Revelation 12:1-17; Set Apart To Overcome

Alex Sarran March 8, 2026 Faith Presbyterian Church Birmingham, AL

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Transcript

Welcome And Framing The Big Question

SPEAKER_00 0:24

Good evening, Faith Presbyterian Church. I've loved uh hearing all these reports of uh works that you're supporting locally and internationally, and it's really wonderful that you do support all of these works. Thank you. I'm glad that you uh came back to hear the sequel to this morning's sermon. As you recall, the big question we're asking ourselves is what is my purpose? We're trying to acquire a framework in order to better understand the totality of reality and our particular place in it. We're trying to see the connection between our daily lives and well, what is going on in the totality of world history. And we're doing this by considering two chapter 12s from the Bible. The first in Genesis, the other in Revelation. So the first and last books of the Bible. So let's turn now to Revelation chapter 12. We looked at Genesis chapter 12 this morning. My message this morning, if you recall, was entitled Set Apart to Be a Blessing. And this evening, my message is entitled Set Apart to Overcome. So let's turn to Revelation chapter 12. And I'll read the whole of the chapter this evening. And 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. 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 1,260 days. Now war arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back, but he was defeated, and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world, he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him. And I heard a loud voice in heaven saying, Now the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come, for the accuser of our brothers has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God. And they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives, even unto death. Therefore, rejoice, O heavens, and you who dwell in them, but woe to you, O earth and sea, for the devil has come down to you in great wrath, because he knows that his time is short. And when the dragon saw that he had been thrown down to the earth, he pursued the woman who had given birth to the male child. 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. The serpent poured water like a river out of his mouth after the woman to sweep her away with a flood, but the earth came to the help of the woman, and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed the river that the dragon had poured from his mouth. Then the dragon became furious with the woman and went off to make war on the rest of her offspring, on those who keep the commandments of God and hold to the testimony of Jesus. And he stood on the sand of the sea. Let's pray. Father in heaven, thank you again so much for your word. And sometimes there are passages like this one that are complicated to understand, and we just pray, Lord, that you would help us by your Holy Spirit, that you would open our eyes, our understanding, and that we would uh grasp what you want to tell us today, and that we would believe it, and that we would be transformed by it. And we ask it in Jesus' name. Amen. So this morning I talked about how the world in which we live is messed up, and how our own existence in this world is messed up as well. I talked about how easy it can be for us to turn a blind eye to the real state of our existence, because we actually live fairly comfortable lives and well-ordered lives on the surface. You know, a lot of you, I bet, are doing pretty okay in your college studies, or you already have a fairly stable job. You have your circle of friends, you have your wonderful church, you have your hobbies, perhaps even good health insurance and life insurance. But again, what if we pulled back the curtain a little bit? How many of you are actually really struggling to keep up with your studies? How many of you are working out of anxiety and fear of the future? How many of you are actually suffering from broken relationships or conflict with your families? How many of you have a flailing marriage? How many of you are suffering in silence because you've lost a loved one or you've been diagnosed with a serious illness or you're battling an addiction? Let's be honest. When you pull back the curtain, when you look at the state of the world, when you look at your own private life, when you look inside of you at the state of your own heart, and when you do that in light of Genesis 1 through 11, as we did this morning, we need to take in the full extent of our fallen condition, as we call it in theology. We have problems. That's the vernacular for fallen condition. We have problems. We are fallen creatures who live in a fallen world, which means that the whole universe has problems, serious problems. And that is perhaps the most basic common denominator between all religions and all worldviews in the world. It's this inescapable, irrefutable observation that we have problems. Well, the passage we've just read is a very important passage to help us understand the current status of our problems, insofar as this passage is a passage about the prince of our problems, namely Satan, the devil. Now, this morning, if you recall, we talked about God launching a great work of world repair, as he promised to Abraham, that he would bless him and make him a blessing to others, and that God would bless all the families of the earth through him and his offspring. And we saw this morning that this promise of blessing that was to come through Abraham's offspring was actually fulfilled through the coming of Jesus, the Messiah, through his life, death, and resurrection. And this evening