Revelation 12:1 Commentary and Bible Study

This chapter begins the fourth section of the book – the fourth span of the period between the incarnation, and the return of Christ: the gospel age. It continues through chapter 14, and this is quite different. Now the lens focuses in on the details of Satan’s war against Christ. It is as though these chapters forget society at large, and forget the churches just for a moment, and focus on Christ and Satan, and we get a close-up of the war launched by Satan upon Christ throughout the New Testament age. We learn who Satan’s chief agents are: the beast rising out of the sea – governments, international and world governments – the beast rising out of the dry land, who is easily identified as false religion and false ideologies and philosophies, systems of education that take away from God and deny him. These are the agents of Satan in his war against Christ, and to take the souls of men. The closing verses of the previous chapter have recorded the second coming of Christ, the visible establishment of his kingdom, the day of judgment, the destruction of the wicked and the wrath of God poured out on the earth. Chapter 12 returns to the start again. Each of the sections covers the gospel age from a different perspective. The first span shows Christ, his Lordship, his government of his church, and his pastoral care over his people, but it is about really his sovereignty. The second shows the opposition to the church by the world with Satan behind it. There is a third great scan: the warning judgements, the trumpets of warning, symbolising the various judgements of God that are meted out to society throughout history: warnings of final judgement. Now here is this fourth span which begins with the appearance of a great wonder in heaven. Some have said this is also the second part of the Book of Revelation. The preceding visions have had an emphasis on what happens in connection with believers living on earth; now we start to move behind the scenes and receive a view of the principalities and powers that directly oppose Christ.People are troubled very often by these symbols which follow each other in rapid succession, and the unbeliever – even the most articulate and intelligent unbeliever – is just baffled and can make little of them. But almost every one of these symbols is rooted in the Old Testament. John sees an enormous symbol of a woman ‘clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.’ Turning to Genesis 37 we read that following the dream of his brothers’ sheaves making obeisance to his sheaf, Joseph ‘dreamed yet another dream, and told it his brethren, and said, Behold, I have dreamed a dream more; and, behold, the sun and the moon and the eleven stars made obeisance to me. And he told it to his father, and to his brethren: and his father rebuked him, and said unto him, What is this dream that thou hast dreamed? Shall I and thy mother and thy brethren indeed come to bow down ourselves to thee to the earth? ¹¹ And his brethren envied him; but his father observed the saying’ (Genesis 37:9-11). At the time his father did not understand it; later he did. Joseph was a type of Christ, the coming Lord, and his brothers pictured by the eleven stars represented the tribes of Israel in the picture language of the dream. When you come to Revelation 12 the same symbol is employed. ‘There appeared a great wonder in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun and the moon under her feet and upon her head a crown of twelve stars’ – eleven plus Joseph. Quite clearly this is symbolic of the Old Testament church – not the nation of Israel as such, but the true Israel, the seed of Abraham which includes believing Gentiles. She is in heaven because the church is a heavenly entity with a heavenly origin. She comes from heaven because Christ her head is in heaven and he will come again to bring her to be with him. This imagery shows us the glory of the church. She is adorned with those great lights that God has made to bring light to this world. ‘And she being with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered.’ That is just how it was through the Old Testament. The first promise in the Bible that immediately followed the fall spoke of one who would be the seed of the woman and who would bring salvation to God’s people. When God cursed mankind in the garden of Eden, why did he include in Eve’s punishment an addition of great pain in childbirth? There was more to this than simply the imposition of physical suffering in childbirth on women in general. This is mentioned straight after the pronouncement that the seed of the woman will destroy the seed of the serpent. There was one child in particular whose birth would bring deliverance from all the consequences of Eve’s sin. But he did not come before Israel had passed through much trouble and periods of darkness. His coming was delayed so long that the faithful began to despair and needed all the encouragement of Isaiah and other prophets that God would not forget his people. Genesis 3:5 tells how the serpent’s descendants would be against the seed of the woman. Throughout the Old Testament there is a struggle to bring forth the Saviour. He is referred to in prophecy constantly, and it is as though the church of old is struggling and looking to the day when Messiah will come. They don’t know when it will be, and Isaiah and Jeremiah and the later prophets strained to see some clue in their own prophecies that would tell them, but as the apostle Peter tells us, they weren’t allowed to know the ‘when’. They studied their prophecies just as we do, to see if there was any light there. One theme running through the Old Testament is this: Satan seeking to destroy the Messiah. Satan didn’t know when he was going to come, but he knew the Messianic line because that is revealed in Scripture. He knew that it would be a descendant of Abraham, and then ultimately a descendant of David. So constantly he stirred up opposition to Israel of old to try to contaminate or destroy them, because that will then destroy the coming of the Messiah. This is the travail, the struggle of the church. You see it in the life of Abraham. He almost loses the line of succession by giving away his wife to pagans in a near tragic moment of weakness. But then he is dealt with by the Lord, and he girds himself up. Then he does it again. Each time he is rescued, because the seed royal has got to be preserved. For the same reason Satan, who knew the seed royal would come from David’s line, uses King Saul to try to destroy David.