"The Celebration of Christmas in Time of War"

Rev. 12:1-17

Dec. 24, 2000

Text Comment

Chapter 12 of Revelation marks a new division in the book. The attention turns to the church and her warfare in the world, her conflict with the principalities and powers and her eventual triumph over all her enemies. Chapter 12 is something of an introduction to this large section of the book, identifying the theme as that of the struggle between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of Satan. Here John parts the curtain that separates earth from heaven to show us the great spiritual warfare that goes on in the spiritual world and of which the church's life in this world is a manifestation.

v.2 It is natural to think of this woman as Mary, the mother of the Lord, but the chapter will make clear that the woman is really an image of the church. Faithful Israel was the "mother" of the Messiah and of the people of God. A woman was a common biblical image for the church or people of God. As we will see, in v. 17 for example, her children are Christians in the world. The 12 stars represent her as the 12 tribes of Israel, but, in this case, the true Israel, the ideal Israel, which includes believing Gentiles as well. Here is the church in all her glory, viewed as she is from the vantage point of divine election and sovereign grace. The world may regard that church as little or nothing but God sees her in her glory as the bride of Christ and the kingdom of the King of Kings.

The OT frequently depicts Israel as a woman suffering birth pangs. The birth of Jesus to the Virgin Mary is the fulfillment of this larger image. And, of course, Mary was only the greatest in a long line of women who brought forth deliverers for the people of God: Eve herself, whose Seed, we read as far back as Gen. 3:15, would crush the head of the Serpent, Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, Hannah, and so on. The ancient church, as it were, was laboring to give birth to the Messiah.

v.3 John leaves us in no doubt as to the identity of this dragon. He tells us in v. 9 that this is Satan. The use of the image of a dragon or sea monster as the embodiment of evil is a commonplace in the OT. You remember the references to Leviathan, Rahab, and Behemoth in the prophets and Job. The seven heads and seven crowns and the 10 horns suggest great power and majesty. It is all highly imaginary a description, of course. We are not to try to figure out how ten horns fit on seven heads!

v.4 Some see here a reference to the fall of the angels who sinned, in which case, for every angel that follows Satan, God has two angels on his side. But, perhaps more likely, it is just another picture of the greatness of the dragon, so colossal a creature that with one sweep of his tail he can brush a third of the stars of the heavens out of their position. And the next image indicates that Satan's great purpose is to destroy the church in the world by destroying the Messiah himself. This mad frenzy to destroy the seed of the woman has been the story of the world from the very beginning when we learned immediately after the fall that the serpent would strike at the heel of the seed of the woman. Satan tried to kill the seed at the flood, by having Sarah twice taken into the harem of a heathen king, by having all the male children of Israel killed by the midwives, by driving Saul to hurl a spear at David twice and then to hunt him down to murder him, to prompt the wicked Queen Athaliah to destroy all the royal seed of the House of Judah (2 Chron. 22:10) which plan was thwarted when the infant Joash was hidden from her. And so on throughout the age up to Jesus Christ. Satan's plan came to its fulfillment in the Messiah's own lifetime - from Herod's attempt to murder him as a baby, to the crucifixion itself. There too, especially there, the Devil was defeated, for the Cross was not Satan's triumph, as he intended, but God's and was the blow that would finally crush Satan under the Messiah's feet. Remember what Paul says about the Cross, that it was "the wisdom which none of the rulers of this age has understood, for if they had understood it, they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory" (1 Cor. 2:7-8). But, beaten there, Satan has not stopped, and still he seeks to destroy the Messiah and his seed by getting at Christ's church in the world.

v.5 In this severely telescoped presentation of the life and work of Jesus, the point is that Satan failed to destroy him. Jesus successfully completed his messianic ministry, was exalted to God's right hand, and, consequently, the nations will be his inheritance. John is citing Psalm 2.

v.6 Now the Devil turns his attention to the church. She must flee to the wilderness - an image of persecution and hardship - but the Lord protects here there. The 1,260 days, or 31/2 years - a time that appears repeatedly in the biblical apocalypses of Daniel and Revelation, represent a period of great evil, when Satan seems to be dominant.

v.9 Vv. 7-9 seem to provide the backdrop of the statement already made in v. 6. It is the devil's war against the church of God that is in view here, as we learn in vv. 13-14 where the idea of v. 6 is repeated following this account of the defeat of Satan in spiritual warfare with the angels of God. We are then not to think of this war as a particular battle in time - as, for example, the time of the fall of the angels, as some have thought - but rather as a spiritual reality described in these apocalyptic, image-laden, terms. As the preceding verses make clear, this battle which rages in heaven between spiritual forces, is the same battle that is won by the saints on earth by their faith in Christ. Remember, for example, the Lord's remark to his disciples after their return in triumph from their first preaching tour, "I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven" (Luke 10:18). Whether in heaven or on earth it is the same warfare, the one a manifestation of the other. Now, in vv. 10-12 John tells us what his vision of the heavenly war meant.

