Category Archives: Apocalyptic

Michael Peabody on the Sabbath and Anti-Semitism

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The following blog is shared by permission. I share it because I find his commentaries on religio-political issues balanced and insightful. Shared with his permission from behind a paywall.

Before I share, let me just note that I have been overwhelmed the last six months for a number of reasons, hence the lack of any blogs. Hopefully, this will be a step toward regular sharing again.



WIDOW SAYS ‘SHABBAT SHALOM’ — CANDACE OWENS CALLS IT A CONSPIRACY
As antisemitism spikes nationwide, America’s most-watched podcaster turns a Hebrew greeting into a murder theory
ReligiousLiberty.TV



Seventh-day Adventists have kept the Saturday Sabbath for nearly two centuries, endured the “Judaizer” charge from their earliest critics, and built an entire theology of religious liberty around the conviction that the day you worship is nobody else’s business. They should be paying very close attention to what is happening right now in American public life, because someone is treating the word “Shabbat” as a confession of guilt, someone spray-painted a swastika on a Seventh-day Adventist church last Saturday morning, and the two developments are not unrelated.
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The Sarcastic Greeting
There is something almost poetically grotesque about what led Candace Owens to open a recent podcast episode with a sarcastic “OK everybody, Shabbat Shalom,” replacing her theme music with “Hava Nagila.” Three days earlier, Erika Kirk had appeared on CBS and mentioned that she and her late husband Charlie had visited and admired Israel. That was apparently enough. A widow, promoting Charlie’s posthumously published book about his personal embrace of Saturday Sabbath-keeping, offered a Hebrew greeting. Owens treated it as a tell.
The conspiracy Owens has been constructing since Charlie Kirk’s assassination involves, at various points, France, Egypt, and most pointedly Israel. She has implied Israeli government involvement in the murder, claimed Egyptian aircraft had tracked Erika Kirk’s movements for years, and called the evidence in the police affidavit “fake and gay.” When Erika Kirk sat with Owens for four and a half hours, bringing phone records and legal counsel to address the claims, Owens emerged unmoved.
After the “Shabbat Shalom” episode, Blake Neff, producer of The Charlie Kirk Show, pointed out that Owens had “aggressively ridiculed” Erika Kirk for using the phrase, and noted that Charlie’s book was specifically about his love of Shabbat observance. Owens replied: “They need the world to know that Charlie loved Shabbat. We are beyond parody.” She also suggested the book was a fabrication designed to make Charlie appear more pro-Jewish than he actually was.
So in Owens’ framework, a man who kept the Sabbath, wrote a book about it, whose widow uses a Sabbath greeting while grieving, is exhibiting suspicious Jewish entanglement. The ancient Hebrew practice of Shabbat has become a red flag. A greeting becomes a tell. Faith becomes proof of a plot. That is not anti-Zionism. That is not geopolitical criticism. That is antisemitism, and it is worth being precise about that before moving on.
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A Swastika on a Sabbath-Keeping Church
On February 28, 2026, a Saturday morning, San Francisco police responded to reports of antisemitic and homophobic graffiti on California Street in Pacific Heights. They found the Central Seventh-day Adventist Church painted with swastikas and slurs, damage estimated at more than $20,000. A suspect, 51-year-old Sadat Mousa, was arrested on the scene and booked on charges including felony vandalism with a hate crime enhancement.
The target was a Seventh-day Adventist church. Not a synagogue. A Saturday-morning Christian congregation whose primary distinguishing public feature is that its members worship on the biblical Sabbath.
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The Deep Architecture
To understand why this matters for Adventists specifically, it helps to revisit history the denomination tends to footnote rather than foreground. From the movement’s earliest days, the charge of “Judaizing” was leveled at Sabbatarians. Nineteenth-century critics taunted that Saturday worship was the Jewish practice and therefore suspect. The denomination spent decades distinguishing its Sabbath theology from Jewish law, arguing that the seventh-day Sabbath predates Abraham as a creation ordinance.
Adventist scholar Samuele Bacchiocchi spent a career documenting how anti-Judaism drove the early Christian shift from Sabbath to Sunday worship. The social pressure to not look Jewish in a Roman empire hostile to Judaism reshaped Christian liturgical practice for two millennia. Sabbath-keeping was suppressed not primarily through theology but through the ambient cultural force of antisemitism.
Which raises an uncomfortable question for the present moment. Could a sufficiently intense resurgence of antisemitism generate renewed pressure on Sabbath-keeping communities? Not necessarily through Sunday laws enacted by legislatures, but through the ambient social violence of a culture that has learned to treat Jewish practice, and practices adjacent to it, as suspect?
What the Numbers Say
The data is not reassuring. A recent American Jewish Committee poll found that 41% of American Jews are avoiding publicly displaying identifiers of their faith out of fear, and 66% feel less secure than a year ago. In January 2026 alone, New York City recorded antisemitic hate crimes at a rate 182% above the prior year’s baseline. In 2025, violent antisemitic incidents included an arson attack on a governor’s mansion during a Passover celebration and a shooting outside a Washington museum that killed two Israeli Embassy staff members.
Into this environment, a podcaster with one of the nation’s largest audiences treats “Shabbat Shalom” as a conspiracy marker. The algorithm rewards her for it. The mockery is directional: Saturday worship is suspect, the language of the Hebrew Sabbath is suspect, and the people who use it are suspect. She is not carefully distinguishing between Jewish Shabbat observance and Adventist Sabbath theology. The hostility is not that precise.
The Pattern Adventists Should See
The Adventist prophetic framework has long anticipated conditions under which Sabbath observance would become socially or legally costly. Those discussions tend to focus on Sunday law legislation, on formal legal coercion. But formal coercion is rarely how persecution begins. It begins with ambient hostility, with culture, with the slow normalization of the idea that people who worship differently are not merely wrong but dangerous.
A man primed by that ambient hostility sprayed swastikas on a Seventh-day Adventist church on a Saturday morning. A podcaster with tens of millions of listeners turned a widow’s “Shabbat Shalom” into a punchline with a conspiratorial edge. The Adventist Record in Australia noted plainly that “a threat to the Jewish faith community is a threat to our faith community.” That observation no longer needs to travel across the Pacific to find its application.
The right response is not panic. It is clarity, solidarity, and preparation.
What Adventists Should Watch For
This is not a theoretical exercise. Here is what to monitor concretely in the months ahead.
Copycat vandalism. The San Francisco incident will not be the last. Adventist churches that display Sabbath-related signage, operate visible Friday-evening or Saturday-morning programming, or are located in urban areas with elevated antisemitic incident rates should be reviewing their physical security, documenting their facilities with photographs, installing security systems and cameras, and establishing a direct contact at their local police department before something happens rather than after.
Conflation in public discourse. Watch for commentary, particularly from the conspiratorial right and the anti-Zionist left, that treats Adventist Sabbath observance as a form of Jewish sympathy deserving the same hostility. The logic is already present in the Owens framework. It does not require a large additional step to apply it more broadly to Saturday-keeping Christians.
Legislative activity around Sunday. The Heritage Foundation published a study in January 2026 specifically promoting Sunday-closing laws, a development that followed directly on the heels of Charlie Kirk’s posthumous book about Sabbath-keeping gaining a wide readership. Watch state legislatures, not just Congress, for Sunday rest proposals framed as worker protection or Christian heritage measures. These will not arrive labeled as Sabbath restrictions. They will arrive labeled as something else.
Social media targeting of Adventist content. If the cultural logic that treats “Shabbat Shalom” as a conspiracy marker continues to spread, Adventist pastors, educators, and communicators who use Sabbath language publicly online may find themselves on the receiving end of coordinated harassment. Screenshot threats. Report them to law enforcement and local conferences. Keep records.
The thread connecting Owens’ podcast to a spray-painted swastika on California Street is not difficult to follow. Ambient hostility finds its targets through cultural permission, and right now that permission is being issued from some of the largest microphones in the country. Adventists, of all communities, should recognize that pattern. They have read about it in their history books. They are watching it form in real time.
What Candace Owens is doing has a name. A grieving widow using a Hebrew phrase for a peaceful Sabbath should not have to defend it.
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Michael Peabody is an attorney and publisher of ReligiousLiberty.TV, tracking First Amendment and religious freedom cases across the United States.

