If you could turn in to revelation chapter 12 revelation chapter 12 in your Bibles I'd like to read that before you're seated The name of the sermon Mother's Day sermon is the mother and the dragon, right? Yes, it will focus an awful lot less on mothers than on the Lord Jesus Christ, but that's appropriate and worship. I think you'll Find it satisfying revelation chapter 12 Verses one through six. Let us pray. Lord, I pray that the reading of this word would open up a newer understanding, perhaps, to some that would confirm and encourage the belief in what you're doing now in the earth and in the heavens to others, and that we would all conform our lives based upon what we learn and hear that is true. In Jesus' name, amen. So Revelation 12, beginning in verse one, 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 12 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 10 horns, and on his head 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 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. That ends the reading. You may be seated. You may wish to keep that passage open. So I kind of read the passages I read earlier as they relate very intimately to this passage that we're reading here this morning for the sermon. You need to know that since the Garden of Eden, godly mothers have wanted to bear children who would war against Satan. God made a messianic prophetic promise to all godly women When he said to the serpent, I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring. He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel. So from the start, Satan knows and women should know that they are in a war against each other. And as often as women bear children to do God's work, Satan is in grave trouble. It's very bad for Satan when a woman's children seek first the kingdom of Christ. It's very bad for him. In fact, Satan's goal is to keep the children blind and disobedient to God. He wants them to indulge in their sin and rebellion. He wishes them to serve his purposes rather than the purposes of Jesus Christ. Those who remain hardened, those children who remain hardened against God, are actually the serpent's offspring. The devil is their father. And this is reinforced by Jesus in John 8, 44. The devil is their father, still. There's the two offspring, the offspring of the serpent and the offspring of the woman, and they're in conflict with one another. And so the goal of every mother should be to produce godly offspring. She must work to introduce them to the triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. She must bring them into the church, God's covenant community, not just the building, but those represented in the building, in order that they might learn His ways and receive His grace. That's what a godly mother will do. She will be intentional this way. Every good mother knows that having a child isn't enough, right? It's not enough. She must also train the child in godliness. This training in godliness is much more important, much more, then building skills in them, then their academic training, then whether or not they have clothes and are fed and grow up and have nice homes themselves. That stuff is so secondary to their training in godliness. The last thing a godly mother wants, or should want, is a child who excels as a worker of iniquity, as a worker of sin, and has grown to become a very wise, smart, effective offspring of the serpent. You don't want that. I remember I used to kind of talk with my dad, and he was very strongly encouraging us to educate our children differently, at least when Zachary was first born. We wanted to keep him home, actually, and teach him academically, as well as the ways of God. And he really thought, I don't know, my dad was always public school teacher, and that's how I grew up as well. But he was very concerned, and I said to my dad, I said, Dad, I'd rather have an idiot son who loves the Lord than a genius son who hates him. And I say that and believe that about every one of my children. As you can see, I think they love the Lord, but they're a bunch of idiots, right? Joking. A godly woman knows she must train every one of her children to become warriors in Christ's kingdom. To go out into the world to crush the serpent's head. As was evidenced in the Romans passage, that's not something we disregard. A good mother wants her children to become slayers of a dragon. I want you to consider something. This comes from a book written by Dave Chilton. And he kind of shows you how the dragon's offspring and the women's offspring have been going at it throughout scripture. And I'm gonna read what he's compiled here from his book. Chilton writes, from the first book of the Bible to the last, this is the basic warfare of history. The dragon is at war with the woman and her seed, primarily Jesus Christ, as we see it play out. All throughout history, Satan was trying either to keep Christ from being born or to kill him as soon as he was born. This is why Cain killed Abel. under the inspiration of the dragon. The attack on Abel was an attempt to destroy the seed. It was unsuccessful, for Eve then gave birth to Seth, the appointed one, in place of Abel, and the seed was preserved in him. Satan's next tactic was to corrupt the line of Seth, get them to compromise, right? Thus, within 10 generations from Adam, virtually all of Seth's descendants apostatized, which means they defected from the faith. And you knew what happened then. The whole earth was corrupted except for one righteous man and his family. Noah, right? Satan's mad rage to attack the seed was so great that the entire world was destroyed. Yet still he failed. The seed was preserved within a single family in the ark. The dragon again tried to murder the seed in his attacks on the family of Abraham. On two occasions, Satan attempted to have Sarah raped