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Why does it seem like we declare God’s victory, and yet it often doesn’t feel very victorious? When Christmas joy collides with year-end weariness and plans that never quite landed, Revelation 12 can help us better understand where that elusive victory really is.
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This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Things don’t always go how we plan, do they? As you think back to Christmas 2021, what was it that you were peering into the new year of 2022 and imagining would be this way or that way? Our hopes and our dreams or just our expectations? Sometimes the unplanned ends up being better than our plans, but many times it’s the other way around. And we come to this end of the year and we have the joy of Christmas, but we also find ourselves reflecting. What happened this year? Did we make good use of this year? And what happened to the things that we thought were going to be one way when the year was young and fresh and now it feels like it didn’t go how we hoped?
We look out and we peer into the rest of the winter, and it looks bleak thinking about that oftentimes. Life often looks dark. And we think about the weird contrast. Maybe we even struggle with it in our head. Maybe you are tonight as you do that reflection. And you find yourself on the one hand wanting to feel joyful and maybe even feel joyful, and yet you also have this weariness or this sadness as we think about how things don’t seem to go how we hope.
Well, God isn’t surprised by that. And that’s what we’re going to find tonight is we’re going to go to yet another story about the birth of the Messiah, the coming into the world of the Son of God. We’ve looked at the four Gospels and what they’ve had to tell us about that, but did you know that we also find the story in, of all places, Revelation? And sometimes we just skate right past it because we’re so busy trying to understand everything going on in Revelation that we miss that John isn’t done telling the story of Jesus when he talks about Jesus and his gospel or the coming into the world of Jesus when he writes that beautiful prologue we looked at on Sunday in John 1. He has more to say, and I think it speaks directly to this struggle that we have, this uncertainty. Why does it seem like we declare God’s victory, and yet it often doesn’t feel very victorious? What’s going on?
Well, let’s take a look at Revelation 12 and see what we find there. John writes, “In 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.”
We think about that passage, and what we’re seeing there is the cosmic or spiritual picture of everything that’s happening when we think about the Incarnation. Sure, we see what happens with the encounter of the spiritual and the earthly when we see, for example, the angels appearing to the shepherds, or Gabriel appearing to Mary or in the dream with Joseph, etc., etc. We see little in breaking moments, but here John wants to sort of zoom out and let us see what’s really going on, to say, “This is what’s going on. It’s why all this is happening. There’s the spiritual battle that’s so much bigger than what we mere mortals often understand.” We understand a little bit of it. We understand that the year didn’t go how we expected. Lives may not be going how we expected. The things that we anticipate for 2023 probably won’t go how we expect, and some of that seems just wrong, and some of it reminds us the world’s broken, but it’s still hard for us to truly understand what’s going on as God restores the world, as He pushes out Satan. But here John is allowing us to see, “This is what’s really going on.”
Now we might say, “Well, that’s all well and good, but I’m still not really sure what’s going on here. This is rather dense. It’s Revelation, after all.” And so why are we looking at this on Christmas Eve? Well, I think we’ll see several things as we look at it. They’re exactly why we should be looking at it on Christmas Eve.
And the first one we see, which is really interesting here, I think, is this picture of the woman. At first we want to just locate that as just a direct reference to Mary, and we say, “Oh, okay.” But notice here that this woman has a crown of 12 stars on her head, and of course, 12 often goes back to the 12 tribes of Israel, in other words God’s people, and so it’s been observed over the years, and I believe this is a very helpful observation that this woman is referring to God’s people. Of course the Messiah comes out of God’s people. Mary is part of God’s people. And so there’s a connection there, but it’s much more than that, because it shows here that on the one hand you have the woman, and then on the other hand you have this serpent, this dragon that wants to attack. And so that’s the picture, that’s the setting in which everything about the Messiah coming into the world plays out, exactly as it does, right? Because what’s God doing? He’s rescuing those who trust in Him from the clutches of the devil, from the work that the devil’s been doing from the very day that He caused Adam and Eve to sin. And so we see here a picture that ties in, and it’s letting us understand as we go through our earthly lives, and we feel that spiritual opposition, we see the brokenness of sin, we even see it in ourselves and wonder, “Why in the world am I doing this or that?” I was just celebrating Christmas the other day and feeling joyful and singing praises like an angel, and today I’m acting like this. What’s wrong with me?
