The passage: A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, the moon under her feet, and a crown of twelve stars on her head. She was pregnant and cried out in the pain of childbirth. Then another sign appeared: a great red dragon with seven heads, ten horns, and seven crowns, whose tail swept a third of the stars down to earth. The dragon stood before the woman, ready to devour her child as soon as it was born. She gave birth to a son who would rule all nations with a rod of iron, and her child was caught up to God and to his throne. The woman fled to a place prepared by God in the wilderness, to be fed there for 1,260 days. War broke out in heaven: Michael and his angels fought the dragon, who fought back with his angels but was defeated and lost his place in heaven. The great dragon—the old serpent, called the Devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world—was cast down to the earth with his angels. A loud voice in heaven declared that now salvation, strength, the kingdom of God, and the power of his Christ had come, because the accuser of the brethren, who accused them before God day and night, had been cast down. They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, and they did not cling to their lives even in the face of death. So the heavens and those in them should rejoice, but woe to the earth and sea, for the devil has come down with great wrath, knowing his time is short. When the dragon saw he was cast down, he pursued the woman; she was given the two wings of a great eagle to fly into the wilderness, to her place, where she is nourished for a time, times, and half a time, away from the serpent. The serpent poured water like a flood after her to sweep her away, but the earth helped her by opening its mouth and swallowing the flood. The dragon, enraged with the woman, went off to make war against the rest of her offspring—those who keep God’s commandments and hold the testimony of Jesus Christ.
In the previous vision the earthly temple vanished, and a temple in heaven was opened. The first thing the prophet’s spirit sees in that higher region is a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head.
It must truly have been a wonder to him. Nothing could more strikingly show the contrast between the old world that was passing and the new world that was beginning. That old world has often been called—whether in praise or blame—a male world. The description fits the Jew at least as strongly as the Roman. It would be very unjust to either to say they lacked reverence for women. Among the Jews it was fostered by all their institutions and prophecies; it colors some of their most striking legends and their most certain records, as it does the traditions the Roman republican cherished. But the man was singled out to be the servant and witness of Jehovah, especially in those acts in which the woman could not share. The fear that some standard of worth other than the male might slip into the State and weaken it was a chief reason the older Romans dreaded the coming of Greek art and learning. For in Greece there had floated a vision of surpassing beauty that could not be embodied in an Apollo alone. Pallas and Aphrodite contended with him for supremacy, though the sternness of the one and the merely passive grace of the other showed how difficult and dangerous it was to lose sight of that other ideal.
What this change means—whether it has necessarily brought effeminacy, whether it marks progress or decline—are questions that have occupied thinkers in every age, never more than now. This heavenly vision, bound up as it is with the whole purpose of the Apocalypse, and beginning a series of visions, may, I believe, shed light on this subject—light we need almost as much for our daily and practical guidance as for the study of history.
I. The wonder the Apostle saw is exactly the wonder that has accompanied Christendom through every stage of its life and growth. The mother and the child, in one form or another, have been present to everyone who has tried to work out what the human is and how it relates to the Divine. All have felt, more or less clearly, “What we are seeking is there; how, we cannot say. Perhaps it cannot be put into words at all. Perhaps the symbol itself is all we need.” Romanists and Protestants have felt their difference, their intense opposition, nowhere more strongly than when this subject presses itself upon them—as it always does. They sense that here must lie the very secret of their quarrels. And yet they dimly feel that here too, if they could go a little deeper, might lie the secret of their reconciliation. May not some neglect or reversal of the law that binds this mother to this child explain many corruptions that have made men in the new world long for what seemed the simpler, manlier glories of the old? May not a true grasp of that law vindicate both the old and the new, and prove that the new is truly a blessed unfolding of what was hidden or imperfect in the old? And may not the book that claims to be a revelation of Jesus Christ give us that unfolding?
The woman is clothed with the sun. She has no brightness or glory of her own. Yet she is covered with brightness and glory. She lives in perfect light. She can look up to the source of light. The crown of twelve stars on her head distinguishes the brightness that is around her—which to those looking up from below seems to be hers—from that which she herself sees, from the true Divinity she confesses and worships. The moon at her feet shows that a reflection of this Divinity does come from her, but she must not become enamored of it. If that image attracts her, she will meet the fate of Narcissus: her self-love will destroy her.
