History Viewed from Heaven
And a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. She was pregnant and was crying out in birth pains and the agony of giving birth. And another sign appeared in heaven: behold, a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and on his heads seven diadems. His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven and cast them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to give birth, so that when she bore her child he might devour it.
Revelation 12:1-4
There may be many more important chapters in the Bible. However, on any short list of most fascinating chapters of the Bible, Revelation 12 must surely rank at the top. There are two (perhaps even three) basic divisions. For G. K. Beale,
“it should be seen as one vision with various parts and an interpretation of the vision in the middle (vv 10-12) because the whole chapter has only one introductory vision formula (v 3 together with v 1).”1
This chapter is also crucial in setting in motion the structure of the rest of the book. Beale writes, “In chs. 12-20 John chiastically pictures the four figures rising in this order [i.e. Satan, beast, false prophet, whore of Babylon] and then meeting their demise in the reverse order.”2
Let us set the characters in their roles, then move on to the sequence of events, and draw some conclusions about the meaning.
The Characters and Their Roles
To get right to it, the woman is the church; her singular offspring is Jesus Christ; the dragon is the devil; the third of the stars that fall are the demons; and the rest of the woman’s offspring are the church in between the First and Second Advent. Now how can we be so sure of all of this?
Let’s start with the woman. She is a sign “in heaven” (v. 1), so that she is an archetype and not a historical instance. Recall from the early chapters of the book that the stars represented the angels of the churches, and here there are twelve (v. 2), representing the fullness of Israel. Note the tension of her travail as Israel. This is the scene as the dragon is introduced (v. 3).
John leaves us no doubt that the dragon “is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world” (v. 9). Who else has put himself in such an adversarial position to Christ? In verses 1 to 6, we are beholding the Old Testament church. As the devil attempted to abort salvation through Pharoah trying to kill infant Moses and Herod trying to kill infant Jesus on earth, so this archetypal dragon sees his mission as murdering the Messiah (v. 4).
Verse 5 speaks in the clearest terms of Christ as the King now ascended to the throne, so that we have a transition here. The words recall the promises of Psalms 2 and 110. We have to wait for the very last verse of the section to see how vast of a type this woman is. There we are told that the dragon “went off to make war on the rest of her offspring” (v. 17). It misses the point completely to suppose that this woman is either Eve or Mary in an exclusive sense. It is both and, more importantly, it is a much bigger idea.
As Richard Bauckham wrote,
“Eve and Mary, Israel, Zion and the church all combined in an image of the spiritual essence of the covenant people of God. She is the female figure corresponding to the holy city of 11:2.”3
It is as Paul said: “But the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother” (Gal. 4:26).
The Great War and the Time “in Between”
Another clear feature of this passage is that a great conflict is occuring in heaven that “spills over” onto the earth. In the first place, “war arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon. And the dragon and his angels fought back” (v. 7). Beale comments, “The actions described [in vv 7-12] are the heavenly counterpart of earthly events recorded in vv 1-6.”4
God’s elect angels represent Israel and those of the evil one represent the powers of Babylon, and John is borrowing explicitly from the imagery in the latter chapters of Daniel. I have written elsewhere of different views about the relationship between Michael and Jesus. Beale gives what might fit best with the Realist model by saying “that Michael reflects Jesus’ earthly actions in heaven.”5
When it comes to the dragon being cast down, there is an obvious difficulty not only in the chapter itself, but in relating this to the binding of Satan in Chapter 20. Beale is helpful again: “Is the devil barred from heaven totally or only in a limited sense? We will argue that v 10 answers in favor of the latter option.”6 The analogy of a mob boss giving orders from prison is one that I have used to create categories for this. In any event, the imagery of “chains” and a “pit” used elsewhere are not literally speaking of a physical or even spatial restraint in the way our minds race ahead towards.
What follows is the devil’s rage against the church. If he could not defeat Christ, perhaps, he thinks, the church can be destroyed. We must finally consider two paradoxical pieces of imagery. The place of the offsprings’ sojourning is called “the wilderness” (v. 14); and yet “the earth came to the help of the woman” (v. 16). So the world is both hostile and advantageous. This requires great balance, so that one does not inflate either the good or bad resources of the church–ending up in an eschatology defined by either spineless pessimism, or mindless optimism. In fact, the two “acts of nature” (vv. 15, 16) that seem to collide are pictures of intensified warfare, first from the dragon’s “river” and then the decisive answer by Christ, causing the earth to “swallow” it. We are not given a timeline in this. In fact, this too may occur repeatedly throughout church history.
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1. G. K. Beale, The Book of Revelation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 622.
2 . Beale, The Book of Revelation, 650.
3. Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 128.
4. Beale, The Book of Revelation, 650.
5. Beale, The Book of Revelation, 652.
6. Beale, The Book of Revelation, 655.
