In yesterday's passage the seventh trumpet sounded. This will bring in what are called the seven bowl judgments. But before the bowl judgments are poured out, we will study some things having to do with the nation of Israel. When we concluded yesterday we saw God's copy of the ark of the covenant in heaven. The ark is not connected with the church, but with Israel. God was setting the scene for what we are going to see in Chapter 12 about Israel, about Satan's repeated attempts to destroy Israel, and about the Lord's unbreakable covenant with Israel.
John relates some bizarre imagery to us today, but he tells us up front that what he sees is "a sign". He tells us that so we won't think there is a literal woman who looks the way he's about to tell us she looks. "A great 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." (Revelation 12:1)
Right away we know this woman symbolizes the nation of Israel. She is crowned with twelve stars, and whenever we see the number twelve used symbolically in the Bible, this number represents the twelve tribes of Israel. Furthermore, in the Old Testament we often find the Lord referring to Israel as a woman or as a wife.
The symbolic appearance of the woman in Revelation 12 is may be intended to remind the nation of Israel of a prophetic dream that Joseph, the son of Jacob, had. In this dream Joseph said, "The sun and moon and eleven stars were bowing down to me." (Genesis 37:9) In his dream, the sun and moon symbolized his parents, the eleven stars represented his eleven brothers, and he was the twelfth star to whom they were bowing down. The dream was prophetic because someday he would be second-in-command to Pharaoh of Egypt and his family would come to Egypt in search of food during a great famine. They would all bow before him, for he would hold the key to Pharaoh's storehouses. Joseph had his dream long before Israel was a nation, but God may be using the symbolism of Joseph's dream to remind Israel that in His eyes they will always be a nation. As far as He is concerned, they were still a nation when the ten northern tribes were taken captive to Assyria and when the two southern tribes were taken captive to Babylon. They were a nation during the centuries between their Old Testament defeat and their re-establishment as a sovereign people in 1948. They will still be a nation during the Great Tribulation while the world is going mad and while the Antichrist reigns as the most anti-Semitic dictator the world has ever seen.
The symbolic appearance of the woman in Revelation 12 may be intended to remind Israel of God's great promise to her: "This is what the Lord says, He who appoints the sun to shine by day, the moon and stars to shine by night, who stirs up the sea so that its waves roar---the Lord Almighty is His name: 'Only if these decrees vanish from My sight,' declares the Lord, 'will Israel ever cease being a nation before Me.'" (Jeremiah 31:35-36) The Lord is saying that as long as the sun and the moon and the stars endure, Israel will endure. The Jewish people have endured dark times during several periods of history. There is one dark time left to endure. But the people of the twelve tribes of Israel can look to the heavens for proof that God has not abandoned them. The sun hasn't fallen out of the sky. The moon hasn't disintegrated. The stars haven't winked out of existence. As sure as the sun comes up every morning, as sure as the moon still hangs in the night sky, and as sure as the stars are still shining from space---God is going to keep every promise He's ever spoken to Israel.
The woman of Revelation 12 is with child. "She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth." (Revelation 12:2) As we move through our Chapter, we will be told that the male child she has is the One foretold in Psalm 2, which is a Messianic psalm that says He "will rule all the nations with an iron scepter." (Psalm 2:9) So what we see here is Israel giving birth to the Messiah: the Lord Jesus Christ. John is going to tell us in tomorrow's passage of another sign he sees, which is a great red dragon who is waiting to devour the child as soon as it is born. We won't have to strain our imaginations at all to understand who the red dragon is. He represents the Antichrist and the power behind the Antichrist who is Satan himself.
