Revelation 12

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks from Revelation 12 in his series called Missions as the Triumph of the Lamb.

Now we’re going to take a jump to Revelation 12. As Revelation 4 and 5 have to be taken together, so also do Revelation 12 and 13. In the next few meetings, we will be looking at chapters 12–14, until in the very last meeting we take a jump to Revelation 21–22. Hear then what Scripture says.

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“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. She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on his heads. 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. She gave birth to a son, a male child, who will rule all the nations with an iron scepter. And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne. 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.

And there was war in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. 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.

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. 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. 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.’

When the dragon saw that he had been hurled to the earth, he pursued the woman who had given birth to the male child. 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.

Then from his mouth the serpent spewed water like a river, to overtake the woman and sweep her away with the torrent. But the earth helped the woman by opening its mouth and swallowing the river that the dragon had spewed out of his mouth. Then the dragon was enraged at the woman and went off to make war against the rest of her offspring—those who obey God’s commandments and hold to the testimony of Jesus. And the dragon stood on the shore of the sea.”

This is the Word of the Lord.

I have two children. My son is a strapping six-foot-two, and if I might be excused the role of a proud father, he’s a bit of a hunk. He’s all muscle and toughness, and although, yes, he likes to read and program computers and that sort of thing, if he had his druthers, he’d rather be rappelling down a cliff face for about 300 feet or something like that. He is all hunk.

When he was about 3 years old, he had these (well, he still has them; the same ones, as far as I know) whopping big blue eyes that were very expressive and got him out of all kinds of trouble that he should have remained in. When he was about 3, I asked him one day where he obtained these wonderful deep blue eyes, and he answered with all the authority that only a 3-year-old enjoys, “From God.” Of course, he was right.

Mind you, had he been 20 years older and a biology student, he might have replied, “I have them because although neither you nor Mom have blue eyes, both of you must necessarily carry the appropriate recessive gene, which happily combined in the formation of my DNA.” Which answer would have been more true? They’re both equally true. Which answer was more fundamental? Let’s try another question. What caused the destruction of the southern kingdom of Judah in 587 BC which sent Judah into the exile?

Well, you could mention the rise of the Babylonian superpower; the acquisitiveness of the emperor Nebuchadnezzar; the decline and decay of the Davidic dynasty; the proud arrogance and stupidity of Hezekiah three or four monarchs earlier, who then showed the emissaries from the Babylonian superpower its wealth; the criminal stupidity of Zedekiah despite Jeremiah’s warnings; the sins of the people, sins that attracted God’s judgment.

You could mention all of those things, or you could simply say, “God did it.” Which answer would have been more? They’re equally true. Which answer is more fundamental? What made Job suffer? Well, you could mention the Sabeans and the Chaldeans, these bands of marauding riffs, who came in and swiped all his sheep and cattle. You could mention the windstorm that brought down the house and killed all 10 of his children in one go.

You could mention the disease that left him scraping his scabs on an ash pit. Eventually you could even mention a nagging wife. But you could also say God did it. In fact, behind the scenes, God certainly sanctioned it. Which answer is more true? Well, they’re both equally true. Which answer is more fundamental? One more question.

What has caused the church her greatest difficulties and sufferings during the past few decades? Of course, the answer you give will vary somewhat with location. If you’re talking about Africa, it becomes impossible not to mention the AIDS virus. There are 28 or 29 million dead so far, and no matter what we do, not fewer than 40 to 50 million will die, and they happen to be mostly the middle class, the new economic potential.

This past budget, the US has budgeted a new $15 billion for nothing but fighting AIDS in Africa. It’s not going to stop 40 million from dying. Now world health authorities are saying that before this is over, it could be as many as 100 million people will be dead. Then, of course, there’s the lack of trained leadership all through Central Africa, whether you’re talking about the East (Nairobi, Tanzania, Uganda) or the West (Nigeria, Cote d’Ivoire, and so forth).

There are many pastors who were trained with minimal education in the bush at a time when there are rising intellectual classes. As recently as 1963, Nairobi had no university. Now it has four, and Kenya itself has more, Nakuru and elsewhere. As a result, there are rising intellectual classes in the Central African states, right across the continent, where Christianity seems ignorant and impoverished intellectually and not coping with this rising intellectual class.

