The Strange Triumph of a Slaughtered Lamb

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of the death of Christ from Revelation 12.

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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.

Its 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 wilderness 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 Messiah. For the accuser of our brothers and sisters, who accuses them before our God day and night, has been hurled down. They triumphed over 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 wilderness, 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 keep God’s commands and hold fast their testimony about Jesus.”

This is the Word of the Lord. Let us pray.

Help us, Lord God, to understand the symbol-laden language richly and rightly that we may the better think your thoughts after you. In Jesus’ name, amen.

I have a son who is about six-three, and I have to tell you he’s a bit of a hunk, but when he was 3 years old, I asked him one day, “Nicholas, where did you get those gorgeous, big, deep blue eyes?” He said, quite rightly, “From God.” Of course, if he had been about 21 and a biology major, he might have replied instead, “I have them because, though neither you nor Mum have blue eyes, you must carry the necessary recessive genes which happily combined with each other and supported each other in the formation of my DNA.” Which description of reality is truer? They’re equally true. Which one is more fundamental?

Another question. Go back to Old Testament history. We’re now about 587 or 586 BC. The northern tribes about 140 years earlier were already taken into captivity. Now the southern tribes are taken into captivity under the mighty regional superpower of Babylon. There’s destruction everywhere. The question is.… What caused the destruction of the southern kingdom in 587 BC?

You could answer, “The rise of the Babylonian superpower, the decline and decay of the Davidic dynasty, the tragic pride of Hezekiah who showed the opponents some time earlier all the wealth of the land, the criminal stupidity of Zedekiah despite the prophet Jeremiah’s warnings.” You could mention the sins of the people, sins that attracted God’s judgment, or you could simply say, “God.” Which description is truer? They’re both equally true. Which description is more fundamental?

Another Old Testament example.… What made Job suffer? Well, there were those bands of marauding Sabeans and Chaldeans and others who came and took away his thousands of head of cattle and sheep and the like, that miserable windstorm that caused the crushing of the whole house and the killing of his 10 children, his disease so that he sits on a little ash heap using pieces of broken pottery to pick away at his scabs. All true. Or you could say, “Satan did it.” You could even say, “God did it.” He certainly sanctioned it. Which description is truer? They’re equally true. Which is more fundamental?

One more question.… What has caused the church her greatest difficulties and sufferings during the last few decades of our era? Well, probably you’d want to regionalize the question a wee bit because different things crop up in different countries.

In sub-Saharan black Africa, for example, the perennial threat of tribalism and the wars that go with it, the impact of HIV. There are parts of central Africa where there are hardly any adults alive between the ages of 16 and 60. I have friends, African-American pastors in Soweto, who average seven or eight funerals a week from HIV.

We could then perhaps move to some countries with totalitarian regimes and talk about the suffering church in Iran and at least in the interior of China, though not now in the big cities. We could talk about how Christians can to this day be beheaded quite easily in Saudi Arabia or the current round of violence in northern India.

We could come to the West and see here our dangers are often bound up with material prosperity, with the rapid pace of life, the impact of the mass media keeping us going, going, going all the time, instant access to information but not much knowledge and still less wisdom. Very little time to stop and think and reflect and dream and pray. There was a time when Christians got up in the morning and read their Bibles. Now they get up in the morning and check their emails.

The rising secularization, which does not mean the diminishing of religion. Secularization does not shut down religion. What it does is squeeze it to the periphery of life so that you can be ever so religious as long as it doesn’t matter, as long as its just a private thing, so that if anybody wants to say their religion ought to change how people think and act and live and what laws should be passed and the like.… No, no, no. You mustn’t do that. Separation of church and state.

Or pluralism, that kind of pluralism which says it is arrogant for any one religion to claim it has truth. Or moral indifferentism, or loneliness, not least in our big cities, and much more. But have you noticed all the categories? They’re sociological. They’re historical. They’re personal. They’re occasional. They’re demographic. They’re psychological. They’re all performance related. Nothing about the Devil and nothing about God.

Don’t misunderstand me. I am most certainly not saying there is nothing to be learned from good, competent sociological studies. There’s a huge amount to be gained from them, but if all of our analyses are cast in such terms, not only are we relatively superficial, but our answers will also tend to be merely horizontal and sociological.

If all of the problems we raise are defined by these disciplines and nothing takes into account what God is doing according to his most Holy Word, then our solutions, likewise, will be purely pragmatic. They won’t be bound up with the gospel, for example, or with the transforming power of God or with what God is doing.

If I understand the passage before us aright, God here in Revelation 12 gives us a deeper analysis of the difficulties and the sufferings of the church. Chapters 12 through 14 form a unit in the book of Revelation, and I don’t have time to go through all three chapters. It’s a major division in the apocalypse before the final display of the wrath of God in the seven plagues of chapter 16 and so on.

What we discover here is the primary problem the church faces. The primary problem the church faces in every generation is the rage of Satan, and I suspect most of us don’t think in our analyses of that factor first. We have to face the fact that the language here is really odd for most of us. You know, “A third of the stars swept out of the heavens,” and beasts and dragons and things like that.

I’ll say a couple of things about this kind of literature. This kind of literature, which is sometimes called apocalyptic, was a genre of literature, a form of writing, that was not uncommon between about 200 BC and AD 200. People don’t write it anymore. You know different kinds of writings have different rules for interpreting them. They convey their message by different kinds of devices.

