The Destruction of Babylon and the Church of the Nations

Desire: and whenever I am transferred from this, my whole power is transferred. Because of this, those directing their prayers toward Jerusalem did everything possible in their prayers wherever they were brought, according to the requests of Solomon and the divine promises, just as it is necessary for us to turn toward the heavenly Jerusalem.

For it is not right for the instrument of words to fail (Ps 136:6), if it does not receive them toward what is necessary. Therefore, the blessed men also set their whole life upon the care of hymns (Ps 136:5), saying, 'I will sing to the Lord in my life, I will sing to my God as long as I exist.' And the city is precious to them because of the worship of God established in it, just as it is foretold: 'For the sake of the house of my God, I sought good things for you' (Ps 136:2).

For the highest and purest part of joy is placed in remembering the holy city. Thus, it will happen that the coming good joys will be, just as the Lord introduces to us the holy foods before the common and bodily ones.

The righteous pray to be brought what the Babylonians have plundered (Ps 137:8). For this is the holy judgment: the sinner was caught in the works of His hands, making judgments by the phrase 'The Lord knows judgments' (1 Kings 18:40). Blessed indeed is he who is shown able to do this, through whom God manifests the righteous judgment, and He will turn against those who plundered to be plundered, and against those who raised up violence to be overthrown. For the service belongs to God, and blessed is the one serving God.

And it must be applied with knowledge and proper intention, so that Cyrus does not bless the Persian king who conquered Babylon, because he neither knew the grace by which he took strength over them, nor the one who gave it, God ('For you did not know me,' he says Matt 7:23), nor did he understand through the forgiveness of Israel into the power...

If being led away, as it is prophesied through Jesus; but the blessing will surround those who repay Babylon in kind, and those who fasten the infants of it to the rock and lift them up. For in truth, the first thing was blessed: not to ever behold Babylon nor to be in the confusion of its evils; but if once anyone became in it, having fallen from the better ones, he would be blessed if he would do what he has suffered and would counter-imprison the Babylonians and lead their very souls into the fear of God; and if even their infants he would not allow to grow but would crush them against the rock, he would become much more blessed.

But the infants of Babylon are the seeds of wickedness and the beginnings of the confused sins—not to be called sins—which indeed the saving Word (for the rock was Christ) seeks to annul by not allowing them to grow nor to proceed into works, he who is blessed in these things. Regarding Israel, a correction of the things concerning him lies ahead, as the prophecies say; but a second Church, coming out of all the nations, enters, leaving behind a land for those who will return from Jerusalem.

So also in the present matters, we heard fully of the captivity of the nation and a prayer for the punishment of those who captured them, but now the song follows, announcing the appearance of the word of God throughout all the inhabited world, just as in Isaiah the prophet, when the word was being taken away, Zion became a desert and a curse; immediately the knowledge of God is pre-announced among the other nations, according to 'I was made manifest to those not asking, I was found by those not seeking' (Isa 49:6). Such a disposition and such a composition of these songs existed, after the...