So everywhere you hear the pew is higher than the pulpit. It’s a major crisis. At the very time when there are so many converts to Christianity, we could lose an awful lot of it in the next generation because of the lack of trained leadership. Then, of course, you could mention drought, the increasing advances of the Sahel.

You could mention rising tensions between Islam and Christianity, not only in countries like Nigeria, where the population is roughly half and half, but on and off in Eritrea and Ethiopia and elsewhere on the continent. Saudi Arabia has just announced in the last 10 days that it is going to endow 70 new professorships for teaching Islam in Nigerian universities.

Then, of course, tribalism. One of the results of post-colonialism is boundaries were drawn in all kinds of interesting places that cut across tribes, and tribalism has never really died. Or one could say … what? Is this the best analysis we can make? What about China? Persecution, the unavailability of Bibles and other helps, occasional rounds of repression. The church has grown formidably from something like a million in 1948 to estimates that vary today between.… Well, the lowball figure is about 16 million, but just about everybody agrees that’s far too low.

Most estimates are somewhere nowadays between 80 million and 120 million. It’s unbelievable. Nevertheless, a lot of this church is ignorant, sometimes without a Bible or with only one Bible for the entire church, totalitarian Marxism with a Chinese face, and occasional bounds of persecution. At the moment it is estimated that there are something like 3,000 Christian leaders who are detained.

Then, of course, more broadly, in certain parts of the world there is just avid persecution. There have been not fewer than two million Christian martyrs in the Sudan in the last 15 years; not fewer than eight and a half thousand Christians killed in Indonesia in the last three and a half years; pastors occasionally taken out in sweeps in Iran. There have been more Christian martyrs in the last 150 years than in the previous 1,800 years. That’s the truth of the matter.

Then in the West, what shall we say? Well, another whole range of things: the pressures of secularization in which Christianity, even in countries that normally have a lot of it, is squeezed to the periphery so it doesn’t have any influential voice anymore; the rapid pace of life; material prosperity in much of the West that becomes a new form of idolatry; the impact of the mass media and moral indifferentism; in many churches, prayerlessness; and sometimes in our cities, loneliness.

Then there are other factors, too, that are really more than a little interesting. In Western Europe, the traditional European population is no longer reproducing itself. The population rate in non-Muslim France is now about 1.43. It has to be about 2.2 just to sustain itself. In Czechoslovakia it’s a little lower than that. Thus, Europe is going to change its face enormously if present trends continue, just on population and demographic grounds, in the next half century.

But have you noticed my categories? They’re all sociological, historical, occasional, demographic, psychological, medical. They’re all performance related, all circumstance related. Nothing about the Devil, and nothing about God. Now do not misunderstand me. I am certainly not saying there is nothing to be learned from sociological and demographic analysis. Yes, there are distinctions to be drawn between the profiles of baby boomers and baby busters, between modernism and postmodernism. Yes, that’s all true.

The profile of changes in Northern Ireland is formidable, and unless the church adapts in some ways, the church will linger and decline. That’s just inevitable. Those things are also true. Yet if our analyses are cast exclusively in such terms, inevitably our solutions will be cast in such terms. That’s the danger. All of our analyses thus become relatively superficial because we do not probe deeply enough to see the cosmic tension between God and the Devil himself, and thus our analyses become superficial as well.

One of the things that apocalyptic literature sets out to do is to analyze things from a God’s-eye view. It looks at things from the perspective of the throne room of heaven. Now if I understand the passage before us, God here gives us a deeper analysis of the difficulties and sufferings of the church. Chapters 12–14 mark a major division in the book itself.

Before the final display of the wrath of God in chapter 16, John teases out in these chapters the underlying cause for the hostility and suffering that fall upon the church, and it turns out to be nothing less than the rage of Satan. If you don’t have a category for that, you cannot understand deeply what is going on in contemporary Christianity. First, John outlines the occasion for this satanic rage in verses 1–9. Secondly, he identifies the reasons for this satanic rage. Finally, he specifies how Christians overcome this satanic rage.

First, he outlines the occasion for this satanic rage. In John’s vision, the scene opens with a great and wondrous sign appearing in heaven. Now sign here, as sometimes elsewhere in Revelation, is something like a spectacle that points forward in some way to the consummation. The content of this spectacle is a woman, and what a woman she is (verses 1–2).

