Show Notes
Revelation 12:1-6
Pastor Christopher Chelpka
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Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] God, we ask that you would spread your knowledge, the knowledge of your grace, of your wisdom, of your power, your holiness, your goodness, your justice, your truth, spread the knowledge of you throughout all the world. Lord, may we swim in it. May we enjoy in it, enjoy it, even grow in it, according to your promises. Lord, we thank you that you have allowed us to see the good news of salvation in Jesus. And we pray that you would give us even a clearer eyes to see, sharper ears to hear as we come now to the reading and preaching of your word in revelation twelve. Bless us, Lord. We pray in Jesus name. Amen.
[00:00:53] Well, let's turn to revelation twelve, verses one through six.
[00:01:02] Revelation, chapter twelve, verses one through 16.
[00:01:26] Let's give our attention to God's word.
[00:01:29] And a great sign appeared in heaven. A woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. She was pregnant and was crying out in birth pains and the agony of giving birth.
[00:01:48] And another sign appeared in heaven. Behold, a great red dragon with seven heads and ten horns. And on his head seven diadems. His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven and cast them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to give birth, so that when she bore her child, he might devour it.
[00:02:13] She gave birth to a male child, one who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron. But her child was caught up to God and to his throne. And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared by God in which she is to be nourished for a 1260 days.
[00:02:34] May God bless his word to us. Please be seated.
[00:03:00] From time to time, in the various circumstances of life, it is easy to find ourselves in this position where we ask ourselves, what's God doing?
[00:03:11] What's he doing here? What's he doing in this moment?
[00:03:14] What's going on?
[00:03:16] Well, revelation twelve gives the answer to that in a summary form, but in a very memorable form, in a very powerful way. God speaks to us in the vision he gives to the apostle John, and he helps us to see and understand what's going on.
[00:03:37] How are we to think about ourselves and the world that God has made and our current events, the things that we experience now? God doesn't give every level of detail that we might want. Why aunt so and so did this, and why uncle so and so broke his whatever. Right? All these little tiny details are not accounted for in detail, but they are all accounted for at a high level.
[00:04:13] Here we have another aspect of Jesus and the world that he came into. And one of the things that we learn in particular from this passage is that the world he came into was one that there was a war going on, one in which there were enemies and enemies not just of a worldly and political nature, but we might say otherworldly or spiritual nature.
[00:04:42] This battle that is going on and depicted here is spoken about in a number of places throughout the scriptures. We're reminded in lots of ways. One such place is in Ephesians chapter six.
[00:04:53] Paul, at the end of his letter, says to the Ephesians, finally, this is encouraging, strengthening. He says, finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil.
[00:05:13] For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.
[00:05:27] So put on the armor of God, he says, this is the window into this that John gives to us. The Lord gives to us, to John through John in revelation twelve.
[00:05:40] And we're going to just cover the first six verses. But there is, of course, much more after and before this. But here we have a picture, one of the stories, we might say, of Jesus's birth, a way to understand who he is and what he's doing in the world.
[00:05:58] So let's consider different aspects of these signs that appear and then draw some conclusions from those.
[00:06:07] First of all, John sees a great sign appearing in heaven. The first one, he sees two. The first is a woman.
[00:06:17] This woman is covered in light, an amazing image. Hard to imagine, I think, in some ways. What does it mean to be clothed with the sun?
[00:06:30] I'm not sure what you picture when you picture that.
[00:06:34] Certainly brightness, right? Lots and lots of brightness. If someone was clothed with the sun, you would, I think, say that this was a very bright person, a very shining person.
[00:06:50] In addition to that, we read of other images of light. Clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head, a crown of twelve stars.
[00:07:02] These stars are most likely a symbol of the twelve tribes of Israel. When Joseph had one of his dreams back in Genesis, he describes the sun and the moon and the stars all bowing down to him, the eleven other stars, which refers to the tribes of Israel.
[00:07:25] And so here we have a picture, not just of a single person, this woman, but she is a picture of a people representing in part, Old Testament, all the Old Testament saints.
[00:07:40] She also represents New Testament saints as well as we continue on. In revelation, chapter twelve, we read that she is the one.
[00:07:54] She gives birth not only to this one child, but to all who follow the Lord Jesus Christ.
[00:08:03] We read in verse. This is verse 17. Then the dragon became furious with the woman and went off to make war with the rest of her offspring on those who keep the commandments of God and hold to the testimony of Jesus.
[00:08:17] And so we can say in a simple way that she here represents the people of God, the church of God in the Old Testament and in the New Testament, the one through whom the messiah was born.
[00:08:33] And we get a sense of her character as well.
[00:08:38] The church, as we will see when she is sent into the wilderness, is struggling, is under attack. But even though she is weak, even though she will struggle, we also see a sense of her true character.