A computer manual, for example, teaching you how to master C+++ or something is going to read a bit differently from a love poem, and a lyric by your favorite music group is going to be just a wee bit different from a scolding letter from an in-law who is not too pleased with the way you’re handling things. They have different genres to them. We know that even with the different kinds of poetry, don’t we? When I was a boy, we were forced to memorize all this stuff.

anyone lived in a pretty how town

(with up so floating many bells down)

There are not a lot of people who read E.E. Cummings today, but it’s a very different genre from a Shakespearean sonnet.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O, no; it is an ever-fixed mark,

That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;

You interpret that a bit different from E.E. Cummings. Or, coming from Canada, this free verse.

When I see birches bend to left and right

Across the lines of straighter darker trees,

I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.

But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay

Ice-storms do that.

That’s clever, isn’t it? You can do so many different things with language, can’t you? In apocalyptic there are a lot of standard symbols you get to know. For example, every time you find a horn, it means either a king or a kingdom. Numbers are deeply symbolic. If you have seven horns, that means a perfection of kingly authority or the like. Twelve in this book regularly has to do with the 12 tribes of Israel or the 12 apostles of the new covenant. There are standard symbols to these things.

The nature elements … “The stars swept out of the heaven” does not mean the author really thinks stars are tiny little things that can be swept out of the heaven. It’s a way of saying a disaster is taking place. Conversely, when everything is going well, then the trees are dancing for joy and the hills are clapping their hands. You have to get to know how the language works to make sense of it. Having said that, let me suggest to you how John puts this passage together and what bearing it has on us today.

1. John outlines the occasion for this satanic rage.

Verses 1 to 9. He outlines the occasion for this satanic rage, which is his analysis of the problems the church faces. In John’s vision, the scene opens with a great and wondrous sign, we’re told, appearing in the heavens … a sign here is sometimes elsewhere in Revelation a great spectacle … that points in some way to the end.

The content of this spectacle is a woman, we’re told, and what a woman she is! She is clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and a crown of 12 stars on her head. She’s pregnant, and she cries out in pain as she’s about to give birth. Who is she? Some have immediately guessed she is Mary because she does give birth to the child who was snatched up to God and his throne, the one who is going to rule with a rod of iron.

But when you look more closely, it’s not Mary. It’s the people of God. In the Old Testament, sometimes the people of God as a whole, or Zion, or Jerusalem, was figured as a woman so the citizens, the people of the Israelites, are the sons and daughters of Zion, and she is understood to be a woman.

It’s the messianic community. Just as Zion is the mother of the people of God so also Messiah comes out of this messianic community. The way you can prove that is once Jesus is gone, then we’re told (verse 17), “The dragon was enraged at the woman who went off to make war against the rest of her offspring—those who keep God’s commands and hold fast their testimony about Jesus.”

In other words, this woman has a whole lot of other children including all Christians. In other words, this is the messianic community figured as a woman. That she has the sun, that she’s utterly radiant, and her feet on the moon indicate she has a certain kind of dominion. The 12 stars on her head from the old covenant. She comes in 12 tribes. In the new covenant she’s under the aegis of the 12 apostles. She now is in travail. That is, she’s pregnant, and she is in pain as she’s about to give birth.

In fact, Jews at this time sometimes spoke of “the birth pains of the Messiah” by which they meant the terrible suffering through which the people of God had to go before the Messiah showed up. That’s drawn, actually, from language of 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.” What we have here is true Israel, the messianic community, in an agony of suffering and expectation as the Messiah is about to come to birth. That’s the first sign.

The second sign in the pageant, in this spectacle, is an enormous red dragon (verse 3). We don’t have to argue about who he is or what he represents. He’s identified for us in verse 9. He is Satan himself. Dragon or Leviathan, for those of you who read the Old Testament, or monster of the deep … These are standards symbols for all that opposes God.

Sometimes dragon or Leviathan is connected, for example, in the Old Testament with Assyria and Babylon when they attacked God’s people, as in Isaiah 27, or with Pharaoh at the time of the exodus, as in Ezekiel 29. You can see it in the New Testament in another way. Do you remember that remarkable scene in Matthew, chapter 16? Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” They reply, “Well, some say this and some say that.”

“But what do you say?” Peter says, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” and Jesus says, “You’re blessed, Simon son of John, for flesh and blood hasn’t revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.” From that time on, he starts talking about how as the Messiah he has to go to Jerusalem and suffer and die and rise again.

Peter at this point has no category for a crucified Messiah. Messiahs win. Messiahs triumph. Especially a Messiah who can do miracles like this. How are you going to stop a Jesus who can do miracles like that? He turns to Jesus and says, “Never, Lord. This shall never happen to you.” Jesus wheels on him and says, “Get behind me, Satan.” The Beast rises again, even in corrupting the minds of a pharaoh or a Peter so we do not see.

He’s a red dragon probably indicating he’s murderous. Jesus himself says in John 8 he was a murderer from the beginning. After all, he slew our first parents. Seven heads like the Leviathan of Psalm 74. That is, universality of his power in this fallen and broken world. Ten horns recall the fourth beast of Daniel 7. I don’t have time to go into that one.

Crowns. Not here victory wreaths, but these are crowns of usurped authority. He’s claiming to be something he really isn’t. He’s standing with authority over against the one who in this chapter is described as the one who will rule all the nations with an iron scepter (verse 5). He claims this is all his.