© 2026 Founders’ First Freedom
Founders’ First Freedom, PO Box 571302
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Sunday Laws in Our Future?

The following is a rewrite of the conclusion of my paper on the mark of the beast. I have concluded that Sunday laws in our future remain the likely reading of Revelation 13 and certainly that of the Great Controversy. But given what we know about fulfilled prophecies in the Bible, they may well come from a surprising direction. For example, Clifford Goldstein offers a path to international Sunday laws that would make sense in today’s world. All the world religions anticipate some future figure that will dramatically impact the course of history. For the Christians, his name is Jesus. For the Jews, he is the Messiah. For the Muslims, he is the Mahdi (although many Muslims also anticipate a major role for Jesus). For the Hindus, he is Kalki. For the Buddhists, he is Matreiya. Second Thessalonians (2:8-10) and Revelation (13:13-14; 16:13-14) anticipate a great end-time deception in which Satan impersonates Christ before the world (GC affirms this idea). His dazzling, end-time appearance could evoke the hopes and dreams of people of all faiths. Seizing upon these expectations, Satan could call the world to worship God on Sunday as a sign of loyalty to Jesus/Messiah/Mahdi/Kalki/Matreiya and the highest hopes of their faiths. Such an outcome would fulfill Great Controversy and Revelation 13, but in an unexpected way, something fulfilled prophecy in the Bible would lead us to expect.