we're going to look more closely at what that means for the devil, for the prince of our problems. Indeed, the coming of the promised offspring, Jesus Christ, some 2,000 years ago now is great news for us with regard to our problems, our illnesses, our fears, our losses, our grief, our temptations, our failures, our conflicts, etc. It's great news for us because it was very bad news for the devil. And so, in a sense, this sermon this evening is a sermon about the devil, because the message of Revelation 12 is a message about the devil in relation to the person and work of Jesus Christ. I don't know how often we preach about the devil specifically, but I hope you'll see how revel relevant it is to do so, especially in the context of a missions conference and in light of that big question we're asking ourselves today concerning our purpose and the connection between our individual lives and the totality of reality around us. And here's the big idea that I'd like us to see in this passage it's that the coming of Jesus some 2,000 years ago was the greatest and most significant landing in the history of landings. Jesus was set apart and sent to overcome all the powers of evil in all of the universe on behalf of those who trust in him. For that reason, if we are in him through faith, well, everything that's wrong about our lives is only momentary. All of our problems had better brace themselves for what's coming to them. That's the big idea. If you're a theology nerd, you've probably heard of the concept of the already not yet. The already not yet. But I'd like to introduce you to a slightly different concept, which I have called the still but not the same. The still but not the same. If we are in Christ through faith, we are still subject to all kinds of hardships in this world, but it's not as before. It's still but not the same. Because Jesus came to overcome, and if we are in him, we too shall overcome. So if we look at our passage, there are three things again, I believe we need to see in order to better understand the world in which we live and the purpose of our lives in it. Number one, the devil is failing. Number two, the devil is disarmed. Number three, the devil is on borrowed time. When we read the passage a few minutes ago, it may have seemed a bit complicated. But really, it isn't all that complicated. Number one, the devil is failing. You see that in verses one through six, where you see that the coming of Christ was an incredibly positive turning point in the history of mankind. So in our passage, what we have is a woman who represents the elect people of God. And so before the coming of Jesus, that elect people of God was known as Israel. And so in our passage, the twelve stars represent the twelve tribes of Israel. And that woman is pregnant and she's in labor. She's going to deliver the Messiah, the promised offspring from the line of Seth, Noah, Shem, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Judah, David, and so on. He is the one who must establish his good kingdom over the whole earth. And so the coming of this offspring, whom we talked about this morning, was promised by God even from the time of Adam and Eve, when God said to the serpent that the offspring of the woman would one day crush its head, the serpent's head. So here's this woman whose offspring is about to be born, but there's also this terrible and gigantic red dragon whose shape suggests a preposterous imitation of God. Did you notice he has seven heads with seven diadems, which point us back to the seven spirits of God, which we s- we we would have seen in chapter one of Revelation. The dragon, you see, is persecuting the elect people of God. He casts a third of the stars of heaven to the earth, it says in verse 4, where the stars actually represent the saints, the members of the elect people of God. But even more importantly, the dragon tries to prevent the Messiah from coming into the world. Later in the text, it says explicitly that the dragon is the ancient serpent, namely Satan and the devil in verse 9. In our passage, he does everything that's in his power to thwart the coming of the Messiah. Why? Because he knows very well that the coming of Christ would be an incredibly positive turning point in the history of mankind, and very bad news for the devil himself. I wonder if you've seen the movie Terminator with Arnold Schwarzenegger. The story is about an evil robot that comes from the future and who tries to eliminate a woman called Sarah Connor because that woman is going to have a child named John, and that child in the future is going to become the leader of the resistance that will fight and eventually overcome the dictatorship that the robots will have established on Earth. So, what the robots want to do is they want to prevent John's birth into the world because they know that his birth into the world means good news for mankind and bad news for them. So now you see the connection between Terminator and our passage. And it's not simply that the initials of John Connor are JC, though that I believe is significant in and of itself, but it's this idea that the devil, just like the Terminator, did everything he could to prevent the hero, liberator, deliverer from coming into the world. And he failed. In fact, much of the Old Testament is simply the story of the devil's attempts at sabotaging the coming of the promised offspring. Cain murdered Abel, the faithful son. Esau tried to kill Jacob, the heir. Pharaoh had all the baby Israelites killed who were boys. King Saul tried to eliminate the future king David. Queen Atheliah in 2 Kings ordered that the whole of the royal family of Judah be killed. The Assyrians tried to obliterate the kingdom of