v.11 The defeat of Satan was accomplished at the cross and continues and is worked out in the faith that God's people have in the power of his death for their redemption. As always in the Bible the work of Christ for his people and their faith in him are linked as the way of salvation. And their faith proved its genuineness in their willingness to die for it!

v.12 The defeat of the Devil may mean rejoicing in heaven at the prospect of his doom, but it means more fighting and more suffering for the people of God on earth who must endure the onslaught of this defeated but still dangerous enemy. If you've ever read William Manchester's biography of Douglas MacArthur, you will remember how General MacArthur's officers and men greatly resented his announcing triumphantly to the press that a certain Pacific island had been taken and the enemy defeated and that only mopping up was left to do, when, in fact, that mopping up was some of the bitterest fighting of the war! A cornered enemy with nothing more to lose can be a desperate and dangerous foe. But, all his efforts to destroy the church are doomed to fail, because he has already been defeated by the King of Kings. That is John's great point.

v.16 Remember, Israel was lifted out of Egypt on eagles' wings. Here it is the promise of God's protection even in the worst times of persecution. Satan can send great rivers to sweep away the church, but God will frustrate even his mighty power with devices of his own. These are simply images of the supernatural warfare that Satan will make against the church and the divine power by which she will be protected. The "rest of her offspring" will be all the Christians who have not yet "overcome" him, as in v. 11. In other words, we are among that "rest of her offspring,"

Ordinarily at Christmas time one expects a sermon on Isaiah 7 and its prophecy of the virgin birth seven hundred years beforehand, or Isaiah 9 and its account of the coming Messiah - "Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Prince of Peace" - or a sermon from one of the birth narratives themselves in Matthew or Luke. And, over the years I have preached any number of sermons on all of those texts. But there was one "Christmas" text I had never preached and it was this one in Rev 12, where we read of the birth of "the male child who will rule all the nations with an iron scepter."

And, frankly, I wonder if this text will become more and more familiar to Christians as we enter another period of more virulent unbelief in the western world. We in the American Christian church have for generations had a harder time seeing our lives and the life of the church in terms of the deadly conflict between the kingdom of Satan and the kingdom of our Lord and Savior, we have had a harder time seeing our own lives in terms of our role in this desperate battle, because life has been good for us and very comfortable and we have suffered little or none of the sort of organized persecution that other generations of Christians have suffered and, indeed, other Christians in our own day are now suffering in other parts of the world. So, perhaps it was natural for us, at Christmas time to gravitate to the beauty of the pastoral scenes painted in Luke or the account in Matthew of honor paid to the newborn King by the wealthy Magi from the East, or to those accounts of magnificent supernatural occurrences - the announcement and then the birth of John the Baptist to a barren mother, the annunciation to Mary, the virgin birth itself. It was the Christian way to attend to Christmas in a culture that itself loved Christmas, sang the Christmas songs of Christ and his birth, and associated that story with Norman Rockwell scenes of winter beauty and family cheer.

But it has not been as natural for us to see Christmas and the birth of the Messiah - beautiful as that history is in so many ways and precious as it is to all Christians - as the opening salvo of a terrible battle that would decide the great war that is itself the story of this world and of every human being who has or ever will live in this world. But, without a doubt that is what we are being given in Rev. 12: a philosophy of history, an understanding of the meaning of human history, with Christmas and the birth of Christ a great turning point. Human affairs, whether on the grand scale of men and nations, great revolutions of thought and life, the progress of science, the history of war, and so on, or on the smaller scale, the circumstances of a single person's life, it is all in one way or another the reflection of a great war being fought in the heavenly realms between the kingdom of Jesus Christ and the kingdom of Satan. Human beings are always - whether they know it or not, and they usually do not - fighting on one side or another of this war and their individual circumstances are shaped as they are, just as the circumstances of men and nations are shaped as they are, precisely because they amount to individual and specific engagements in a larger battle, one particular, perhaps quite minor, skirmish on the great battlefield of this world, strewn as it is with the carnage of war.

If the weather is sufficiently clear and you are in the right spot, you can sometimes in Tacoma see the night sky lit up by the artillery firing away on the Ft. Lewis ranges. In some places you can hear the rumble of the great guns soon after you see the reflection of the flash against the sky.