Here is a very striking symbol of humanity. Nothing from the old world comes anywhere near it in completeness. That male ideal I spoke of struggles in vain to be more than national. When it aspired to be more in the Greek, it sank into effeminacy and slavery. When it aspired to be more in the Roman, it became imperialism. When it aspired to be more in the Jew, it either narrowed into the tightest sectarianism, or else broke out into this very type of humanity we are now contemplating.
But though more perfect than anything the world had yet seen, it is still imperfect. Another element is missing. “And she being with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered.” Something is needed to connect this female ideal with the male ideal of the earlier ages. That must be expanded as well as this. That must be brought into the closest harmony with this. The woman is not merely looking up to a light above her. She is struggling with a birth. The Divine must be above the human; but it must also come forth from the human. There must be a man-child. All the struggles and conflicts in society and in the individual are the throes leading up to that birth. All the conflicts the individual or society has undergone are conflicts over whether that child shall live or die. For—
“There appeared another wonder in heaven. And behold, a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns upon his heads. And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born.” I must remind you again that the last vision of the Apocalypse—if we interpret it strictly, as I try to—points to a definite critical moment in the world’s history: as I think, that period of three or four years when Jerusalem was threatened by the Roman armies and Rome herself seemed to be in a death-struggle. Seen from above, what does this crisis mean? It means the struggle over whether humanity shall have its true and rightful king, or whether some other power shall rule over it and receive its homage. That power is pictured as a bloody dragon. The Lamb, you remember, had the seven horns and seven eyes that are the seven Spirits of God going out into all the earth. There we have the symbol of concentrated, harmonized power, coming from one loving Will, aimed at one loving end; the symbol of life in all its measures and forms, coming from the Source of life, to quicken, renew, and unite. Here we have the opposing symbol: seven heads and ten horns—powers intellectual and physical, going out not from one creative mind to achieve a blessed result in various ways, but from a destructive mind, destructive, and therefore broken into different shapes to spread death. This is the dragon that has fought man in every generation of the world—fighting to separate him from the loving, eternal God; fighting to make him see God under divided forms, to make him mistake and pervert God’s purposes, to make him build the Divine Spirit out of his own notions instead of letting his notions be shaped and re-formed by the Divine Spirit. This is the dragon, then, who tried to tempt the Divine Son while He was on earth into distrusting and denying His Father, into separating Himself from the creatures whose nature He had taken. And that same dragon is shown here struggling to keep men from confessing the Conqueror of the evil spirit as both the Son of Man and the Son of God.
This dragon is said to draw a third of the stars of heaven and cast them to the earth. Whenever spiritual beings are led to worship themselves, to glory in their own power, to revere power for its own sake, they are dragged down from heaven to the earth. Being stars meant to spread light, they become powers of darkness. All creation is blighted by their influence. Men have believed there was such a fall of spirits. If you ask me how many texts of Scripture they have had to support that belief, I would answer: if they had only this one, it would be all the more remarkable that the faith should be so widespread, should have ruled so many different ages, penetrated so deeply into the heart of nations, taken so many forms of art and literature, and defied so much scorn and disbelief. And this faith, though it may have had various forerunners and foretastes in the ancient world, is strictly a Christian faith. The revelation of our own spiritual capacities and temptations has shown us how the dragon’s tail might sweep down the stars of heaven. Every man has known, at some crisis of his life, longings, insights, and hopes that could not belong to an animal but must belong to a spirit. He has felt these were emphatically human longings, insights, hopes. They were not his own. They lifted him above himself. They made him understand what other men and other ages had felt. They found their voice in cries for deliverance and acts of thanksgiving. He knew he had something in him capable of communion with what he could not comprehend. It is possible—we all know it is—to fall from this state of mind, to treat it as utterly fantastic and ridiculous, and at the same time to hate it, as if the sense of it were haunting us and we could not drive it away. And so the thought of how spirits may have fallen connects itself with the resistance we feel when our own spirits are trying to rise. Is there not One who knows all our needs, who is helping us against our enemies, who offers Himself to us as the Divine man, the Lord of our spirits? Is not that the Man-child, feeble yet mighty? Is not the dragon seeking to kill Him as soon as He is born?