Ellen White herself hints at something like this in the following statement: “As we near the close of time, there will be greater and still greater external parade of heathen power; heathen deities will manifest their signal power, and will exhibit themselves before the cities of the world. . . .” In the same context she also says, “. . . the Lord has called His people and has given them a message to bear. He has called them to expose the wickedness of the man of sin who has made the Sunday law a distinctive power, who has thought to change times and laws, and to oppress the people of God who stand firmly to honor Him by keeping the only true Sabbath, the Sabbath of creation. . . .” Maranatha, 140. To me this statement suggests the possibility that a movement toward Sunday will not be a natural philosophical progression from where the world is today, but the result of dramatic shifts in the popular mindset, grounded in miraculous displays that transform popular opinion almost overnight, much as Goldstein suggests. But for those who are waiting for some “sign of the End” to get serious about their faith, such rapid movements may not signal themselves the way we might hope, and also may not leave any time for spiritual preparation. “The final movements will be rapid ones.” Testimonies for the Church, volume 9, page 11.

My concern, and the main point of the whole treatise on the mark of the beast, is that by focusing on a prediction that seems as specific and measurable as a national Sunday law in Congress, we could distract ourselves from the real thing when it happens. In a changing world things could come from a different direction and in a different way. We need hearts that are open to revelation and open to the Holy Spirit as we navigate the challenging waters ahead. The desire for certainty causes us to focus on specific details rather than on understanding the larger picture of prophecy. That understanding is difficult work, but it will keep us safe in the perplexing times ahead of us. Prophecy was not given to satisfy our curiosity about the future, it was given to prepare our hearts to meet the one that we worship and adore. I suggest we prioritize that task.

Sunday Laws and Bible Prophecy (10): The Key Statements of Ellen White

The first of the best-known statements of Ellen White on Sunday laws at the End is in The Great Controversy, page 573. I will quote the full statement and then make some brief comments: “In the movements now in progress in the United States to secure for the institutions and usages of the church the support of the state, Protestants are following in the steps of papists. Nay, more, they are opening the door for the papacy to regain in Protestant America the supremacy which she has lost in the Old World. And that which gives greater significance to this movement is the fact that the principal object contemplated is the enforcement of Sunday observance–a custom which originated with Rome, and which she claims as the sign of her authority. It is the spirit of the papacy–the spirit of conformity to worldly customs, the veneration for human traditions above the commandments of God–that is permeating the Protestant churches and leading them on to do the same work of Sunday exaltation which the papacy has done before them.”

Note first that this statement concerns “the enforcement of Sunday observance” in the United States. It is something that had been commonly done in Europe when the Roman Church had much more authority there than she ever had in the United States. But in this case the driving force behind the drive for enforcement was the Protestant leadership of the US government in the Nineteenth Century. Ellen White is not talking about some distant, future event, the movements to enforce Sunday observance were “now in progress in the United States”. She was speaking about current events in her context and the outcome of those current events for the future.

She returns to this matter on page 579 of The Great Controversy: “It has been shown that the United States is the power represented by the beast with lamblike horns, and that this prophecy will be fulfilled when the United States shall enforce Sunday observance, which Rome claims as the special acknowledgment of her supremacy. But in this homage to the papacy the United States will not be alone. The influence of Rome in the countries that once acknowledged her dominion is still far from being destroyed. And prophecy foretells a restoration of her power. . . . In both the Old and the New World, the papacy will receive homage in the honor paid to the Sunday institution, that rests solely upon the authority of the Roman Church.
“Since the middle of the nineteenth century, students of prophecy in the United States have presented this testimony to the world. In the events now taking place is seen a rapid advance toward the fulfillment of the prediction.”

In this statement she is clearly making reference to Revelation 13 when she mentions the beast with the lamblike horns (Rev 13:11). She indicates that this prophecy will be fulfilled when the United States as a nation shall enforce Sunday observance. In some form this will also occur in the “Old World”, a common reference in Ellen White’s time for Europe. And, once again, she makes it clear that this is not some distant, future event. The movement toward Sunday enforcement is already in motion and moving rapidly toward an outcome that would include both the United States and Europe. Her prophecy of the future was a natural extension of things occurring in her day.

