Can I pray for you in any way?
Send any prayer requests to TheChristianWalkPrayers@gmail.com.
In Christ, Mark
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
** Follow The Christian Walk on Twitter @ThChristianWalk
** Like posts and send friend requests to the author of The Christian Walk, Mark Cummings on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/mark.cummings.733?ref=tn_tnmn
** Become a Follower of The Christian Walk at http://the-christian-walk.blogspot.com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The scriptures. May God bless the reading of His holy word.
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. She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth.
Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on its heads. Its tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that it might devour her child the moment he was born.
She gave birth to a son, a male child, who “will rule all the nations with an iron scepter.” And her child was snatched up to God and to His throne. The woman fled into the wilderness to a place prepared for her by God, where she might be taken care of for 1,260 days.
Revelation 12:1-6
This ends this reading from God's holy word. Thanks be to God.
The sounding of the seventh trumpet led to a proclamation of the world becoming the Lord’s kingdom, one He would reign and rule over forever. This prompted the twenty four elders to fall on their faces, worshipping God and proclaiming:
“We give thanks to You, Lord God Almighty, the One who is and who was, because You have taken Your great power and have begun to reign.”
“The nations were angry, and Your wrath has come. The time has come for judging the dead, and for rewarding Your servants the prophets and Your people who revere Your name, both great and small—and for destroying those who destroy the earth.”
And with that, the scriptures at the end of Revelation, chapter 11 tell us that the temple of God “in Heaven was opened” to where “the ark of his covenant” could be seen within. This triggered “flashes of lightning, rumblings, peals of thunder, an earthquake and a severe hailstorm” which signaled that the third and final woe, the worst of the three was about to begin and we will see this play out into Revelation, chapter 19.
As we turn to the opening six verses of Revelation 12, we see the first main event of the third woe, an encounter between a pregnant woman and a dragon hoping to destroy the son the woman carried as soon as he was born. Look again at these verses here:
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. She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth.
Then another sign appeared in Heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on its heads. Its tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that it might devour her child the moment he was born.
She gave birth to a son, a male child, who “will rule all the nations with an iron scepter.” And her child was snatched up to God and to His throne. The woman fled into the wilderness to a place prepared for her by God, where she might be taken care of for 1,260 days.
In the continuing vision John had of the tribulation period yet to come, we read where he saw a yet another “great sign” which “appeared from Heaven” in the form of “a woman” who was “clothed with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head”. Symbolically, this woman was Israel and the “twelve stars on her head” represented the twelve tribes of Israel.
In our passage, we see where the woman “was pregnant” and crying out in pain because “she was about to give birth”. The baby she was carrying was none other than Jesus Himself who we know had a genealogy that traced all the way back through the history of the Israelite people (Matthew 1).
At this moment, as the woman was going through birth pains, John sees another “sign” which “appeared in Heaven”, an “enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on its heads”. This dragon had a tail that “swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to earth”, giving us a good visual of just how big and powerful it was. It’s immediately evident the dragon was up to evil because we read where it “stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth” so it could “devour her child the moment he was born”.
So, what did the dragon represent?
In verse 9 of this chapter, we read where it is none other than Satan who is further described as an ancient serpent. Back in Genesis, chapter 3, he appeared as a serpent who enticed Adam and Eve to sin and here, that serpent has spent the entirety of the history of the world and mankind, doing his wicked work, a wicked work that was soon going to come to an end.
More on that later but as we return to our message for today, we find the woman successfully giving birth to a “male child” who entered creation to “rule all the nations with an iron scepter” and so we now know why Satan was so anxious to eliminate Him. As we see in our passage, he never got the chance because the baby “was snatched up to God and to His throne” while “the woman fled into the wilderness” into a place of protection “prepared for her by God”. He would take care of her there for 1,260 days, the same period of time we saw before in chapter 11 which equaled 42 months.
With the woman gone, the stage was set for a battle involving the dragon, one that we will look at tomorrow as the events of the third woe continue.
Amen.
In Christ,
Mark
PS: Feel free to leave a comment and please share this with anyone you feel might be blessed by it. Send any prayer requests to TheChristianWalkPrayers@gmail.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment