Fr. Stephen De Young: So we’ll go ahead and get started, and when we get started here in just a moment we’ll be picking up in Revelation of St. John, chapter twelve, verse one. Last time we left off before we started chapter twelve because, as we mentioned then, the end of chapter eleven was sort of the end of one of St. John’s cycles. We’ve talked about several times now how the structure of the book of the Revelation, like the structure of all of St. John’s writing—but it’s a little more clear in Revelation than it is other places—moves in these sort of continuous cycles. We saw these cycles of sevens that culminated last time in the seventh trumpet being blown and sort of the final judgment, which we got in very brief detail, and now, as we’ve mentioned, each time St. John cycles around, there’s sort of more detail added to each theme. We’re about to begin another one of his cycles, and as we come back around more detail will be added. Because of that, I don’t need to do a lot more, I think, repetition than that, because we are sort of at the beginning of a section here.

We have— This is— Sometimes as we’ve been going through the New Testament, we’ve seen that where they’ve put a chapter break is kind of arbitrary and sometimes totally doesn’t make sense, but this is one that makes perfect sense; this is one in just the right place, because there is sort of a break here in the text. Unless there are any questions or comments or NASCAR results that anyone wants to share or anything, we’ll go ahead—

Q1: Kyle Bush crashed his car.

Fr. Stephen: Just now?

Q1: No!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Okay. We’ll go ahead and get started in the Revelation of St. John, chapter 12, verse one.

“Now a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman, clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a garland of twelve stars.” Verse two: “Then, being with child, she cried out in labor and in pain to give birth.”

There are two major ways in which we find commentators, ancient commentators, interpreting these two verses. One of them is that this woman represents Israel, because—spoilers—this woman is about to give birth to Christ. So they understand, because of the twelve stars—the twelve stars representing the twelve tribes of Israel. This is a sign in the heavens. As we saw, there was a sign in the heavens at the birth of Jesus that the Magi followed. So they say this is the line of Israel, and in particular the line of David, [which] ultimately produces Christ.

The other major way, of course, as you might have guessed, is that this is the Theotokos, and that this is a sign of her, that the depiction of her here, like the depiction of Christ that we’ve seen in Revelation, is the depiction of her in glory. And so if you ask me which of these is correct—is it Israel or is it the Theotokos—my answer will be yes, because you don’t— This isn’t a thing where you need to choose, because it is both true, in terms of the flow of the Scriptures— And we’ve talked about this before when were reading through St. Paul’s epistles when he was talking about the Torah and how the particular commandments of the Torah were sort of temporary: they served this purpose for this period of time; they allowed God to dwell among his people, despite his people being sinful, for this period until Christ came. Christ isn’t, for St. Paul, the end of the law in the sense of “Christ is here; throw it in the dust-bin”; he’s the end of the law in the sense of he’s in Greek the telos, he’s the purpose. He’s the end like the telos; this is what it was aiming at.

It is correct to see that the history of Israel culminates the birth of Christ, and you can look at that from a number of different trajectories. You can look at it from the line of David as king: that culminates in Christ. You can look at it from the perspective of the Torah and Moses: that culminates in Christ. The promises made to Abraham about his seed culminate in Christ. The promise made to Adam and Eve after the expulsion from paradise, about the seed of the woman who would crush the head of the serpent: that culminates in Christ. But the whole history of God’s people culminates in Christ, and that is part of what’s being depicted here.

But what you also find prominently in the Church Fathers is the understanding that, following that trajectory of the Torah in particular, that history and that set of rules about creating a sacred space and keeping it sacred and pure and clean and holy so that God could dwell in it among his people, that particular trajectory and idea culminates in the Theotokos, and this is the importance of the Feast of the Entrance of the Theotokos into the Temple, is that that feast is celebrating the fulfillment of that. There’s kind of a hand-off. She goes into the holy of holies to prepare to become the holy of holies; she’s going to become the place where God dwells among his people for nine months. She represents also the culmination of Israel’s history and the bringing of Christ into the world. So the imagery here is sort of deliberately both. It’s deliberately both.

Christ is getting ready to be born. This is important. This is important because this sets our— What time are we talking about?

Q1: [Inaudible]

Fr. Stephen: Right, but this is set up as here’s what’s going on— We talked about before how, in apocalyptic literature and in this vision— St. John is seeing things on earth but from the perspective of heaven. So my point being: this that’s unfolding is not some time in the future.

Q1: Oh, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: The birth of Christ is not some time in the future. This isn’t something that happens after the things that happened in chapter eleven. I have to make this point, because the most common way, especially in the United States, to interpret the book of Revelation is as this sequence of events in the future. Christ isn’t going to be born in the future after the seven trumpets have been blown. That’s not what this is saying.