You might think she is married, but she is not. For although she gives birth to this son, this male child, who will rule with a rod of iron, nevertheless, it’s pretty clear by verse 17 that she can’t be reduced to marry. Verse 17: “The dragon was enraged at the woman and went off to make war against the rest of her offspring—those who obey God’s commandments and hold to the testimony of Jesus.”

The woman here is the messianic community, whether under the old covenant or the new. Just as Zion in the Old Testament is symbolically understood to be the mother of the people of God (“Sing, O barren woman, sing a new song”; she’s a woman) so the heavenly Jerusalem, the new Zion, is considered the mother of the people of God in the new. Thus, Galatians 4:26: “Jerusalem that is above is free, and she is our mother.”

So the messianic community gives birth to the Messiah, and then the messianic community continues. Her children are the ones who are being persecuted in verse 17. This symbolism continues right through the book of Revelation. We’ll discover it dramatically in the next two or three chapters and very dramatically in chapter 21.

She is clothed with the sun (that is, she’s utterly radiant), and the feet on the moon suggest dominion. She has 12 stars on her head, whether from the 12 tribes of the old covenant or the 12 apostles of the new. Jesus himself links these two in Matthew 19. She is pregnant, we’re told in verse 2. She is in travail. The Jews sometimes spoke of the birth pains of the Messiah; that is, the birth pains that the people of God, the mother of the Messiah, would go through waiting for the Messiah to come to pass.

This derives, again, from the Old Testament. 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.” That is, waiting for the coming of the Messiah. The birth pains of the Messiah experienced by the people of God waiting for the Messiah to come to birth.

What we have in the first spectacle, then, is Israel in an agony of suffering and expectation as the Messiah comes to birth. After Messiah comes to birth and is taken out of the way, then the children of the woman, the messianic community, still face an ongoing onslaught from Satan. That’s what this chapter is about.

That brings us to the second sign in the pageant: an enormous red dragon. There’s no question of identification here. He’s identified for us in verse 9: “The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the Devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray.” So the dragon, sometimes called Leviathan in the Old Testament, monster of the deep, a standard symbol for all that opposes God …

He’s associated with Egypt at the time of the exodus in Psalm 74. He’s associated with Assyria and Babylon in Isaiah 27. He’s associated with Pharaoh in Ezekiel 29. But the supreme opponent is Satan himself. Do you remember that dramatic scene in Matthew 16 and parallels, where Jesus asks his own followers, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is? Who do people say that I am?” They say, “Well, some say this; some say that.” “Yeah, but what do you say?”

Peter finally stands up and says, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Jesus immediately begins to talk about his impending death, how he has to go to Jerusalem and suffer many things, and so forth. Peter tries to score again. He is the one speaking for all, who says, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” and for that confession Jesus commends him. “Blessed are you, Simon son of John, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.”

But when Peter hears Jesus going on to talk about impending suffering and crucifixion and death and resurrection, he has no category for a crucified Messiah at all. “Never, Lord! This shall never happen to you.” Jesus wheels on him and says, “Get behind me, Satan!” What are we to understand from that? You see, it’s not that suddenly Peter has become demon-possessed and it’s not really Peter speaking; it’s Satan himself. This is Peter giving his considered judgment.

But the judgment is so diabolical, is so wrong-headed, it so fails to understand that the Messiah is also the suffering servant, is so an attempt to short-circuit Jesus from going to the cross (which lay at the heart of his temptations already in Matthew 4), is so bound up with the agony of Gethsemane (“Not my will but yours be done, but if it be possible, take this cup from me”) that Jesus himself understands that the voice behind Peter’s is Satan’s voice.

Oh, it’s Peter’s opinion. He just doesn’t understand. He doesn’t have his Bible together yet. But at the same time, behind Peter’s voice is Satan’s voice, just as behind the Assyrian Empire in the capture of the northern tribes was Satan, and behind Babylon in the capture of the southern tribes was Satan, Leviathan. Indeed, the seven heads in this passage remind us of seven heads of Leviathan in Psalm 74:14, suggesting the invincibility of his power at the time, the superpower of the time.