- “And she brought forth a man-child, who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron, and her child was caught up to God and to his throne.” This week we shall be celebrating the mystery of our Lord’s ascension. Does that mystery have anything to do with the words I have just read? It seems to me, my brethren, that all the acts of our Lord’s life—His Birth of the Virgin, His Cross and Passion and Resurrection—have to do with them. All were steps in the manifestation of the true King and Conqueror of men. All were steps in the redemption of humanity. And the ascension was, if we believe St. Paul, the highest of these acts—the leading of man’s captivity captive, the declaration of Christ’s royalty. I would never separate that ascension from the one spoken of here. The very worth of heavenly visions is that they bring under one law and principle events that in the records of time are kept apart. In this case I do not think they are separated by any wide interval. The words, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, this generation shall not pass away till all these things be fulfilled,” I have taken throughout these Lectures in their literal force. At the very moment when the kingdom of God on earth seemed to be ceasing, when the pledges of any union between heaven and earth were vanishing, then the kingdom of heaven that Christ had preached is actually inaugurated; then the pledges of union are made good. That disappearance of the signs is itself the sign that the representative of humanity is caught up to God and His Throne.
Divines have a technical way of handling this subject. They speak of an actual Christ born into the world, and of a mystical Christ born in the hearts of some men. Philosophical students of history have made use of this distinction, treating the Christian idea as merely an idea, and showing how such an idea had been floating in men’s minds in every country and age. It seems to me that St. John the divine understood the whole matter better than these later divines, and that for him the actual Christ and the mystical Christ are never separated. No one is so careful to set forth the Man who sat by the well, ate the Passover supper, whose soul was troubled, whose feet and hands were pierced by nails. No one is so certain that this was the Word, the light of every man, made flesh. So when He had died for the sheep and risen again, He simply returns to His natural state, to the glory He had with the Father before the worlds began. But He returns after making it known to His disciples that He is the Vine and they the branches; that all their life is from Him and in Him; that apart from Him they are nothing and can do nothing. What He had taught them, He sent them to teach the world. Everyone who received the message discovered Christ to be the teacher of his spirit, the source of his life. His conscience had told him of such a one before; now he knew His name. The Jewish prophecies and heathen traditions had said the world must have a Divine king who was also a human king. When the Jewish world passed away, He is revealed as Lord of the universe. The woman has brought forth the Man-child. He is to rule the nations with a rod of iron. Humanity is not entering a merely feminine age—though, seen only in its earthly condition, that is the highest and most universal symbol by which it can be represented. There is to be dominion and government; the Man-child is to rule the nations. There is to be no lazy tenderness. With the rod of His wrath He is to slay the wicked. It is a shepherd’s rod, but a rod of iron too; let the tyrants of the earth know it and tremble.
V. “And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she hath a place prepared of God, that they should feed her there a thousand two hundred and three score days.” Can all the commentators have been wrong in supposing that the woman here must mean the Church? If not, must I not change the meaning I gave the symbol earlier? I cannot doubt the commentators are right, and that this vision does describe the Church’s condition during a period of unusual desolation. But since the Apostle does not use the same images as before, I think we are bound to ask why he changed them, and to learn the new lesson the change must be meant to teach. When he spoke of six candlesticks and said the candlesticks were Churches, I assumed he meant to describe the Churches as lights of the world; when he speaks of a woman without saying he means the Church, I cannot simply swap one name for the other. I must find out from the context and the analogy of Scripture what the symbol naturally means, and then, if the occasion calls for it, apply that discovery to the Church. Doing so, we may hope to reach St. John’s own idea of the Church, instead of forcing an idea of our own upon him.
Suppose the twelve hundred and sixty days are that period of darkness when the old witnesses of law and priesthood were prophesying in sackcloth and were about to be destroyed for a time; suppose that was the crisis in which humanity was translated to a new glory, its Divine representative being caught up to the throne of God. Where then should we look for the representative of her new condition upon earth? Not in the city of Jerusalem, which has been denying this glory of man and is to perish in its denial. But those who believe that Jesus is the Christ and that He stands at the right hand of God as their Mediator and Advocate—they, banished from the city, with no country they can call home, no visible fellowship or unity—are nevertheless upholding the true greatness of the race. They are claiming the rights of spirits; they overlook the boundaries of space and time; they have a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.
The records of the Church during those particular years—indeed through all the later years of the first century—are especially scanty and confusing. Its numbers must have been greatly reduced; the love of many, as our Lord foretold, must have grown cold. Eusebius gives hints that seem to reflect the confusion of the time in the Church—of a decline that soon followed, especially in Palestine. In them are dim records of a flight to Pella. Bishops are said to have succeeded one another with incredible speed; often they bear heathen names. That the Church survived at all through such a time seemed altogether wonderful to human eyes. No fuller account of its preservation can be given than the one in the text: “She had a place prepared by God”; she was kept alive in the wilderness for twelve hundred and sixty days.