by a heathen king. He tried again with Rebecca. The draconic enmity against the seed is manifest also in the enmity of Esau against Jacob. A struggle between the two seeds that began in the womb. We can also see Satan's attempts to obstruct the seed in Isaac's sinful plan to cheat Jacob out of his divinely appointed inheritance, Genesis 27. Again, when the children of Israel were in Egypt, the dragon tried to destroy the seed by having all the male children killed in Exodus chapter one. 500 years later, the seed was being carried in a shepherd boy, King David, And again, the dragon attacked twice, inspiring a demon-possessed king to throw javelins at him. In fact, the whole machinery of Saul's kingdom went into effect just to try to kill David. Similarly, the wicked queen Athaliah destroyed all the seed royal, sorry, of the house of Judah. the seed that were kingly in the House of Judah, yet the seed was preserved in the infant Joash. Haman, the evil prime minister of Persia, would have succeeded in his attempt to launch a full-scale pogrom, an organized massacre, to destroy all the Jews, had it not been for the courage and wisdom of Queen Esther. The most striking example of this pattern on a large scale, however, occurs throughout the history of Israel. They themselves, from the Exodus to the exile, the covenant people's perennial consistent temptation to murder their own children, to offer them up as sacrifices to demons. Why? Why? It was the war of the two seeds. The dragon was trying to destroy the Christ. This pattern comes to a dramatic climax at the birth of Christ when the dragon possesses King Herod, the Edomite ruler of Judea, and inspires him to slaughter the children of Bethlehem. And that's the end of the reading. So then the thing God said to the serpent in the garden was ultimately expressed in the conflict with Jesus Christ, the Son of God. The prophetic promise, I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring, he shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel, is fully realized in the death, then resurrection and ascension of the Lord Jesus. Therefore, the hope of every godly mother was satisfied when Mary's seed crushed the serpent's head. The hope of every godly mother was satisfied when Mary's seed crushed the serpent's head. Yet, as it was happening, Jesus' mother Mary had to watch her seed suffer and be bruised in his battle against Satan. Indeed, Jesus was about to die for the kingdom. We read in John's gospel, John wrote that standing by the cross, by the cross of Jesus where his mother and his mother's sister, Mary, the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. A lot of Marys. When Jesus saw his mother from the cross and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to his mother, woman, behold your son. Then he said to the disciple, behold your mother. And from that hour, the disciple took her to his own home But if you think about it, okay, certainly Mary trained up her son to be righteous and God-fearing, probably with no resistance. We don't have the beauty of that. She brought him into the church. God's covenant community in order to learn God's ways and receive God's grace. She trained him to be a warrior. And although at the cross, it temporarily appeared that Satan did more than bruise Jesus' heel. Indeed for a while, it looked as if Satan had gained the upper hand in the war with God. It was not so. For God the Father had a strategy that was designed to win the war. The bruising of Jesus Christ's heel on the cross would prove to only bruise, not crush. For Mary's son overcame the grave. He stomped the killing blow on the serpent's head. And he brought victory to all of the godly seed, past, present, and future. Yes, every godly mother can praise God for Mary's seed. This is why the vision the apostles saw is so wonderful for you and me, that revelation In it, all godly mothers can rejoice for their children, those who have suffered bruised heels for the sake of the kingdom of Christ throughout history, they now in Christ have been redeemed and rewarded. I wanna look at that Revelation passage again briefly. I'd like to read it again, 12, one through six. John saw 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 12 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 10 horns, and on his head 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." All the little details. will not explain them all. I want you to see the main picture of what John was seeing. All the little details I think are fulfilled in many cases during the time of the destruction of Jerusalem. When indeed the church was brought out to safety and nourished for 1,260 days, we won't get into all of those things. But I want you to see that the woman in verse one First of all, it's a symbol of the Old Covenant faithful Israel, the Church of God. Faithful Israel is represented in this dream imagery language of Joseph. If you remember, Jacob's son Joseph had these dreams. He was a dreamer of dreams, right? God gave him dreams. And one of the dreams God gave to Joseph was that the sun and the moon and 11 stars, he said, they were bowing down to me. And his father, of course, took it into consideration. But it was the idea that Joseph shared that he could see into his own future that his brothers and his 11 brothers and his father and mother, the sun and the moon would bow down to him, his star, the 12th star. Of course his brothers didn't like hearing that, and that's not the point of what I'm sharing here. The point of what I'm sharing is that this woman who appears through the words of John in this apocalyptic language, as he considers the Old Testament, is not just Mary, the mother of Jesus, but indeed Israel, the mother of the Messiah. We know that Jesus Christ came out from his mother, Mary, We also realize that she was but