We’re seeing a picture of the spiritual battle going on, and it reminds us of exactly the depth of God’s love, the fullness of God’s love, the determination and the power of God that what we’re facing and what He is coming into the world to fix is so much bigger than we often imagine. It isn’t just our particular sin or our particular struggle or our particular uncertainty, it’s every one of those for every person of every creature of all time. He cares about our individual ones, but it’s all of them, and we see that encompassed in this attack from Satan himself.
Now, some of this opposition happens immediately after the birth of Jesus. We see, for example, Herod killing all the infants to try to attempt to eliminate a potential rival. And it sure sounds an awful lot like the serpent waiting to devour the child. In that, as we look at that, we’re seeing a picture of this because Satan is operating through Herod, he’s certainly applauding that effort, and we see that throughout the ministry of Jesus. It isn’t purely a matter of that first few months or years of Jesus’ life, but we see throughout Jesus’ life a continual push by those who oppose Him, those who want to throw Him off a cliff, those who ultimately betray Him, turn Him over to the Romans to be crucified, and then have continued to persecute God’s people over time. There hasn’t been a time in history where Christians haven’t been persecuted somewhere. Why? Because Satan loves to stir up opposition to Jesus and His church. And that’s what we see here, that, of course, Jesus Himself, the Messiah, is opposed, and in those famous temptations that He takes Jesus out into the wilderness and tries to tempt Him, or rather the Spirit takes Jesus out, but Satan tries to tempt Him, He’s trying to go straight at Jesus, but He also goes again and again against Jesus’ people. And so it is, as we read through parts of Revelation chapter 12 and the rest of Revelation, we see over and over again the forces of evil opposing God’s people.
And so if we’re thinking about this woman as representing not just Mary, but God’s people in general, the dragon’s continued opposition to her, it reminds us of what’s going on still. Life seems dark oftentimes, because Satan is seemingly unrelenting, and it seems like maybe for all the joy we celebrate now, what good does it do if nothing changes? Oftentimes we find those in those dark moments we wonder, “Is God really victorious at all?” But we’re given this insight so that we can know that God is indeed victorious. It just isn’t clear in that moment.
The other day I watched Home Alone, I love that movie, I’ve watched it probably about as many times as any movie, and it’s just such a wonderful thing to watch at Christmas time. I think it’s just, as far as if we’re just talking about fun, more secular minded, but just fun full of joy and heart type movies to watch at Christmas time, how can you beat Home Alone? I mean, it’s just so good.
And something that was interesting, sometimes after I watch a movie I like to go online and read Wikipedia and IMDb and other places like that and just understand more about behind the scenes. What struck me that I’d never read before was that Home Alone was almost shut down in production. Initially it was supposed to be a low budget film, and its production team wasn’t able to meet that low budget. They had a feeling it was going to become a problem, and so they secretly met with another studio. It was originally going to be a Warner Brothers film, and they feared that Warner Brothers wouldn’t be willing to up the budget so it could make it. So they were secretly meeting with 20th Century Fox as production was going on to try to find a way to make sure it would still be produced.
And this came to a head, WB tried to hold the line on the budget, and when the production team said they couldn’t do it, that it wasn’t going to work for that, they shut down the production. It looked like it was dead in the water. Except there was that plan, that plan that maybe not everyone in the movie would have been privy to. Probably a lot of them wouldn’t. Maybe the actors didn’t know, and it looked like all this work we’ve been putting into this is just done. Well, what was happening? Behind the scenes there was a much bigger battle going on between corporate titans and heavyweight producers and all this sort of stuff that the normal person on the set wouldn’t know. And it was ensuring that eventually that great Christmas classic was going to happen.
Because there was already a victory happening, and 20th Century Fox acquired the rights and took over and gave it the bigger budget, and now we have that movie that we get to watch. I know many of you watch it regularly, and so there was a victory, but in the moment it seemed awfully dark. And sometimes in the midst of that joy of celebrating Christmas Day, we look at Christmas Day and it feels very joyful, but it looks like it’s a scene on the set of this movie of life, and that scene’s going really well, but we see the executives walking down the hallway getting ready to shut down the production, and we think, “Where’s it going to go from here?”
