This week we continue our Advent series, When Heaven Met Earth. As promised, we are going to be taking in a story of Jesus’ birth that probably doesn’t fall on your radar when you think about your favorites. Yet this story, for as different as it is, may be the most important of all the stories of Jesus’ birth in terms of giving us a bigger, fuller picture of the reality of what was happening in the universe at large when God came to be with us as a baby. Read on (or listen!) as we marvel at the fact that Christmas is bigger than we realize.

A Cosmic Christmas

Paul Harvey was famous for telling “the rest of the story.” He would take a story that many people know a little bit about, and then explore some surprising or encouraging element of it that not nearly as many people knew. The combination of the creativity of his reporting with his absolutely classic voice made his stories a true delight to all those who got to hear them. Sometimes his stories introduced people he thought should be better known. Sometimes they gave details about something or someone that made it even more impressive than it already was to most people. They always left you feeling not just better informed, but encouraged about the state of the world than you were before listening to them. Harvey was doing Gospel good with his reporting. A good story that lets us see things from a different angle or a bigger picture often does that. 

This morning we are in the third part of our Advent series, When Heaven Met Earth. Each week in this special season we are taking a fresh look at the various stories of Jesus’ birth in the Scriptures. These are all stories most of us are intimately familiar with. We come back to these stories every single year around this time. We’ve read them. We’ve studied them. We’ve seen plays and pageants about them. We know them. And yet, when we approach the Scriptures with the understanding that these are God’s words, and that His Spirit can reveal truth to us through them whenever and however He pleases even when we already “know” the stories perfectly well, we just may find His Spirit surprising us with fresh insight and understanding. So, here we are. 

We started out our journey three weeks ago (in case you have missed the memo: Christmas is this Thursday) by taking a couple of weeks to look at Matthew’s presentation of the nativity story. He doesn’t spend much time on Jesus’ actual birth, but he starts by giving us a glimpse through Joseph’s eyes into the impossibly difficult circumstances Jesus’ earthly and adoptive step-father faced when the news broke of his fiancee’s unexpected pregnancy. We were reminded that even when they don’t make much sense, God’s plans are still for our good. In the story of the arrival of the wise men in the following week, we gave our primary attention to the apparent inattention of the Jewish religious elite to God’s word. What they didn’t do, the wise men did. The wise men earned their appellation and took God’s word seriously. As a result, they met Jesus. When we take God’s word seriously, we will meet Jesus. 

After a wonderful break last week to enjoy the choir’s fantastic musical celebration of the season (not to mention the awesome kids’ program that same afternoon!), we are back this week to look at yet another story of Jesus’ birth. This one, though, is probably not one you have thought about in these terms before—if you have even read it. As we have moved forward in this series, I have consistently been dropping bread crumbs that at some point we were going to take a look at a version of the Christmas story you may not have even known was in the Scriptures. Today is the day. This morning I want to dive in with you for a bit to a story about Jesus’ birth that isn’t found in the Gospels. It doesn’t look like the others. It doesn’t even mention Jesus by name. None of the major characters we know and love appear in it. Yet in terms of setting before us the meaning of the Christmas story for us today, it may be the most important of the bunch. This morning we are going to take a look at the story of what at least my Bible identifies as “the woman, the child, and the dragon.” If you have your copy of the Scriptures handy, find your way to the back of the book and take a look with me Revelation 12. 

Now, we should perhaps start with this: Revelation is tough. It’s tough to read. It’s tough to study. It’s tough to preach. It’s tough to understand. The reason for this is that it lies so far outside of the kind of genre with which we are accustomed. Even just in the context of the Scriptures, which have some pretty wild parts, it stands apart as sufficiently outside the norm as to make reading it more of a chore than we typically enjoy taking on. The reason for all of this is twofold. First, the apostle John was writing in a day when Rome was ratcheting up the pressure on believers to conform with the standards of the broader society, and a book that explicitly challenged the notion that Rome and Caesar was the ultimate sovereign over the inhabitants of this world wasn’t exactly a message that the government was happy to have floating around out there. Because of this, he wrote it in a kind of code and with lots of symbols that believers would understand, but which the average Roman official would not. The whole vision is steeped in Old Testament imagery, as well as imagery from other extrabiblical Jewish writings that were fairly popular and widely known when it was written in the waning days of the first century. 