a woman, a descendant of Israel. And John's sign there in Revelation uses language that begs to represent more than just one solitary person. This sign represented something greater, a woman greater. than just Mary. The sign uses symbolic language drawn from Joseph's description of Israel and reuses it here in the revelation. You remember God changed Jacob's name, the father, to Israel. Jacob's 12 sons made up the 12 tribes of Israel. And it was these brothers and father and mother, son, moon, 11 stars that bowed down to the 12th star, Joseph in Egypt. It was all of Israel that went down to Egypt. It was all of Israel that came back up into the promised land. Indeed, Israel is the woman who was given birth to a male child in verse five of Revelation. And who is it that wants to kill the mother's offspring? The dragon. Beginning in verse 3, we read, and another sign appeared in heaven. Behold, a great red dragon with seven heads and ten horns, and on his head seven diadems. Again, going on at the time, Roman government, different Caesars, all that. We're not going to spend some time on that. His tail, this dragon's tail, it says in verse four, 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, almost like a catcher crouched down with his face mask on waiting for the pitch. We know that the dragon is Satan. because of John's explanation, just a little further down in chapter 12, in verse nine. John writes, and the great dragon, in verse nine, if you kept reading, and the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, it says, who is called the devil and Satan, he says, the deceiver of the whole world. He was thrown down to the earth and his angels were thrown down with him. So the stars that the dragon's tail sweeps down and throws to the earth, cast to the earth, they're not from the woman's crown, these stars, but these are angels that defy God along with the dragon, according to the later verse and its explanation there. Verse nine explains that the stars of heaven, which is tails swept down, were bad angels. Or as John says in verse nine, his angels, the dragon's angels. Whatever the case, it happens that both mother and child, what? What happens to them? They gain victory over the dragon. Look at the context. They gain victory over this dragon. She gave birth to a male child. One who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron. That's Psalm 2, it's directly from Psalm 2, language of the Old Testament, I guess. But her child, it says, devoured by the dragon, he was caught up to God and to his throne. It's almost as if he speeds right past the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ that goes from his incarnation to his ascension. This was the goal of God. Her child was caught up to God and to his throne. And the woman, oh no, what's gonna happen to mother? Well, she fled into the wilderness, not because she was abandoned by God. It says where she has a place prepared by God in which she is to be nourished. So the sign the apostle John witnessed was to show forth the victory of God in the ascension of the child and the preservation of the child's mother. Christ ascended to heaven and is ruling while faithful Israel, the church of Jesus Christ, is preserved in the earth and protected from the dragon. So, application, mothers, children. A Christian mother, a godly woman, should instruct her son or her daughter to love God and keep his commandments. When they do, as we'll see, they step again on Satan's head. A Christian mother must train her son or daughter to take a stand on the side of righteousness and light versus wickedness and darkness. It's not hard to understand that. It's not hard to think that we believe that. But I tell you what, mothers, when we're so concerned about the safety and security of our children, that we encourage them not to take the stand, but to compromise and worry about their own earthly goods, we're making a huge mistake. And it's very easy to do that. Christian mothers, may your children be counted among the good guys, I say this in general terms, and not the bad guys. And I say that in terms not according to the world's standards of good and bad, right? But according to Christ's standards. A Christian mother, I think, will always feel safer when her child, and I know some of you, feel unsafe this way. because some of you are very concerned about where your children are in their souls, in their lives. But a Christian mother always feels safer when her child has tethered himself or herself to God the Father and Jesus Christ, his son. Indeed, Christian mothers are comforted if they know that God is for their child and the dragon is against them. As scary as that dragon seems, you want him to be against your children, not for your children. Every act of obedience to God is another nail that we pound into the coffin of Satan. He's through. For the victory has been won by Jesus Christ, yet the cleanup battles, they continue in the earth Although defeated, Satan refuses to accept his defeat, but he continues to writhe and claw after the heels of every mother's offspring. That being the case, the Apostle Paul instructed the church in Rome, as I read earlier, to be obedient and wise. He instructed them to be innocent as to what is evil. And then he encouraged them that the God of peace will soon crush Satan under their feet. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, he said, be with you. Let's pray. Lord, I pray and I ask that we would aspire to what is good and noble and true, that we would be active people, sons and daughters in the kingdom of Jesus Christ. Lord Jesus, continue to rule, continue to put your enemies under your feet, and I pray that we, Lord, would humbly, and I repeat, humbly obey you, and therefore have Satan crushed under our feet as well. We pray because we're able in your name, amen.