All in all Ellen White makes perhaps a hundred references to Sabbath-Sunday issues at the end of time. But this statement is different from all the earlier ones. What is different about this statement is that it is not referring merely to Sunday legislation here and there in various states, but something that would occur as a whole nation. To see the significance of this, it is helpful to know that the story of the Great Controversy came in seven editions (Early Writings, Spiritual Gifts, Spirit of Prophecy, Story of Redemption, and three editions of The Great Controversy—1884, 1888, 1911). What may surprise some is that the first five editions (through GC 1884) speak in general about Sunday legislation without the specifics of a national Sunday law legislated in Congress. It is only in the year 1888, the same year that Senator Henry Blair introduced a national Sunday law into the US Congress, that we see the addition of a national move to enforce Sunday in her projections of the End. I have gone through two collections of all of Ellen White’s statements on Sunday laws. There are actually only two statements about a national Sunday law, and both of them were written in the year 1888 (later statements, like the 1911 edition of GC, are reprints of the earlier statements). We will come to the second statement in the next blog.

Sunday Laws and Bible Prophecy (8): The Mark and the Seal

How shall we understand the “mark of the beast” in the context of Revelation 13? The most obvious parallel to the mark is the seal of God. The seal is placed on the foreheads of God’s servants (the 144,000) to protect them from Satan’s destructive efforts when the four winds of the earth are released (Rev 7:1-3). An evident parallel to the seal of God is the 144,000 having the Lamb’s name and His Father’s name written on their foreheads. In the Hebrew context names are associated with a person’s character. So the seal of God seems to have something to do with the character of those being sealed.

This is supported by the wider use of sealing in the New Testament. In Ephesians 1:13, sealing by the Holy Spirit is the consequence of a faith response to the gospel. It represents the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit in a person’s life. This sealing is a lifelong experience of the Spirit after conversion (Eph 4:30). It is the evidence that a person truly is known by God and belongs to Him (2 Tim 2:19). In the Second Christian Century, sealing was associated with baptism. So the seal of God has to do with the character transformation that happens as a consequence of a genuine relationship with God.

Revelation 7 and 14 place this sealing in an end-time context, as does Ellen White: ““(The seal of God) is not any seal or mark that can be seen, but a settling into the truth, both intellectually and spiritually, so they cannot be moved.” SDABC, vol. 4, 1161, Last-Day Events, 219-220. Ellen White understands the last-day sealing to be deepening of commitment and a completion of Christian maturity. Those who have to pass through the trials of the end-time cannot be the kind of believers Paul talks about in Ephesians 4:14, “Tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine. . . .” Likewise, at the End, Satan is forming his image into those committed to his side of the conflict. That makes the mark of the beast the mirror counterpart of the seal of God. The three angels (Rev 14:6-12) and the three frogs (Rev 16:13-14) both go out to the nations of the world. The end result is three types of people, as mentioned earlier. Those fully committed to God (the sealed), those fully committed in opposition to God (marked on the forehead), and those who go along with the beast and its image in order to preserve their lives and economic opportunities. Just as the seal of God provides protection to God’s people at the End (Rev 7:1-3, cf. Ezek 9:1-7), so the mark of the beast provides “protection” against the death decree and economic boycott of Revelation 13:15-17.

There is one further element to the mark of the beast. It is part of the beast’s counterfeit of the first four commandments of the Decalogue. The forehead and the hand echoes Moses’ call for Israel’s complete commitment to the commandments of God (Deut 6:4-8). In contrast, the beast and his image violate the first four commandments. The first commandment says to have no other gods before Yahweh. The dragon and the beast seek to be worshiped as gods (Rev 13:4, 8). The second commandment forbids the worship of images, the beast sets up an image to be worshiped (Rev 13:15). The third commandment forbids taking the Lord’s name in vain, the beast is full of blasphemy (Rev 13:1, 5-6). The mark of the beast is in defiance of the Sabbath, which is brought in on God’s side in Rev 14:7 (cf. Exod 20:11). If the law of God is a transcript of His character, you can see what is happening here, a rejection of God’s character and an affirmation of Satan’s. Satan’s character, in contrast with God’s, will be fully revealed in the final conflict.

The previous paragraph underlines that the Sabbath is a crucial issue in the final conflict. It also suggests that some counterfeit of the Sabbath will be central to the beast’s actions in the same conflict. What is less clear in the text is exactly what form that counterfeit will take. I can think of four options: 1) Another day (as in Sunday), 2) no day is a Sabbath (abolished), 3) every day is a Sabbath (not much different than two), and 4) force work or forbid worship on Sabbath. When dealing with Revelation 13 Ellen White normally works from number 1) above, but on at least one occasion mentions number 4). In the blogs that follow we will look at the evidence of Ellen White herself in the context of American religious history.

