Isaiah 47:1-4 Come down and sit in the dust, virgin daughter of Babylon. Lose your place of rule, you daughter of the Babylonians, never again will you be called beautiful. When the Lord takes vengeance, with no clemency for anyone, your shame will be exposed. But your Redeemer is the Holy One of Israel.
Isaiah 47:5-7 Sit in silence and go into darkness, you daughter of Babylon, for never again will you be called ‘the queen of the nations’. The Lord was angry with His people and he allowed the Land to be desecrated. I gave My people into your power and you showed them no mercy, you even made the elderly work. You said: ‘I will be powerful forever, the leader of the nations’, but you failed to realize that there will come a Day of Reckoning.
Isaiah 47:8-10 Now; you lover of luxury and given to pleasures, carefree in your power and thinking that nothing will change, listen to this: Suddenly, in an instant, in a single Day, disaster will befall you. You trust in sorceries and witchcraft and in your wickedness, you think that no one sees your sins. Your wisdom and knowledge have led you astray and you have said: I am, and there is none beside me.
Isaiah 47:11-12 Therefore a calamity will fall upon you, one that you cannot see or prevent. Ruin and catastrophe will suddenly overtake you. Persist in your godless ways and false beliefs that you have always held to, maybe help will come from them, perhaps you will keep some strength!
Isaiah 47:13-15 Yet, in spite of your many experts and astrologers, you are powerless and all your stargazers cannot save you from what is coming. They will be as stubble when the fire burns them up, they will not save themselves from the heat of the flames. This will not be a glowing coal to warm anyone, this will not be a fire to sit by! So much for those who have advised you, they continue in their error and they will not help you.
Virgin daughter of Babylon: It is evident that this is not the original Babylon, or the actual descendants of them, as this Bible passage refers to a later people, [Jeremiah 51:7] who are in a ‘place of rule, the queen of the nations’, and who are thought of as ‘beautiful’, that is: prosperous and desirable. They are ‘lovers of luxury, given to pleasures and carefree in their power’. Their ‘wisdom and knowledge has led them astray’, that is: their scientists promote evolution, gene manipulation etc. Their teachers refute the Bible and the Ten Commandments, their lawyers think they have done well if they get a guilty person off and now their leaders pursue policies of appeasement and aggrandizement. They are a ‘type’ of Babylon.
‘They cannot save you from what is coming’. ‘On the Day of Reckoning, when the Lord takes vengeance’, all those types of people ‘will be as stubble, they will not save themselves from the heat of the flames. Suddenly, in one Day, calamity will befall you’. This will be the terrible Day of the Lord’s vengeance and wrath, the next prophesied event that we can expect, a judgement of fire in the form of an enormous mass of superheated particles ejected from the sun.Isaiah 66:15-17
Sit in silence, go into darkness. After the disaster of the Day of the Lord, the huge fires of the cities and forests and also volcanic eruptions will cause the sky to darken for quite a long period. The survivors will have time to contemplate their wayward lives and those who can change will turn to the Lord in faith and trust in Him for their salvation. Jer. 51:50, Joel 2:32
Revelation 18:4-8 Come out of her, My people, lest you have any part of her sins and you share in her punishments. Disaster will strike in a single Day and she will perish in flames, for mighty is the Lord, who has pronounced her doom! Jer. 51:5-6Ref: REB. Some verses abridged.
The Prophetic Word 