I believe that God allows us to see this very different picture of the birth story in Revelation, so that we can see, well, sure the executives are coming down and they’re going to close it down. Satan wants to close down the church. He wants to close down our lives and turn us away from God. He wants to shut off the lights and leave us in the dark. But God isn’t just content to orchestrate the scenes and see how it plays out. He’s already pulling together all the pieces for his ultimate victory as well.
And so Christmas Day is the sign, as we talked about on Sunday, it’s the sign of what Jesus is doing. We looked at that Monday night as well, and it’s so important we keep coming back to that picture of sign, because God gives us these signs, these things that he does, including this ultimate miracle of God incarnate on this earth. He gives them to us so that we can look at them and say, “Okay, I don’t know all the things happening behind the scenes. I don’t always get to see a picture like I see in Revelation 12, but I know things are going on, and more importantly, I know that God’s will is going to prevail.”
That’s what we see as we go on to verse 5. It says, “She gave birth to a male child, one who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron, but her child was caught up to God and to his throne. And the woman fled into the wilderness where she has a place prepared by God, in which she is to be nourished for 1260 days.”
Well, it looks like everything is going to go wrong in verse 4. The child is about to be born and the dragon is right there ready to consume him. And certainly, imagine if you were a shepherd that heard the angels proclaim that first night. You heard the angels proclaim that first night, and maybe you followed a little bit of the ministry of Jesus. You see people rejecting him. Imagine if you were a shepherd who actually really tracked him all the way to the crucifixion. You think, “Well, it sure seemed good for that moment. It seemed so promising. There were angels even, and yet now he’s dead. Now what?” It’d be really easy to think, “Well, the dragon consumed him. He lost.” But what do we see that goes on here? And of course, it’s what we know as Christians that God doesn’t allow Satan to win. He doesn’t allow the dragon to win.
So it is that after the ministry that’s all encapsulated just in this one sentence of Jesus, we go right to the next cosmic point, the next overarching point about the universal history of everything. He’s caught up to God and to his throne. John fast-forwards and says, “Okay, here’s the birth. I can just talk about the threats because you already know what happens. There’s all kinds of opposition to Jesus, but here’s what you need to know. We need to keep our eyes on this, that the birth happens and there’s that triumph. But don’t get caught in what happens after that and feel like it failed.” Because what we know is that Jesus triumphs over death. He’s taken up and he’s right now reigning on his throne.
And we’re told what he’s supposed to do. He’s going to rule all the nations with a rod of iron. And that rod of iron is referring to a device used by shepherds. It’s not talking about like an iron fist, like we’d use it today, that he’s a cruel tyrant, but rather someone who is definitively in charge. Someone who is taking care of his people and able to rule.
And so we see here, yes, the dragon wants to win. And it looks like he’s going to win. And so many times, even right in the midst of the Christmas story, everything, someone who we hear oftentimes about the markets and people, the betting markets and people are betting on which team’s going to win the Super Bowl or the World Series or what stocks are going to do or all this sort of stuff. If that were running at the time and there was a bet on is Jesus going to have a successful ministry, you know what it would have looked like. There have been so many times that the odds were going to be way against him. Everyone would be betting against him because they would have assumed, no way this is going to work. Just look at it. Here it has people out killing all the infants. They’re going to get to him eventually. Or there’s an angry mob and they want to throw him off a cliff. There’s no way he’s escaping that. Or they’ve nailed him up to a cross and he’s dead. There’s no way he’s escaping that. But what do we find? The story of Christmas is the picture of God’s victory. And when we look at certain parts of it, it doesn’t feel like a victory. But when we look at the overall picture, it is a victory.
And so too how God is working in our lives. When we think about how God also not only protects his Son, the Father protects his Son so that God incarnate in the flesh isn’t somehow conquered. What else do we find at the end of verse 6? We find so too the woman is protected. That woman that we were talking about earlier who’s representing God’s people is protected for a period of time that matches some of the other parts of Scripture. For example, we turn to Daniel speaking of the end times. And Peter, as Jim’s going to help us to understand next week, Peter says the end times, that’s the time starting at Pentecost. So we’re in it right now.
In other words, what this is saying is that God is going to make sure that we’re nourished too. That his people, he doesn’t forget us. It’s not just enough that God came into the world, then does a rescue mission and brings himself back out of the world and everything’s okay for him. And he says, “Well, I tried my best.” It’s not that. What’s he doing? He’s still actively going to protect us. He’s going to protect you. He’s going to protect me in every age. He doesn’t give up. This isn’t something that starts at some point in the future. It’s happening right now, and it’s happened for all the history of the world.
