Revelation 18:19

And they cast dust on their heads, and cried, weeping and mourning, saying, Woe, woe, the great city, wherein all that had their ships in the sea were made rich by reason of her costliness! for in one hour is she made desolate.

Note that it is not for the harlot that all of the weeping and wailing and mourning and crying and casting dust on the heads comes about, but for "the great city." This is the great world-city, the complex of urban civilization, so identified in earlier chapters. Even at this late hour, the mourners cannot see the connection that the harlot had with all this.

Cast dust on their heads and cried, etc. ... "The awful woes that are sure to come upon mankind when they turn completely away from God and burn even the apostate version of holy religion, which is all that they know, will issue in the wholesale destruction of all that is worthwhile on earth. In a pale little epitome of what is yet to happen upon a far more vast scale, Hitler and his peers burned the Bibles at Nuremburg; and what followed? The most awful slaughter in nineteen centuries! When the liberal theologians, atheistic humanists and insane Marxists have finally dismantled the last vestiges of religion, even in its apostate forms, the true and final holocaust will suddenly appear. God be merciful and delay that day.

As Morris pointed out, it is the working class, the sailors, who carry their mourning the furthest by casting dust on their heads.[58] And, as in the case of the other mourners, it is not weeping for lost faith, but for lost jobs. There is here the evident truth that laboring humanity will suffer first and longest. The godless labor unions that have led the world in their defiance of true religion as well as every other form of it shall suddenly discover that the society which they helped to kill was their own. It will be too late for dust on the head to do any good.

What all this means is that a working coalition between a watered-down, apostate Christianity and the unbridled forces of the devil will one day be terminated, and the final prejudgment wreck of the whole social order will reach its roaring climax.

THE FINAL JUDGMENT

Again, the Book of Revelation shows us the judgment, particularly as it comes to human civilization: there will be a summary end of it. Before depicting it, as usually throughout the prophecy, the vision will first show us a scene of rejoicing in heaven, for the purpose of showing that the wreck of all things shall not in any manner hurt God's people.