The Woman, The Dragon and The Child
11 They overcame him
by the blood of the Lamb
and by the word of their testimony;
A great and wondrous sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. 2 She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. 3 Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on his heads. 4 His tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that he might devour her child the moment it was born. 5 She gave birth to a son, a male child, who will rule all the nations with an iron sceptre. And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne. 6 The woman fled into the desert to a place prepared for her by God, where she might be taken care of for 1,260 days.
7 And there was war in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. 8 But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. 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.
10 Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say:
“Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God,
and the authority of his Christ.
For the accuser of our brothers,
who accuses them before our God day and night,
has been hurled down.
11 They overcame him
by the blood of the Lamb
and by the word of their testimony;
they did not love their lives so much
as to shrink from death.
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!
He is filled with fury,
because he knows that his time is short.”
13 When the dragon saw that he had been hurled to the earth, he pursued the woman who had given birth to the male child. 14 The woman was given the two wings of a great eagle, so that she might fly to the place prepared for her in the desert, where she would be taken care of for a time, times and half a time, out of the serpent’s reach. 15 Then from his mouth the serpent spewed water like a river, to overtake the woman and sweep her away with the torrent. 16 But the earth helped the woman by opening its mouth and swallowing the river that the dragon had spewed out of his mouth. 17 Then the dragon was enraged at the woman and went off to make war against the rest of her offspring
The dragon really wants the child, DEVOUR!
The child - Jesus
But, you may ask, how is the church (the woman) to be understood as giving birth to Christ (the male child)? Surely that does not make sense. Yes it does! We must remember two things. The first is the licence that must be allowed in visionary and symbolic picture writing. Such language cannot always be pinned down too neatly or too tightly, for the very reason that it is symbolic and not literal. But the second thing is this. While we know that the Lord Jesus Christ is God and that voluntarily, and in complete obedience to the Father’s will, He left the glory of heaven for a season and ‘made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness’ (Philippians 2:7), yet gloriously and miraculously, He is also represented in Scripture from the human side as coming from an earthly line. Romans 9:5 sets this forth very clearly: ‘From them [the patriarchs] is traced the human ancestry of Christ, who is God over all, for ever praised!’ So too do verses like Isaiah 11:1 and Romans 1:3, along with many others.
The dragon
There will be the devil’s attempts to conform the church to the world—the line that any religion will do, that treasures on earth really do pay, that the church should be in the state’s pocket, that sexual deviations condemned by God are deviations no longer, and so on. He has all manner of tricks, wiles, devices and schemes (Ephesians 6:11) to get us to water down the gospel in order to make it more ‘palatable’ to sinners. One contemporary minister, Dr Robert Schuller, famous for his Crystal Cathedral, is reported as writing, ‘I have no right to offend the self-esteem of a person under the motivation or guise of saving his soul,’ and ‘Don’t tell them they’re sinners. They’ll believe you—and you’ll reinforce this self-image.’
What we find to be the great concern of the second part of the book, however, now that we have reached the halfway point, is to demonstrate that this church-world struggle is but the outward manifestation of the behind-the-scenes conflict being fought between the Lord Jesus Christ and Satan. This war being waged in time and history has a cosmic dimension and this the apostle Paul speaks of when he insists, ‘Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms’ (Ephesians 6:12). Chapters 12 and 13 open up the account of this matter, with their focus upon the character and opposition of the enemies of God. First of all we meet Satan at work (chapter 12) and then we are introduced to Satan’s right-hand men (chapter 13).
Chapter 12 falls into three scenes which we shall map out straight away as a guide to the territory we are about to investigate:
1. Satan purposing to destroy Christ (1–12).
2. Satan, having failed in that design, turns his attention to destroying the church of Christ (13–16).
3. Satan’s work against the individual Christians who make up Christ’s church (17).
Back in 1652 the Puritan minister Thomas Brooks wrote a treatise called Precious Remedies against Satan’s Devices, which has recently been republished. Even the contents pages make searching and profitable reading. Very comprehensively he details 38 devices and 196 remedies (if I added them up correctly!). But how vital it is that we take them seriously, for knowing your enemy is half the battle! Here are just a few areas of the devil’s activity that we must be ready to deal with.
1. He will seek to draw us back into sin, especially into those particular sins which figured largely in our pre-conversion life.
2. He will try to overwhelm us with a view of our past and present sins, suggesting that they are not wiped out or are too large or too repeated for God to deal with them.
3. He will remind us of our frequent relapses into sins formerly repented of and prayed against, implying that we are not making any progress or headway in the Christian life.
4. He loves to persuade Christians that repentance is an easy matter that we can just take in our stride, so we need not have any second thoughts or scruples about sinning against God—no mention from Satan of the misery of sin, the forlornness of having God hide His face from us, the agony of repentance or the nature of true godly sorrow for sin.
5. He seeks to persuade us that all that glitters in the world that we have forsaken is gold after all.
6. He does all that he can to remove our assurance of salvation—sometimes by making us think that our salvation itself and our continuance in it depends upon us, sometimes by twisting our view of God’s love and fatherly care towards us when we face discouragements and afflictions, sometimes by suggesting that the promises of God’s Word are insufficient to meet our needs and case.
7. And he will draw our attention to the supposed happiness and freedom enjoyed by those who are walking in the paths of sin, over and against the crosses, losses, sufferings and sorrows that daily attend those who seek self-denyingly after Christ and holiness.
‘Resist him, standing firm in the faith’ (1 Peter 5:9). Remember this: He who is for us and within us is far, far greater than he who is against us