So we’re re-oriented. This is part of why there’s a break here. The vision is sort of re-orienting itself. So now we’re talking about the birth of Christ. So this isn’t in the remote past; this isn’t in the remote future. What we’re seeing now is the birth of Christ coming into the world—from a different perspective.

Verse three: “And another sign appeared in heaven. Behold, a great fiery red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven diadems on his heads.”

Q1: Illustrations of this look really weird.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah. So the idea of the ten horns is not that he had ten horns distributed amongst the seven heads; it’s that each head had ten horns. And that’s why he has seven diadems or crowns on these seven heads. So the dragon language is important for a couple of reasons. We’re going to see— Bablyon is going to come up in terms of this next cycle, and in Babylonian stories, the sort of primeval gods— So in the ancient world, there were usually at least two, sometimes three, sort of tiers of gods in terms of age. In Greek myth, you have basically the sky and the earth, Gaia and Uranos or Uranus, and then you have the Titans, and then you have the Olympians. There’s sort of these tiers.

Well, the same was true in Babylonian mythology. For them, the first tier, which was the sky and the sea, are depicted by them as dragons and continued to be depicted as dragons; in statuary in their temples, idols were depicted as dragons. Dragon also, as we’re going to see as we go on in this chapter, picks up some of the— because it’s reptilian, picks up some of the serpent language from Genesis. The idea is he’s bringing together sort of the pagan gods worshiped in Babylon and the figure of the devil, the serpent. He’s bringing those together in this picture of primordial evil, the Evil One, capital-E, capital-O.

That is part of why you have the seven heads. We’re going to see he’s going to do some other things with seven, but seven remember we said represents wholeness and completeness, so this is sort of evil itself, “perfect evil,” if you want to use “perfect” in a different way. But also we’re going to see he’s going to do some things with the number seven, because of course the city of Rome was built on seven hills. So he’s going to pick that up a little bit later on. That’s part of this, too.

The ten horns he is picking up from the book of Daniel. In Daniel 7, right before Daniel sees the vision of the Son of Man who comes up before the Ancient of Days and is enthroned, he has this vision of these beasts that come out of the sea that represent sort of the different empires of the world—the Babylonian Empire, the Persian Empire, Greece, and then Rome. And we’re going to see there’s going to be some more beasts coming up; we’re going to draw on more of that imagery. But sort of the greatest of the beasts that Daniel sees has ten horns, and then there’s a whole thing where there’s an eleventh horn and some other things. St. John will pick up on some of those things again later, but that’s where he’s getting the ten horns. So this is another identifier between those sort of figures of evil.

Verse four: “His tail drew a third of the stars of heaven and threw them to the earth, and the dragon stood before the woman who was ready to give birth, to devour her child as soon as it was born.” He immediately, obviously, as soon as— What we’re seeing depicted here is sort of the devil becoming aware of the Incarnation. St. Ignatius actually talks about this in one of his letters. He says that the star in heaven is not only how the Magi sort of figured out what was going on; it was also how the angelic beings figured out what was happening. It was like a sign to them, too. And he’s picking up in part on this; that’s part of where he’s getting that interpretation and understanding. So the idea here is that when Christ is incarnate in the womb of the Theotokos, this is when the devil kind of realizes, “Wait, what?” because of course he’s not all-knowing and all-powerful, but so immediately he sets out to destroy Christ. And we see that— Because, remember, this is— We’re seeing this story from heaven’s perspective. We’ve already seen this in, for example, St. Luke’s and St. Matthew’s gospel, from the other end, from sort of the bottom up instead of the top down. And you remember what happened immediately after the Magi showed up and told Herod that a king was born: he set out to massacre. So that’s what’s going on on earth; this is the heavenly perspective. This is the devil that’s motivating Herod to do that.

And we have that reference, which we’ll get back to, of him— of a third of the stars of heaven. We’ll get back to that in a second.

Verse five: “She bore a male child who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron, and her child was caught up to God and his throne.” This is where it becomes pretty obvious who the child is, because that language of ruling all nations with a rod of iron comes from Psalm 110 and from Daniel, regarding the Messiah. Ultimately, he’s caught up to God and his throne, so that’s the ascension.

Q1: Also that gets him out of the way of the dragon.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so the dragon tries to get him; doesn’t get him.

Verse six: “Then the woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared by God, that they should feed her there 1,260 days.” The woman runs out to the desert and is there for—again, this figurative period of time, which is basically like three and a half years. We talked before about that three and a half years number, that it’s half of seven. It has this finite period of time.