Sunday Laws and Bible Prophecy (6): The Image of the Beast

The deception of Revelation 13:13-14 results in the formation of an image to and of the beast, presumably the first beast of Revelation 13 that came up out of the sea. “And he [the land beast] was permitted to give breath to the image of the beast, in order that the image of the beast might speak and might cause whoever does not worship the image of the beast to be killed.” Rev 13:15. Typical of Jewish apocalyptic literature, the book of Revelation never quotes the Old Testament, but it alludes to it very frequently, using key words, phrases, ideas and structures to signal the reading to incorporate OT knowledge into the interpretation of a passage. We saw such allusions to the OT in 13:13-14: the experience of Elijah on Mount Carmel (fire from heaven) and the deceptive miracles of Pharaoh’s magicians.

The combination of image and breath is an unmistakable allusion to the early chapters of Genesis. God created male and female in His own image (Gen 1:26-27), using His breath to install the software of life into Adam’s earthy body. More than just oxygen, God was installing the life principle, with its unique personality and traits and that life principle included the “image of God.” That phrase is not used for the creation of animals. So there was something very godlike about Adam and Eve. They reflected God’s character in their own.

The beast from the sea is in the image of the dragon (Rev 13:1, cf. 12:4), which is also defined as the ancient serpent, Satan (Rev 12:9). So the phrase “image of the beast” implies a similar relationship to Satan as Adam originally had to God. Revelation 13:15 is telling us that at the end of time Satan will seek to implant his image into the human race in contrast to the image and character of God. Just as God’s breath installed His design into the human race, Satan at the End will seek to install his own design into the human race. The contrast could not be more stark, as noted in the previous blog in this series. Satan’s character prized lies and unreality (deception—Rev 13:13-14), intimidation and force (Rev 13:12, 15-17). Both qualities are summed up by Jesus in John 8:44. In contrast, God always speaks the truth (Rev 3:14; 15:3) and prizes human freedom (Rev 22:17). God never forces anyone. So the two sides in the final conflict grow increasingly apart as they model more and more the character of the God they worship.

The ultimate outcome of the formation of an image to the beast is to exhibit the murderous character of Satan (John 8:44) in a death decree. When the image of the beast comes to life it will “cause whoever does not worship the image of the beast to be killed.” Rev 13:15. This is a clear allusion to the Plain of Dura event in Daniel 3. There an image was set up for worship. All who would not worship Nebuchanezzar’s image would be thrown into the fiery furnace. Likewise, at the end of time, a decree goes forth that all who would not worship the image of the beast, all who will not conform to the beast’s (Satan’s) character, will be killed. Two other OT death decrees may also be in mind here, the lion’s den incident of Daniel 6, and the genocidal decree of Haman in the book of Esther (3:6, 13). The final era of earth’s history will include a replay of earlier attempts to destroy God’s people. But that is not all that Satan has in mind for the End-time.

Signs of the End: Are the Signs Really Signs?

When I was eight years old, I stood with my parents in front of our home and watched Sputnik (the first man-made satellite of earth) move with surprising speed across the night sky. Shortly after that an earnest fellow believer declared, “God will never let man land on the moon, Jesus will come first.” For him, as for many Christians, various events in today’s world provide evidence or signs that the coming of Jesus is truly near. He felt that since it would be inappropriate for human beings to defile another planet (having already messed up this one!), the approach of human exploration of the moon and the planets became a “sign” that the second coming of Jesus was at hand.

A few years later I got up at three in the morning to witness the live broadcast of Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon. Jesus did not come to intervene. Evidently human occupation of the moon was of less concern to God than my fellow believer had assumed. It turned out not to be a “sign of the End.” Incidents like these make people wonder: Will we ever know with absolute certainty that the return of Jesus is at hand? Are the signs really signs?

When we examine the New Testament, we discover that many world events that Christians take as “signs of the End” are really “signs of the age” instead. Rather than pointing to the timing of the second coming, they confirm that His predicted return at the end of the age is secure. They encourage us to believe that if Jesus knew the character of the whole age in advance, He will not be mistaken about the event that brings it to a close.

For example, when the disciples asked Jesus (Matt 24:3) about the “sign”of His coming and the end of the age, He replied, “You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come.” Matt 24:6 (NIV). Wars and rumors of wars made great signs of the End in the Jewish apocalyptic of Jesus’ day, but in Matt 24 they do not herald the End, they are part of what life is like before the End.

To fully understand what Jesus was doing in Matthew 24, it is helpful understand how the Judaism of Jesus’ day handled the same ideas (an excellent summary of the early Jewish perspective on signs can be found in D. S. Russell, The Method and Message of Jewish Apocalyptic [Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1964], 271-276). The Jewish understanding of signs, which the disciples of Jesus would have shared, was based on the Day of the Lord passages in the OT. It was felt that the near approach of the End would be marked by wars, wickedness, earthquakes, famines, and heavenly portents, among other things. So Jesus is not inventing the concept of signs, He is moderating their impact on the disciples. So it is fascinating that Jesus’ “signs” are generally used for the opposite of the purpose He intended.