Then a drama begins. Verses 4 to 6. It’s meant to be grotesque. The woman, the first spectacle, has her feet in the stirrups pushing in the travail of childbirth to give birth to the Messiah, and there’s the Devil standing between her legs and saying, “Come on! I’m going to eat you. I’m going to eat you.” Wanting to grab the baby to eat it. It’s meant to be grotesque. He is determined to destroy the Messiah when the Messiah comes. “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.”

Historically, of course, this worked out, for example, in the slaughter of the innocents in Matthew, chapter 2, when Herod killed all the babies in Bethlehem not knowing Joseph and Mary and Jesus had already escaped south toward Egypt. He comes at it again when there’s a crowd that tries to push Jesus over a cliff in Luke’s gospel.

Now we’re told this son is born who will rule all the nations with an iron scepter. Anybody who reads the whole book of Revelation knows that has to refer to Jesus. “And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne.” In other words, you now skip all of his ministry, his death, resurrection, and ascension. You skip all of that. There’s a reason for skipping it. The author has spent a lot of time explaining it in symbol-laden language in chapters 4 and 5. I’ll come back to that in a moment.

He skips all of that because the focus now here is not on what Jesus did during the days of his flesh. The focus is what happens now that the baby has escaped and has ascended into heaven, what happens now to the church, what happens now to the people left behind, what happens now to the other children of the woman. What does the Devil do to them? That’s what the focus of the chapter is.

He’s now snatched out of the way. He has ascended. He has gone back to the right hand of the majesty on high. The woman, for her part, flees into the wilderness to a place prepared for her by God where she might be taken care of for 1,260 days. You have to know the 1,260 days has generated any amount of speculation about how to understand it.

I have a friend on the faculty at Trinity who has an enthusiastic imagination, shall we say, and he knew I was going to do a series in chapel there on Revelation 12 to 14 back in 1990 and 1991 just after the first Gulf War was on. For those of you who remember, during that Gulf War the Iraqis were threatening everybody with what was called a scud missile. It’s all dead now, but a scud in that time was thought to be pretty terrifying.

He knew I was going to be preaching on this passage, so he quickly sent me a note saying,

Roses are red,

Violets are crud.

One thousand two hundred and sixty

Represents scud.

Well, it’s creative. It’s probably not exactly what the author had in mind. The number 1,260 is an expression that doesn’t ring for us what would ring in the first century. Let me explain.

Every American schoolgirl or schoolboy learns to memorize Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which begins, “Four score and seven years,” so that almost anybody with an American education knows about those 273 words in the entire address that lay at the heart of the magnificence and the gore of the American Civil War and the formal abolition of slavery. If you say “Four score and seven years” to anybody with that sort of background, they don’t have to be told what it’s from, do they? It’s a symbol-laden number.

In the first century, three and a half years was a symbol-laden number for the Jews. The number 1,260 on an idealized month of 30 days is 42 months or three and a half years, or time (one year) times two more years (that’s three) and half a time. (Time, times and half a time is three and a half years.) All four expressions are found in these three chapters, and they all mean exactly the same thing (time, times and half a time). It would be as meaningful in those days for first-century Jewish readers as four score years and seven would be for any American child growing up today. What is it?

In the second century BC to the north of the Jews there was Syria, at the time ruled by Antiochus IV Epiphanies. There had been lots of struggle between the Jews and Syria, but under Antiochus, who had the upper hand, he resolved to stamp out Judaism. He made it a capital offense to hold any part of the Old Testament. He made it a law that all priests should be slaughtered. He sacrificed pigs in the temple in Jerusalem. He made it a capital offense to observe the Sabbath. He was determined to stamp out Judaism.

In one of the villages of Judea there was an old priest by the name of Mattathias. He had three sons. The first was Judas. He came to be called Judas Maccabeus. In Aramaic it means Judas the Hammer. He started a guerrilla war. In fact, I’m told if you go to West Point today, one of the documents you study as part of your education in guerrilla warfare is Josephus’ (a first-century historian) account of the Maccabean War.

For three and a half years from about 167 to late in 164, this guerrilla war went on until there was a set peace in which the Jews won and Antiochus IV was thrown out of the land, and with this came the rededication of the temple and so forth. So three and a half years became a kind of numeric symbol for a time of suffering and persecution and opposition and struggle before a final victory at the end. That’s what it indicated.

What we’re told here now is that the woman with her children (that’s us, the Christians) is now out in the desert for a short time where there will be struggle and persecution and violence, and it’s not going to be easy for three and a half years. That doesn’t mean it’s literally three and a half years for us but for a short piece of time before the final consummation and the glory at the end.

Another way of looking at this is the struggle that’s going on between Satan and God himself. That’s what you get in verses 7 to 9. “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.”

Do you remember in the book of Job Satan himself appears with the other angels before God and is questioned by God? Now, as it were, something so definitive has taken place that Satan is cast out of heaven. The only place where this is talked about in the Gospels is when Jesus starts sending out his trainee disciples. Do you remember in Luke, chapter 10?

When they come back and talk about the things they’ve seen and done in the name of Jesus, Jesus says, “I saw Satan fall from heaven.” That is, as the gospel begins to make its advance, Satan’s domain, as it were, is curtailed. He has no access before the Father. His domain is curtailed. He’s cut back. He falls from heaven achieved, finally, in Christ’s triumph, in his death, and resurrection. We’ll come to that in a moment.

“He 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.” Do you see what is said further? “Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God. For the accuser of our brothers, who accuses them before our God day and night, has been hurled down.”

