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Guest (Male): The Battle of Gettysburg, the Alamo, Normandy, there have been some bloody battles fought over the course of time and today on Light on the Hill we'll encounter another great battle to be fought in the most unusual venue: heaven. Welcome once again to Light on the Hill as we continue our study through Revelation with Pastor James Kaddis. We've reached chapter 12. We're going to learn about one of the great battles of all time, one that's been fought since the beginning of time and one that continues today. It's the battle between Satan and God. One interesting aspect of this battle is that we already know who has won.

James Kaddis: Revelation chapter 12. Now as we dig in I want to remind you guys and I told you that I would be saying this all through the book of Revelation and that I would be talking about it on a regular basis and that is if you want to understand the book of Revelation you need to know the Old Testament. And if you know the Old Testament Revelation doesn't even function as mysterious, it is actually very easy to understand and know because so much of what we read about in Revelation, literally all of it, is in essence a completion of so much of what we read in the Old Testament.

It literally is a picture of what the culmination of what is said in the Old Testament, what it all looks like because Bible prophecy is coming to life and all of the Bible in one way or another has a very prophetic element to it and we know that. We know that the Bible says in the volume of the book it is written of Christ and Jesus made that declaration. We see that in the Psalms. It's something that we know and it's very obvious here. And when we talk about the book of Revelation, we are talking about what happens as Christ comes back and he does exactly what he promised he would do in actually bringing everything back into place and consummating all of the things that we know are going to be a part of what we'll experience into eternity. It becomes a gateway for what we actually see.

So Revelation is not some hallucinating man writing down some crazy things. It's not a book that you'll actually lose your mind permanently if you study. As a matter of fact, it's really interesting to think about this. Especially back east there is a whole idea that a lot of people have that says don't study the book of Revelation. If you do you'll actually go crazy. And it's wild to think about that, but that's a very common teaching that's out there when in reality all of it is simply a culmination of everything we read in the Old Testament.

So when we get into chapter 12, we are going to see that become manifest to us when we read about not only the war in heaven, when we read about the dragon, when we read about the woman and that woman's child. And there's a lot to be said here and there's not a lot of mystery involved in this in that God has made it very clear what it is that's happening and who the players are and what's actually going on. And again, if you know the Old Testament this is not going to be hard to be able to discern. So let's look at this verse 1 of chapter 12.

It says, "And there appeared a great wonder in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun and the moon under her feet and upon her head a crown of twelve stars. And she being with child travailed in birth and pained to be delivered." So who is this woman? That's a lot of what's on people's minds and it's not very difficult to be able to understand who this woman is because when you stop for a moment to reflect upon the description that's being given to us, we see this description being given to us in other contexts in the Old Testament. We see a description similar to this in the book of Isaiah.

We also see this description being given to us in a dream that Joseph had and if you remember in the Old Testament in Genesis Joseph has a dream and in that dream he actually sees his father and his siblings bowing down to him in this dream and there is a very vivid picture that's being created for us and of course in this dream what is really interesting is that when Joseph has this dream not only do his brothers get upset by this dream, his father actually gets upset as well because he's accused of being proud and arrogant when in reality what a lot of people don't recognize or realize is that God is actually speaking to Joseph at the time. And of course now that we have the benefit of knowing the Bible and reading it later on, we know that God was literally making a prophetic declaration concerning the nation of Israel and Israel's interaction with Joseph specifically and what would happen.

And so when we talk about this woman, this woman undoubtedly it's without a doubt there's not even a question, right? This woman is Israel, okay? This is not a difficult picture to be able to draw. And what's even more interesting is when you read about Israel being with child crying and travailing in birth and pain to be delivered. What's very obvious is that this child that's being had is clearly the Messiah, okay? It's Jesus. That's the picture here. Okay, now we don't have the time to get into all of the implications that this carries. We will get into a few of them as we go through the chapter and we certainly don't have a lot of time to talk about all of the implications that are brought forth with respect to Israel as a woman metaphorically or symbolically speaking giving birth to Christ.

We know that Jesus was a Jew, right? And we also know the heritage of Christ being a Jew and there's something very spectacular when you consider the idea of a Jew who comes to faith in Jesus Christ because when a Jew comes to faith in Jesus Christ they in essence are completed, right? They are not converted. If you think that a Jew converts to Christianity you'd be terribly wrong because the reality of it is a Jew who chooses to receive Christ into their heart actually completes themselves. They become completed because the Messiah that always represented an open gap that they were waiting for to complete whatever it was that was promised to them by God has always left a part of their lives kind of open-ended, right? There was always a part of them that isn't reconciled or consummated for lack of a better term because they never had their Messiah.