[00:08:54] She's beautiful.
[00:08:56] She is clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars.
[00:09:05] The crown reminds us that she is regal, dignified, beautiful.
[00:09:11] The church of God is often called in the scriptures the bride of Christ. We remember also in Ephesians how we are told how the sun makes and presents the church as the bride of Christ without wrinkle or spot. There are many other passages in scripture that talk about this, that show the nature of the church in this amazing way, resplendent with the light of God, beautiful, regal, noble.
[00:09:45] We also see, however, that she is struggling.
[00:09:49] We read in verse two she was pregnant and was crying out in birth pains and the agony of giving birth.
[00:09:57] We know, as we continue to read on in this passage, that the one she gives birth to is not just a child, but a male child, a male child who was the one to rule the nations with a rod of iron. This, of course, refers to Jesus, this one on whom the governments of the world would rest upon his shoulders, the one who rules with a rod of iron, this great shepherd's club, in which he would smash and govern and defend his bride and shepherd his sheep.
[00:10:36] She bears forth this child, and not without trouble. We remember that even at the very particular point of Jesus'birth right, Mary and Joseph were on the road. Mary and Joseph did not have a lot of stability going on in their life at the moment. Mary and Joseph ended up having to flee to Egypt as Herod sought to kill her son.
[00:11:08] So the child is born, or she is about to give birth. If we think not only right before Jesus was born, but the hundreds of years, the thousands of years that had happened between the promise that God first made to Eve and that moment when Mary was bearing forth that child and everything in between, all the ups and the downs and the movements of history, the empires that come and go, all of the people who had suffered the blood that had been shed trouble, birth pains and agony.
[00:11:47] Well, then we come to verse three, and another sign appears in heaven.
[00:11:52] John gives us something else to hear about and pay attention to.
[00:11:57] It is this great red dragon.
[00:12:02] He is described as having seven heads and ten horns, and on his head are seven diadems.
[00:12:09] What can we say about the dragon?
[00:12:13] First of all, we can say that he is powerful, clearly powerful. We can also say that in some way or another he is a ruler, also wearing crowns. There's a sense of completeness and awesomeness in his power.
[00:12:31] Having these multiple heads and all of these crowns and ten horns. He is called the one who rules over these powers of darkness.
[00:12:43] He is called a prince in various places.
[00:12:48] But nevertheless we see that he will be destroyed in revelation 20, verse 19. If you want to flip over a little bit, a few passages or a few chapters.
[00:13:07] Not verse 19. There is no verse 19.
[00:13:11] We read in verse nine that they marched up over the broad plain of the earth, surrounded the camp of the saints in the beloved city. But then fire came down from heaven and consumed them. This is after Satan is released from his prison.
[00:13:26] Fire condounds and consumed them. And the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur where the beast and false prophet were. And they will be forever tormented, or they will be tormented day and night, forever and ever.
[00:13:41] So we have this two important things to note. On the one hand, we have this great red dragon imposing, terrifying, these multiple heads, likely representing these multiple manifestations of this singular rule throughout time and history, all the ways in which Satan has gone through the powers of this world to seek to destroy the Lord, the anointed one.
[00:14:12] But we see in the end he will not succeed.
[00:14:17] We don't have to get to the end to succeed. Even though his tail sweeps down a third of the stars of heaven and casts them to the earth, even though he stands right before this woman who is about to give birth, instead of being a doctor or a midwife to help in this process, he wants to devour the child, destroy the child.
[00:14:38] But what happens?
[00:14:40] This child born in pain and agony and weakness, this baby is caught up to God and to his throne. Just as soon as he comes, he's gone in the way Satan has almost no chance to destroy him.
[00:15:00] This very quickly describes the ministry and life of Jesus. Jesus comes into the world and now he's in heaven, ascended at the right hand or to the right hand of God the Father Almighty. Now that may feel like a very quick way to describe Jesus's ministry, and it's fleshed out in other places. We have all sorts of other things, but what's the point here? The point here is to help us to focus not so much on the length of that ministry or all the particular aspects of it. We'll hear about those in other places. But to see the contest and the war and struggle between the woman and the dragon. And what we see immediately is that this dragon, though he's got ten heads to devour this child with, is not able to do it as powerfully, is as ready as done as this story seems to be, just as easily it's not done.
[00:16:02] Of course, Satan, despite all of his planning, despite all of his desires, despite all of the power that he had at his disposal, was not able to devour the child, he was not able to destroy Jesus, even though he put him to death.
[00:16:21] He was postponed in this, of course, at the time of Herod, we see many times in which people sought to kill Jesus, but he escaped. We see that Judas, even one of his friends, one of his close companions, his disciples, betrays him.