The 10 horns recall the fourth beast of Daniel 7 in the passage that was read. I wish I had time to unpack that more wholly. Awesome power, kingly authority, and we’ll see that in the next chapter the beast out of the sea likewise is one of Satan’s agents and is similarly endowed. He has crowns. Notice he doesn’t have the same number of crowns as he has heads. That’s because once again you’re dealing with mixed metaphor. You’re not supposed to divide up the seven crowns among the ten heads equally. It just gets so silly if you start treating apocalyptic that way.

Seven crowns, that is, crowns of arrogated authority, usurped authority, against him who is described as Lord of Lords and King of Kings, who will rule the nations with an iron scepter, here in chapter 12, verse 5. So now you have the two big elements of this spectacle, and the drama unfolds in verses 4–6. “His tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth.”

Hebrew poetry is constantly nature poetry. When things are going well, then you speak of the hills dancing for joy and the trees clapping their hands, and when things are going badly, then the stars are falling from the heavens. You’re not supposed to think that literally one third of all of the stars in the universe fall on the earth and this is a crazy, mixed-up, magical world that doesn’t understand modern science. It has nothing to do with that at all.

No more are we expecting the stars to fall on the earth than we are expecting the hills to dance. This is nature poetry. It’s a way of saying that when God acts in a certain way, all of nature is festooned with joy, and when there is tragedy and rebellion, then all of nature suffers under the curse. That’s what’s going on here. The language is drawn from Daniel 8, verses 9–10. We’ll come to that part of the drama in a moment.

“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.” This is meant to be grotesque. Here the woman is about to give birth. Her feet are in the stirrups, and between her legs is this wretched dragon, ready, as the baby is pushed out, to grab the baby and eat it. You are meant to be revolted by this vision. That is exactly what is going on.

She does give birth to a son, a male child, destined to rule all the nations with an iron scepter. The child survives, transparently. “And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne.” Now you’ve just covered the entire history of Jesus. There’s no dwelling on it here, because the triumph of Christ has already been set forth in the vision of Revelation 4–5. You’ve moved from his birth to his ascension to his exaltation at the right hand of the majesty on high.

Here the focus now is what happens to the woman and her children, the ones who were left behind. What you are dealing with in this brief summary is the flight into Egypt so that Herod didn’t get the baby, and behind Herod is the dragon. You have the attempt to put Jesus over the hill and kill him that way in Luke 4, and behind the crowd of Nazareth trying to kill Jesus that way is the red dragon.

Then you have the attempt to stone Jesus to death in John 8, and behind that attempt is the red dragon. Then you have the determination to send Jesus to the cross, Pilate and the rulers of the Jews and Herod, and behind them all is the red dragon. Behind the red dragon is God himself, bringing to pass his purposes, even in the death of his Son, to bring about our redemption.

Now what about the woman who’s left behind? “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.” Now then, there are two elements of the symbolism here that need to be understood. First, the flying into the desert. You remember, of course, that in the Old Testament the people pass through the desert before they come to the Promised Land and receive the Law from God from Sinai, now applied throughout the community, and so forth.

The desert became a part of the pilgrimage of the Jews before they entered into the Promised Land. Later on, when the Jews rebel against God and are slinking into idolatry, then you have a prophecy like that of Hosea, where according to Hosea the prophet, God is like a cuckolded husband. His bride is busy sleeping around all over the place with every pagan deity around, and the Almighty is the cuckolded Almighty.

Within that framework, Hosea 2:14 pictures God saying, “I will allure her, and I will bring her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her.” You see, the wilderness was not only the place of testing before entry into the Promised Land; it was also in some ways a place of betrothal, a place of magic, a place where God provided the manna, a place where God ensured that their sandals didn’t wear out, where God provided all of the food they needed miraculously.

It was a place where God allured the people, taught the people, trained the people before they entered into the Promised Land. Once again, therefore, God will, as it were, court his people and allure her in the desert. So now Israel, or the messianic community, the people of God, the woman, flies into the desert to a place prepared for her by God before entry into the Promised Land. Once again you see the messianic community (brothers and sisters, that’s us) is off in the desert before entering into the Promised Land, but this time it’s the ultimate Promised Land.