In the very beginning, when Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden of Eden, the Lord promised a Redeemer. He told that old serpent the devil that the Redeemer would bruise his head. (Genesis 3:15) As soon as the Lord promised a Redeemer, Satan set about trying to prevent the advent of this Redeemer. He saw that Adam and Eve's son Abel was godly and that their son Cain was wicked. He assumed that God intended to bring the Redeemer from the line of Abel, so he enticed Cain to kill Abel. When he realized God intended to bring the Redeemer from the line of Seth, a later son of Adam and Eve, he tried to corrupt and pervert the people of the earth so that God would kill them all. But instead the Lord preserved His faithful servant Noah and Noah's family from the great flood. Later, when Jacob had his twelve sons, Satan believed God would bring the Redeemer from the line of Joseph because Joseph was the most godly of the twelve. So he stirred up resentment in Joseph's twelve brothers. He tried to tempt them to kill Joseph, and when that didn't work they did what he thought was the next best thing by selling Joseph into slavery in Egypt. But again Satan misunderstood God's plan, for God intended to bring His Son into the world through the line of Jacob's son Judah. Once he understood that God intended to establish Judah as the royal line of Israel, and that God anointed David to be the first king of that line, and that God intended for the Messiah to be a descendant of David, he tried to kill David by the hand of Saul but the Lord protected David.
Killing people and attempting to kill people wasn't working very well, so the devil changed his plans. He decided to lead the twelve tribes of Israel into so much idolatry that the Lord would have to discipline them and perhaps cut all ties with them forever. But this didn't work either. The Lord disciplined the people, but even after they were taken captive and even after millions of them ended up scattered all over the earth, the twelve tribes of Israel never stopped being a nation in the Lord's mind even while they weren't an actual nation in the world. Satan has used various evil rulers to try to wipe Israel off the earth, but every time the Lord has prevented this from happening. The devil wasn't able to keep the Messiah from being born, so he played on King Herod's insecurities by whispering in his ear that his authority was threatened by the new king that the wise men told him had been born in Bethlehem. Herod had killed a number of people already because he felt threatened by them, including some of his own family members. Most of his fears had no basis in reality but were a product of his paranoid mind. Satan used this weakness against him by telling him to have all the baby boys of Bethlehem killed. Herod didn't know which child was the Messiah, so he ordered them all killed, but the Lord had already warned Jesus' step-father Joseph to flee Bethlehem for the child's safety.
After Jesus became a grown man and began His ministry, several times the devil tried to have Him killed. But every plot against His life failed until the appointed time came for Him to lay down His life. The devil wasn't even successful then, for Jesus voluntarily submitted Himself to death on the cross. If He had not submitted, Satan would have been powerless to touch Him. Jesus said so Himself when speaking to His enemies whose prejudices and jealousies Satan was using to lead them to condemn Jesus to death. He said that no one was taking His life from Him but that "I lay it down of My own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again." (John 10:18) Because Jesus had authority to take His life up again and to rise from the dead, the devil couldn't even keep Him in the grave. If we could have seen what was going on in the spiritual realm while Jesus' body lay in the tomb, I think all the forces of hell were present. I think a black, heavy, swirling darkness surrounded the tomb. I think every hand of every demon was on the stone that sealed the doorway. I think Satan may have stood on top of the tomb roaring in victory---a victory that was short-lived. No power on earth or in hell was going to be able to keep Jesus in that tomb. He emerged fully alive early on Sunday morning, in a resurrected immortal body that can never die again, and in His hands He held the keys of death and to the realm of the dead. (Revelation 1:18) He held these keys because He had triumphed over death and over the dark things of the spiritual realm that tried to hold Him in the grave.
This is the One we serve, the One who has all power over all things! As we read through Revelation, at times it might look like the forces of darkness have the upper hand, but that isn't the case and that has never been the case. We needed this reminder right now, because as we move on through Chapter 12 we are going to see some frightening things. We are going to become aware of the hidden spiritual realm perhaps in ways we never were before. But at every turn we are going to see that God is in control and that nothing happens without His permission. Everything that takes place in Revelation is a part of His plan and nothing will ever cause Him to break a single promise He has ever made to the church or to the nation of Israel.
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