- And is that all? Do we only have an account of a few scattered Christians with no visible refuge or home for three or four years? Not quite. We have another record besides this.
“And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him. And I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ: for the accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accused them before our God day and night. And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death.”
That insignificant sight of a handful of poor men, exiles from cities, unrecognized on earth, is suddenly exchanged for this wonderful sight of the hosts of heaven pouring out shouts and congratulations for the greatest victory ever won. What was the victory? The words describe it clearly enough if we heed them. There had been a tremendous barrier between man and God. An enemy was constantly arraigning man as a rebel, and constantly arraigning God as a tyrant. And now the Man-child presented men to God as redeemed, justified, perfected in Him—and presented God to men as their loving Father who had given up His only Son for them. The battle in heaven had this subject and this outcome, no other. Was there truly a bond of peace and fellowship between heaven and earth? Was it truly possible for man to meet God and God to meet man? Was there One in whom both could be well pleased? Was God drawing men to Him or pushing them away?—seeking to save them or to damn them?
Whatever other dreams we may have had about the Devil and his angels being cast out of heaven, this is St. John’s account of it. The accuser of the brethren is no longer able to tear the creature away from the Creator. They are made one in the well-beloved Son. “And now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ.” The two are inseparably, eternally joined. Christ has not exerted any power to change the will of the Father. His power has been shown in fulfilling that will, in making it effective. It is not God who has been keeping men at a distance from Him; it is the enemy of God. He is the condemner; God is the Justifier.
These are not principles that lasted only twelve hundred and sixty days, my brethren. They were proved in those twelve hundred and sixty days; they were established in those days, when the world looked most dreary and hopeless, as the principles on which Christendom and the whole world were standing. For the men of those days overcame the dragon by the blood of the Lamb and the word of His testimony. The blood of the Lamb was a perpetual witness to them that God had reconciled the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them. The blood of the Lamb was a living sacrament of a perpetual, living union between the children on earth and their Father in heaven. And the word of this testimony was that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son for it. These were the answers to the accuser, answers that rose above all the arguments and subtleties by which he would try to persuade men that they are an accursed and not a redeemed and blessed race; that death is a sign of separation from God and from one another—as it must seem when we look at any single case—rather than a bond of reconciliation and atonement to God and to one another, as it must be when we look at it in the death of Christ, the Head, Representative, and Redeemer of the whole race. And so these witnesses did not cling to their lives even in the face of death; they could throw their lives away as witnesses for the truth, knowing that the truth was worth more than their lives, and that they could trust their lives with the God of Truth. The male courage of the old time had not departed. The Christian martyrs were to be its guardians and to hand it on.
- “Therefore rejoice, ye heavens, and ye that dwell in them. Woe to the inhabiters of the earth, and the seas, for the devil is come down to you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.”
The dragon was cast down from heaven. Those who claimed their portion in God saw an unclouded face. Those who looked into the eternal world—so full of dark shadows before—now saw that it was full of light. This vision was not for angels, but for sinful, dying men. The kingdom of heaven had been opened to them by Him who had borne sin and overcome the sharpness of death; even in the midst of torments they could dwell in it. The woe and trouble were for those who inhabited the earth and the sea—for those who could not look beyond the visible and temporal. These too had been redeemed and united to the other world. But if they would not acknowledge the reconciliation, if they tried to interpret the universe by the events passing within it, they could find no ground for hope; everything was a reason for despair. It was a time when the devil held sway over the world—a short time, for whatever our unbelief may pretend, such times of ascendancy are short. They bring to an end long stretches of indifference and heartlessness; they act as cures for atheism; they drive men, in spite of themselves, to a good God. But who can tell how dreadful they are while they last? Who can measure their anguish by minutes or by years?
- “And when the dragon saw that he was cast upon the earth, he persecuted the woman which brought forth the man-child. And to her were given two wings of a great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness, to her place, where she is nourished for a time, and times, and half a time, from the face of the serpent.”