We’re told again halfway through verse 12, “Therefore rejoice, you heavens and you who dwell in them because he has been hurled out of heaven! But woe to the earth and the sea, because he has been hurled down to your domain because the devil has gone down to you! He is filled with fury.”

In the following chapters, then, this dragon stands on the shore of the sea and calls forth a beast from the land (from the earth) and from the sea, and then the symbolism works on through the next two chapters. That’s the way the drama is set forth. John outlines the occasion for this satanic rage and it is bound up with his defeat.

2. John identifies the reasons for this satanic rage.

He identifies the reasons why he’s so angry. Did you notice that line, “He is filled with fury,” in verse 12? Why is Satan so flaming angry? First, he knows his time is short. Verses 10 and 12. In other words, Satan is not angry because he’s on a roll and he’s really going to win. He’s angry because he is defeated in principle and knows it and wants to do as much damage as he can before he’s finally shut down.

In World War II, once the Russians were sweeping in from the east in the land mass of Europe and the Western allies had cleaned out North Africa and then they landed on the boot of Italy and were beginning to move up into southern Europe, and then in June 1944 they landed on the beaches of Normandy so we could have a Saving Private Ryan film, and then the troops were making their way …

Anybody with half a brain in his head could see how the war was going to end. In terms of numbers of men in uniform, in terms of war materiel, in terms of production, in terms of energy, there was only one way the war could end at that point. There was no other possibility. What did Hitler do? Did he say, “Oops! Sorry,” and sue for peace? No. He was filled with rage, and he broke out again in what has come to be called the Battle of the Bulge and almost made it all the way to the coast of France. He didn’t make it only because he ran out of gasoline.

Satan is outrageously angry at you and me. He’s angry at the church. He’s filled with fury because he knows his time is short. We are not to be frightened of him because God and Satan are sort of roughly equal (sometimes one wins and sometimes the other). God’s the good god and Satan’s the bad god, and they sort of struggle, and we’re in the middle, and we sort of tilt things by our will and our repentance and our being nice.

That’s not the way the Bible presents the account. Rather, it presents the account that Satan is already a defeated foe, defeated in principle. That’s what the cross was about, as we’ll see. Because he’s defeated and knows his doom is sure, there is no doubt in Satan’s mind who is going to win on the last day. None! Therefore, he’s filled with fury because he knows his time is short. He’s vindictive and has sworn to do as much damage as he possibly can.

Moreover, his sphere is restricted as we’ve seen, cast out of the presence of God, and restricted to the earth. Then, in verses 14 to 17, his success is limited. The language here is all drawn from the exodus accounts. We won’t go through it in detail. “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 wilderness, where she would be taken care of for a time, times and half a time.”

This language of wings of a bird in the wilderness is drawn from Exodus 19, verse 4, referring to that kind of big-winged bird in the Near East.… One of the things the parent birds do is throw the young out of the nest when they think the young can fly. If there is a slight miscalculation, then the parent swoops down under the baby bird and brings it back up. He bears the bird up on wings of the eagle.

God is presented in Exodus 19:4 as the one who rescues his people on wings of a mighty eagle, taking them out of danger. The danger attacks, but God wards off the danger in a variety of ways. It opened its mouth to blaspheme God, this beast does. “Then from his mouth the serpent spewed water like a river, to overtake the woman and sweep her away,” drawing pictures of flood and torrents and so forth back and forth as the people of God face ongoing pressure and struggle until the very end of the age for time, times and half a time. That’s what’s going to happen.

Even this language of the wilderness is fascinating, isn’t it? For the Jews, the wilderness was the time of preparation before they got into the Promised Land. That was the time of hardship. They had their manna and all of that, but it wasn’t exactly the land of promise. It was the desert, for goodness’ sake, and they had their struggles there.

Now we’re told the church of God, the people of God, the children of the woman and the woman herself is back out in the desert. That’s not the symbolism we use when we live in a nice place like Seattle, but spiritually speaking, we’re to understand that we can expect a lot of desert before the end.

The desert is also the place where God wooed his people. He cared for them. So centuries after they got out of the desert and got into the Promised Land when the people are sinning again, God warns them he’ll send them out into the desert again in the prophecy of Hosea, chapter 2, verse 14. “I will allure her,” he says of his people Israel, “and bring her into the desert and speak tenderly to her.”

The desert things through which God’s people pass today may be full of suffering and opposition and the rage of Satan; it’s also the place where God demonstrates his love, his affection, his wooing of the church of the living God, the bride of Christ. That’s the frame of reference in which this entire vision is set up. It’s spectacular!

Sometimes Christians want to know, “Is the world getting better and better or is it getting worse and worse?” Historically, people have interpreted the Bible in different ways. Some quote a passage like, “Evil men and seducers will wax worse and worse deceiving and being deceived,” and others quote, “The earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.”

Of course, you have to interpret both verses in their context. Historically, Christians have wondered, “Is the world getting better or is the world getting worse?” I won’t get into those disputes. I’ll simply tell you the truth. Jesus tells a very interesting parable. It’s called the parable of the wheat and the weeds or the wheat and the tares.

Do you remember how Jesus says the good seed is sown? The enemy comes along and sows a lot of the bad seed. The servants, when they see the two seeds coming up, want to go in there and take away all the bad seed right away, and Jesus says, “No. Let both grow until the end,” and there’s a final separation at the end.

I’m not a prophet or a son of a prophet, and as some would say, I work for a non-profit institution, too, but let me tell you what’s going to happen. Until the Lord comes again, both will grow till the end. There will be revivals and millions of people converted. There will be times of glory and renewal, and there will be persecution, and there will be violence, and there will be suffering, and both will grow till the end.