Now what do we do about this 1,260? There are many countries that have a specified period of time carrying some symbol-laden value. I’m a Canadian, but I’ve lived in the US long enough that I know every American schoolchild and up knows what 87 years represents. Do you know what 87 years represents in America? Every American knows this. However ignorant they may be of history, they know “Fourscore years and seven.”

Do you know what it comes from? Has anybody here done any American history or did their degree or a high school education in America? I guarantee you know if you did your high school there. It’s Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg Address, which just about every school child memorizes. It’s only 287 words long. “Fourscore years and seven,” that is, since the founding of the nation, which brings you up to the Civil War and the great Gettysburg Address after the horrible slaughter of the soldiers on both sides.

“Fourscore years and seven” is such a part of American mythology in history that you cannot say “87 years” or “fourscore years and seven” without calling to mind the Civil War and the ending of slavery and the decree of emancipation and its rootage and its links to the Constitution, both good and bad. You cannot do it. It’s part of the whole mythology of the country.

In Israel, 1,260 did exactly the same thing. It comes from the time of the Maccabean Revolt. One thousand two hundred sixty days represents three and a half years on an idealized calendar of 30 days a month, or 42 months. Same thing. You find all of these ways of speaking. Forty-two months on an idealized 30-day month or “time, times, and half a time.” Same expression. Time representing one year, times two more years, and half a time three and a half years.

Three and a half years, 1,260 days, 42 months … it’s exactly the same expression, and all of these expressions are used in these three chapters. Thus, the 42 months crop up, and so does “time, times, and half a time” a little later even in this chapter. Verse 14: “Where she would be taken care of for a time, times, and half a time.” What does it mean? What does it refer to?

Well, when the Jews finally did return in some numbers … not massive numbers, but in some numbers … to the Promised Land after the exile, then eventually the prophets started encouraging them to rebuild the temple. Nehemiah came along and helped them rebuild the wall. The prophets Haggai, Zephaniah, and Malachi are busy trying to encourage the people to rebuild the nation and so forth.

Eventually they build another temple, but they’re still under Persian power. After the Persians collapse under Alexander the Great, who with his thundering horde swept all the way to India, then they’re under the Greeks. Then when Alexander dies, allegedly at the age of 33 because there were no more worlds to conquer, in fact, he broke up his empire under four generals.

One of them founded what came to be called the Ptolemaic dynasty down in Egypt, and another founded what came to be called the Seleucid dynasty up in Syria. Guess where Israel is? Squashed right between the two. These two struggled back and forth and back and forth and back and forth, with Israel being no-man’s-land, sometimes attached to one, sometimes attached to the other, decade after decade after decade in ruthless, bloodthirsty civil war.

Eventually, the Seleucids in the North gained control. In the second century, one of them came to power called Antiochus IV Epiphanes. He resolved absolutely to squash Judaism and its religion. He made it a capital offense to go to the temple. He made it a capital offense to observe the Sabbath. He made it a capital offense to own any part of what we call the Old Testament. He resolved to kill all the priestly classes.

When he captured Jerusalem, he immediately slaughtered pigs there and put in pagan deities. As a result, civil war broke out. He resolved to kill all priests and sent his execution squads here and there. He went up into a small village in the Judean hill country and came before an old man, Mattathias, who was simply an old faithful man, and Mattathias killed the emissary. He had three sons. The first was called Judas.

Judas eventually came to be called Judas the Hammer, hence Judas Maccabeus. That’s what Maccabeus means in Aramaic. Judas the Hammer. He invented, so far as our records go, first-class guerrilla warfare. You can read about it in Josephus. I am told (I don’t know that it’s the truth) that at West Point, which is the premier army training college in America, they still read Josephus’ account of Judas Maccabeus just because it gives the origins of guerrilla warfare.

So for three and a half years, he trained troops in the hill country of Judea and Samaria and kept attacking the Seleucid forces, on and on and on in bloodthirsty skirmishes, until finally, in a pitched battle, he turfed them all out, and for the first time in half a millennium, the Jews were free to govern their own affairs. Did they put a Davidide back on the throne? No, they did not. They just put their own people back in control. A century later, the Romans came and took over, and they were under control again in 63 BC.