And any Jew who rejects Christ as their Messiah is in many ways incomplete because they're still waiting for their Messiah to come according to what the Bible says. And what's so powerful is any Jew who says Jesus is my Messiah and they receive him and they come to know him and they become Christians or rather what we would say Messianic believers, they are what I would call a completed Jew, not a converted Jew because no Jew who accepts Christ is turning their back on anything that the scriptures raised them up to teach, right? As a matter of fact, they're completed in everything that the scriptures actually teach them. And I think that this is a very, very important distinction. So when we talk about this mother or this woman who carries on this motherly role, we're talking about Israel and this child is undoubtedly Jesus and we'll get into a little bit more of this in a second.

So then we get introduced to, of course, a great red dragon. Now I don't need to get into too much with respect to shielding the identity of this dragon. This dragon is none other than the devil, okay? And I do think that that's very important that we note the Bible actually reveals that to us later on in this chapter, but there are some things to note about the devil that everybody needs to be aware of, right? And that is the fact that the devil himself hates you, right? That's why he's called Satan. Satan means adversary. His whole goal is to destroy your soul. He hates everything about you. He doesn't want to see you succeed. He wants to destroy your family. He wants to destroy your life. He wants to take away everything that is good from you. He wants to destroy everything that is sacred in you. He wants to literally exploit you at every level and he's very, very, very good at doing this as we're about to see. Look at this in verse 3.

And it says, "And there appeared another wonder in heaven and behold a great red dragon having seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns upon his head. And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven and did cast them to the earth and the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered for to devour her child as soon as it was born." Now this is such a powerful description, right? First of all we have to understand that when we talk about this devil, there's a lot of characteristics about the devil that we need to picture. Without getting into a ton of detail and we don't have the time to do it. If I had a few hours we could really spend some time talking about how the devil is described here where it talks about these characteristics of the devil.

But when you start looking at the description of this dragon and it talks about having seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns upon his head, I'm not going to get into much of the description of the devil here because as we get into a description of the antichrist which of course is the beast, is the devil, then we will understand the significance of all of these characteristics that we read about in this dragon, right? So that's very important to understand. You'll understand what those things mean and when we start talking about the idea of having seven heads or ten horns or seven crowns upon his head, you begin to get a picture of what is contrary to that that everything Christ represents. The one thing I do want to say and I think is very important is that the devil is not the opposite of Christ, okay?

So many people view the devil as Christ's opposite and if the devil was Christ's opposite then it would imply that the devil has the same power of Christ and the same standing as Christ and that's not the case. He is our adversary. He is the enemy of Christ. The enemy does not mean the equal. It just simply means the person who is against, okay? So we need to point that out and I think that's really incredible. The other part of this description that I want everybody to see because it's appropriate especially for the day in which we live is the description of it talking about his tail drawing the third part of the stars of heaven and did cast them to the earth, right?

So the idea and we know this, we know what this means. This if you know the Old Testament you know exactly what this refers to, right? You know that Satan himself who by the way was arguably the most attractive creature that God had ever created, right? There was nothing more beautiful than Satan. Like this picture that people have of Satan with a pitchfork and that kind of thing. You need to understand something: that is not Satan according to the Bible. As a matter of fact, the picture of the devil that we often see with the horns and the pitchfork is literally indicative of a Greek mythological character that is characterized in a very specific way, but that has absolutely nothing to do with the devil. The devil is actually a drop dead gorgeous character and we know that, right?

And so when we talk about his tail casting down a third of the stars, what it's actually talking about is the fact that he the devil seduced a third of the angels, right? And so that the third of the stars that get casted down, what we're talking about here is we are talking about the demons, right? We are talking about the enemies of God that have walked away from the ranks that God had created from within the angels, right? So that's what we're talking about. We're talking about demons and fallen angels here and so he cast them down. And isn't it amazing to read the description of this dragon that is waiting for the woman as she gives birth to actually destroy the baby that's being given birth? Do you understand how absolutely remarkable the picture of that prophecy actually is?

I mean if you think about it, think about the circumstances under which Christ was born, right? Honestly I want you to really think this through, okay? The devil did everything that he could to make the circumstances behind the birth of Christ to be completely impossible, right? And then if you really think about it wasn't there a massive attempt that was made that was satanically inspired to destroy the life of Christ? When you think about it, right? Remember what Herod did? Remember when the Magi came to Herod? A massive delegation, probably a solid hundred 150 wise men go to Herod, at least that's what we can assume, right? They go to Herod, they basically say, you know, where is the king of the Jews?

