Kalev Creative

 10/13, 10/27, and 11/10/2024

We’re reading through Revelation along with NT Wright’s Revelation for Everyone. These notes include discussions of topics of additional interest and attempt connections with more Old Testament material.

11:15-12:6

The seventh trumpet blows and voices in heaven announce that the kingdom of the world has become God’s kingdom. The elders we met earlier worship God in song. The temple of God in heaven opens to reveal the ark of the covenant. We observe lightning, thunder, an earthquake, and hail, signs of theophany, God appearing. 

Then comes a vision of a woman giving birth and a dragon pursuing her and her child.  

We discussed the dragon as a figure with layered meaning derived from numerous earlier passages concerning sea monsters, snakes, Leviathan, and Rahab including:

-Genesis 1:21, 3

-Exodus 7:8 -10

-Deuteronomy 32:31-35

-Job 7:11-16, 26:6-14, 41

-Psalm 74:12-17

-Isaiah 26:21-27:1, 51:9-10

-Jeremiah 51:33-37

-Ezekiel 32:2-8 

The dragon’s pursuit of the woman and her child is the culmination of the seed of the serpent vs the seed of the woman conflict God first declared in Genesis 3. The dragon is an apparent composite of imagery spanning the Scriptures of powerful nations, their spiritual counterparts, and the original serpent in the garden.  

We discussed the extreme vulnerability of the woman giving birth threatened by the dragon as like Jesus’, exposed on the cross, under the power of Rome at its most oppressive, yet ultimately victorious because even death at its hands could not prevail over him.