But in the Jewish mind, that three-and-a-half-year period came to exercise a controlling self-understanding of their history, exactly like that 87 years does for Americans. That was the period of horrible suffering. It was the horrible year of abomination. It was the time of being rejected. It was the time of being on the verge of being wiped out until finally God gave victory to the people and the temple was rededicated and purified and the sacrifices started again. In fact, it had been predicted by the prophet Daniel four centuries earlier.

In other words, three and a half years came to symbolize for the Jews a time of intense suffering; a conventional symbol for a limited period of time during which evil has remarkably free course before God steps in and cleans things up for them. So now the messianic people of God, this woman, flies into the desert to a place prepared for her by God, where she would be taken care of for three and a half years, 1,260 days.

If I understand the way the book of Revelation works (and we’ll tease this out a bit more in the next chapter), that’s the whole period in which we live right now. That’s us. That’s where we are. It’s not just three and a half years. The three and a half years is symbolic of this entire period, where we’re squashed between the triumph of Christ, who has already gone to heaven, and his return. Meanwhile, the Devil has remarkably free play.

The same thing is put into cosmic terms in verses 7–9. “There was war in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. 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.”

I think anybody reading this in the first century would know exactly what this was talking about, because Jesus in the days of his flesh, as the kingdom was being announced, as the disciples were going out preaching the gospel, performing miracles in Jesus’ name and reporting back to Jesus, Jesus said, “I saw Satan fall from heaven.”

He understood that with the advance of the gospel, with Jesus’ own passage through death and resurrection to the right hand of the majesty on high, claiming, “All authority is given to me in heaven and on earth,” heaven, as it were, is cleaned out. Satan has already lost this fundamental fight. He has already been destroyed, and he’s cast out of heaven and is in restricted territory.

That’s why John now hears 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.” He’s defeated in principle. That happened at the cross, at the resurrection, at Jesus’ exaltation, with the dawning of the kingdom of God. That’s the setting of this entire drama in this chapter.

In the second place, John identifies the reasons for this satanic rage. Look at what is said now. Note the connection between verses 10 and 12. He has been hurled down. Verse 12: “Therefore rejoice, you heavens and you who dwell in them,” because he has been hurled out of heaven (verse 9), and he’s now on the earth. “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.”

The psychology here works, actually. Think of World War II. By the time you get to 1944, the Russians, who were also receiving massive supplies on the Murmansk Run from the Western allies, have now forced their way through the Battle of Stalingrad, and they’re into Poland. They’re on the edge of Germany. The Western allies have cleaned out North Africa. They’re halfway up the boot of Italy. Finally D-Day arrives, and in three days we dump 1.3 million men and countless millions of tons of war material on the beaches of Normandy.

Now anybody with half a brain in his head can see that the war is over. It’s done. In terms of numbers, in terms of economic strength, in terms of access to energy, in terms of access to steel, in terms of war material, in terms of planes versus planes, tanks versus tanks, guns versus guns, the war is over. Anybody with half a brain in his head can see it. Does that mean Hitler said, “Oops! Sorry, guys, I goofed,” and sued for peace? No, he was filled with fury because he knew his time was short.

What happens next, of course, is the Battle of the Bulge. He almost broke out to the coast of France again. The only reason he didn’t was he ran out of gasoline. It wouldn’t have changed the outcome of the war, but it certainly didn’t mean the war was any gentler at that point. The Battle of Berlin was perhaps the bloodiest of all.

You and I must understand that Satan is a defeated foe. He has already been defeated at the cross, but that doesn’t mean he has packed up his bags and said, “Oops, sorry. I guess I’d better go home; I was wrong.” He is rather filled with fury, because he knows his time is short. He can’t get at Jesus anymore. He can’t tempt him through a Peter or in the wilderness or on the way to the cross. Christ, we’ve already been told, has been caught up to heaven.

He has already been defeated, so he no longer stands, as it were, in God’s presence accusing the brothers. He can’t do that. Christ has died. His people are already vindicated. Christ has borne our guilt. He has taken our pain. He has taken our curse. Does that mean we have no problems with the Devil? No. “Woe to those who live on the land and the sea. He is filled with fury, because he knows his time is short.” We had better see that our conflict belongs to this cosmic sweep of things.