And they assumed that they should go to a palace to be able to find this king because their general assumption in which of course they were wrong was that if this is royalty and we know this is the king of the Jews then we should expect to see him in the palace under the set of circumstances that you would expect to see any king, right? And that would be the idea. The reality of it is what they did not recognize or what they did not understand was the type of king that they were talking about was on a much grander scale than simply the king of the Jews and that the circumstances behind the birth of that king would not only be very prophetic in nature, but would also be tied to something that wasn't typical of what you would see as the birth of a king, right?

And it's just really interesting to be reminded of so many of those details. As a matter of fact we have this Bible study as a family that we go to me and my wife and my children and it's at my brother's house. And we just love it. It's just such a great time. We go to my brother's house and my brother right now is teaching through the book of Daniel and you have no idea how relaxing it is for me to just be able to sit down and listen to my older brother teach through something, right? And you know he's new at this. He's learning but quite frankly for somebody that's new at this he's not making a lot of rookie mistakes. And I think a lot of that is he's got a solid foundation.

He was raised up well by a father and mother who love the Lord. So he knows the word, he studies the word, he doesn't mess around, he takes it very seriously in what he does. And one of the conversations that we had recently in our Bible study and this was a few months ago is the circumstances behind the birth of Jesus and what it actually looked like and some of the things that sort of related to that. And I was very vividly reminded because at that time I was already reviewing Revelation 12, right? And I was vividly reminded of the circumstances that Christ faced and what it actually looked like and what it meant to be born in a real manger, right?

A manger of course very interesting or to be set in a manger after you're born, right? A manger not having anything to do with wood and hay or anything like that that it was in essence a feeding trough that was carved out of stone. You know you begin to think about all the details of the birth of Christ, they were not easy. But perhaps one of the things that's the most substantial and again, you know, it's kind of cool to be reminded of this outside of a context of actually teaching where you're just sitting and you're listening. But the other aspect of this of his birth that was also very unique was by the time the wise men came to see him you have to remember that the idea behind them coming to see him Christ was already more than a few years old.

And what's really interesting about that is it was at that time that Herod targeted the lives of children that were at that tender age, right? And if you remember Herod because of his fear concerning somebody taking his throne actually had all the Jewish babies executed below a certain age because of the fact that he was very fearful that his throne would be taken. And so it's interesting when you have this picture of this dragon who is waiting there as this baby is getting ready to be born wanting to destroy the baby before the baby even comes out. And the picture of Christ and what's actually going on is pretty substantial and remember you have to know you have to remember Hebrew culture and you have to remember Hebrew storytelling.

If you know Hebrew storytelling then you'll understand that a history is being established for us concerning this dragon and what his influence is and what he tried to do and we know perhaps one of the most significant targets that this dragon has always had is been Christ himself. He wanted to destroy Christ and he wants to destroy the people that actually gave Christ to the world, right? He hates Jews and that's why we see this radical increase in antisemitism especially as we get near the last days because there was a massive increase in antisemitism at the time that Christ was born, right? And now as we see Christ getting ready to come back literally to rapture the church and then eventually coming back after the end of the tribulation, we know that the increase in antisemitism is going to be just off the charts.

It's going to be through the roof. I mean if you think about it how is it that we could see something as atrocious as what happened on October the 7th yet so much radical antisemitic sentiment exists now? Like it's worse than it's ever been. Far worse than it's ever been especially since October the 7th. They've become one of the world's most profound victims of violent crime and yet they're becoming more hated than any other people group, right? It's crazy. And the people that actually killed them and the people that did the terrible things to them are becoming the heroes. This is a perfect picture of Satan waiting, right? To destroy those things and that's what we see here. It's very, very obvious what we're looking at, right?

So he draws down a third of the angels and look what it says, "And she brought forth a man child who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron and her child was caught up unto God and to his throne." And it's such a powerful picture, right? Christ came on this earth, he was born to do a purpose, he fulfilled that purpose in that they attempted to destroy him, the enemy attempted to destroy him and we know every biblical account that we have he ascended into heaven, right? And his ascension into heaven was one that was indicative of tremendous victory as he rose from the dead, right? So we know he defeated death, he defeated the grave, he gave us salvation and he ascended into heaven.

