1. Revelation 18:7 (ESV)
  2. Exposition

Why does the prostitute say, “I am no widow”?

Revelation 18:7 (ESV)

7 As she glorified herself and lived in luxury, so give her a like measure of torment and mourning, since in her heart she says, ‘I sit as a queen, I am no widow, and mourning I shall never see.’

On the one hand these words recall the prophecy of Isaiah 47:8 and so foreshadow that the prostitute's fall is imminent, as Babylon’s was. At the same time, the prostitute conveys with those words her conviction that the law of restitution (“eye for eye, tooth for tooth”) would never apply to her; that is, she was above the law. To be drunk with the blood of saints (Revelation 17:6) implied that she left so many widows in her wreckage. The Lord, however, insists that her sense of superiority, of being above the law, would come crashing down upon her, leaving her lonely, ruined, widowed, grieving. He, after all, is a righteous Judge over all the earth. Here is comfort for so many saints over the centuries left destitute by the selfishness of the Babylons of history.