Jesus goes on: “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of birth pains.” Matt 24:7-8. Wars, famines and earthquakes do not signal the End, they signal the beginning! The disciples asked for a sign of the End, Jesus gave them signs of the age. These “signs” are not intended to stimulate speculation regarding the timing of the end, they are to remind us of Jesus’ words, which encourage us to be watchful for the End at all times (Matt 24:42).

Jesus does seem to give a measurable sign of the nearness of the End in Matt 24:14. The End will come when the gospel has been preached to the whole world. Yes, the gospel must be preached to the world before the Lord comes, but it is not the kind of sign you can base a calculation on. After all, Paul had the impression that this sign had been fulfilled already in his day (Col 1:23). The only sign that meets the disciples’ intention is the “sign of the son of man” in 24:30. But this appears to be the literal glory that surrounds Jesus Himself at His coming. Those who wait for this sign will be too late.

Jesus’ response to His disciples is disappointing to me in a way. It would seem easier for us if He would have given us all the details about the End, and the events leading up to It, then we could line them all up, see exactly where we are, and know when we have to get ready. But apparently that wasn’t Jesus’ purpose. Apparently that wouldn’t have been the best thing for us. What then was His purpose in this chapter? He gives us that in Matt 24:42. “Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come.”

Interpreting Biblical Apocalyptic (26): The Time of Jesus and John

Someone noticed number 26 was missing. I wrote this and somehow never posted it. So here it is, in belated fashion.

The result of the dragon’s attack in 12:4-5 is to split up the woman and the child. He is snatched up to heaven and she flees into the desert, under God’s protection but still on earth (Rev 12:6). When the male child reaches heaven war breaks out there, with the result that the dragon and his angels lose their place in heaven and are hurled down (evblh,qh) to earth (12:7-9). When did this casting out take place? Verse 10 clearly addresses the same point in time as the war of 7-9. “Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God, and the authority of his Christ. For the accuser of our brothers has been hurled down.”

The time of the war in heaven is the time when the kingdom of God and the authority of Christ were clearly established (12:10). In the book of Revelation, this took place at the enthronement of the Lamb in as a result of His overcoming at the cross (Rev 5:5-6, cf. 3:21). Throughout the New Testament the Kingdom of God was seen as a present reality in the person of Jesus (Matt 12:28; Luke 17:20-21, etc.) and was established in force at His ascension when He joined His Father on the heavenly throne (cf. Heb 8:1-2, etc.). “Accuser of our brothers” (12:10) is a play on the Hebrew meaning of the word Satan (12:9), which means “the one who accuses.” Apparently up until the cross, Satan and his accusations still had a certain credibility in heavenly places (Job 1:6; Zech 3:1-2), but now this is all over. The accused can now overcome Satan by “the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony” (verse 11). Beale addresses this matter in a fascinating way, “The emphasis on Satan’s accusatorial role in 12:10 reveals that the angelic battle of vv 7-9 was figurative for a courtroom battle between two opposing lawyers, with one losing the argument and being disbarred for employing illegal tactics.”

The language of 12:7-9, however, is also reminiscent of 12:4, where the dragon hurled (e;balen) a third of the stars from heaven to earth. But that event occurred before the birth of Christ, and the war of 12:7-9 occurred after the ascension. So there are two separate events in this chapter in which a hurling down from heaven occurs, one is prior to the birth of Christ (12:4), and the other is after His ascension (12:7-10).

How long before the birth of Christ did the dragon sweep a third of the stars from heaven to earth? The traditional Adventist answer is “before creation.” The exact timing of that action is not addressed in this chapter, but a strong hint is found in Rev 13:8, where the Lamb is described as “slain from the creation of the world” (tou/ evsfagme,nou avpo. katabolh/j ko,smou). This comment finds no context in the entire book unless the dragon’s action in 12:4 represents that primeval attack on the Lamb. If that is the case, the war in heaven of 12:7-9, while clearly in the context of the cross in Revelation 12, nevertheless speaks in the language of that earlier conflict, as noted by scholars such as Adela Yarbro Collins.
In His earthly life, therefore, Jesus was participating in a war that had begun in heaven before His arrival on earth (Rev 12:3-4,7-9). At His ascension, Jesus establishes His kingdom and casts the “accuser of the brothers” (Rev 12:10) out of heaven. Since the dragon had already been cast out of heaven physically, according to the symbolism of 12:4, the language of 12:7-12 implies that after the Christ-event, Satan has no more influence over heavenly deliberations. This casting out is, therefore, more spiritual than physical. It is interesting, that while the dragon appears in all four stages of the conflict in chapter 12, the actions of Jesus, expressed in the images of the male child, the Lamb, Christ, and probably Michael, are confined to the second stage, the time of Jesus’ birth, life, death, resurrection, ascension and heavenly rule (Rev 12:5-10).