Well, according to the picture painted for us in John's vision, life is like that. And what we see in the world are the distant flashes of artillery in the battle going on in the heavenly realms and what we hear is the rumbling of those great guns, as Satan's forces and Michael's tear into one another.

Is this not the explanation for what so mystifies us about life in this world: the pervasiveness, the sinister darkness, the intractable momentum of evil. There are great spiritual forces at work in this world that are darkness itself and they take human beings - who alas are only too willing to be taken - up into their plans and their programs. Why is evil done by and argued for and justified by such brilliant minds and in such effective ways? Why cannot human beings see the destructiveness of the forces that are being unleashed by their plans and programs? Why are men and women in such bondage to vice; why can't they see the truth? Because, as Paul says, they are subjects of the Prince of this World, a liar from the beginning, and they follow his ways. And do even Christians struggle so to do and to be what they know full well is good and right? Because they are constantly subject to the subtle, powerful temptations of the Devil, who opposes at every turn what would please God and bless man. Why are such high sounding and wonderful principles - freedom, love, respect for life - brought into the service of such deadly and disgusting practices? Why? Because there are great geniuses of terrible power that are pulling the strings in this world. Beings whose influence is largely unrecognized but nevertheless explains the ascendancy of evil at every turn in modern culture and in human history to this point. As John says in v. 9, the Devil leads the whole astray. Remember John Newton's comment: "Perhaps such a one as Voltaire would neither have written, nor have been read or admired so much, if he had not been the amanuensis [or secretary] of an abler hand in his own way. Satan is always near when the heart is disposed to receive him..." [Cardiphonia, Baker pb. Ed., 59] And of how many able and influential purveyors of unbelief and evil could we say a similar thing today. No, there is a war being fought over the ground of this world and everyone is a combatant, but the general staff lies hidden behind the lines, out of sight.

You see the way John's vision mixes the heavenly and the earthly perspectives. Our eyes are not only lifted up into the heavenly places where spiritual warfare wages. We also find ourselves as combatants in this great war. We do not merely observe the flashes of distant canon, we fire the canon ourselves, holding our hands over our ears to protect them from the roar of the guns. We are combatants in the very same war that is being waged in heaven. Our Savior overcame the Devil, but, in him, as we read in v. 11, we overcome him too. Our lives, our faith, our serving Christ are the weapons that the kingdom of heaven employs in its battle with Satan and his legions, just as the unbelief, disobedience, and rebellion of multitudes of human beings are the weapons that Satan employs on his side.

Think, in particular of vv. 4-5 and compare them to v. 11. All the beloved history of Zechariah and Elizabeth, Gabriel's announcements to Mary and Joseph, the shepherds, the angelic choir, the manger and the wise men, are reduced to this: "the dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth so that he might devour her child the moment he was born. She gave birth to a son, a male child... and her child was snatched up to God and to his throne." The triumph was Christ's to be sure. He won the victory, he cast Satan down, he made certain heaven's eventual triumph. But, how, was that victory secured? How did he manage the conquest of the evil one? Well, he used the faithfulness of an old priest and his barren wife, the sturdy faith of a young couple, just betrothed, who believed the Word of God and acted on it in defiance of appearances, the long miles of searching on the part of some intrepid eastern Magi, and on and on.

Oh, this view of Christmas is certainly not less wonderful, not less beautiful. It is grander still! The chapter and John's account of his vision begin "A great and wondrous sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun...was pregnant..." It is a greater thing than words can express that the Woman gave birth to this male child who cast down the Evil One, who broke the back of his power over us by his death on the cross. We see Christmas here as a part of the titanic struggle between two kingdoms and the first blow struck in the great battle that would determine the outcome of that struggle.

And, seeing Christmas this way, and linking it as John's vision does here in vv. 11 and 17 to ordinary Christian faith, obedience, and devotion, we are given a higher view, a more solemn view, a more heroic view both of our daily lives and of our remembrance of the birth of our Lord and Savior.

We are pleased to welcome to our fellowship today two young Frenchmen. One of them now preparing for the Christian ministry at our Covenant Theological Seminary in prospect of his return to his homeland; the other, the son of the administrator of a Reformed Theological Seminary in France, a student at Covenant College, soon to wed one of our young ladies. Thinking of them, I thought of Antoine Court. You perhaps remember this great Reformed churchman. He lived in the 18th century, the period of the most intense persecution of Protestants in French history. A century and a half after the Reformation, it had again been made illegal to be a Protestant and the penalties for failing to conform were harsh: loss of the rights of citizenship, loss of property, the threat of one's children being taken away by the state, imprisonment, and, in many cases, the terrible servitude of a galley slave. But, as always during the church's darkest days, there were those who, as we read here, overcame the forces of the Evil One by "the word of their testimony; they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death."