[00:16:41] This son of Satan, we might say, so close, so diabolical, diabolos, so evil in every way.
[00:16:52] And eventually Jesus is put to death. But what happens in three days? He rises from the dead. Soon he ascends into heaven, where he now rules, caught up to God and to his what? To his throne.
[00:17:06] Jesus is in a place now, while the woman flees into the wilderness, he is in a place now where he is ruling.
[00:17:14] He is ruling. He is on his throne, he is secure, he is safe, he is king.
[00:17:23] And then finally we are brought back to the woman in verse six. And we read that she flees into the wilderness.
[00:17:32] But she flees. Not randomly, she flees, though she may not exactly know where she is going, God knows where she's going. And even better, he has prepared a place for her there.
[00:17:48] This phrase prepared a place often has temple connotations to it. The sense that she is going to the place that the Lord has prepared, the place where the Lord has set his name.
[00:18:02] In some ways, it's an invisible place now, a place that is all over, not defined by any one particular spot. But it is a place where she belongs in the safety of the Lord, in the place of his dwelling.
[00:18:18] And in this place she is to be nourished. 1260 days.
[00:18:25] I don't have time to go through all the passages that this number has in mind. But I'll just point out to you that this number and several other similar numbers represent basically the same thing. This period, this definite period of time between the Lord's first coming and his second coming, where the church finds herself in the wilderness in exile, as people that are not of this world, but in the world until he comes again. You can look for it when you hear phrases like this, like 42 months or three and a half years. That happens in eleven and twelve and 13. Or this phrase time and times and half a time.
[00:19:14] All of these phrases basically equal the same thing.
[00:19:19] They're pointing to this definite period of time in the wilderness, all kind of going back to Daniel and some things that were there.
[00:19:28] What do we take from this time, this thousand years, this intertestamental time?
[00:19:39] Well, there's a lot of lessons we can take from it. One is that though the devil is strong, he is not supreme. He is limited in what he can do. This time also being a definite time will come to an end. It will come to an end. It's not just going on and on and on forever and ever. Sometimes it feels like this to us. We say, oh, Lord, when are you coming? The saints who have died, the martyrs cry out to the Lord, when will our blood be avenged? When will the wicked be put down? When will Satan finally be cast into the lake of fire? When will the people and the enemies of the Lord be destroyed?
[00:20:24] And we don't have an exact day, a month, date, and year that we can point to, and we never will. But we do know this. It's a definite time. The Lord knows the time, and he will come when it's time.
[00:20:39] The other thing we can say that is important about this time is that though the devil, as we see in the next passage, will flee after the woman in the wilderness and will seek to destroy her, it's not because he's winning. It's because he's already lost.
[00:20:57] He's already lost the battle. He already failed to devour the child. The child, the Lord Jesus Christ now sits on the throne and is reigning. The woman is in the place prepared for her by God. Everything's going to be fine for us, but not for him.
[00:21:16] That's why he wages war in the way he does. That's why he pursues. We read in verse 13 the woman who gave birth to the male child, but God protects her. In verse 14 we read, the woman was given two wings of the great eagle so that she might fly from the serpent into the wilderness, to the place where she is to be nourished for a time and times and half a time.
[00:21:44] In all of this, we see that the world that Jesus came into was not just a world filled with political powers or religious institutions or various people, was also filled with these unclean spirits, with the devil and all those who serve at his calling.
[00:22:05] Jesus came into a world in which cosmic powers and a cosmic war was being played out in heaven and on earth.
[00:22:17] And he did not fail.
[00:22:22] God did not fail. The child was born as promised. As promised and promised throughout the Old Testament. He was born and he was successful. He was caught up to God and to his throne.
[00:22:37] Now we, of course, know how exactly it was that he was caught up to the Lord in his ascension. And we also know how it is we conquer in Christ. As revelation tells us, in the blood of the lamb, we have success and we have protection. As the bride of Christ, we are protected and kept clean through his work. For us, the work that Satan tried to accomplish, the work that the great dragon tried to do in killing the Son of God, was ultimately a complete failure, because God used that death to be a perfect sacrifice for sins, to remove the curse of death, to remove the misery. And it is in our lives now and in our lives now. And to remove the wrath of God to come through the blood of Christ. Not only is the victory over Satan won, but the bride is made pure and holy and lovely and covered in the light of his righteousness.
[00:23:52] So when we pull back the curtain and we think about our times now, we can affirm several things.
[00:24:00] We can affirm that, as Paul tells us, that there is a battle going on and we ought to fight in the strength of the Lord. We ought to put on the armor of God. And part of that means believing and trusting in the things that he's said.