The last 150 years have seen more people converted than in the previous 1,800 years combined. The last 150 years have seen more Christian martyrs than the previous 1,800 years combined. We’ve just come through the bloodiest century in human history, with 117 million people killed by their own governments. Apart from war and apart from disasters like AIDS and things like that, the bloodiest century in human history.

Do you know what? I cannot think of a single reason why the twenty-first century might not be even bloodier. I’m not saying it will be, but it won’t surprise me. The fact of the matter is, for the Christian, optimism is naÔve because we are such a sinful race, but at the same time, pessimism is atheistic because it’s acting as if God doesn’t exist. In reality, both will grow till the end. Both the wheat and the weeds. We must see this is the framework in which we live and move and have our being. That’s all the framework. Now we get to the point.

3. John specifies how Christians overcome this satanic rage.

A) They overcome him on the ground of the blood of the Lamb.

Verse 11. Remind yourself of the setting. After this conflict in verses 7 to 9, John hears a loud voice in heaven saying, “Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God, and the authority of his Messiah.”

What you have now is the reigning Messiah, the Messiah who says, “All authority is given to me in heaven and on earth.” This is the Messiah who has risen from the grave. This is the Messiah who reigns. The kingdom has already dawned. It is here. That has come. In his triumph on the cross, “The accuser of our brothers and sisters who accuses them before our God day and night has been hurled down.” What does that mean, that he’s the accusers of the brothers and sisters?

What it sounds like is, “God, you say you’re so holy. Have you seen this Don Carson character? He goes around the world preaching, but his mind isn’t nearly as pure as he’d like people to think. He’s not always pure in motives. He’s not always careful in his choice of speech. He’s not always loving with respect to his family. He’s a sinner, God, and you say he’s your son? Huh? What kind of God are you? You’re compromised? You’re half evil yourself. I accuse him, and justifiably. He’s a sinner! What does that make you if you claim him as your own? Huh?”

But Satan has been cast down because the cross has taken place and God has protected his justice while justifying the ungodly. Don’t you see? It is precisely that he has borne our sins in his own body on the tree that has made Jesus the one who has defeated the accuser of the brothers. How can he say, “God, you’re not really all that just after all, are you?” when the justice has been demonstrated by the sacrifice of Christ? That’s why Satan is cast out. He has no ground before God. None!

How could he come to you or to me and say, “You’re not going to make it; you’re not good enough”? Because we don’t claim we are. We claim we’re justified instead by the sacrifice of another. “The accuser of our brothers has been cast down,” and now the believers triumphed over him by the blood of the Lamb. That does not mean the blood of the Lamb is used in some sort of mystical way. It would be a better translation to render that, “They overcame him on the ground of the blood of the Lamb.” That’s what the Greek literally says.

Quite a number of years ago, I spent a summer working at a church in Winnipeg. I was just a young man at the time. At the end of the summer, I bought an old jalopy. The rust on it was held together by the termites, but somehow I was going to drive that the 1,400 miles back to Toronto for another year at the seminary.

As I drove, I had another student with me who was making the trip back to Toronto with me, and every once in a while we’d stop off and get some petrol or get some food or have a chat. Sometimes we’d actually stop and say, “Well, let’s pray before we go on,” and have a little prayer meeting by the side of the road before we moved on.

He liked to pray, “Lord, spread your precious blood over this car.” I knew the car needed help. In fact, we blew the transmission going around the lake head, bought one in a junkyard, and installed it to save money. I knew the car needed help, but for the life of me, to this day I’m not quite sure what the prayer meant. Is it some sort of mystical magic somehow if the blood gets spread over stuff? I don’t know what you do with that.

At my most generous, I think he might have meant something like, “If we are in danger because of the attack of the Evil One on our venture, then may the sacrificial atoning work of your dear Son demonstrated in his shed blood protect us from evil.” He might have been as theologically sophisticated as to have been thinking in those terms, but I’m not sure.

What is meant here, then, by “triumphed through the blood of the Lamb” needs to be understood. This does not mean somehow you just plead the blood, as if the blood were some sort of magic liquid or a formula like Abracadabra, plead the blood. That’s not what is meant. It’s horrendous to think so!

In the New Testament, all the things that are said to have been secured by the blood of Christ are elsewhere said to be secured by the death of Christ or by the cross of Christ. When you’re pleading the blood, when you say you overcome by the blood of the Lamb, then you’re also saying you overcome by the cross. You overcome him by Christ’s death. What does that mean?

It’s at this point we need to remind ourselves before you read chapter 12 of this book you’re supposed to have read chapters 1 to 11, and chapters 1 to 11 include chapters 4 and 5. Let me tell you what’s in chapters 4 and 5 because it is presupposed by this chapter. Chapter 4 is to chapter 5 what a setting is to a drama.

In chapter 4, you have the setting of the throne room of God, and God is presented in symbol-laden language as stunningly transcendent, all glorious, the one before whom even the angels hide their faces. He is the sovereign God of creation, and the angels of glory sing, “For all things were made by you. They were created by your will and for your purpose,” and so on. That’s the setting. God on the throne, with lots of imagery drawn from the vision of Isaiah 6 or of Ezekiel 1.