For example, if we were to turn over to Revelation 12, verse 14, we read, “But the woman was given the two wings of the great eagle, so that she might fly from the serpent into the wilderness, to the place where she is to be nourished for a time, and times, and half a time.” Right there, we see that God’s providing her with eagle wings. And if you think about Scripture, that should sound very familiar to us, because what do we find all the way back in Exodus 19:4? “You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagle’s wings and brought you to myself.” Over time, God reminds us again and again how he uses his power to protect his people. He promised it to the people as they were leaving Egypt, and he promised it over and over again with the prophets. Jesus promised it to his people.
And as John sees that cosmic battle, we’re seeing again from the on-the-top, looking down perspective, what does God do? He takes his people and he provides them with safety. He bears them once again on eagle’s wings. Why is this being given to the people at the time that John writes this? Well, they were in the midst of facing persecution. They would face much more persecution, and it wouldn’t stop. Life does often seem dark. We turn off the Christmas lights as one reason I like to leave them on for a really long time. We look out at the darkness of winter, and it often gets this kind of gloomy. We think about everything that’s just dark. Why do we struggle with being uncertain? Why do we struggle with fears and doubts? We see survey after survey saying we’re struggling with these things more than ever. Well, it’s because there’s lots of stuff going on, and we get caught up in it, and we’re not being caught up in God’s Word. But when we turn to this, we see this isn’t a new problem. It’s something that has gone on in all time. This huge battle is going on, but God is victorious.
It’s interesting, I received a text earlier this week. It was a text from Spectrum saying, “Here’s what you need to do if the winter weather this week takes out your service.” And, of course, they didn’t know what the storm was going to do at the time, but they knew this, that winter storms have a tendency to take out internet service, phone service, television service, and they wanted to kind of give a heads up on what to do right out of the gate. Well, why were they doing that? Well, they have lots of trucks and technicians and so on that are supposed to somehow make things right, but they weren’t confident they could necessarily keep everything up. If the winds blow too hard, the ice comes, the snow comes, it all could come crashing down in just a moment. They weren’t confident in their own abilities, and rightly so. They can’t overcome the weather, we’re reminded of that every year, no matter how good our power grid is, no matter how good our other technology is, weather can often overrule it.
Here, in Revelation, we see a different kind of warning. It’s not a warning about God’s lack of confidence and whether he can repair what’s being done. It’s rather a warning that these things are going to come, but God is in control, and so that we don’t need to fear. We need to be aware that it’s coming. Be comfortable with the fact that, yes, things are dark out there and it feels discordant with the joy of Christmas, but we can be confident, we can be joyful, because even when life appears dark, the light of the world is always there with us. It doesn’t matter if we have the advent wreath lit or not, the light of the world is with us. Whatever you might be struggling with, whatever you thought could be somehow different in life than it is, God is with you in it.
What are those things as you come to the new year that you’re thinking, “Boy, I wish this were different. I thought it would be different. I needed it to be different.” God is with you in that. Maybe on Christmas Day, your family gathers, and things don’t go so smoothly. God is with you in that. Maybe you’ve been downsized at the end of the year. I’ve read about all kinds of companies doing that. God is with you in that. Whatever it might be, God is with you in it. The gift of Christmas isn’t just something we unwrap on Christmas Day and feel sort of good for a moment. He’s with us in the everyday. That’s what we’re reminded of time and again.
And may Christmas Day, as we turn to God’s word, be the day that we’re reminded of it all the more, that God came into the world not for a brief moment, but for His overarching victory. The stuff we can’t even see. He’s with you in everything that you can see.
Would you pray with me, please? Father, we lay before You all these things we struggle with. How do we know what to do? Well, You tell us. You tell us to turn to You. And yet, it’s so hard because we want to turn back and somehow take control and somehow have everything under control and have everything be certain. But Lord, we pray that You would help us to trust all the more in You, that we would see that You overcome, that no matter how crafty, no matter how seemingly triumphant, Satan may be, and the forces of evil may be, and even the sin in our own hearts may be, that You are the one who has victory not just on Christmas, but every single day of every single year.