Interpreting Biblical Apocalyptic (29): Conclusion

Even in apocalyptic prophecy God meets people where they are.  Although He knows the end from the beginning, He does not choose to express Himself beyond the comprehension of the original writer and audience.  Historicism, therefore, is built on passages where the time element is not explicit at the point of first reception.  Events can be portrayed as a long time in the future (Dan 8:26-27: 12:11-13) or extremely near (Rev 1:3; 22:10).  Whether the sequence of Daniel 2 would take a lifetime or thousands of years was not evident in the vision itself, but becomes evident with the passage of time.

So it is also with Revelation 12.  The vision clearly begins with the generation of Jesus and John and moves to the final events of earth’s history.  But the great length of the intervening period is not obvious from markers in the text, being hidden in the use of days instead of years among other things.  As history progresses and the time of fulfillment comes, the sequences and their historical fulfillment become more plain (John 13:19; 14:29).

It is probably true that none of the biblical writers foresaw the enormous length of the Christian era.  The passage of time has opened up new vistas in terms of the Lord’s patience and purpose.  Having foreseen such a delay, would not God prepare His people to understand the great events by which He is bringing history to its climax?  Historicism is grounded in the conviction that God knows the end from the beginning and cares enough for His people to share an outline of those events.  While it is only from the perspective of the Parousia that history will speak with perfect clarity, each generation must make the attempt to understand biblical apocalyptic or risk being surprised by God’s final acts (Rev 16:15 cf. 1 Thess 5:1-6).

Interpreting Biblical Apocalyptic (28): The Final Attack on the Remnant

Rev 12:17 serves as a summary introduction to Revelation’s portrayal of a great final crisis at the conclusion of earth’s history. It indicates that there are two sides in the final conflict, represented by the dragon, on the one hand, and the remnant on the other. But the dragon does not immediately act on his anger. Instead he “went away” to make war. Why? Because he was frustrated by repeated failures in the course of apocalyptic history. He was not strong enough to last in heaven (Rev 12:8), he failed to destroy the man-child of the woman (Rev 12:3-5), and he failed to destroy the woman herself (Rev 12:16). Because of his repeated failures he realizes he doesn’t have the strength to defeat God’s purposes by himself, so he decides to enter the final conflict with allies, a beast from the sea and a beast from the earth (Rev 13:1-18). The remnant are ultimately, therefore, faced with three opponents: 1) the dragon; 2) the sea beast, and 3) the land beast.

In the book of Revelation, God is often spoken of in three’s–Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (Rev 1:4-5). So the dragon, the sea beast and the land beast in Revelation 13 would seem to be a counterfeit of the holy three, an alternative to the true Godhead. These texts indicate that there is to be a great, final world-wide deception where a counterfeit “trinity” stands in the place of the true God. The purpose of the counterfeit is to deceive the world.

Rev 12:17 summarizes the final stage of earth’s history in a nutshell, the rest of the book of Revelation elaborates on that summary introduction. Rev 13, for example, outlines in more detail the dragon’s war against the remnant of the woman’s seed (Rev 12:17). Linguistically this occurs in two great stages signaled by the Greek tenses in relation to the final attack of Rev 12:17. Two beasts (from the sea and the earth) are each given “character introductions” in past tense (Rev 13:1-7; 13:11). These past-tense portions begin with a visual description of each character followed by an account of that character’s subsequent actions. Being in the past tense, these actions would seem to have occurred prior to the dragon’s final war against the remnant.

In each scene the Greek of Rev 13 then moves from description in the past to a mixture of present and future tenses (Rev 13:8-10; 13:12-18), describing the actions of these two beasts in the context of the final attack of Rev 12:17. So two stages of history are clearly marked off by the Greek tenses signaling events prior to the dragon’s war (past tenses) and an elaboration of the events of the war itself (present and future tenses). Beale has noted that Rev 13 is parallel in time with 12:13-17, which coheres with the Adventist position described here.

There is one further passage in Revelation which speaks to this end-time deception, Rev 16:13-16, the famous Battle of Armageddon passage. Here the counterfeit trinity of Rev 13 uses demonic spirits that look like frogs to gather the kings of earth for the final battle. Since frogs were the last plague that the magicians of ancient Egypt were able to counterfeit (see Exod 7:18-19 in context), the use of frogs as a symbol here signals that the message of Revelation 16 has to do with the last deception of earth’s history.

