Dragons, Births, and the Stories That Keep Us Going
I have a confession: I love the weird parts of the Bible.
You know the ones I'm talking about. The passages where Sunday School teachers get a little uncomfortable. The chapters that make well-meaning small group leaders nervously suggest, "Maybe we should skip ahead to something more... practical?" The scriptures that seem designed to make us scratch our heads and wonder what exactly the biblical writers were smoking.
Revelation 12 is definitely one of those passages.
A woman clothed with the sun. A dragon with seven heads waiting to devour a newborn. A cosmic war breaking out in heaven. Angels and demons locked in battle while a mysterious chorus sings victory songs off-screen. It reads like something between a fever dream and a fantasy novel—which, honestly, might be closer to the point than we think.
But here's what caught me off guard as I sat with this passage: underneath all the cosmic imagery and apocalyptic drama, we're actually dealing with a nativity story. A birth story. And not just any birth story, but the birth story—the one that changes everything. Merry Halloween, I guess.
When the Bible Decides to Go Full Cosmic Drama
Let's be honest: Revelation 12 fits perfectly into what most of us expect from the book of Revelation. It's got the mysterious characters, the strange symbolism, the vivid colors, the cosmic scope. When someone says "apocalyptic literature," this is exactly the kind of thing that comes to mind.
The woman appears first—clothed with the sun, moon under her feet, wearing a crown of twelve stars. She's pregnant and in labor, crying out in pain. Then the dragon shows up: great, red, with seven heads, ten horns, and seven crowns. His tail sweeps down a third of the stars from heaven and hurls them to earth. And he's waiting. Watching. Ready to devour the child the moment it's born.
The child is born—a son who will rule the nations. But immediately, he's snatched away to God's throne. The woman flees to the wilderness where God has prepared a place for her to be sustained for 1,260 days. War breaks out in heaven. Michael and his angels fight the dragon. The dragon loses. He and his angels are thrown down to earth. Then comes the victory song: "Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Messiah!" (Revelation 12:10). They've conquered by the blood of the lamb and their testimony. They didn't cling to life, even facing death.
But here's where it gets interesting—and by interesting, I mean uncomfortably relevant. The dragon, thrown down to earth, pursues the woman. She's given eagle's wings to escape into the wilderness. The dragon tries to sweep her away with a flood from his mouth, but the earth helps her by swallowing the water. Finally, enraged, the dragon goes off "to wage war on the rest of her children, those who keep the commandments of God and hold the testimony of Jesus" (Revelation 12:17).
The battle isn't over. It's ongoing.
Reviving Imagination, Not Adding Information
Here's where Eugene Peterson comes in with an insight that completely reframes how we should approach Revelation. In his brilliant book Reverse Thunder, Peterson writes something I hope you'll carry with you every time you think about this final book of the Bible: "I do not read the Revelation to get additional information about the life of faith in Christ. I have read it all before in law, in prophet, in gospel, in epistle. Everything in the revelation can be found in the previous 65 books of the Bible. There is nothing new to say on the subject, but there is a new way to say it. I read Revelation not to get more information, but to revive my imagination."
Read that again slowly. Revelation isn't giving us new information. It's reviving our imagination.
This changes everything. We don't come to Revelation to decode the future or figure out the exact timeline of the end times. We come to Revelation to see—in high definition, in vivid color, in cosmic scope—what the entire Bible has been saying all along.
If the book of Revelation puts the whole message of scripture in high definition, then Revelation 12 helps us boil down that message to its most essential elements. We get to see the breadth and height and depth of evil. We also get to see the breadth and depth and height of hope. Good and evil. Death and resurrection. All of it distilled into one chapter, one dramatic cosmic showdown that's really about a birth.
The story isn't new. What's new is the way it's told—and that new way of telling has the power to wake up our imaginations that have grown numb to the reality of what we're living through.
The Battle We're Already In
Here's what strikes me about Revelation 12: it's simultaneously cosmic and intimate, ancient and immediate, symbolic and viscerally real.
