What's up with Revelation 12?
- richieeparsons
- Aug 21, 2023
- 8 min read
I had planned to begin a new series on Jude today, but this past weekend I heard a sermon that used Revelation 12 as a supporting text for the message. Now, the interesting thing about Revelation 12 is that there is disagreement among scholars, pastors, and professors as to what event this passage is actually describing. So I thought it made sense to dive into Revelation 12 today instead.
Now, let me stress that I intentionally avoid end times prophecy in general. It is just personally not an interesting topic to me and also there are still unresolved problems with every major viewpoint on the matter. In short, no one really knows for sure what will happen or when and, if we are to take the Bible at its word, we aren’t supposed to know. I’ll let Mike Heiser punctuate this thought for me: When it comes to the end times, “Your system needs to sort of be rooted in an Old Testament Second Temple context. That’s all.”1 So there you have it – whatever your views on end times prophecy, make sure it isn’t divorced from the Old Testament as viewed through Second Temple texts and you’ll probably get close.
Back to Revelation 12. Here are the pertinent verses:
The Woman and the Dragon
12 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. 2 She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. 3 Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on its heads. 4 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. 5 She gave birth to a son, a male child, who “will rule all the nations with an iron scepter.”[a] And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne. – Revelation 12:1-5
There are three widely accepted interpretations of this passage:
1. This describes a pre-creation fall.
2. This describes a future, apocalyptic fall.
3. This describes events surrounding the birth of the Messiah.
View #1: Pre-Creation Fall
The view you will hear most often on Sunday mornings (and the one that prompted this article) is that these verses describe the original pre-creation fall where Satan rebelled with 1/3 of God’s angels and these fallen angels became demons. Philip Long summarizes the supporting viewpoints on this:
“For some (usually conservative) commentators, Revelation 12 looks back at this satanic rebellion. For example, Robert Thomas said this “must refer to angels who fell with Satan in past history” (Revelation 8-22, 124). Lenski observed the clear allusion to Daniel 8:10 and drew an analogy to Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who threw down some of the stars from heaven and trampled them on the ground, and Satan, who threw down a third of God’s stars” (Lenski, Revelation, 366; cf., Patterson Revelation NAC, 263).”4
While this view gets lots of mileage among pastors and regular churchgoers, it has several problems.
Problem #1: Reading a pre-creation fall into Revelation 12 doesn’t fit into the chronology of that text and also finds no basis in any Biblical writing.
Philip Long’s take is representative: “There are problems with the interpretation of Revelation 12:3-4 as referring to the fall of Satan. The woman was pregnant and about to give birth to the male child (presumably Jesus, v. 2, 5) prior to the second sign, the great rea dragon who seeps away a third of the stars from heaven and flings them to the earth (v. 3-4). War does not break out in heaven until after the child is born and is snatched up to heaven (presumably the ascension).”4
Mike Heiser goes even further: “There isn’t a single verse in the entirety of Scripture that tells us (a) the original rebel sinned before the episode of Genesis 3, or (b) a third of the angels also fell either before humanity’s fall or at the time of that fall.”2
I know this will be surprising to many readers who grew up believing the idea that the fall in the garden came sometime after an original, cosmic rebellion of Satan and 1/3 of the angels, but these ideas have more foundation in John Milton’s Paradise Lost than in the Bible. This notion is simply an example of how tradition can mistakenly be given the status of doctrine over time.
On that point, here is Philip Long again: “More troubling for those who want this text to refer to a pre-Edenic fall of Satan is the lack of evidence for the kind of rebellion against God assumed in most descriptions of the fall of Satan. Even if Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28 are admitted as evidence for an angelic rebellion against God, there is nothing in either passage to support one-third of the angels falling along with the rebel, nor do either of those passages make a clear connection to Satan as the leader of a demonic horde. In fact, the idea that demons are the angels who fell with Satan is built on a number of assumptions built up over centuries of myth-building rather than solid textual/biblical evidence.”4
We’ll dive into the research surrounding the various falls/rebellions in ancient times on another day. For now, the lack of any corroborating biblical evidence for a pre-creation fall severely hinders this viewpoint from being plausible.
Problem #2: To come to this conclusion, you must interpret the dragon sweeping 1/3 of the stars language in a vacuum, thereby rendering all the other symbolism around it as unrelated.
There is a lot going on in this passage and this view simply interprets one idea in a vacuum without consideration for the others around it. This reverse-engineering while studying can often result in trying to match up a passage with a belief and then reading that passage through that lens. If you read Revelation 12 with Paradise Lost in mind, you’ll find a pre-creation fall. But if you read the passage and let it say what it wants to say, you’ll likely find yourself coming to a different conclusion.
