The Dragon of Revelation 12, and the Incessant Attack on Christmas

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 twelve stars. ² She was pregnant and was crying out in birth pains and the agony of giving birth. ³ And another sign appeared in heaven: behold, a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and on his heads seven diadems. ⁴ 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 (Revelation 12:1-4).


In the late 1800’s and early 1900’s the church became embroiled in a theological war between the modernists (the children of the enlightenment) and the fundamentalists (believers in orthodoxy). And what doctrine do you suppose was contested most vigorously? The Virgin Birth.

The modernists said four things: A virgin birth (a) has never happened before (b) has never happened since (c) could not be observed empirically (d) could not be repeated scientific setting. In other words, they took the tools of empirical observation, applied them to the doctrine of the Virgin Birth, and rejected it.   

But this is exactly the limitation of the naturalistic sciences. Science can only study that which is "inside the box" of the observable world. But the Lordship of our Sovereign God extends to both the natural/material and supernatural realms. Science is limited by definition.

But conversely, God is not limited in any way. As I have so often preached to my congregation, if Genesis 1:1 is true “In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth…” then absolutely everything else in the rest of the Scripture is possible. 

When science says it doubts the Virgin Birth because it cannot be repeated in a lab, Christian Philosopher Alvin Plantinga says it’s a lot like a drunk driver insisting on looking for his lost car keys only under the bright streetlight, on the grounds that the light is better there![1]

But now we must ask, Why does the wicked seven-headed dragon attack the Virgin Birth so strenuously and aggressively?

           

The answer is that the Virgin Birth of Christ is the one domino--that if Satan could cause to fall--would destroy the whole of Christianity. If the Virgin Birth is not a fact rooted in the dusty hills of Palestine in the city of Nazareth 2,000 years ago, then our Bibles are not inerrant, because Matthew 1:18 and Luke 1:35 expressly say that it was so. Furthermore,

• If Christ was not born of a Virgin, then the full deity and full humanity of Christ would be impossible. 
• If Christ was not fully divine, then His sinless life would be impossible. 
• If Christ sinned even one time, He could not have laid down His life on the cross for our sins as an atonement of satisfaction and propitiation. 
• If Christ did not lay down His life for us, our forgiveness and renewal would be impossible.

 In other words, tipping over this one domino would ruin the entire Christian faith.

If it could ever be proven somehow that Jesus was not born of the Virgin Mary, conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, He would not be worthy of our worship. But if He is—truly man and truly God—as I proclaim to you today that He is, He is worthy of our eternal praise. Amen. 

Matthew Everhard is the Senior Pastor of Faith Evangelical Presbyterian Church in Brooksville, Florida. 

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[1] Quoted in Tim Keller. The Reason for God. 86.

The Opportunity Presented by Post-Modernism

By Matthew Everhard

Permit me a moment to do a bit of cultural analysis. Let’s cover a thousand years of history in two minutes. Here goes…

The Ancient World gave way to an era called the Medieval Age, marked by superstition, supernaturalism, tradition, and the centralized authority in the Roman Catholic Church. This broke wide open in the Reformation period (1500’s) one of history’s great revivals of Biblical truth, as men like Luther and Calvin returned to the sources of the Old and New Testaments.  

Co-extensively, the Reformation ushered in the Enlightenment period (1700’s) marked by scientific inquiry and advance (Newton et al.) This matured into full-blown modernism (1900’s) which rejected almost all forms of supernaturalism, and essentially made empirical science “king.” Freud and Darwin took the top of the heap.

But today, we live in an age called “post-modernism.” Here, because we live in an inter-connected “global village” now, our culture rejects modern notions of absolute truth. Post-modernism rejects overarching meta-narratives. The playing field is wide-open. Anything and everything gets a fair shake in our day. Your truth is as good as mine. Wicca, Scientology, Mayan Calendar, Zombie Apocalypse--are all handled with the same gloves of tolerance!

We can define post-modernism as: an era of history in which the idea of “absolute truth” has been abandoned, in favor of: pluralism, tolerance, and personal experience. 

Good News/Bad News

There is both good news and bad news in all of this for evangelicals. First the bad news. Post-modernism makes evangelism a very difficult endeavor, because the preaching of the Gospel is first of all a truth claim. It is an assertion of certain facts: Jesus came, Jesus died, Jesus rose again. If these facts are not absolutely true, Christianity is unfounded. That post-modernism rejects “absolute truth” makes evangelism hard sledding indeed.

The good news in all of this is that our post-modern era is far more open to the sharing of personal-experiences than we fear! Much more so than other eras in the past! This is to our advantage in sharing personal experiences of Christ! Notice that in the book of Acts, Paul’s personal conversion story is told three times (chapters 9, 22, and 26). We should take note.

Discernible Life Change

There is, however, one rule to play by in post-modernism: you had better be authentic. The one thing that you must have to share your testimony with a post-modern thinker is a discernible life-change. Post-modern people can smell out a hypocrite from a mile away.

As Paul re-told his testimony and conversion to the angry crowd in Acts 22:1-22 twenty years later, not one man there could dispute that Paul had determined to live exactly like he professed that he would. Paul could pull up his shirt and show them the scars to prove it.

Biggest Fear

For most Christians, our biggest fear and ultimate obstacle in sharing our faith is that someone will reject us because we spoke about something so deeply personal as our faith in Christ. We are terrified of those two letters “no.” Have you ever heard the child’s motto “Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me?” Well that goes for personal evangelism too!

Ironically, most people will not reject you for telling them what Jesus did for you. We should, however, be far MORE AFRAID that our lives reveal our hypocrisy, superficiality, and shallowness. That to me is far more terrifying prospect than rejection. 


Matthew Everhard is the Senior Pastor of Faith Evangelical Presbyterian Church of Brooksville, Florida. Follow him on Twitter @matt_everhard or friend him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/pastor.everhard