The woman in labor isn't just any woman. The child isn't just any child. The dragon isn't just any threat. These are archetypal images that pull together the entire biblical narrative—creation, fall, promise, deliverance, incarnation, resurrection, and ultimately, victory.
But they're also our story. Right now. Today. * *"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" *(Revelation 12:9).
Notice what happens: there's victory in heaven, but woe to the earth. The accuser has been defeated in the cosmic realm, thrown down. But he's come to earth "with great wrath, because he knows that his time is short" (Revelation 12:12). * This is our reality. We live in the tension between the victory that's already been won and the battle that's still being waged. The dragon has lost, but he's still fighting. He's still pursuing. He's still trying to sweep away God's people with floods of lies, chaos, violence, and despair.
And here's the uncomfortable truth: the passage ends with the dragon going off to wage war on "the rest of her children"—that's us, those who hold the testimony of Jesus. The story doesn't end with "and they all lived happily ever after." It ends with ongoing conflict. So what do we do with that?
The Great Stories
I'm a fan of The Lord of the Rings films. And there's this moment in The Two Towers where Sam says something that perfectly captures what Revelation—and specifically Revelation 12—is doing. Sam and Frodo are in the absolute depths of despair. Everything seems lost. The mission feels impossible. And Sam says:
"It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn't want to know the end because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come, and when the sun shines, it will shine out the clearer."
That's Revelation 12. That's what it's doing for us.
We need the great stories. We need them told and retold, shown to us in new ways, with fresh imagery that breaks through our defenses and captures our imagination. Because when we're living in the middle of darkness and danger, when the shadow feels permanent, when chaos and turmoil surround us—we need to be reminded that we're part of a larger story. A story where evil is real and powerful, but not ultimate. A story where the dragon rages, but has already lost. A story where victory is both already accomplished and still being worked out.
They conquered "by the blood of the lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they did not cling to life even in the face of death" (Revelation 12:11).
This is how the battle is won: not by avoiding suffering, not by escaping to some safe spiritual bunker, but by holding onto the testimony of Jesus even when it costs us everything. By refusing to cling to life itself when life means compromising what we know to be true.
Living Between Victory and Battle
So here we are. Living between the victory song in heaven and the dragon's rage on earth. Living between the already and the not yet. Living in a world where the shadow is real but passing, where darkness exists but must ultimately yield to light. What does that mean practically?
It means we learn to persevere. We learn to hold hope not as naive optimism that ignores reality, but as a defiant conviction that reality is larger than what we can see. We learn that peace in chaos doesn't mean the absence of struggle, but the presence of a deeper Story that puts our struggles in context.
It means we stop looking for Christianity to be safe or comfortable. The woman is given eagle's wings, yes—but she's given them to fly into the wilderness, not away from it. She's sustained there, protected there, but she's still in the wilderness. God's provision doesn't always look like removal from difficulty.
It means we recognize that the dragon's primary weapons are deception and accusation. He's called "the deceiver of the whole world" and "the accuser." He lies about who God is. He lies about who we are. He accuses us day and night. And our victory comes through holding onto the truth of the testimony of Jesus—the truth about God's character, the truth about our belovedness, the truth about the victory that's already been won.
Most importantly, it means we need our imaginations revived. We need to see the cosmic scope of what we're part of. We need the strange, vivid, even disturbing imagery of Revelation 12 to wake us up to the reality that our daily struggles, our choices, our testimonies matter in a story much bigger than we typically recognize.
The preacher in me wants to tie this up neatly. Give you three action steps or a simple formula. But Revelation 12 doesn't do that, and neither will I.
What I will leave you with is this: you are living in the story. The dragon has been thrown down and is raging. The woman is in the wilderness being sustained. The battle is ongoing. And the victory has already been won.
Your job isn't to figure it all out or to make yourself safe. Your job is to hold the testimony. To not cling to life even in the face of death. To let Revelation revive your imagination so you can see that what feels like chaos is actually part of a Story that ends in restoration.
The great stories matter because they remind us we're in one. And this story—dragons, births, battles, and all—is the truest one there is.