Apocalypse Revealed #719
719. Saying to me, "Come, I will show you the judgment of the great harlot who sits on many waters." This symbolizes a revelation about that religion as regards its profanations and adulterations of the Word's truths.
Saying and showing symbolize a revelation. The judgment symbolizes the state of the Roman Catholic religion at its end. The great harlot symbolizes a profanation of the sanctities of the Word and the church, and an adulteration of their goodness and truth. Many waters symbolize the Word's truths adulterated. To sit upon the waters means, symbolically, to possess them and live caught up in them.
To play the harlot, to whore, to behave licentiously and to commit adultery mean, symbolically, to falsify and adulterate the Word, as may be seen in nos. 134, 620, 632 above; and waters symbolize its truths, nos. 50, 563, 614, 685, here those truths adulterated and profaned, because a harlot is said to be on them.
It is apparent from this that "saying to me, I will show you the judgment of the great harlot who sits on many waters," symbolizes a revelation about the aforesaid religion as regards its profanations and adulterations of the Word's truths.
[2] Something similar is said about Babel in Jeremiah:
...Jehovah will... do what He spoke against the inhabitants of Babel. You who dwell upon many waters, abundant in treasures, your end is coming, the measure of your material gain. (Jeremiah 51:12-13)
We say that Roman Catholics adulterated and profaned the Word's truths, because they used the Word's truths to gain dominion over the sanctities of the church and over heaven and to claim for themselves the Lord's Divine power; and to use the Word's truths to gain dominion over the sanctities of the church and heaven is to adulterate them, and to use them to claim for oneself the Lord's Divine power is to profane them.
People know that they use the Word to defend their dogmas. But read those dogmas attentively and you will see that they have used everything that they have taken from the Word to gain dominion over people's souls and to acquire for themselves a power, authority and majesty that is Divine.
It is for this reason that Babylon is named the Mother of the Whoredoms and Abominations of the Earth in verse 5.
John 4:7-15
7
A woman of Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, "Give me a drink."
8
For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.
9
The Samaritan woman therefore said to him, "How is it that you, being a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a Samaritan woman?" (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.)
10
Jesus answered her, "If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, 'Give me a drink,' you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water."
11
The woman said to him, "Sir, you have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep. From where then have you that living water?
12
Are you greater than our father, Jacob, who gave us the well, and drank of it himself, as did his children, and his livestock?"
13
Jesus answered her, "Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again,
14
but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never thirst again; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life."
15
The woman said to him, "Sir, give me this water, so that I don't get thirsty, neither come all the way here to draw."