So you may be wondering if this is the Theotokos, when did she flee into the desert? She didn’t. Did Israel flee into the desert?

Q1: Yes.

Fr. Stephen: When?

Q1: The exodus.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but that’s way before this. That’s not after the birth of Christ and after Christ’s ascension.

Q2: [Has the temple been destroyed?]

Fr. Stephen: So this is— Who did that? That was the Christian Church, specifically the one in Jerusalem: fled into the desert at the time of the destruction of the Temple. Here the same woman is representing the Church. Does that mean the woman isn’t the Theotokos? No, because the Theotokos is also the mother of the Church and the image of the Church. Does that mean that it isn’t Israel? No, because the Church is Israel. That’s part of— This is the same. This is emphasizing the continuity.

So Christ’s birth: this is the culmination of the history of God’s people, but that doesn’t mean God doesn’t have any people any more. It’s quite the opposite. So the idea here is that—that St. John is getting across—the devil didn’t manage to get Christ and now can’t get Christ. He couldn’t really before, either; that’s why he didn’t. [Laughter] So whom does he go after?

Q1: The Church.

Fr. Stephen: Right. He goes after Christ’s people. He goes after Christ’s people, which is really the continuation of what he did at the very beginning in the book of Genesis. The devil can’t do anything to God. I mean, what can he do to God? But he can go after humanity; he can go after the people whom God created, his fellow creatures. So that’s the idea here.

And notice—we’ve already seen St. John talking about this in the last chapter and even before that, that this persecution is for a limited time and that God is protecting his people through it. So they’re in the wilderness, which is not a nice, happy place to be. There’s suffering involved in this persecution. God protecting them doesn’t mean they don’t suffer at all, but it does mean that they’re not abandoned to it. They’re not at the mercy of the dragon.

Now, in the rest of the chapter, we’re going to have two zoom-ins for what we just saw. So it’s going to zoom in on what was going on in heaven that we just read about, and then it’s going to zoom in on what we just heard was going on on earth. So the first zoom-in, the one in heaven, starts in verse seven.

And war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought with the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought, but they did not prevail, nor was a place found for them in heaven any longer. So the great dragon was cast out, that serpent of old, called the devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world. He was cast to the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.

This is the zoom-in on that third of the stars of heaven, because, remember, we’ve seen stars are sort of angels, all the way through Revelation. This is the zoom-in on that. This is sort of the point here where the devil and what are called “his angels, his messengers,” fall.

A couple of points. First, we’re just given this ratio of one-third; we’re not given exact numbers. I put a pin in something, now a couple months ago, when we were early on in Revelation, when we first saw the elders. When we first saw the elders, we noted that there were 24 of them. We said there was this connection to the twelve tribes of Israel and the twelve apostles, because 24 is two twelves. But I also put a pin in it and said, “The number 24 is going to become important later, in terms of 24 elders in particular.” Because if you go back and look at elders in the Old Testament, that word in particular, the first place where you find elders like that—I mean, you find vague references to elders of the tribes and that kind of thing, who are just the heads of clans and tribes and families, but where you find any kind of number attached to them for the first time is under Moses.

There’s this episode in Exodus where Moses, his father-in-law, Jethro, the priest of Midian, comes to visit him, and Jethro says, “Hey, son-in-law Moses, you’re spending way too much of your time hearing petty disputes between all these Israelites out here in the desert. One guy says another guy stole his goat, this, that, and the other. You’re spending all day hearing all these cases. You have better things to do, as the prophet, as the leader of this people, than handling all this stuff.” He says, “You need to appoint elders whom you trust from each tribe to handle this kind of lower-level stuff, this day-to-day stuff.”

At that point, Moses appoints 72 elders, which is six from each tribe. There’s twelve tribes, so you end up with 72 elders. So what fraction of 72 is 24? Math quiz! [Laughter] It’s one-third. It’s one-third, so when we saw presented to us, we noticed that one of the big differences between St. John’s vision of the worship of heaven and the Prophet Isaiah or the Prophet Ezekiel’s vision of the worship of heaven was that there were these 24 humans there. There were these 24 humans there. And now we’ve just read that there were a third of the angels who were tossed out, who fell and became demonic powers. So we have a third of the angels gone; we have a third of the elders there. The idea here that St. John is getting across by using those numbers is not there’s only 24 saints or only 24 people get saved or there were only 24 demons, for that matter; but the idea that the saints in glory are replacing the angelic beings who fell, that the angels are part of God’s sort of heavenly administration. He assigns them these different jobs and different tasks. Some of them proved unworthy of it, so now humans who are glorified, who become saints, become part of God’s administration, like replacing them.

