Desert, Torrent and Sea

Woven throughout the puzzling images of the Book of Revelation are the twin themes of victory and suffering.

Half-way through the book, in Chapter 12, John sees ‘a great and wondrous sign’ that illustrates this double truth.

A pregnant woman is on the verge of giving birth, but a fierce red dragon stands in front of her ready to pounce on her infant the moment she delivers. It’s a bizarre picture to be sure, but it's a symbolic portrait of the cosmic battle under-lying the history of the human race.

The woman is a composite of Eve, the mother of all living (who was stalked by the serpent) and Mary, the mother of Jesus, stalked by Herod after Jesus was born. The new-born boy-child, we’re told, “will rule all the nations with an iron scepter.” So we know this is about the reign of Jesus and the hostility of the evil one who seeks to destroy him. The child is no sooner born than he is “snatched up to God and to his throne” (v.5). The story leaps from the birth of Jesus to his ascension to heaven.

When Jesus conquered death and ‘escaped’ to heaven, the dragon who had hoped to destroy him in Bethlehem or in the wilderness or at Calvary, takes out his revenge against the woman and the rest of her offspring. Like Pharaoh racing into the desert to re-capture Israel, this is nothing less than the vast campaign of spiritual warfare unleashed against God’s people throughout history.

The whole earth is the battlefield for this conflict, but the woman is protected, just as ancient Israel was protected, in the desert. God provides his people with the wings of an eagle (v. 14), which metaphorically is how God carried Israel out of Egypt (Exodus 19:4). These eagle-wings picture the power of the Spirit that gives the church decisive advantage over the earth-bound power of evil, but the church cannot entirely escape, any more than Jesus could.

The Dragon stands on the shore of the sea, implying his vast earthly authority. He tries to drown the woman and her children by spewing out a river of water, a deadly torrent of ridicule, accusation and opposition, a “stream of lies, delusions, religious ‘-isms’, philosophical falsehoods, political utopias, quasi-scientific dogmas” (William Hendrickson) as well as outright persecution against the Church.  Darrel Johnson sees this flood of water spit out by the dragon as the counter-image to ‘the river of the water of life’ that flows from the throne of God and from the Lamb.

But the torrential river does not prevail. The earth sides with its Maker not the intruder; it swallows the waters of persecution in the same way that Dutch people protected Jews from Hitler’s death camps, and Roman citizenship protected Paul; the same way that righteous laws protect people from exploitation and modern civil laws of tolerance allow the church some reprieve from the deadly designs of evil. Creation simply will not allow untruth to prevail forever.