12:1 And a great sign was seen in heaven: a woman arrayed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars; 2and she was with child; and she crieth out, travailing in birth, and in pain to be delivered. 3And there was seen another sign in heaven: and behold, a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his heads seven diadems. 4And his tail draweth the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth: and the dragon standeth before the woman that is about to be delivered, that when she is delivered he may devour her child. 5And she was delivered of a son, a man child, who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron: and her child was caught up unto God, and unto his throne. 6And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she hath a place prepared of God, that there they may nourish her a thousand two hundred and threescore days.

The main point of chap. 12 is the protection of God’s people against Satan because of Christ’s decisive victory over Satan through his death and resurrection. The purpose is to encourage the readers to persevere in their witness despite persecution.

What made Job suffer?

The Sabeans, a bunch of marauding thugs, running off the sheep and the cattle, the Chaldeans coming in, the natural elements, the windstorm that knocks down the house and crushes all 10 of Job’s children, bereavement, illness, loss of health, finally a nagging wife, or you could say, “Satan did it,” or you could say, “God did it.” Which description is truer? They’re all true. Which description is more fundamental?

What has caused the church her greatest difficulties and sufferings during the last few decades?

The answers we give will depend very much on the location. If you just look at it from a North American perspective, you get one slant, but look around the world a bit. In China, Persecution, unavailability of Bibles until fairly recently, extermination or imprisonment of most qualified leaders, totalitarian Marxism with a Chinese face.

In Central Africa, Tribalism, war, famine, endless civil strife, lack of trained leadership, enormous pressures from AIDS, no proper democratic regime that is genuinely democratic in sub-Saharan black Africa for all kinds of reasons, the drawing of the old colonial lines that went across tribal grounds almost guaranteeing tribal strife, endless stupidity of colonial leaders as they left.

What about the West?

Material prosperity combining with decay and poverty in many of our inner cities, the rapid pace of life, the impact of the mass media that shape the way people think, rising secularization, rising philosophical pluralism, rising moral indifferentism, rising prayerlessness, rising loneliness, recently attacks by a society and media that are increasingly secular.

In these last cases, all of the categories I’ve mentioned have been sociological, historical, psychological, demographic, and phenomenological?

I haven’t mentioned anything about the Devil, and I haven’t said anything about God.

Isn’t that the way most people think today?

I am not saying there is nothing to be learned from sociological analysis.

The problem is, that if all of our analyses are demographic, sociological, and phenomenological, sooner or later we start to think that our solutions are also sociological, demographic, and phenomenological.

Today, even among Christians, we tend to look at problems and answers from only a sociological level, only at a horizontal level, only at a mechanical level, and we are not seeing God anywhere.

Is it possible for Christians even to begin to overcome that kind of bias in our society, in our culture, in our churches, unless they reread and reread and reread Scripture so that they learn to think in a whole different mode.

In the paragraph today we see the difficulties and sufferings of the church. At a certain level, you could say that the sufferings of the church at the end of the first century come about because of Roman persecution. You can identify the emperor involved. You can analyze emperor worship. You can talk about the synagogue collapse of support of Christians and so on.

What chapter 12 does is give us a profound theological/spiritual analysis of what is going on in this kind of suffering. Chapter 12 marks a major division in the Apocalypse. Before the final display of the wrath of God in the seven plagues of chapter 16, in these chapters, the underlying cause for the hostility and suffering that fall upon the church and, likewise, the judgments that fall upon those who fall in judgment on the church.

There is suffering here for the church. There is suffering for those here who persecute the church too. What is going on here that the church must suffer is nothing other than the rage of Satan.

John outlines the occasion for this satanic rage (verses 1–9),

Then the reasons for the satanic rage (verses 12–13),

And how Christians overcome the satanic rage.

The occasion for the satanic rage.