Israel. The Babylonians destroyed the promised land. And while the Israelites were in exile, the the evil Haman in the book of Esther, under the reign of the Persian king Ahasuerus, conspired to have all of the Jews killed. Let's not forget, even after that, the terrible Antiochus Epiphanes, king of the Seleucid Empire in the second century before Christ. Nor, of course, Herod the Great, King of Judea, who had all the babies killed at the time of the birth of Jesus in a final desperate attempt at devouring the child of the woman. There's a pattern, don't you see? But all of these schemes failed. Every time the dragon's plans were thwarted, and finally, after many labor pains and contractions that lasted not hours but centuries, at last the Messiah was born. The promised offspring came into the world. Next Christmas, I want you to think about that. The birth of Christ was the worst setback for the devil. His plans were put in check. The first coming of Christ some 2,000 years ago is a dramatic confirmation that the devil is failing. The Prince of our problems was unsuccessful at preventing the coming of the one who was sent to deliver us from our problems. The Prince of the Power of the Air, the God of this world, was not able to stop the promised offspring from setting foot into the territory that was, so to speak, occupied by the dragon. That's bad news for the devil, but it's excellent news for the world and for our existence in it. So the devil is failing. But secondly, the devil is disarmed. The coming of Jesus into the world was the beginning of a battle against evil of which Jesus has come out utterly victorious. Turn to the passage again, if you will. And we'll come back to verses five and six in a moment. But what we have now, starting in verse seven, is a great spiritual war that opposes the Messiah and his armies to the devil and his armies. The Messiah and his armies opposed to the devil and his armies. Verses eight and nine tell us that the devil loses this war and that the reign of the Messiah is established in verse 10. This is also what was suggested in verse 5. After being born into the world, the Messiah succeeded in his mission and then ascended to God and to his throne. So the way to understand this, I believe, is that the time that Jesus spent on earth corresponds to a great battle in heaven. That is, as I as I like to put it sometimes, on the reverse side of reality, okay? In the invisible world. It was a great battle between the forces of the Messiah and the forces of the devil. The result of this battle was the devil's defeat and his being expelled from heaven with all of his demons. But how was this battle won? The text says that it was won in particular by the blood of the lamb in verse 11. The blood of the lamb is an expression that describes the blood of Jesus, the blood of the promised offspring, the blood of the Messiah that ran down the wood of the cross where Jesus was sacrificed as a lamb. You see, in old in the Old Testament, the priests of Israel offered lamb sacrifices every day. In fact, twice a day, morning and evening. And those sacrifices were a picture of the atonement of Israel's sins. By atonement, I mean the way through which the penalty required by God's law for the sins of the people was paid through a sacrifice that served as a substitute instead of the people themselves, you know, having to pay with their own lives. And so you see, Jesus, the promised offspring of Abraham, came into the world and he presented himself as a sacrifice. But this time it was a perfect sacrifice, a sacrifice that would not have to be repeated, a sacrifice sufficient to atone once and for all for the sins of innumerable men and women and children. And so it is through this sacrifice, this perfect sacrifice of the perfect lamb, through the blood of the Lamb, that the battle was won against the devil in the heavenly places where there was this battle going on. How did that happen? Well, I want you to imagine a criminal court, if you will. And in that courtroom, there's a judge, and in the duck, there's you. And standing in the middle of the courtroom, you have the prosecutor. And he's holding in his arms an enormous binder. It's hundreds and hundreds of pages of charges that he has against you. It's the Alex files, not the Epstein files, the Alex files. And he's reading them out loud, listing them one by one, and it's so long that it's going on day and night. On March 12, 2016, at 8:54 a.m., Alex got angry and snapped at a member of his family. At 8:57 a.m., he lied to save face. At 9:04, he acted selfishly when it was time to clear the table. At 9:06, he cursed his neighbor in his heart. At 9:12, he coveted his neighbor's Ferrari. At 9.13, he coveted his neighbor's wife. At 9:20, he coveted the woman pictured on the billboard. At 9.23, he did not care for the family of refugees that were begging on the on the sidewalk, etc., etc. In other words, all day long and each and every day, Alex did not love God with all his heart, and he did not love his neighbor as himself. And perhaps in the case of some of you, the charges are even more serious and painful. On such a day and at such a time, this person shoplifted or committed adultery or injected themselves with heroin or physically abused their spouse. And in our passage, the prosecutor is the devil, who is called the accuser. And since he's the prince of our problems and his purpose is to harm us, he well, he takes all of these charges and he brings them before God, the just judge, with the vicious intent of having us sentenced to eternity in hell. That's the devil's ultimate goal from the beginning. That's how he feels about us. But the Messiah has overcome the accuser. How did he