So his time is short. His sphere is restricted. Verse 12: “Rejoice, you heavens and you who dwell on the earth, but woe to the earth and the sea.” Verse 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.” He is determined to wreak as much vengeance as he can upon the woman, which is the messianic community, which is us. He is determined.

His success keeps coming in cycles, even though it’s limited. The symbolism of verses 14–17 is full of bits and pieces of the original Exodus account. “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 could be taken care of.” That’s that passage I referred to earlier from Exodus: “You have seen how I’ve borne you up with eagles’ wings.”

“But from his mouth the serpent spewed water like a river to overtake the woman and sweep her away with the torrent.” Whether this is as in the Red Sea crossing or the like.… “The earth helped the woman by opening its mouth.” You remember that account as well with Nadab and Abihu. “The dragon was enraged at the woman and went off to make war against the rest of her offspring, those who obey God’s commandments and hold to the testimony of Jesus.”

You see, some people approach the whole question of the book of Revelation and eschatology and say, “Do you believe the gospel is going to triumph and have great success, or do you believe we’re going to become smaller and smaller and be an oppressed minority? What do you think is going to happen?”

Do you remember the parable of the wheat and the tares? The master sows good seed, but during the night, the enemy comes in and sows tares everywhere. The master’s followers want to rip out the tares. The master says, “No, no. Let both grow until the end.” (Matthew 13:29–30) So although I’m neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, let me tell you what’s going to happen in the twenty-first century.

Unless the Lord comes back first, I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. There will be more evangelism, more church planting, more growth. Countless millions will be brought to Christ. There will be more persecution, more suffering, more death, more torture, more horror. I see no reason whatsoever why Europe shouldn’t have another massive war on its continent sometime in the next century.

There is no way we can solve these things finally by sending in the US Marines or by a European common market. It doesn’t work that way. These are at most temporary expedients. At the end of the day, no matter what the system is, we can corrupt it. There are different kinds of corruption too. I’ve just come back from spending time ministering again in Central Europe. Talk to the older pastors of Central Europe.

On the streets of Bratislava, three weeks after the wall came down in 1989, they were openly selling pornography in the marketplaces. It hadn’t been seen for 50 years. Who was more corrupt? We can pollute anything. If we’re given a totalitarian regime, then there’s suffering because of the totalitarianism. If we’re given freedom and democracy, it’s not long before we corrupt it with sheer greed and pornography and licentiousness. There is no hope in any of these things. There will be suffering. There will be persecution.

In my own country of Canada, the government has just added homosexuality to the hate laws. That means anybody who speaks against homosexuality can now be prosecuted under Canada’s hate laws. It is still unclear what that will mean for a preacher who’s expounding Romans 1 and believes it. It may be that the Supreme Court will make an exemption, but it may not be too. It’s quite possible to believe that in a few years, preachers of the gospel in some Western countries will go to jail for preaching Romans. Quite possible.

I was brought up, after all, in a Western democracy, but Baptist ministers alone between 1950 and 1952 spent eight years in jail in French Canada for preaching the gospel. We kids were occasionally beaten up as maudits Protestants. It’s a different time and a different place now. Now it’s so secular, but that’s the way it was then. Don’t ever for a moment think we’re going to be exempt.

We have had such a remarkable run of relative freedoms that we forget how flimsy all such freedoms are in a broken world, a world of sin and malice. There will be persecution. There will be tears. Even at lesser levels, Jesus himself says in Matthew 5:10–13 that persecution can take the form of malice and bad-mouthing and insults and so on. There’s enough of that in the Western world already.

You really are a twit in many circles if you are a Christian today. Especially in certain circles … the media, for example, or most of our universities, and so on, you’re a second-class citizen. “Let both grow to the end.” You need to understand that behind whatever small things you face or, in the mercy of God, some of you will face more.… Whatever things you face, behind the merely superficial, demographic, occasional, cultural, religious expressions is the wrath of Satan himself. He is filled with fury, because he knows his time is short.

Lastly, John specifies how Christians overcome the satanic rage. What do we do about it? How do we overcome it? I can answer this quickly. First, we overcome it on the ground of the blood of the Lamb. Verse 11: “They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb.” By here is not the preposition that suggests the blood is somehow the means or the instrument. This is the ground on which we overcome.