Then, in the next chapter you have the drama. “In the right hand of him who sits on the throne,” we’re told, “was a scroll sealed with seven seals.” In the symbolism of the day, this scroll contains all of God’s purposes for judgment and blessing for the entire human race, and the only way those purposes for judgment and blessing will actually be effected, will actually take place, is if someone comes along and takes the scroll from God’s hand and slits the seals. It’s the slitting of the seals that effects all of God’s purposes.

A powerful angel with big lungs is found who sets out a challenge to the entire universe: “Who is worthy to open the scroll?” You see this in the setting of chapter 4, where God is so transcendently glorious if even the angels of heaven, the cherubim of the highest order, can’t bear to look on the throne, who can sort of saunter up to God and volunteer and say, “Okay. I’ll do it”? No one is found, we’re told. No one is found in heaven. No one is found on the earth. No one is found in the abodes of the dead.

John, in his vision, weeps. He weeps, not because he’s a nosey parker and can’t see into the future, but because in the symbolism of the vision, if nobody is found to take the scroll and slit the seals, then God’s purposes for justice and judgment and righteousness and peace and forgiveness will all fall to the ground. The church is going through suffering for nothing! God’s purposes for judgment and blessing will not be brought to pass. John weeps.

Then the interpreting elder taps him on the shoulder and says, “John, stop your crying. Look. The Lion of the tribe of Judah …” That is, a kingly figure. “The Lion of the tribe of Judah has prevailed to open the scroll.” John says, “So I looked, and I saw a Lamb.” You’re not supposed to think of two animals parked side by side: a lion and a lamb. One of the things apocalyptic literature does is mix its metaphors. The lion is the lamb.

The interpreting elder says, “Look! The Lion of the tribe of Judah has prevailed. The king from Judah’s line, the Davidic king. The monarch. As the lion is the king of the beasts, so the king from David’s line has prevailed to open the scroll.” “So I looked and I saw a Lamb.” This lion is a lamb. He’s not only the reigning king; he’s a lamb.

Then John says, “It was a slaughtered lamb. It was a sacrificial lamb.” Nevertheless, it had seven horns on its head with full kingly authority. It’s the lion-lamb. It’s the magnificent portrait of Christ who prevails to open the scroll because he has been slaughtered as the sacrifice that bears our sin and our guilt. That’s what brings God’s purposes to pass, the suffering of the lamb and the triumph of the king.

Tellingly, he does not come from the outside having to work his way to the throne in order to receive the scroll. We’re told he actually emerges from the very center of the throne. You’re back to the very mystery of the Godhead. The Son comes from the throne of God himself and as the lion-lamb brings about all of God’s purposes for judgment and blessing.

As a result, the angelic choirs burst out in a new song addressed to Christ. “You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood you purchased men and women for God from every tribe and tongue and people and nation. And they shall reign on the earth.”

Throughout the rest of the book, then, you get this depiction of God with an added phrase, “Him who sat on the throne and the Lamb,” or “He who sits on the throne and the Lamb” right through the rest of the book. “I saw no temple in that city for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.” Right through the whole book.

That’s why, when the Son is introduced a little earlier on (when he’s born), we don’t have to explain all of these things again. John has already devoted two long chapters to this, and now that he has done all of this work, he’s snatched up to God, and now we’re focusing here on the people left behind.

As we go through this struggling facing this Satan who is filled with rage because his time is short, how do Christians prevail? We’re told, “They overcame him. They triumphed over him on the ground of the blood of the Lamb.” Let me put it this way. Do you ever wake up in the morning and it’s one of those gray days in Seattle? I do know you get one or two of them. I used to live in Vancouver.

It’s cold and chilly and you’re feeling out of sorts and you’re coming down with a bit of flu and you can’t find a clean pair of socks. You go out to the car a little late. You put the key in the ignition and the battery dies. Eventually, you get to work. The boss is on a short fuse, and you’ve arrived late so you know you’re in trouble anyway. At the water cooler, at some point some friend at work says something about your religion and religious stuff, and you muff it entirely. You’re snippy. You take a chunk out of them. Then you go back to your desk feeling guilty.

It’s a rotten day. You get back home. You’re married, perhaps, and the kids are all misbehaving and the wife is out at some wretched church function so you’re on your own with the spaghetti. Nothing is working out. Finally, that night it’s time to go to bed, and you pray, “Dear God, this has been one rotten day. I’m sorry I haven’t acted better. It’s my fault. I’m sorry. I’m a mess. Your will be done. Forgive my sin. In Jesus’ name, amen.”

Another day you get up and the sun is shining and the birds are singing out the window. “Bacon? Wonder what we’re celebrating?” You have a wonderful breakfast and a time of devotions with your spouse before you beat it out the door. You put the key in the ignition and it starts right up. “Yes!”

You go to work and the boss, snippy though he may be, is now talking about opening up a branch and, “Maybe you would like to become the manager? We’ll just see how this works out.” Then the same dude who confronted you at the water cooler comes back looking for more, and somehow this time you respond with humility and graciousness. You invite them to Mars Hill Church on Sunday and you think they might actually come. Things go well at work. The kids are right little angels when you get home.

That night you get down on your knees to pray, and you pray, “Eternal and heavenly God, in the mystery of your majesty I bow in your presence and bless you for the plentitude of your goodness toward me, wretched sinner that I am.” Then you go on and bring up all the attributes of Christ and the names of God, and you reflect on the truths of Scripture and delight in the incarnation, glory, and substitutionary atonement and anticipate the resurrection still to come.