The three frogs are the demonic counterparts of the three God-sent angels of Rev 14:6-12. Both groups of angels have a mission to the whole world (Rev 14:6; 16:14), one trio calling the world to worship God, and the other seeking to gather the people of the world into the service of the unholy trinity. The final showdown takes place at “Armageddon” (Rev 16:16).

My work on the “Armageddon” article for the Anchor Bible Dictionary led me to the conclusion that the best way to understand the word Armageddon, in the light of the Biblical evidence, is as the Greek form of a couple of Hebrew words that mean “Mountain of Meggido.” Meggido was a city on a small elevation at the edge of the Plain of Jezreel. Looming over the place where the city of Megiddo was, however, is a range of mountains called Carmel.

What counts for Revelation is that Mount Carmel was the place where the great Old Testament showdown between Elijah and the prophets of Baal took place (1 Kings 18:16-46). On that occasion God answered Elijah’s prayer to bring fire down from heaven onto an altar in order to prove that Yahweh was the true God, not Baal.

According to Revelation, the Mount Carmel experience will be repeated at the End. Once again there will be a showdown between the true God and a devious counterfeit. But it will be different this time. At the End the fire that comes down falls from heaven will fall on the wrong altar. It will be the counterfeit Elijah and the counterfeit three angels who bring fire down from heaven to earth (Rev 13:13,14). On that day all the evidence of the five senses will suggest that the counterfeit trinity is the true God. Adventists see themselves as the “church of the remnant” whose recognition of the realities described in these prophecies enables them to help prepare their fellow Christians and others for the unique challenges of the last days.

Revelation 12, therefore, clearly demonstrates the successive stages of prophetic history that are characteristic of the historical type of apocalyptic found in Daniel 2 and 7. Observing carefully the markers in the text, the author’s use of character introductions and way the Old Testament is utilized, we have detected three stages of Christian history running from the time of Jesus and the John to the end of all things. When we note that at least two of the main characters in the chapter were active in the time before the birth of Jesus (which we will call below Stage Zero), there are a total of four successive stages of apocalyptic history.

Interpreting Biblical Apocalyptic (27): The Broad Sweep of Christian History

Rev 12:12 makes the transition between the experience of Jesus, in his various symbolic representations, and the vision’s renewed focus on the woman back on earth. Her exile into the desert was introduced in 12:6 and now becomes the focus of the devil/dragon, who was angered by his casting out and by the knowledge that “his time is short.” In apocalyptic language this verse tells us that after Jesus’ ascension to heaven, the church took the brunt of Satan’s wrath on earth (Rev 12:13-16). Having been cast out of heaven, the dragon pursues the woman into the desert (12:13). The language of 12:13-16 is reminiscent of several accounts in the Old Testament, the vision of Daniel 7, the Exodus from Egypt, and the temptation and fall in the Garden of Eden.

The language of “a time, times and half a time” recalls Dan 7:25, as do the seven heads and the ten horns of the dragon who pursues the woman. In Daniel 7 the breakup of Rome into ten parts was followed by a little horn power, which was to persecute and “oppress God’s saints for a time, times and half a time.” (Dan 7:25) The only time in history that comes even close to matching this description is the Middle Ages, when the Roman Papacy dominated the Western world and drove competing views of Christianity into obscurity.

“The mouth of the serpent” (Rev 12:15) reminds the reader of the deceptive words of the serpent in the Garden of Eden (Gen 3). The flooding waters that attack the woman in the desert (the faithful church), therefore, imply deceptive and persuasive words as much as persecuting force. In the Middle Ages, unbiblical teachings were fed to the people in the name of Christ.

The woman fleeing into the desert on the two wings of a great eagle (Rev 12:14) reminds the reader of the Exodus experience, where God carried the tribes of Israel “on eagle’s wings” out of Egypt (Exod 19:4). So the experience of the woman, who represents the people of God, is built on the language of Old Testament Israel, both before and after the time of Christ. The experiences of Old Testament Israel and those of the Church are closely entwined in the book of Revelation.

In Rev 12:16 the “earth” helped the woman. This is a further allusion to the Exodus and Israel’s experience in the desert. The desert protected Israel from the “flooding waters” of both the Red Sea and the Egyptian army. If “sea” also represents the settled populations of the earth (as Rev 17:15 may suggest), “earth” here may represent more desolate places where the true people of God obtained refuge from deceptive and persecuting opponents; the Alps in Europe during the Middle Ages, and places like North America, South Africa, and Australia afterward. Toward the end of the 1260 years (the 16th through the 18th centuries) many forces came together to elevate the Bible and to end the persecution of God’s people; the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the American Revolution, and the beginnings of the great missionary expansion of the 19th century. During that period of calm, the dragon prepares for his final attack (Rev 12:17).