You find this all over the Church Fathers. St. John Chrysostom references this. When St. Paul refers to “the number of the elect,” St. John Chrysostom just very casually says, “Oh, this is the number of the angels who fell.” [Laughter] You’re like: “What? What?” But he has this idea. And you find this very practically in the life of the ancient Church, as Christianity was spreading. A lot of times, modern scholars will look at the beginning of the veneration of saints in the Church. They’ll say, “Oh, well, see, this is just paganism. They’re just replacing the different gods of the different things with saints.” And they’re sort of half-right, because what the early Christians believed and what the Fathers believed was that those saints were literally replacing the pagan gods.

Not like the people still want to worship a pagan god so we’ll give them a saint instead, but they believed that, in actuality— So the city of Thessaloniki used to be overseen by what they considered to be a demon, because the gods of the nations are demons, called Aphrodite; now it’s St. Demetrios who’s the patron of that city. The idea— And they believed that happened quite literally. St. Cyril of Alexandria when he had to deal with— Well, there’s still these Egyptian pagan temples: he has the bodies of martyrs taken and buried there and rededicates them as churches with those martyrs as patrons. So it’s old spirits out, new spirits in. [Laughter] The idea is this is actually a thing that is happening.

The job given to those spirits who fell, that they failed at, was leading humans and the rest of creation towards God. They failed to do that in various ways and led them into other things. The idea is that now the saints in glory are able to fulfill that task in helping lead us to God. They’re not gods in their own right any more than the angels were. That’s part of the problem with some of those angels who fell, is that they wanted to be worshiped as gods in their own right. But they lead us to him.

So St. John’s doing that kind of subtly here with the numbers, but numbers and things like that, those are things that the original readers, especially the original Jewish readers, would have noticed. The Church Fathers did, too, and sometimes when we read some of these things in the Church Fathers, it just seems like they’re doing weird allegorical things. I’ve said before: the way modern people use allegory is sort of like this old cartoon—I don’t know if you’ve seen it—there’s this old cartoon where they use these two mathematicians standing in front of a chalkboard, and there’s a math problem written and then there’s the answer written, and in between the one guy has written with chalk: “A miracle occurs.” [Laughter] The other guy is saying, “I have some questions about that middle step that’s in between the two!”

Modern people, when we look at a passage of Scripture and then we look at what a Church Father says about it, if we can’t figure out what they’re doing we just sort of say, “Oh, allegory! A miracle occurs!” But that’s just a punt, that we don’t want to seriously think about what they were doing, what they were about. And so a lot of times they were picking up on details like this that are not accidental. St. John didn’t have this vision and just—the number was coincidental. Because sometimes he doesn’t write down numbers. Sometimes he just says, “I saw a whole lot of angels.” [Laughter] “Angels without number” or “thousands and thousands.” Sometimes he gives very specific numbers: that’s not an accident; that’s not just random. He recorded those numbers for a reason; he was communicating something. And so that’s the idea here.

Another point is we’ve all gotten our brains poisoned a little by John Milton, where we have this idea in our heads that the devil and the demons fell some time before the world was created. The reason I say we’ve been poisoned by John Milton is that’s actually nowhere in the Church Fathers. None of them say that. They all have the angels being created at some point in the six days of creation in Genesis 1. The most popular options are either the first day when God creates light and darkness, and they say, “Well, that’s the creation of the angels”; or the fourth day when he creates the sun, moon, and stars, because of the— what we’ve been talking about in Revelation about the stars. Those are the two most popular, but you get some Fathers who will say the second day, but they all say somewhere in there.

As St. Andrew of Caesarea says in his commentary here on Revelation 12, he says that we must accept what all of the Fathers say, which is that after the creation of the world, the devil fell through envy. So we have to get sort of— There was this other creation and this other fall, back before Genesis 1 picks up: we have to get that out of our head. I know Milton made it really dramatic and stuff, but he’s also a Puritan, so. [Laughter] He wrote really well, and he wrote really…

Q2: He gave us a very sexy garden of Eden.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. [Laughter] Well, and a very anti-heroic devil, too, while he was at it! But that depiction of the devil has messed with us a little bit, too, the whole idea— Well, he says he’d rather rule in hell than serve in heaven. Where do you get that he’s ruling in hell from the Scriptures and the Church Fathers? He’s suffering in hell. He’s the first one convicted to it. He’s the chief occupant; he’s whom it was created for.

Q1: [He’s the only one.]