Then you pray for the cousins of the missionaries and the missionaries themselves and the second cousins twice removed. Then you pray for everybody in the church you can think of and all the pastoral leadership. Then you go to bed justified. Am I the only one who has ever done that?

Don’t you see what the problem is? You’ve acted like a pagan both times. You’re acting as if you get accepted into the presence of almighty God on the basis of what sort of day you had. You’re giving in to the accuser of the brothers. Don’t you understand? You’re a Christian! You’re accepted before God Almighty on the ground of the blood of the Lamb. That’s the only ground.

If you absorb that well and truly you will understand this is what gives you stability. This is what gives you confidence in God. You recognize your constant perennial neediness. For all eternity you will stand before God not because you’re such a catch and not because you’re so wonderful or so beautiful or so intelligent or so inspired or so gifted or anything else but because Christ died for sinners, of whom you are one of the chiefs. You overcome him on the ground of the blood of the Lamb.

If Satan comes and whispers in your ear, “You stupid piece of cheap human fodder; you’re such a hypocrite,” your response is, “All true. All true. But Jesus died for me.” When somebody comes to you for counseling and says, “I’m so bad I don’t believe Jesus could love me,” you never say, “You’re not as bad as all that. I know people who are lots worse.” You always say, “You’re much, much, much, much worse than you think you are, but that’s not the basis on which God accepts people. Get over it.”

You return people to the cross all the time. This is the ground of our confidence. The accuser of the brothers accusing us before God and accusing us to our own ears is constantly trying to tear us down, but he is defeated in principle. Christ has died for sinners, and we overcome him on the ground of the blood of the Lamb.

B) They overcome him by the word of their testimony.

That doesn’t mean they give their testimony a lot. It doesn’t hurt, but it’s not what it means. It means they bear witness. They bear testimony to Jesus. In other words, they teach the gospel. How do you overcome Satan and all of his works?

First of all, by resting all of your confidence in Christ, and secondly, by talking, by giving testimony to who Jesus is all the time. How else will the gospel proceed? Shall we take out our swords and go and fight the Saracens and start a new crusade? No. We bear witness. We proclaim the Word. We teach the Word of God. That’s what we do.

By the proclamation of the Word of God in home Bible studies, one-on-one in Starbucks, in our small group settings, in our families, at work, and wherever we can, we bear testimony to who Jesus is, and the gospel goes out. Some will find it an aroma of life to life and some the stench of death, but that’s how the gospel advances. That’s how we overcome Satan and all of his works. On the ground of the blood of the Lamb and by the word of our testimony.

C) They did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death.

What do you do with a Christian who is not afraid to die if you want to hush him up? Are you going to hush him up by threatening to kill him? To depart and be with Christ is much better. Quite apart from the kind of death that might come where there is active, violent persecution, there is this business of taking up our cross daily and dying to self-interest.

If we care much less about what the world thinks of us or what the Devil thinks of us, we’re not afraid to die. We look forward to a home in glory. Death does not have the last word here. It might be the last enemy, but it doesn’t have the last word. How do you stop the church of the living God? “They did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death.”

Let me tell you, brothers and sisters in Christ, this is something that has always been understood when the church has been at its strength. Martin Luther, whom I mentioned in the first address, wrote a great hymn, A Mighty Fortress is our God, and in the third stanza …

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 entire stanza is a meditation on this chapter. I’m sure some of you, when you became Christians, have had to pay some prices. This is a secular part of the country. I’m sure some of you became alienated from your families. Some of you have probably had to pay a good deal more than that. Nothing compared with what Christians in some parts of the world have to pay but still.… Sometimes deep down we wonder if it’s all worth it or quite fair.

I told the folk I cherished how my sins had been forgiven,

How Jesus changed my outlook, took my guilt, and gave me heaven.

They thought I’d lost my senses, turned fanatic, lost my reason.

They charged me with betrayal, with a vicious kind of treason.

And I wondered why salvation should cause me so much pain.

If they persecuted me, they will persecute you—

For the slave is not above the Lord he serves.

My assignment was the cross; you my slave will bear some loss:

My disciple takes his cross and daily nerves his heart and mind to follow me.

Then soon I learned my brothers and my sisters in the Savior

So often shine in suffering with astonishing behavior,

Adorn the blessed gospel with forbearing perseverance,

Forgive their cruel tormentors with a graceful, firm endurance.

Still I wondered why salvation should cause them so much pain.

If they persecuted me, they will persecute you—

For the slave is not above the Lord he serves.

My assignment was the cross; you my slave will bear some loss:

My disciple takes his cross and daily nerves his heart and mind to follow me.

What alien perspectives I’ve pursued with willful blindness.

For apostolic servants would rejoice at God’s great kindness

In reckoning them worthy to take on a little battering;

They longed to know Christ’s power and the fellowship of suffering.

For they understood their calling to trust and suffer pain.

If they persecuted me, they will persecute you—

For the slave is not above the Lord he serves.

My assignment was the cross; you my slave will bear some loss:

My disciple takes his cross and daily nerves his heart and mind to follow me.

Let us pray.

Help us, Lord, we ask, not only to understand the social dynamics of the age in which we live but to look at things through the lens of Scripture: the work of Satan, the power of God, the triumph of the cross. Make us strong, we pray, in believing. For Jesus’ sake, amen.

I suppose there’s time for a question or two, at least.

Question: What are your views on progressive dispensationalism?

Answer: It is superior to classic dispensationalism. Next.

Question: Did Satan not fall from heaven until Jesus came?

