The Dragon and the Baby

The fire from heaven's altar had fallen, and the seventh trumpet had blown. Now John looked up and saw a great sign in the sky.

A woman stood there, dressed in the sun. The moon was under her feet, and on her head was a crown of twelve stars. She was about to have a baby, and she cried out in pain.

Then came a second sign: a huge red dragon with seven heads, ten horns, and a crown on every head. His tail swept a third of the stars from the sky and flung them down. He crouched before the woman with his jaws open, waiting to eat her baby the moment he was born.

The baby came, a son who would one day rule all the nations. Before the dragon could move, the child was caught up to God and to his throne. The dragon's teeth snapped shut on nothing.

The woman ran into the wilderness, where God had a place ready and fed her for 1,260 days. (That is about three and a half years, which is a lot of breakfasts in a desert.)

Then war broke out in heaven. Michael, a leader of God's angels, fought the dragon and his angels. The dragon lost, and down they crashed to the earth. This dragon was the old serpent who lied to Eve in the garden, the one called the devil and Satan.

A voice rang through heaven: "Now the rescue has come, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his chosen King! The one who accused our brothers and sisters day and night has been thrown down!" (To accuse means to point at someone and list every wrong thing they have done. The dragon never took a night off.)

"They beat him by the blood of the Lamb," the voice went on, "and by telling the truth about the Lamb." Some of them had been killed for belonging to Jesus, and still they won.

"Be glad, heavens!" cried the voice. "But the devil has come down to the earth in a rage, because he knows his time is short."

So the dragon chased the woman, but God gave her the wings of a great eagle to fly away. The serpent spewed water from his mouth like a river to sweep her away, but the ground opened its mouth and gulped the whole river down. (The dragon had not expected the ground to take sides.)

Furious, he went off to fight her other children, everyone who obeys God and keeps telling the truth about Jesus.

The dragon had lost heaven, but he was still raging, and John's friends felt it. Some were in prison. Some had died.

John knew this baby had a real birthday, in a real town. When he was small, King Herod wanted him dead and sent soldiers to Bethlehem to kill every boy there two years old and under. But an angel had warned Joseph in a dream, and he had already carried the child and his mother off to Egypt by night, the way the woman fled to the wilderness. The boy grew up and did not stay out of reach. He walked into death, and his blood, the blood of the Lamb, threw the dragon down. Then he rose and went up to God's throne, right where John saw the child carried.

The baby the dragon could not eat was Jesus, and he is ruling from that throne today.