That is, the great redemptive act that loosed these Christians from their sins in chapter 1, verse 5, establishes their right to reign and enables them to conquer Satan. He is the accuser, we’re told, of our brothers, of our sisters, in the preceding verse. He accuses us before God. He accuses us to our conscience. How do we overcome him?

“Well, I’ve tried so hard this week. I mean, I’ve had my devotions every day. He’s really got nothing on me.” No, no, no. You know that doesn’t work. We overcome him by the blood of the Lamb. I plead the blood of Jesus Christ. If you were to die right now, what would you say? “I should get into heaven because I had my devotions this morning and I’m at a retreat”? Our only ground for acceptance before God, for squashing all the accusations of both conscience and the Devil himself is the blood of the Lamb. The only one.

Then they overcame him by the word of their testimony. This does not mean they gave their testimonies a lot. It means they bear witness a lot. That is, they bear witness to the gospel. It is the word of their testimony to the gospel. How then are Christians to overcome? By taking up the sword themselves as in the Crusades? No, but the way Christians did it in the first century, the way Christians do it today in Eritrea, the way Karen peoples in Burma do it, the way Christians have always done it when they’re being faithful to the Word of God. You bear witness to the gospel.

Whether you suffer for it or live in relative freedom, whether you’re praised for it and touted as a minister in Victorian England or despised in the twenty-first century because you’re a minister, it doesn’t really matter. You proceed by the word of your testimony. You propagate the gospel. You gospel the gospel. That’s what the first apostles had to understand too. When they’re forbidden to speak the gospel.… “We must obey God rather than human beings.”

There is a certain priority to bearing witness to the gospel. This might be done more surreptitiously under a totalitarian regime with hidden churches meeting in houses and so on, or it might be done in massive campaigns. I don’t really care. But it must not ever stop. That’s how we beat the Devil. We beat the Devil by trusting the death of Christ, the triumph of the Lamb, and then by proclaiming the good news of the gospel. That’s how we beat the Devil.

Thirdly, we beat him by a simple willingness to die. “They did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death.” Now for many Christians in many parts of the world, this is a real consideration, but even for us there is a kind of dying to self-interest, of dying to self daily. We’re to take up our cross daily.

But if, instead, our own self-preservation, our own self-promotion, our own self-magnification is our god, we cannot possibly win. We will not witness. We will be more concerned in promoting our reputation than Christ’s. We have no means for overcoming anything, but Christians learn to understand that there are worse things than death.

For example, shame, dishonor, disobedience, faithlessness, lust. There are a lot of worse things than death. Do you remember the old hymn? “Oh, let me never, never outlive my love for thee.” I had a disease a number of years ago that threatened to take me out. I had all kinds of Christians coming and telling me they were praying for my healing. Well, I was grateful. I was happy to be healed at the end after four years of it.

On the other hand, I couldn’t quite bring myself to pray for healing in some sort of unqualified way, because I remembered Hezekiah. He turned his face to the wall and cried, “God, how could you do this? I’ve been such a good king.” He got 15 more years, and it was during that time that he betrayed his legacy. The hymn writer had it right. “O, let me never, never outlive my love for thee.” I am 57 years old. There is still time for me to cheat on my wife and destroy everything I’ve done and said. “O, let me never, never outlive my love for thee.”

We have a willingness to die precisely because death is not the worst thing. So whether it means dying to self-interest or self-perceptions of self-interest or actually dying in martyrdom, it doesn’t really make much difference. You can’t beat that crowd. What are you going to do? Kill them? Brothers and sisters, that’s how we overcome the Devil: by the blood of Christ, by the word of our testimony, and by resolving that death is not the worst enemy. And you know what? That was all entirely understood by Martin Luther.

And though this world, with devils filled,

Should threaten to undo us,

We will not fear, for thou hast willed

God’s truth to triumph through us:

The Prince of Darkness grim,

We tremble not for him;

His rage we can endure,

For, lo! His doom is sure,

One little word will fell him.

The next verse tells us that word is the word of the gospel. Brothers and sisters in Christ, our analysis of what is going on in our society at any given time must probe beyond the demographic, the occasional, the historical, the sociological, to recognize the cosmic, the demonic, the divine, for only then will we see what our true weapons are. Amen.