In John’s vision, the scene opens with a great and wondrous sign appearing in the heavens. A sign here, as sometimes elsewhere in Revelation, is a great spectacle that points in some way to the consummation. It is not a sign like a stop sign or a miracle. It is a spectacle, it is a common use of sign in apocalyptic literature. A great spectacle.

The content of this spectacle is, a woman. And what a woman (verses 1–2). She’s clothed with the sun, she has the moon under her feet and a crown of 12 stars on her head, and, according to verse 2, she’s pregnant and about to give birth. Who is this woman?

If you only had verse 5, you might rightly infer that this is Mary, but it can’t be, not when you read the whole chapter. By the time you get down to verse 17.… “The dragon is enraged at the woman and goes off to make war against the rest of her offspring, those who obey God’s commandments and hold to the testimony of Jesus.” No, this has to be the Mother Church, and all the offspring are all of the believers.

The mother turns out to be the entire messianic community, whether from the old covenant or from the new. The messianic community is often figured as a woman in the old covenant, just as Zion is the mother of the people of God (Isaiah 54:1, “Sing, O barren woman,”), so under the new covenant, the heavenly Jerusalem is our mother. Galatians 4:26: “The Jerusalem that is above is free, and she is our mother.”

Messiah comes, then, out of this messianic community. If she’s clothed with the sun, she’s utterly radiant. Her feet on the moon suggest dominion. The 12 stars on her head will call to mind both the 12 tribes of the old covenant and the 12 apostles summarizing the new. Then she’s pregnant and brings forth Messiah, she is in travail.

In apocalyptic literature, Jews spoke not uncommonly of the birth pains of the Messiah … that is, that period of time when the people of God go through anguish like that of a woman about to give birth … just before the Messiah comes. Just as a woman before she gives birth has birth pains (at least most women do), in the same way, the people of God go through a certain kind of anguish before the Messiah comes. That was true at his first coming, and there is a sense in which it is true at his second.

So she’s going through anguish here before the Messiah comes, and then she’s going through anguish in chapter 17. At least her children are, to change the metaphor a little bit, her other children. The language comes out, in Isaiah 26:17. “As a woman with child and about to give birth writhes and cries out in her pain, so were we in your presence, O Lord.”

Waiting for the coming of relief.

What we have in verses 1–2, is a picture of true Israel, the messianic community, in an agony of suffering and expectation as the Messiah comes to birth.

The second sign in this layout is an enormous red dragon.

This dragon is the Devil. Look at verse 9. “The great dragon was hurled down, that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.” Why is he called a dragon?

Well, a dragon or a great monster (leviathan is not uncommon in the Old Testament) is a common standard symbolism for all that opposes God. Leviathan is identified with Egypt in Psalm 74 because of the slavery period, with Assyria and Babylon in Isaiah 27 because of the exilic period, and with Pharaoh in Ezekiel 29:3, but behind them all is Satan himself.

Matthew 16 Jesus said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan. You do not understand the things of God.”

It’s not that he thinks either that Peter has been demon-possessed by Satan. Jesus perceives that behind Peter’s utterance is the blinding, tragic, seductive work of Satan himself, just as the Old Testament writers see that behind Egypt, behind Assyria and Babylon, behind Pharaoh, is Leviathan, the Devil.

He’s a red dragon. That probably means he’s murderous. Jesus said in John 8:44? He was a murderer from the beginning, because by his lies and deceit he brought death to the race. Seven heads, like Leviathan in Psalm 74:14. That is, universality of his power. Ten horns, recalling the fourth beast of Daniel 7. Awesome power, kingly authority

First the earth (verses 4–6). Clearly what he is doing here is incredibly awful. At the one level, again, you have typical Hebrew poetry language.

His tail sweeps a third of the stars out of the sky and they fall on the earth. It’s a way of saying that everything he does is of cataclysmic significance.

It’s grotesque is this beast standing waiting to catch the baby in order to eat it. That’s what the text says.

