Days of Vengeance - The Preterist Archive

12:13-16
Woman, in order that she might fly into the wilderness to
her place, so that she might be nourished for a time and
times and half a time, from the face of the Serpent.
15 And the Serpent threw water like a river out of his mouth
after the Woman, so that he might cause her to be swept
away with the flood.
16 And the Land helped the Woman, and the Land opened
its mouth and drank up the river which the Dragon threw
out of his mouth.
17 And the Dragon was enraged with the Woman, and went
off to make war with the rest of her seed, who keep the
commandments of God and hold to the testimony of
Jesus.
13 St. John returns to the theme mentioned in verse 6:
the Woman’s flight from the Dragon. This happens as a
direct result of the Dragon’s defeat at the hands of
Michael, for when the Dragon saw that he was
thrown down to the Land, he persecuted the Woman
who had given birth to the male Child. It cannot be
emphasized too greatly that for St. John and his
audience this is one of the most crucial points of the
entire chapter. The Dragon persecutes the Church
precisely because Christ defeated him. We must remember
this as we read of the Dragon’s hatching of conspiracies,
his crafty backstage machinations to bring about the
Church’s destruction; all of his attacks on the Church
are rooted in the fact that he has already been
conquered!
It is important for our interpretation to note also that
the persecution of the Woman arises in connection
with the Dragon’s fall to the Land of Israel. It is there,
first of all, that he seeks to destroy the Church.
14 But the Woman is delivered, flying into the
wilderness on two wings of the great Eagle. St. John
again uses imagery from the Exodus, in which the
angel-filled pillars of the Glory-Cloud were described as
“eagles’ wings,” by which God had brought Israel to
Himself in the wilderness, to be a people for His own
possession, a Kingdom of priests to God, a holy nation
(Ex. 19:4-6; cf. l Pet. 2:9-10). The picture is developed
further when Moses, surveying the history of the
Covenant people at the end of his life, speaks of how
God saved Israel in the wilderness:
He found him in a desert land,
And in the howling waste of a wilderness;
He encircled him, He cared for him,
He guarded him as the pupil of His eye.
Like an eagle that stirs up its nest,
That hovers over its young,
He spread His wings and caught them,
He carried them on His pinions. (Deut. 32:10-11)
Moses uses two key words in this passage: waste and
hover. Both of these words occur only one other time in
the entire Pentateuch, and again they occur together,
in Genesis 1:2. Waste is used to describe the
uninhabitable condition of the earth at its creation
(“without form”); and hover is Moses’ term for the
Spirit’s activity of “moving” in creative power over the
face of the deep. God is not careless with language. His
prophet Moses had a specific reason for repeating those
key words in his farewell address. He was underscoring
the message that the salvation of Israel was a creation
event. The Covenant on Sinai was a re-creation, a
reorganization of the world. 38 Similarly, St. John
borrows terminology from the same passage in Moses to
present that message to the Church: God has brought
to fulfillment the provisional re-creations of the old
order. The coming of Christ has brought about the
definitive re-creation, the New Covenant. And, as in
the days of old when God miraculously preserved Israel
in all her afflictions, providing her a Paradise in the
midst of a wilderness, so He will now nourish and
cherish the Church, His Bride and the Mother of His
only begotten Son. His Covenant people dwell in the
shade of the Glory-Cloud, in the shadow of His wings
(Ps. 17:8; 36:7; 57:1; 61:4; 91:4, 11). The wings of the
Eagle, which signify death and destruction to the
enemies of the covenant (Deut. 28:49; Job 39:27-30;
Jer. 48:40; Hos. 8:1; Hab. 1:8; Matt. 24:28), are an
emblem of peace, security, and blessing to the heirs of
Covenant grace.
Again (cf. v. 6), St. John makes the point that the
Woman’s flight into the wilderness is not evidence of
her abandonment by God; it is not a sign that she has
lost the battle, or that events are out of control. Rather,
she flies on eagle’s wings above the waters (v. 15) to her
place, so that she might be nourished during the period
of tribulation (cf. Luke 4:25-26), the standard three
and a half years of judgment mentioned in the prophets
– or, as St. John gives it here in the language of Daniel
7:25 and 12:7, a time and times and half a time.
Preterist commentators have traditionally seen this
passage in terms of the escape of the Judean Church
from the Edomite and Roman invasions during the
Jewish War, when, in obedience to Christ’s commands
(Matt. 24:15-28), the Christians escaped to shelter in
the caves of the desert. 39 There is nothing wrong with
this view, as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough.
For St. John’s allegory of the Woman is the story of the
Church, not only a particular branch of it. The
deliverance of the Judean Church must be seen as the
primary historical referent of this text, but with the
realization that her experience is representative and
illustrative of the deliverance of the Church as a whole
in this difficult period, when the Lord prepared a table
for her in the face of her enemies (Ps. 23:5).
15-16 St. John continues his Exodus imagery,
reminding us of when the children of Israel had been
trapped “between the devil and the deep Red Sea”:
And the Serpent threw water like a river out of his
mouth after the Woman, so that he might cause her
to be swept away with the flood. Farrer says: “The
woman is treated as the congregation of Israel, saved
from Egypt, lifted by the Lord on eagle’s pinions and
brought to Sinai. The dragon’s pursuit of her by
throwing a waterflood after her is a generalized image
38. David Chilton, Paradise Restored: A Biblical Theology of Dominion (Ft.
Worth, TX: Dominion Press, 1985), P. 59; Meredith G. Kline, Images of
the Spirit (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1980), pp. 13ff.
39. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, iii.v.
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