Answer: Yes, that’s a tricky question. I thought he was kicked out before Adam and Eve. Inevitably, we’re inclined to think in thoroughly spatial terms. Kicked out of heaven means he’s not there and so on, but of course, when we speak of the heavenly tabernacle and the throne room of God and so on, we’re speaking of God’s location when God himself is a Spirit who doesn’t have location that can be fixed by galactic parameters or something like that.

There is a sense in which he has been kicked out in that he has rebelled against God. He is no longer amongst the elect angels who are God’s servants for good. That’s true. Yet, even after that happens, when the so-called sons of God are summoned in Job 1, Satan is among them. The kind of dismissal of Satan from the presence of God should not be thought of in just mechanical terms but in the symbol-ladenness of what’s being said.

That is, he has no ground to accuse the brothers and sisters anymore now because the payment has finally been made for them. In that sense, he has no ground at all in the presence of God. In that sense, he’s kicked out in some sort of permanent way because of the triumph of the cross. We shouldn’t think too narrowly in spatial terms but understand this is a way of indicating the utter triumph of the gospel and that Satan is himself now already a defeated foe. Next?

Question: How is the mystery of God affected as your understanding of theology grows?

Answer: The term mystery is a tricky one. Sometimes it means the mysteriousness. There is and always will be mysteriousness to God in our minds precisely because we are finite. God is infinite. God understands everything. We will never understand everything. We will never be omniscient.

Omniscience is an incommunicable attribute of God. That is, it’s not an attribute of God he can share with non-God. Even 50 billion years into eternity, if I may speak of eternity in time categories, I will not understand things to the degree that God understands things, so there will always be some mysteriousness connected with the knowledge of God.

Likewise, I would want to argue as your knowledge of what God discloses of himself in Scripture grows and as you read also how Christians have wrestled with these things over the centuries, your knowledge of historical theology grows, and so on, then you will be know a lot more things about God than you knew before, but you will also become more and more aware of that beyond which you cannot go, that where there is simply not enough information, that where you have to put your hand to your mouth and simply worship.

What you must not do is try to make God so mysterious in the sense of ineffable, some being about whom you cannot speak, that at the end of the day you deny God has given some truth about himself. God has revealed many things about himself that we are supposed to believe and confess. Just read the Bible and see for yourself. These things are joyfully confessed by believers in the old covenant and the new, and as you know more of his Word then you know more things to confess.

That shouldn’t, then, engender within you some kind of attitude that says, “Now I’ve got theology nicely taped. I know all about God.” It’s ridiculous. The more you learn, the more this should be transmuted into revelation and adoration and worship. The aim is not so much to become a master of the Bible as to be mastered by the Bible.

As that happens, then, although you learn more and more truly about God and you grow in your theology (that’s true) and you become better able to teach it to others (that’s also true), so there should always be a huge ground of adoration before the unplumbed depths of his holiness and his love and all kind of mysteries bound up with the Trinity and the incarnation. It’s not that you cannot say many, many true things about these things, but there will always be dimensions beyond which you cannot go that should haul you into worship.

What you must not do is think the more closely you understand these things then the less you actually do understand and everything dissolves into one glorious mystery, because that denies what God has done which is revealed many things. Deuteronomy 29:29 says, “The secret things belong to God, but the things God has revealed belong to us and to our children forever.” Next?

Question: How should Christians respond to speculation on timetables for the end times? Rebuke? Encouragement? Avoid it? Join them?

Answer: Well, it depends on which one if you’re going to join them. One of the things you have to do is see what genuine Christians have held in common across the ages and focus most of your attention there. Across the ages Christians in common have held there is a heaven to be gained and a hell to be shunned.

Jesus is coming back and will be seen personally and gloriously. There is going to be a resurrection of the just and the unjust. There is going to be a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness, and our existence will not only be immortal; it will be physical with resurrection bodies. We await his return and so on.

All those things are common. Those are the things you should stress again and again and again and again. If, in a particular local church or denominational heritage, then you also want to talk about how your heritage sees things in a certain kind of way and defend that point of view, I have no problem with that so long as, first, you don’t make the relatively peripheral central and, secondly, you don’t harp on these things all the time.

The most important thing is to stress the most important thing. Thus, you are more likely to build right liaisons with brothers and sisters in slightly different traditions if you discern wisely and growingly what is absolutely non-negotiably central in the Bible and, by all means, teach further on specifics that not all Christians agree on, but don’t make those things as central as the non-negotiables. I guess that’s what I would say.

If you’re a brand new Christian, don’t make the study of the book of Revelation the first thing you do as you study the Bible. On the other hand, if you’ve been a Christian for 20 years, there comes a time when you should be trying to develop your understanding in these areas as other areas. Just walk softly. Walk gently. Walk humbly. Next?

Question: Is it possible to talk about salvation without mentioning blood?

Answer: Yes and no. I hope that’s clear. Yes, in the sense that you can talk about the death of Christ and what he secured on the cross and his substitutionary atonement and his love for us and how he has borne our penalty in his own body on the tree. You can do all of those things without actually mentioning the word blood. You must not think of blood as a certain kind of magic thing so that unless that word shows up in the sermon then clearly it’s a defective sermon.

On the other hand, if somebody is becoming very nervous about ever using the word blood, when the Bible can speak of Christ’s death in terms of the shedding of his blood and that sort of thing, then I begin to wonder if they’re really actually beginning to trim something about Christ’s death, so an awful lot would depend on how this fits in with everything else they might want to say.

That’s it. God bless you.