There is a length of time between the ascension and return of Christ and something is holding back the return. Common grace has levelled an area for the church to flourish and for people to be gathered into God’s new community. Common grace has also brought about greater knowledge and skill and has lead to greater weapons and the slide towards lawlessness.
Kuyper offers the example of better development of schools and illumination through knowledge. The fruits of common grace are placed at the feet of righteous and evil alike: Murdering is more advanced, theft is more covert, fornication is more refined, false witness is more egalitarian, advertising increases covetousness, pride and ambition are applauded. Common grace raises the standard and ease of our social life and equally, common grace better arms sin. The misuse of our advancement culminates in a person – the Man of Sin – and then the end comes.
Doesn’t this terrible end make grace not grace? Not necessarily; Golgotha was awful and glorious. God ‘sewed all of these capacities in the field of human nature’.
Babylon has been symbolic of the great and misdirected achievements of humankind and has been applied figuratively to places like Rome and Paris – where world power in its expansion and sin manifest. Babylon will radiate glory but be destroyed in an hour, as has happened with Nebuchadnezzar, Pharaoh and Paris. But whilst ‘Babylon’ falls in one place, it rises in another; John in Revelation is talking of a totalising.