And so there's such a powerful picture that's being given to us here and it is very clearly talking about the Messiah. It's clearly talking about Jesus and it's talking about Israel. And I want to make a note about Israel because this is really important, right? You should get yourself in the habit of making a statement like this, right? Israel is not simply a personal treasure to you and to me. Israel is not a national treasure. Israel is a treasure to the world. Israel is a treasure to mankind. The Jewish people are a treasure to every human being that is alive right now and if you do not believe that stop for one moment to reflect upon one aspect of what the Jews have done for us, just one.

Don't get into all the other things. Don't get into the fact that the fruit that you enjoy is a result of Jewish technology. Don't forget the fact that the reason why people are not dying right now because they don't have water is a result of Jewish creativity and Jewish ingenuity. Forget the fact that all of the modern day amenities that you get to experience in your computing, whether it be your phone, your watch, the things that you do on a day to day basis is all Jewish technology, right? Forget the fact that everything that you get to experience in knowing the word of God every single day is a result of some very committed Jewish people who preserved the word of God spectacularly and perfectly unlike what you see in the Quran or unlike what you see in other so-called holy books. The Bible has been preserved for us spectacularly and beautifully by Jews and that makes them a world a human treasure to us, right?

So putting all of that aside and to think about exactly what's happened to us we had the Messiah that came from the Jews and the story of the Jews, the story of what they mean to us. So understand the fact that in a day and in an age where we experience every wonderful modern amenity and benefit that came on the backs of Jews. Look think about it like this. Can we just speak from the perspective we don't even have to talk about the perspective of America in the current condition that we're in right now. How about we just speak for one moment about the country of Egypt, okay? Egypt was a country like any other country until it became an empire.

And how it became an empire anybody remember? It became an empire on the backs of Jewish slaves, right? And if you think about it the Egyptian the country of Egypt the nation of Egypt became the empire of Egypt based on the wisdom of one person Joseph who of course was a Jew and when you go to think about the influence that he had and then the existence of Hebrew slaves within Egypt the infrastructural things that we still praise to this day things like the pyramids and all the other things that we look at and we go wow were very likely built by Jewish people, right? So to think about the kind of treasure that they are and it makes it begins to make sense why the enemy has worked so hard to destroy them and wants to destroy them.

Guest (Male): You're listening to Pastor James Kaddis on Light on the Hill. He'll be right back with more. As we go through this study of Revelation there may come a time when you miss a message or would just like to hear a program again. If so visit lightonthehillradio.com and click on radio or listen through our app. We have a Light on the Hill app available for iPhone and Android users. Just search for Calvary Chapel Signal Hill. Light on the Hill is heard all around the world and it takes a team to bring these shows to the radio and internet. With your help we're able to reach people with the truth of God's word at a time when they really need to hear it.

You can donate today at lightonthehillradio.com. You can also give through our Light on the Hill app. As we're going through Revelation this is a great time to mention Pastor James's new book entitled The Last Book. It will share what you need to know about Revelation, the rapture, and the end times. This guide to Revelation is part one of two and you can order it today at lightonthehillradio.com or at Amazon. We hope you'll join our online communities. You'll find James Kaddis on YouTube, Rumble, and Instagram. You can also hear our weekly prophecy show Countdown to Eternity wherever you get your podcasts and at countdown2eternity.com. We left off in Revelation chapter 12 at verse 6 a moment ago. Here's Pastor James.

James Kaddis: So he rules these nations with an iron rod and then look at verse 6. A lot of people ask where I get this idea of Petra from, the rock city of Petra. I get that from the book of Isaiah but I see this concept being able to be reiterated a lot because what this dragon is going to do based on Revelation chapter 12 what we've already read is he is going to target the Jewish people, right? He is going to destroy the Jews. He's going to seek to destroy Israel. Look what it says in verse 6. It says, "And the woman fled into the wilderness where she hath a place prepared for her that they should feed her there a thousand two hundred and threescore days."

So 1,260 days. What we're talking about according to the Babylonian calendar is 360 days. We're talking about three and a half years, okay? What does that mean? This is the last three and a half years of what would be called the tribulation. This is what we call Jacob's trouble. This is what we call the great tribulation and what we're basically having described to us are the Jews who will be running away from this devil that is going to seek to destroy them and the idea is they're going to go I think it's probably in this area of Jordan, this rock city of Petra where they're going to be hidden and the enemy is not going to be able to touch them. He's not going to be able to attack them. But I think that this is what's describing here. Verse 6 is describing this very event. We'll save the rest of this message for next time. Light on the Hill with Pastor James Kaddis is brought to you by Calvary Chapel Signal Hill.