Satan’s main principle is to destroy Messiah. He puts the woman through it before Messiah comes. Then he puts the woman’s other offspring through it in the rest of the chapter, and now his whole purpose is to destroy Messiah, the one whose destiny it is to rule all the nations with an iron scepter. That can’t be anybody other than Christ.

“But her child was snatched away to God and to his throne.” John’s intention here is not to unpack a whole lot of other things. I mean, there’s nothing here about his ministry or his boyhood. There’s nothing here about the cross. There’s nothing here about his resurrection from the dead. You have his birth, his ascension, and he’s snatched away.

The reason you have all of that is because the focus here is what happens to the woman and her offspring. The focus here is what happens to the people of God. “What happens to the people of God when this messianic figure goes back to heaven?”

Well, the woman is left exposed to the wrath of Satan. “The woman flees into the desert to a place prepared for her by God, where she might be taken care of for 1,260 days.” I think this comes clear quickly. It is clear that Satan’s desire was to destroy the baby. Isn’t that what the slaughter of the innocents is all about in Matthew, chapter 2? Isn’t that what the temptations were about in Matthew, chapter 4? Isn’t that what Gethsemane was about? Isn’t that what the cross was about from Satan’s perspective? But the child is saved.

What happens to the woman?

She has to be taken care of for 1,260 days. If what we have said about 1,260 days is correct (the basic symbolism comes out of Antiochus IV Epiphanes and the Maccabean Revolt), then it’s a period of suffering that is eventually cut short before it goes on too long, a period of suffering for the people of God.

That is a period of time that is extensive that is cut short before it goes on too long, which is, I think, in line with a number of other New Testament passages where tribulation is what characterizes the entire period between Christ’s first coming and his second coming. Isn’t that how long the woman suffers?

That she’s called out to the desert is important. He’s not saying he’s literally going to take her back out of the land and leave it to be overtaken by the Canaanites and meanwhile he’s going to take her back to the desert. What it means is, “I will draw her with all the immediacy of the blessings and the protection I gave to the people of God when they first came out of captivity.” That’s Hosea 2:14.

Thus, on the one hand, the desert is a hard place before you enter into the Promised Land, and on the other hand, the desert is the place of spiritual refuge, of an immediate sense of God’s presence, before you enter the Promised Land. It’s the place where God looks after you. That is a wonderful way of looking at what the people of God go through now?

The woman goes to the desert. We are going to be in the minority.

Christians around the world cannot expect this to be the land of Canaan, not yet. The Promised Land is still to come, but here now, it’s the place where God looks after his own people. He looks after her the whole 1,260 days. That’s the symbolism.

At the upper level, in heaven, there’s war in heaven too. Heaven here does not mean the sky but in the presence of God. This is the heavenly counterpart to Christ’s triumph on the cross. Satan is making an all-out bid to have God’s rights. But that ancient serpent called the Devil is thrown out. He’s hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.

Remember what Jesus says as the kingdom is advancing through the ministry of the disciples? Luke,10:20ff, “I saw Satan fall from heaven.” It’s bound up with the dawning of the kingdom, with the coming of Christ, with the triumph of the cross, Satan is cast out.

Now this at the same time is a turning point in redemptive history. Do you remember how in the Old Testament you get pictures of Satan approaching God? Think of the book of Job, the time comes for the sons of God to be called into his presence, and Satan is also among them. Here it’s as if the climactic fight has already been fought and Satan is banished.

No more appeal to God. No more access to God. Nothing. He is banished.

Where does he go? The accuser of our brothers, has been cast out of heaven. Verse 12: “Therefore rejoice, you heavens and you who dwell in them! But woe to the earth and the sea, because the devil has gone down to you!” So the Devil has been cast out of heaven, hurled down. Verse 9: “He’s hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.”

Satan is defeated in principle. He is no longer in heaven, he is now on earth. That’s the structure of though, what you really have here is John outlines the occasion for the satanic rage: his principled defeat. He hasn’t gotten the Messiah. He has been hurled out of heaven. That’s the occasion. He’s defeated in principle, and he’s hurled to the earth.