Problem #3: False association with other passages
Long notes this when he states, “Most who see Revelation 12:3-4 as a reference to the fall of Satan cite Jude 6 as a parallel text, ‘the angels who did not stay within their own position of authority but left their proper dwelling.’”4
There are many problems with this connection, as we will see when we start examining Jude closely. For now, I will just state that this particular interpretation of Jude 6 is severely ill-informed and completely falls apart under mild scrutiny. This is a non-starter. More on that another day.
View #2: Future Apocalyptic Fall
Another interpretation that seems to fall more in line with Revelation in general is that this is a futuristic, apocalyptic event coinciding with the end times.
Problems with this view: As Mike Heiser notes, someone arguing this viewpoint has a very steep uphill battle on their hands:
“I don’t think the signs of Revelation 12 have anything to do with end times. Revelation 12 is HINDSIGHT with respect to the messiah’s birth, not foresight. It is not a fulfillment of any OT prophecy. There is no OT prophecy that told readers to look for the signs given in the passage for the coming messiah of Israel.3
The one thing that 2/3 of the predominant views agree on is that this passage is not forward-looking, but rather looking into the past. Based on the predominant scholarship, this futuristic interpretation of Revelation 12 is the least likely explanation of the 3 options.
View #3: Fall prompted by the birth/ascension of the Messiah
Another view which is generally held in high esteem by scholars but less known among regular churchgoers is that these verses describe a cosmic event that coincides with the birth and/or the ascension of The Messiah. Like view #1, this view concludes that the passage is looking backwards, not into the future. Michael Dellaperute argues for the ascension:
“Although some expositors have attempted to identify the man-child as the church and explain the symbol of his removal as a metaphorical description of the rapture, the Messianic overtones of Psalm 2 coupled with the gospel record of the ascension (Luke 24:51) require that this incident be interpreted as a metaphor for the ascension of Christ.”5
Mike Heiser takes the position that this passage is actually referring to Jesus’ birth: “The passage is clear that the timing of this conflict involving a third of the angels occurred in conjunction with the first coming of the Messiah. The birth of the Messiah is clearly in view, as Revelation 12:5 points readers to the messianic theme of Psalm 2:8–9.”2
In agreement with View #3, Leo Percer summarizes the passage this way: "Revelation 12 contains a visionary account portraying the difficult birth of Messiah, an attempt by the dragon (i.e., Satan) to destroy Messiah, the removal of Messiah to heaven, and a dramatic heavenly war in which Satan is defeated. Indeed, the whole chapter apparently revolves around a rivalry between the Dragon (Satan) and the Messiah and his community (symbolized in some way by the celestial woman and her children)”6
Advocates of View #3 recognize the connection between Revelation 12 and Psalm 2:
Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession.
You shall break them with a rod of iron and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.
Psalm 2 is widely recognized as a Messianic psalm. The idea here is that once Jesus was born and/or ascended back to Heaven, Satan’s role as The Accuser (real meaning of the title “Satan”) was finished and therefore he was barred from God’s presence from that point forward. He was no longer able to accuse God’s people based on their merit (to be discussed in a future article) because Jesus had removed guilt from anyone who accepted His redemptive work on the cross. The link back to Psalm 2 requires a reading of Revelation 12 in a messianic context. Again, there is a ton of scholarly input on this that I don’t have time to recount in this post, but understand that there is theological support for the notion that Jesus birth/ascension would have naturally triggered Satan’s expulsion from God's presence and Revelation 12 falls in line with this paradigm.
In my opinion, View #3 seems to be the most likely theme of Revelation 12 and the only plausible explanation for this passage.
View #3 is the only one that lines up with Jesus birth and resurrection setting off a chain reaction in the supernatural realm. This concept is such a main artery throughout the redemption story that you will see it pop up in places you don’t expect it. Revelation 12 is a great example of this. Once I began to really study the Bible like a scholar, I was surprised by how many times I’d overlooked a foreshadowing or even a direct reference to Jesus redemptive work on the cross in random, seemingly unrelated passages like this one.
But it's there. Right there in Revelation 12. When Jesus died, so did Satan's claim on humanity. He could no longer serve as our prosecutor in front of the divine judge. He was fired. We're not waiting for Satan to be dethroned, it already happened. Revelation 12 outlines it for us. Because Jesus came down to the cross, Satan was thrown down for good.
That is the message of Revelation 12.
Sources:
1 Heiser, Michael Naked Bible Podcast Episode 382: Revelation 12 https://nakedbiblepodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/NB-382-Transcript.pdf
5 Enter: The Dragon Exegesis of Revelation 12:1-6 https://www.clarkssummitu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/5_Dellaperute_Final_Dragon-Exegesis_7-9-18-1.pdf
6 4 G. B. Caird. Revelation of St. John, 153; and Beasley-MUII'3.y. Revelation. 195-96. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/58820298.pdf
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