do that? He took upon himself the punishment that was required for all of these charges. That is the gospel. If you're resting in Christ through faith, there aren't any charges left that can be brought against you. Because the penalty for each and every one of them has already been paid in full. And now, opposite the prosecutor, you have Jesus Christ, your defense attorney. Who is pleading his own blood. And every time the devil speaks to bring a charge against you, Jesus interrupts. Objection, Your Honor. It is finished. The debt has been paid. The sentence has been served already. And so the dragon is pulling the trigger, but he has no more bullets. The prosecutor is completely disarmed, disarmed, and he has nothing to do in the courtroom anymore. He's unemployed. And so he's expelled from the heavenly courtroom and he's thrown down to the earth. So you see, the coming of Jesus into the world was the beginning of a battle against evil of which Jesus came out utterly victorious. The devil is failing because he wasn't able to prevent the coming of the promised offspring. And secondly, the devil is disarmed because there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Thirdly and lastly, the devil is on borrowed time. The coming of the promised offspring was the beginning of the end for the devil and for every power that wants to harm us. Let's turn to the text one last time. Verses 12 through 18. According to our passage, after having lost the battle, so the devil was expelled from the courtroom in heaven, and he was thrown down to the earth. And now he's stuck here on earth, and he knows that his time is short. Verse 12. What we're meant to understand here is that the eventual and final destruction of the devil has been sealed by the Messiah's victory, who died on the cross and who rose again the third day. So the end is near for the devil, it is inescapable, and he knows it. He knows it. But here's what's happening in the meantime. Says in verse 13 that the dragon pursues the woman. In other words, the devil who is on the earth attacks the elect people of God. But the woman flees into the wilderness, which is an ambivalent location. It's unpleasant, but it's safe. In that place, the woman is going to endure hardship, but at the same time, she's going to be nourished by God for 1,260 days, i.e., forty-two months, i.e., three and a half years, that is a year, years, and half a year, or to put it in in other words, a time and times and half a time. In other words, for a length of time that has been fixed by God, that will seem to be prolonged, so a length of time that was fixed by God, a time that will seem to be prolonged, times, yet that will suddenly come to an end, half a time. It's really not that complicated to understand, it's just complicated to explain. The general idea is, and this is really what we need to grasp as Christians who live on this side of Christ's first coming. The general idea is that right now, we, the community of believers, we the people of God, we're currently living in this state of ambivalence, where we are safe in a hostile location. We're safe in the wilderness. Yes, the devil is in great wrath against us. He pursues us. He's still the prince of our problems, the prince of the power of the air. He's still the father of lies, and he's pouring threats and lies after us like a river out of his mouth to sweep the woman away with a flood if possible. But we can stand firm, having fastened on the belt of truth, says the Apostle Paul. The devil is furious and he's waging war on us who, being in Christ as we saw this morning, are the offspring of the woman. As the Apostle Peter puts it, your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. But we can resist him firm in our faith. And so this is our situation right now. We live in the wilderness, but God cares for us and nourishes us through his means of grace administered to us essentially through the ministry of the church, until the day that Jesus, the Messiah, the promised offspring from the line of Seth, Noah, Shem, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Judah, and David will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and to destroy the devil and his minions and all the power, all the powers of evil, and he will establish his kingdom on all the earth as it is in heaven. And as the devil awaits his final defeat, our passage says that he stands on the sand of the sea in verse 18, which means in a situation of great precariousness. The sand is soft and unstable. The waves are washing and unsettling the ground on which the devil is standing, and soon what will happen is he'll be swept away. So, yes, the coming of the promised offspring was the beginning of the end for the devil and for every power that wants to harm us. The devil, you see, is on borrowed time. But there's a detail that we skipped over in verse 11. It says that the means of our victory over the devil as believers in Christ is the blood of the Lamb and the Word of our testimony. What the text seems to be saying here is that the proclamation of the good news of the coming of the Messiah, who overcame the devil and his power through his death and resurrection, well, the proclamation of that good news by us who are called the brothers in the text, well, that is the principal means through which we take part in the Messiah's battle against and victory over the devil. As Christ Himself was set apart to overcome the devil and all powers of darkness, we too who are in him through faith are set apart to overcome with him as we believe the gospel and as we offer the gospel to the world around us. How does Jesus grow his kingdom on earth? How does he make the devil retreat? How does he