The other reason Revelation is so hard to understand is that John was trying to describe a vision that really went beyond description. He saw a vision of Jesus in all His glory. How do you put that into words? He saw visions of broad and cataclysmic judgments. He saw visions of nations rising and falling, of God’s people being persecuted, of demons and angels, of Heaven and Hell, and all on a scale that was way beyond what any of us could really get our minds around. If the writing and descriptions seem difficult to decipher on occasion, let’s give John a bit of slack for the difficulty of his task of describing the indescribable. 

In spite of all of this, the main points of the work are pretty clear. They have long offered believers in difficult, persecution-filled circumstances great hope and encouragement. The point of John’s writing is this: There is an end coming, and God is going to win. It won’t actually even be close. The enemy will posture like there’s going to be a fight, but there will never be a fight. God will show up, and that’ll be that. He will hold all those who finally oppose Him and His people accountable for their actions. He will protect His people spiritually and even physically to a certain extent. In the end, He will rescue them from the clutches of sin and death once and for all. Then comes eternity in His perfect kingdom for all those who have been willing to place their trust in Him. 

The particular story we are looking at this morning in Revelation 12 falls during an interlude between judgments. The scrolls have been opened and the trumpets have sounded, but the bowls have not yet been poured out. What John is doing in the stories in chapters 12-14 is giving us a glimpse behind the cosmic curtain of reality to see things from a perspective we don’t otherwise have access to. This is a hard perspective to understand because it is so profoundly different from our own, worldly, finite view, but when we are willing to sit with it, some pretty powerful truths start to emerge. 

Out of the gate here, John tells us that “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.” Right away we are left scratching our head at the imagery. That’s okay, we just need to do some thinking here. Where else in the Scriptures (and in particular the Old Testament) do we see a dream or vision that includes reference to the sun, moon, and stars? This is like the dream Joseph had in Genesis 37; the one that made his brothers so intensely angry with him. In Joseph’s dream, all of those elements represented Jacob, Joseph’s mom, Leah, and all of his brothers—in other words, the whole clan of Israel. It seems reasonable  to conclude here, then, that John is talking about Israel as a whole. At this point, this woman represents Israel, or the people of God more generally.

John goes on to give a more precise description of the woman: “She was pregnant and cried out in labor and agony as she was about to give birth.” The woman—the people of God—are suffering and persecuted, but there is relief coming. Labor doesn’t last forever. It eventually ends and gives way to the joy of new life. In other words, John was sharing a vision of the people of God as one representative block from the ancient past through to his own times. I think we can safely extend his imagery forward from the end of the first century to the beginning of the 21st century. God’s people have always been a persecuted bunch—statistically speaking, never more so than we have been in the last 20 years. But John wants us to know that relief is coming. Our suffering won’t last forever. There is joy and new life like what comes when a baby is born yet ahead of us. 

But between here and there more trouble is waiting for us, ready to strike and cause us many more woes. Verse three now: “Then another sign appeared in heaven: There was a great fiery red dragon having seven heads and ten horns, and on its heads were seven crowns. Its tail swept a third of the stars in heaven and hurled them to the earth. And the dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that when she did give birth it might devour her child.” There is an enemy of God’s people in this world, and he is powerful. This enemy wants to steal our joy, to steal our hope, to take the relief that God has planned for us and devour it so that we only know suffering. 

This enemy’s plans, however, will be thwarted. They will not succeed. He will come up empty. The woman will deliver her child, and God will extend Him protection. “She gave birth to a Son, a male who is going to rule all nations with an iron rod. Her child was caught up to God and to his throne. The woman fled into the wilderness, where she had a place prepared by God, to be nourished there for 1,260 days.” Does this Son with a capital S sound familiar at all? John’s imagery has morphed, and we are now in the midst of a nativity tale. The woman is no longer just the people of God, but one person of God in particular: Mary. This is the birth of Jesus being figuratively depicted here. 