The child is beyond the dragon’s reach. He has triumphed. But the mother of the child is still exposed to the dragon’s violence. That is the formula for the history of the modern world—for the history of humanity since the Son of Man was revealed. Part of the battle, and the most tremendous part, which St. John calls the battle in heaven, had been fought. But the woman’s battle—a battle with the dragon in his various forms, now tempting by prosperity, now by adversity, now with one head and horn to the fore, now another—this had still to be fought; and this is the subject of all records from St. John’s day to our own.
I do not, however, extend the direct application of this passage beyond the crisis I have already spoken of. The phrase “time, and times, and half a time” is no doubt chosen for some reason—perhaps to signal that these events belong to a definite period but have a meaning that reaches into other periods. Yet the period itself seems to be the same as the 1,260 days; the flight into the wilderness in verse six cannot be distinguished from the one in verse fourteen. What is further said is that the woman is carried into her hiding place on the wings of a great eagle. “The great eagle” would be more literal; one reading is “the two wings of the great eagle.” Both the usual emblem of the conquering city and the usage of the Apocalypse allow us to take Rome as the protector here. The eagle that was about to swoop down on the Jerusalem carcass rescued the witnesses for mankind—for the redemption of both Jew and Gentile—from the oppression of the Jewish sects, and from their own false position among those sects. The dwelling in the wilderness seems to imply a suspension of all visible ordinances, all outward fellowship. It was a necessary transition, a time in which the Church was to come to know herself before entering her new calling as herald of a Divine kingdom to the imperial world. But there were dangers besetting her in that solitude.
- “And the serpent cast out of his mouth water as a flood after the woman, that he might cause her to be carried away of the flood. And the earth helped the woman, and the earth opened her mouth and swallowed up the flood which the dragon cast out of his mouth.”
Jerusalem had been a hot-bed of sects or heresies. We think we have described them all when we name Pharisees, Sadducees, and perhaps Essenes. There must have been many more within these great political divisions, and many outside them. The Samaritans were another element; they had always been more prone than their neighbors to spiritual impostures, and less tied down by orthodox formalities. The Judaism of Alexandria, closely allied with Gentile philosophy, was rich in all sorts of conceptions and imaginings. These turned especially on the nature of the Divine Word who had spoken to the fathers, on the relation He would bear to the coming Messiah, and on the offices, powers, and relations of angels to God and men. What waters these were for the Church to float in, once she was loosed from her old moorings! All simple faith, at a time when faith was most needed, must have been threatened, if not lost, in them. But there was a merciful deliverance from this evil then, as there has been since. The Apostle’s words point to it very strikingly. The arguments of learned doctors go very little way toward settling controversies; usually they only increase them and add to the bewilderment of those suffering from them. But the earth swallows them up. They may be very sublime, heavenly speculations—who knows? But they do not meet the daily needs, business, and sufferings of earth. And after all, what we ask for is that which will meet them. Opinions with the clearest warrant of antiquity, or the finest gloss of novelty, must be brought to this test: What can they do for us? You say they are very probable; there is great evidence for them. No doubt; but I want something I can rest on—not something that is very likely, but something that is. Thanks to the good honest earth, which in due time soaks up all watery notions and leaves only what has proved itself substantial.
X. “And the dragon was wroth with the woman, and went to make war with the remnant of her seed, which keep the commandments of God, and have the testimony of Jesus Christ.”
The dragon had good reason for his wrath. He had trusted the earth as his friend, and it had proved his foe. The plain solid work and hard suffering that he thought would make men forget the Divine kingdom have really forced them to break through the mists that were hiding that kingdom from them. Other means than these must be tried. The next vision will tell us what they are. But so that we may know why they are used, and what the dragon is trying to destroy, this great simple lesson is left with us for all of us to take to heart. The battle is not with those who hold some system they call Christianity. It is with those who keep the commandments of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ—with those who hold fast the command to love God with heart and soul and strength, and their neighbors as themselves; with those who hold fast the testimony of Jesus Christ, that the God who commands us to love Him has first loved us, has given His Son for us all, has justified and glorified that Son as our Mediator and Advocate at His right hand, and has sent His Spirit of Love to form us after His image. With these the Spirit of Evil fought in the old time, fights now, and will fight until either he or they are vanquished. We have declared this day at God’s altar that we are engaged in that struggle, that we have failed in it, and that there is only one strength that can enable us to prevail. And He has said to us this day: You may be more than conquerors through the might of Him who loved you. By the blood of the Lamb, the weakest of you may overcome.