[00:24:15] To hear the way that these events are recounted and be encouraged by them, emboldened by them, to know that a dragon as great as this one is of no power compared to the king.
[00:24:30] He cannot destroy us because we dwell in a place prepared for us by God.
[00:24:37] The time that he wages war against us, the time that he tries to pursue us, is a definite time. It will end. And eventually he and all those who serve him, all those whose names are not written in the book of life, will be cast into the lake of fire.
[00:24:59] Let me think about as we close, and I ask you to think about this with me, four categories of people.
[00:25:07] Four categories of people that I borrowed from somewhere. I don't remember? I'm sorry about that.
[00:25:14] The first category is people. Perhaps this includes you. People who are not doing well and they don't know it.
[00:25:24] People that are not doing well and they don't know it. How does this passage speak to someone like that?
[00:25:32] It says, wake up.
[00:25:35] You are in the middle of a cosmic war. And compromise with the world is to align yourself with the evil one.
[00:25:46] To give yourself over to your pleasures and lusts, to give yourself over to a plan of works, righteousness. To seek to save yourself and serve yourself over and against God is dangerous, and it will end in hell.
[00:26:07] For those who are not doing well and don't know it, the call is wake up. Consider the dragon, consider his fate, and be aware.
[00:26:19] How about a second group?
[00:26:21] Those who are not doing well but know it.
[00:26:26] You see your struggles. You see the pains that you are feeling. You see the things that are going on and the difficulties that you're facing.
[00:26:36] I think this passage speaks to you and says, persevere.
[00:26:41] You're not doing well. You know it. But it's okay if your faith is in the Lord Jesus Christ. Keep on keeping on. Be strong. Put on his armor. The place that you are in the struggles that you are experiencing are not random. God is nourishing you, actively nourishing you, helping you.
[00:27:05] The battle is won.
[00:27:07] The battle is won. The devil's wages for his war will come to him, and he's already lost.
[00:27:17] So be encouraged and persevere.
[00:27:21] Hold fast to Christ, and he will save you.
[00:27:25] The third of these fourth categories we'll speak of is those who are doing well and know they're doing well. And to you, I would say as well, persevere, encourage and tell the good news to other people.
[00:27:38] Tell them about the dragon, tell them about the woman. Tell them about the child and the strength that we have in him, that we are being nourished, that you are being taken care of, that God loves you and is working in you and in your life, and he will bring all things to their very happy end.
[00:28:01] And finally, to those who are doing well and don't know it.
[00:28:06] For those who are doing well and don't know it, who are maybe feeling discouraged and sad despite all kinds of blessings and success and nourishment in your life, I'd say, perhaps things are better than you think they are.
[00:28:22] Perhaps you're doing better than you realize.
[00:28:25] Perhaps it's true that you are in a place that God has prepared for you and you are being nourished. Perhaps the devil's war has already been lost, perhaps. And of course it's true that the Lord Jesus sits on his throne.
[00:28:43] These passages like this are given to us in this way to catch in our minds and hold fast in our memories so that we can trust the Lord and all that he's doing now and in the days to come. Let's pray.
[00:29:01] Our heavenly Father, as your children, we call out to you and we ask that you would hear our prayer, that you would give to us the things that we need for this life and the life to come.
[00:29:15] And one of those things is certainly boldness and encouragement and the will to fight and persevere even when things are very difficult.
[00:29:26] Lord, sometimes temptation comes upon us and it feels almost impossible to resist.
[00:29:32] Sometimes the persecution of the evil one is so strong that we are tempted to give up and not confess you anymore. As our one true king, doubt creeps into our minds, guilt and accusation from the sins that we've committed.
[00:29:53] We are tempted to believe the lies of the evil one, who's one of his primary tools is to deceive us in all of these ways. Under all of these attacks. Lord, we say help. We need your help.
[00:30:08] And we here in this passage recognize that we receive it and are receiving it in you.
[00:30:16] And so, Lord, help us to continue to put our faith in you and not be discouraged. Help us to tell other people and encourage them as they are pursued by the evil one. Help us to recognize your awesome strength and how far and supreme it is above the strength of even this great dragon.
[00:30:41] Let us not fear him, but fear the Lord and the Lord alone.
[00:30:49] As we ask all these things. Lord, we also praise you. We thank you for. And we thank you for making us the bride of Christ, for nourishing feeding us, beautifying us, making us holy and fit for union with you. Lord, we thank you for the way in which you take the lowliest and weakest and most foolish people of the world and bring us together into this magnificent, glorious, beautiful creature of light.
[00:31:22] Lord, we ask that you would help us to see ourselves as you have made us to be and not believe the lies of the world and the devil in all this. Lord, we do bless and praise your name, and we look forward to the coming of our king, in whose name we pray. Amen.