What John is helping us understand here is that Jesus’ birth didn’t come out of nowhere. It wasn’t some act of God independent of what was going on in the rest of the cosmos. Jesus was born out of and into a situation of great conflict and turmoil. This was obviously the case with His immediate family in light of all they went through just to bring Him into this world in the first place. We talked about that in the first couple parts of our series. But while that image should not be out of our thinking when we read this, neither should it be the only thing in our thinking. Jesus entered this world in the midst of a much greater conflict between God’s kingdom and the ruler of this world, the devil, than merely what we see in the Gospel accounts of His birth. Our lives spent in pursuit of God through Jesus are part of a cosmic war that has been raging, and which will continue to rage until the time comes to bring it to an end. If we view the story of Jesus’ birth as just a human story, we miss out on a much bigger picture of the full reality of what took place on that silent night in Bethlehem. 

God was establishing a permanent kingdom basehead deep within enemy-occupied territory. The enemy knew of His plans and tried everything within his limited, but still formidable, power to stop it. What do you think Herod’s command to slaughter all the toddler boys in and around Bethlehem was? But God was always one step ahead. All of Satan’s efforts through his servants in this world came to naught. God protected His Son by miraculously directing the wise men and His earthly parents through various dreams and visions. He wisely chose in the first place servants He trusted to be obedient to His commands no matter how hard they seemed. God had been planning to take back His world for a very long time. The birth of Jesus was the first major step toward putting those plans into action. 

But again, this didn’t come out of nowhere. This battle that God was finally advancing in a powerful and dramatic way is but a part of a larger battle that had been raging between God’s servants and the devil since almost eternity past. John, doing his best to transcribe another wild vision, gives us a glimpse of this larger battle in the next few verses.

Check this out: “Then war broke out in heaven.” Pause there. My translation uses the word “then” here, but that’s probably not the best rendering of the Greek conjunction, kai. The Greeks used kai, which is most often translated as “and,” as a kind of narrative advancer, but not necessarily one that implied a linear chronological sequence like we expect from our stories. And indeed, what John describes next happened long before the woman in the first part of the story gave birth to her Son. I say that just to help you understand that what John describes next here is not somehow subsequent to Jesus’ birth. We are back now before the creation of humanity. 

“Then war broke out in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon. The dragon and his angels also fought, but he could not prevail, and there was no place for them in heaven any longer.” This is the great war of Satan, rebelling against God’s authority and being cast out of heaven along with all those angels who joined his terrible, hopeless cause. And indeed, did you catch the language there? “He could not prevail.” This war is not like it is so often portrayed in our stories—a distortion no doubt introduced by the father of lies himself—as a fairly even battle between two sides that both have reasonable points in their defense. This was never a meaningful battle. Satan never had a chance. In spite of his best efforts, he could not prevail, and was cast out of heaven for his efforts. Our enemy has been a loser from the start. We dare not face him thinking that he is somehow going to win any battles against God’s people. The only battles he wins are the ones in which God is not an involved party. He cannot prevail against our God. “So the great dragon was thrown out—the ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the one who deceives the whole world. He was thrown to earth, and his angels with him.”

This is the battle God sent Jesus to finally and decisively turn to the right. Okay, but if this is a cosmic, spiritual, heavenly battle, why send Jesus to earth? Because that’s where Satan and his minions were banished. And, as we’ll see next, the loser, knowing his time was short to wreak havoc on God’s plans and people, unleashed his full fury on those who were given to him. The devil does not love. He hates even his own human servants because they are made in the image of God and even when they have no connection to or relationship with God, they are nonetheless reminders of the one who is most responsible for his defeat. 

And yet, his defeat is assured. God’s victory has already been proclaimed, as the next part of the passage here celebrates. Verse 10 now: “Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say, ‘The salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have now come, because the accuser of our brothers and sisters, who accuses them before our God day and night, has been thrown down.” If you ever feel like you are being accused, know well that your primary accuser has already been cast down from heaven. He has no audience before the King to make accusations. 

Instead of wilting before his limited attacks, we can stand firm. More than that, we can conquer him. How? “They conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; for they did not love their lives to the point of death.” How do we conquer? We conquer in Christ. Jesus’ sacrifice, His death and resurrection are the source of our power, and our willingness to stand firmly on that testimony, to live as if it really is true, no matter what is how we exercise it. There’s not some grand quest or gesture we need to make, there are no talismans that will do the trick. It’s much simpler than that. We place our faith in Jesus and stand solidly on that faith regardless of what the world throws our way because of our confidence in His promises, and He takes care of the rest. Our foe still has power and can still do damage, but these are all the actions of a dying snake that is still thrashing around as the life drains from its body. “Therefore rejoice, you heavens, and you who dwell in them! Woe to the earth and the sea, because the evil has come down to you with great fury, because he knows his time is short.” 

