Desire

Revelations 18:1 After this I saw another angel coming down from heaven, having great authority, and the earth was made bright with his glory. 2 And he called out with a mighty voice,
“Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great! She has become a dwelling place for demons, a haunt for every unclean spirit...3 For all nations have drunk [3]the wine of the passion of her sexual immorality,and the kings of the earth have committed immorality with her, and the merchants of the earth have grown rich from the power of her luxurious living.
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14 The fruit for which your soul longed has gone from you, and all your delicacies and your splendors are lost to you, never to be found again!”
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It is on verse 14 that I would like to meditate for a moment. For those who fall in with Babylon, basically buying into the lie that this present life, with its physical pleasures, is the be all and end all; they will find out in the end that their desires - the fruit for which their souls longed - are lost to them. C.S. Lewis argues in The Weight of Glory that our desires may be a clue to certain supernatural objects for which we were designed. The Persian mystic, Rumi, wrote of this aspect of human nature when he said that like a reed cut from a river bank, "Who's from his home snatched far away, Longs to return some future day." Pascal, interestingly, referred to us as reeds as well: “Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed”

And in his Pensees described us thus:

"What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself."

Our longing points us to God, but many will perish because they settle for less.