeremiah 51:45. Even in Rome, God has a people; but they are in great danger: their safety is in coming out of her at once. So in every world-conforming church there are some of God's true Church, who must come out. Especially at the eve of God's judgment on apostate Christendom: as Lot was warned to come out of Sodom before its destruction, and Israel, to come from about Dathan's tents, So the first Christians came out of Jerusalem, when apostate Judah was judged. 'State and Church are precious gifts of God. But the State being desecrated to a different end from what God designed-namely, to govern for, and under, God-becomes beastlike; the Church apostatizing becomes the harlot. The woman is the kernel; beast and harlot are the shell: whenever the kernel is mature, the shell is thrown away' (Auberlen). 'The harlot is every church that has not Christ's mind. Christendom, divided into many sects, is Babylon - i:e., confusion. In all Christendom the true Jesus-congregation, the woman clothed with the sun, lives and is hidden. Corrupt, lifeless Christendom, is the harlot, whose aim is the pleasure of the flesh, governed by the spirit of nature and the world' (Hahn in Auberlen). The first justification of the woman is in her being called out of Babylon, the harlot, at the culmination of Babylon's sin, when judgment is to fall: for apostate Christendom is not to be converted, but destroyed. Secondly, she has to pass through an ordeal of persecution from the beast, which purifies her for the transfiguration-glory at Christ's coming (Luke 21:28; Luke 22:28-29; Revelation 20:4).
Be not partakers - `have no fellowship with her sins.'
That ye receive not of her plagues - as Lot's wife, by lingering too near the polluted city.