Someday You will return. Our Savior Jesus will come back into this world and rule as King and make all things new. And Lord, we pray that You would help us to trust and to cling to Your hope until that day. And then to rejoice in it all the way there. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
God gives us His victory. He gives it to us in the incarnation from the very beginning of the ministry of Jesus, from that very first moment, from the proclamation of the angel Gabriel until the end of time when He returns, and in that span between where we find ourselves, and oftentimes it feels like that dragon is winning, we come to the Lord’s table knowing that He is with us. And He gives this to us so that we’re reminded that He is with us, that these elements that we have, why are they there? Why did He give us this bread? Why did He give us this cup? He gave it to us that we could have confidence, that we could be nourished, that we could be strengthened, and be reminded of His promises that do not fail.
And so it was that on the night that He was betrayed, Jesus took the bread and He broke it, and He gave it to them saying, “This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” And like man after supper, He took the cup. He poured it. “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, poured out for you into the remission of sins. Do this as often as you drink of it, in remembrance of me. For as often as you eat this bread and you drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes.”
Now the key thing is we’re proclaiming that victory. And the first step is to actually be a part of that victory. And if you haven’t yet trusted in Jesus, please let these elements pass by you tonight. But don’t let go of that victory. Don’t turn away from it. Grasp it tonight. Open the Christmas present and experience it. Then when we gather again next week, we’ll share this with you. We can share it together as those who are joyful because God’s victory is there for all of us.
If you’d like someone to pray with you tonight, you can send an email to the email address on screen, or you can leave a comment in the chat, because I know everyone on there would love to pray with you. What a better thing on Christmas than to make it the first day that you declare that Jesus is your Lord and that you experience His victory.
We come before Him. He provides this to us to declare that again and again because our hearts need that reassurance. He’s there with us. Let’s come before Him now as we prepare to take these elements.
Lord, we come before You as those who couldn’t possibly be worthy of Your table. We cling to hopes in the world. We get fixated on the darkness that we see, and often feel like we’re just being consumed by the dragon. We struggle even to trust. Yet You call us to Your table because You recognize how weak indeed we are, that You invite us here that we might be nourished, that we might be strengthened and prepared to do the things that You’ve called us to do. And so it is that we pray that You would bless these elements, this bread and this juice, that we might be nourished by Your very body and blood, enabled then to recognize what You are doing in our lives, how You are bearing us on eagle’s wings, that You have called us, that You care about us, that You love us and have summoned each of us by name. May we be strengthened by Your Holy Spirit. This very day we pray in Jesus’ name, in Your precious name. Amen.
Take and eat the Body of Christ broken for You. Take and drink the Blood of Christ poured out for You. God gives us this meal that we can be nourished. It doesn’t stop at nourishing us. He calls us. He directs us. He has a purpose for us, and it’s why I love that age-old tradition, that one that we love to do every year on Christmas Eve, which is to light candles together and to hold them up, because it reminds us of God’s purpose for each of us. And His purpose for us in every part of the world, we are called to be God’s light.
So now we’re going to travel back down to Wanoato, and Joyce is going to help us to prepare to light our candles. And now I pass the light to Pastor Tim.
One of the amazing things, if you think about what we’re called to do, as we are placed in the world to reflect God’s light, is that we get to hand that light to each other. We get to light up each other’s world, because God’s Spirit works in us to be those who encourage each other. That’s what’s so neat about the church gathering together. But it’s never meant to stay simply within the walls of the church, and that’s one thing I love about our particular community, since we’re more than just a community within walls. We can’t help but see that to an extent. Even in our online community, even in just our church family, as little hills, we’re reminded it’s beyond that.
As you hold up this light, and you see it light, more than what you’re initially thinking about, if you look around the room you’re in, and if you’ve lit a candle with us, and if you haven’t, I’d encourage you to do that right now. As you do that, and you look at that candle, you start to notice more and more things, maybe some aspect of the room that you’re in that you hadn’t seen before, and you realize it’s providing light to that. It’s so neat how God works that oftentimes we don’t realize whom it is that we’re providing light for. We may not even notice them, they’re just often our periphery during life, and yet God’s using what he’s doing in us to show them who he is.
So as we go into Christmas day, and Christmas week, and beyond, may we keep our eyes on what God is doing. Keep our eyes on how he’s using us to show his light and be ready to shine that light into the new year, shine it into people’s lives. They might know more about the Savior.
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