The great serpent raged and attacked God’s people with wanton fury, but then came Christ; then came the baby born in a stable and laid in a manger. And now, even though the battle still rages on, our hope and help are found in God through Jesus. Our enemy will still attack, but our God can sustain us, and in Him, our lives are set for eternity anyway, so it doesn’t matter what happens to us if our faith is truly in Him. 

It is this ongoing battle that John turns to in the last third of the chapter here. “When the dragon saw that he had been thrown down to the earth, he persecuted the woman who had given birth to the male child. The woman was given two wings of a great eagle, so that she could fly from the serpent’s presence to her place in the wilderness, where she was nourished for a time, times, and half a time.” The enemy attacked; God protected. This pattern has been repeated in an endless cycle. And over and over again the enemy’s attacks fall short, and God’s power is proven more powerful. “From his mouth the serpent spewed water like a river flowing after the woman, to sweep her away with a flood. But the earth helped the woman. The earth opened its mouth and swallowed up the river that the dragon had spewed from his mouth.” In the end, the dragon can only lick his wounds until his end arrives, causing whatever chaos and destruction he still can manage for God’s people. “So the dragon was furious with the woman and went off to wage war against the rest of her offspring.” And who are the offspring of the woman? “Those who keep the commands of God and hold firmly to the testimony about Jesus.” 

That’s not quite the Christmas story you remember, yes? Like I said a little while ago, I think the worth of this particular story of Jesus’ birth—cosmic though it may be—is that it lets us see and understand the nature of the story in an entirely new light. It lets us see that there’s a whole lot more to the story than the sanitized, Precious Moments-like versions we often hear. Jesus’ arrival wasn’t quiet. It wasn’t clean. It wasn’t safe. He may have been away in a manger, but the forces at play in bringing the Son of God to earth—and of opposing it—were cosmic and not just earthly. Jesus’ arrival wasn’t just the beginning of our salvation—although it was certainly not less than that—it was God’s ultimate movement against the forces of this world to bring His victory into its final phase. In other words, Christmas is bigger than we realize. 

Jesus came as God’s ultimate counterattack against the dragon and its forces. Satan had held court long enough, and his defeat was nigh. Jesus did not come, though, as the dragon expected, and this is precisely why the attack was so successful. The dragon didn’t understand God’s methods or His power. He still doesn’t. The world doesn’t get it when the church looks and acts like Jesus. And it hates us for it because it hated Him first. God didn’t come with the strength of arms in power and unassailable might. God came with the strength of humility and gentleness and kindness and love. God came with the power of dependence on the love of others and the faithfulness of imperfect servants. All of this is part of the Christmas story. Christmas is bigger than we realize. 

If we want to stand firm in this great conflict and experience the fullness of the victory He won by His power and wisdom, we have to stand in the same way He did. We have to approach the battle before us with the same mindset. We have to use the same weapons He used. We have to love. We have to choose humility over pride, kindness over hatred, gentleness over malice. We have to choose dependence on the love of others and even more so the love of God. We have to choose to depend on His faithfulness. Christmas, the birth of Christ, proves that He will be. When we grasp this bigger picture, we can see it for what it really is. Christmas is bigger than we realize. 

Christmas is bigger than just a baby in a stable. It is not something that just happened in the past and we merely celebrate in the present by giving gifts. Christmas connects to our lives still today. The victory Jesus came and won is something we still live with today. The opposition He faced is something that still comes after us today. The battle that was raging then is still raging now. We can and should celebrate what happened in the past when a baby was born to a poor couple living in tough circumstances. But even as we do, we should celebrate the work God is still doing today through that very same baby, now the king of all creation who has indeed established and sustains His kingdom with justice and righteousness. The battle He came to win is one we can still win as we put our faith in Him, stand firm on His testimony, and share it eagerly with others. Our victory is and will always be in Him. This is what Christmas is all about. If that sounds bigger than you thought, that’s precisely because it is. Christmas is bigger than we realize. May you come to see just how big Christmas really is, and celebrate with all the joyfulness it is truly due.