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, exactly! So that part has skewed our thinking a little bit. And the idea that he was trying to overthrow God somehow and make himself God. Like, how would you do that? You can’t. That’s not a thing. But I think the key there for Milton was that the most horrible thing he could think of someone doing was desiring to be a king, because if there’s one thing Puritans hate, it’s high church ritual, but if there’s two things, it’s high church ritual and monarchy. [Laughter] He was not a fan.

But at any rate, we have to kind of get that out of our head. So when St. Andrew of Caesarea comes to this, and he’s talking about the timing of it, he says, well, we know from all the Fathers—that quote I just gave—that after the creation of the world, the devil fell through envy.” So they took Genesis 3, when the serpent is cursed: that’s when the devil fell. That was their understanding. But this is at the birth or shortly after the birth of Christ, the way it’s depicted here. So for him, that’s the issue. Sometimes people who want to argue for Milton’s ancient fall will come here, to Revelation 12, but for St. Andrew who was living in the sixth century, he’s never heard anything like that. So for him it’s: Well, wait a minute.

He says there’s two possible things from him reading the Fathers and him just working on this passage. He points to the place which is recorded in both St. Matthew’s gospel and St. Luke’s gospel, when Christ sends out the 70 apostles (70 or 72, depending on your version), and that kind of connects here, too, with the numbers, where Christ says— After they come back and they say, “Hey, we were even able to cast out demons in your name,” remember Christ says, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.” So he spots that. St. Andrew spots that, and he says other Fathers spotted that, and he says, so there’s some kind of fall of Satan that happens as a result of—during, related to—Christ’s ministry. He says, “Okay, well, this must be talking about that. That must be what’s being talked about here in terms of the fall of Satan.”

So then he points out in verse nine, where it says, “So the great dragon was cast out, that serpent of old, called the devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world.” So there’s one way of reading that, in the Greek and in the English, which is how I just sort of read it. These are all titles for the dragon. This is the great dragon. Of old he was called the serpent. He’s called the devil; he’s called Satan. He deceives the whole world. The other way you could read it is: “The great dragon was cast out, that serpent of old called the devil, and Satan, who deceives the whole world.” [Laughter] So he says you could read this, and some people had read it before him, as referring to these two demonic beings. So the devil fell back then, and Satan falls when Christ says that, or related to around when Christ says that.

Q2: May I say something? Last time, you were speaking of saints replacing fallen angels, but men and women were not created to replace fallen angels, in the beginning.

Fr. Stephen: Well, God knew what was going to happen, so… yeah. [Laughter] That’s sort of the other interpretation he’s familiar with.

Q1: What does the name of Satan mean? Does that give us a clue as to—?

Fr. Stephen: It just means the Adversary or the Enemy. These could be two separate beings, so either you have two separate beings who each fall once, or you have one being who falls twice, like in two different senses. The one that St. Andrew goes with is that it’s one being who falls in two different senses; that’s the one he goes with. His view of Revelation has become fairly authoritative in the Orthodox Church, so that’s sort of the majority opinion forever, probably. [Laughter]

How he understands that is— Like if you look at the book of Job, in the book of Job at the beginning all the angels come to present themselves before God, and Satan shows up, like in the throne room. So even though he’s already Satan, he’s already an adversary, he still sort of has some kind of access, where he can come and accuse Job and do all those things. The idea that St. Andrew has in terms of this being one being is that, yes, he’s cursed, he falls in Genesis 3, but he still had some kind of access to go and accuse the brethren before God, and that, through Christ’s ministry, he loses that. Through Christ’s ministry, he’s sort of thrown out of heaven completely, where he can’t even go and accuse anyone.

Q3: So is this like he’s like a prosecutor, and then how it says Christ is like our defender? Something more like that?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but now he’s out of the picture.

Q1: Christ is the defender, the prosecutor, all the things.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, because he’s also the judge. St. Paul mentioned that in Hebrews, that our defense attorney is also the judge. Yes.

Q4: I had a question. You said there was a St. Andrew.

Fr. Stephen: St. Andrew of Caesarea, yeah.

Q4: Referred to in Luke and Matthew, where Christ says, “I saw Satan fall…” But that goes with the assumption that Christ saw that happen during his earthly incarnation?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, because it’s in the present tense when he says it.

Q4: But why—? Like, “I am seeing him fall” or “I have recently seen him fall”?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Q4: In Genesis, we’re supposed to understand that Christ— We’re supposed to understand that the Son was there. So the Son was— It couldn’t be that he’s talking about “back then, I saw.”

Q1: I always thought it referred to that.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Well, he’s interpreting it as not, and that’s in part because he’s trying to interpret this, where he’s said to fall related to Christ’s earthly life.