build his church while the gates of hell do not prevail against it? He does so as men, women, and children receive the word of our testimony, and as their hearts are transformed by the Holy Spirit, working through the word of the gospel, to irresistibly call to God his own children, his own elect, and as they welcome Christ's gracious reign in their lives. So if I return to what I was saying in the beginning, at the beginning of this sermon, we have problems. We're fallen creatures who live in a fallen world, therefore the whole universe has problems, very serious problems, and the prince of our problems is called Satan. He's the devil, he's the serpent, he's the dragon in our passage. And if we want to make sense of this world and make sense of our own existence in this world, it's important that we reckon with what the Bible says about him too, about the devil. He was there in the backdrop of the promise that God made to Abraham in Genesis 12, because he was there in Genesis 3. He was the one who tempted Eve. He was the one who was instrumental in the fall of mankind into sin, and who and he's the one who heard from God himself that one day the offspring of the woman would crush his head. And now in Revelation 12, we see that the promised offspring did come and he did overcome the devil. Satan has failed, he's disarmed, and his days are numbered. We live, you see, in the time between times, the already not yet, where Christ has already fulfilled everything that was necessary for the blessing of all the families of the earth, as it was promised to Abraham, and he's going to come again, and his reign will engulf the whole universe on that day. But you see, the already not yet, this time between times in which we are, is also a still but not the same stage. We still have problems, we still have sin in our lives and in our hearts, we still suffer from illnesses and accidents and heartbreaks. We still cause others to suffer. And the world itself is still subject to corruption, as we see injustice and wars and natural disasters all over the news. But because Christ has already overcome the prince of our problems, we too, if we are in him through faith, we too have already overcome in a sense, and we too will overcome. We've been set apart to overcome in Christ, and we will enter free and victorious into his everlasting kingdom when he comes again. And for that reason, though we are still subject to all kinds of hardships in this world, well, it's it's not the same anymore. Imagine two men in prison. Their cells are strictly identical. They have the same bunk on which to sleep, identical meals each day, identical guards, the same hours for walks, the same bars on the windows, they're the same age, the same skin color, they received the same education, they even have the same tastes. They were incarcerated on the same day. So you get the idea. These two men objectively are in the exact same situation, all right? And they're enduring the exact same hardships in prison, except that it's not the same. Because you see, one of them is waiting to be executed while the other is waiting to be released. That's the concept of still but not the same, as I like to call it. I hope that what we've seen this evening together with what we saw this morning will help us connect our lives to the big picture of all of reality. If we're in Christ, we're connected to Abraham, and we've been set apart to be a blessing. If we're in Christ, we are the offspring of the woman whom God nourishes in the wilderness, and we've been set apart to overcome. Brothers and sisters, our lives are pretty comfortable overall, aren't they? We have clothes on our backs, a roof over our our heads, and food on our plates. We have insurance, friends, and a growing church with a brand new sanctuary. Praise God, who cares for us in the wilderness. But don't forget to pull back the curtain from time to time and to remember that it is a wilderness. We are fallen creatures who live in a fallen world. It's a needy world, it's a lost world. And forgive me for saying so, but the battle isn't primarily over who will win the midterm elections. It's not primarily about regime change in Iran. It's not primarily about schooling options for our kids, or the church's style of worship, or the roles of men and women in ministry, though all of these topics are important indeed. But the battle primarily is over who will reign in our hearts. And the outpouring of Christ reigning in our hearts primarily should be our offering Christ to the world. Oh, that we would fight our own sin more than fight the sin of others. Oh, that we would understand better what it means to be a blessing to the world as we demonstrate the fruit of the Spirit in our interactions with the world. Oh, that we would realize that we can believe the gospel with confidence and that we can offer the gospel to our neighbors with confidence because Christ has overcome and we will overcome with him. Oh, that we would truly understand this word that we saw in our passage, that the God of this world has been conquered by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of our testimony. For we love not our lives even unto death. Let's pray. Again, Lord, we want to thank you for the coming of Jesus, the most important event in the history of the universe. Thank you for doing everything that was necessary on our behalf, so that we would just have to rest in Him, not having anything to do additionally to obtain anything from you except resting in Christ. And so and so, Lord, we do pray that you'd help us, that you'd help us grow in faith and confidence in our dear Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. And it's in his name that we pray. Amen.