Baron de Salgas, who had been a lukewarm Christian during days of ease, found himself a galley slave. "It is the happiest time of my life," he wrote. "I live among brigands, but my Saviour died between two thieves." Marie Durand was imprisoned for 38 years because her brother, a Protestant minister, had performed her wedding service. One Catholic priest, Jean Bion, chaplain of the galley "Le Superbe" became a Protestant Christian through the example and witness of these Christian men, went to London and published an account of their sufferings.

It was into this world of terrible persecution that young Antoine Court was born and raised by a devout mother. With the gifts and graces of a true leader, he organized the church, weakened and scattered as it had been by the blows of the enemy, and began to reform its life and doctrine. As often, in times of persecution, false doctrine had made its way into the church and had to be wrung out. He called clandestine synods to restore theological order to the church and to oversee the church's ministers. New churches were formed and led by pastors who risked death for preaching and attended by congregations who risked imprisonment for attending. Worship was held in secret places, a portable pulpit was set up. Sentries stood nearby ready to give the alarm if the authorities should appear.

It was, of course, necessary to provide more pastors if the church were to be strengthened and God's people were to receive proper spiritual care, and so Court, with the aid of others, established a seminary in Lausanne, in Switzerland, and there trained men who would return to France to the illegal and dangerous work of the Protestant ministry. Some of them returned to France only to be arrested and executed. Indeed, with a kind of wry humor, the diploma of Antoine Court's seminary in Lausanne came to be known as the Brêvet de Potence, the "Certificate for Hanging."

Now what made me think about Antoine Court and those terrible and wonderful days in France was that at the time the Christians referred to their faithful churches as the churches of the desert. Their synods or church assemblies are known to church history as the Synods of the Desert. All the ecclesiastical papers of the time were dated "from the desert."

They were using "desert" in exactly the sense in which that term is used here in Rev. 12:6, 14 of the place of the church's persecution in this world, hunted by the Devil seeking to devour her. France is not a desert country, but spiritually the church was in the desert because she was under the direct assault of the Evil One. She was in the desert and, through faithful leaders like Antoine Court and through faithful Christians in the churches she overcame him and, precisely because they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death.

All of us, everyone, brothers and sisters, inhabit the world that John has described for us here as a desperate battlefield. This too is a church of the desert though perhaps we are not so deep in the desert as other Christians today. This earth on which we now stand is the same earth that John saw as a desert where the church of Jesus Christ was harried by the dragon whom the Messiah had hurled down from heaven. You will have to leave this world, my friends, if you would have a life that is not part of this warfare that rages in heaven and on earth. Whether you know it or not, whether you feel it or not, you are at war. You may not be doing all your duty in battle, you may, by your lethargy and your negligence, be giving comfort to the enemy. But you cannot escape the battle, neither God nor the Devil will let you escape the battle. Some of you know very well that you are in the battle, you know you have been harried into the desert by the Evil One, you can hear him baying, and feel the sting of his nipping at your heels, sometimes it seems as if the river that spews out of his mouth will actually sweep you away. But it will not. God will open the earth to swallow that river up. Let him rage, he has been defeated by the blood of the lamb. Others of you may be resting, your heavenly Captain having led you in victory in some small battle of the war.

When I am among you as your pastor I find myself sometimes struck dumb by the terrible wounds you have suffered in these battles, and sometimes by the bravery that I witness, the feats of daring, and sometimes, alas, by the cowardice and the tendency to turn and run from the thick of the fight. But, what I never have any difficulty believing is that John got this world and our lives in it just right in chapter 12 of his great Revelation, when he described the story of human life in such bloody terms. And I do not doubt that he said all that needed to be said when he told us how victory would come in the mopping up that we must still do after Christ delivered the killing blow to his enemy and ours: "They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and the words of their testimony; they did not love their lives as to shrink from death." Rather, "they obeyed God's commandments and held to the testimony of Jesus."

There stands Christmas, in the middle of human history, a great turning point in the war that must continue until the end of the age. And what is Christmas for a true Christian in light of its exposition in Rev. 12? It is a time to pledge once more to be Christ's faithful soldier until the end of one's life in this world.

Then outspake brave Horatius,

  The Captain of the Gate:

'To every man upon this earth

  Death cometh soon or late.

And how can man die better

  Than facing fearful odds,

For the ashes of his fathers;

  And the temples of his gods?

And how much more when it is the living God for whom we fight, and the faithful saints of past days in whose steps we trod, and when we know that, however desperate the battle, however apparently triumphant evil may be for a season, we Christians are certain to be the ones standing in the field when the day is done!