REJOICE TO EXPUNGE FROM YOUR PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE MYTHICAL MISTAKES MADE IN THE GARDEN OF EDEN! —The “woman with a crown (corona) of twelve stars” versus a great red dragon … with seven crowns upon his heads” (complete coronavirus in its head) –
See below the full, online GEM#3 for Cobbey Crisler on Genesis 3 (B8, B11) curses reversed (not rehearsed) in Revelation 12:
“Now we come to Revelation 12 – a great and portentous moment in the Bible. The word “sign” which the King James Version translates “wonder” appears in verse 1 for the first time and in its only positive use in Revelation.
Rev 12:1 And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars:
This unique sign is the epiphany of God’s womanhood – a contrast with the succeeding negative uses of the word sign is vivid. It stands out as does Isaiah’s well known and similar pronouncement that “the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son.” (Isaiah 7:14) …
But comprehension of this and interpretation of Isaiah’s statement, as well as the twelfth chapter of Revelation, have run the gamut of controversy. Scholars and theologians agree one thing that Revelation 12 is difficult if not impossible to explain. There may be a good reason for this, for the title of the book is not explanation but revelation.
To John at Revelation 12, verse 1 (see above) there appeared a great Symeon in heaven. The Greek word usually stands for a distinctive feature, identifying someone or something clearly. According to The Anchor Bible, “Symeon” usually translates in the Hebrew, that is, “some event assuring man of a divine intervention; it is a form of revelation.”
And we have a woman and her attire is celestial for it is associated with sun, moon, and stars. …
The Expositor’s Bible Commentary and The Anchor Bible have pointed out the sun, moon, and stars were part of the high priest’s garments. Does it follow, then, that this woman has something to do with the highest responsibilities in church?
In the Revelation 1, the son of man’s garments identify him as well with the priesthood, and thus, with the highest God-appointed responsibilities of church. … The archpriest of Israel has the exclusive right annually to enter the Holy of Holies where God’s presence was held in symbol to be. This is also where The Commandments rested inside the Ark, and where two Cherubim of purest gold, later overlaid on olive wood, stood symbolically on the right hand and left hand of God’s presence. In fact, if you remember, God is frequently cited in the Old Testament as dwelling between the Cherubim.
Consider then this Apocalyptic Picture of the woman with priestly implications and meanings and a crown of victory or dominion. How far this is from the stereotype subordinate role accorded woman by Ecclesiastical traditions through the centuries.
Although the very first statement about woman in the Bible is that God created her with dominion which precludes subjection. The first representative of womanhood in the text is Eve, and Eve is not only dominated by her husband, she is evicted from Eden, her home, woman’s special domain. This eviction has been used as Ecclesiastical pretext for her exclusion from high church offices.
[Webster: “pretext, noun – a reason given in justification of a course of action that is not the real reason.”]
Theologians have been kinder to man’s Genesis 1 dominion, than to woman’s simultaneously declared right. Going even further, Ecclesiastism continues solemnly to blame woman for the downfall of the race. This is why the dominion woman of Revelation 12 is such a radical sign that sends tremors through anciently rooted traditions and overturns them.
For Revelation 12 reverberates with news of woman’s God-ordained assignment, to complete the salvation of the race, which Jesus inaugurated. The Anchor Bible refers to this one as a “key figure in the drama of salvation.” Then the author adds “there can be no doubt that Revelation is giving the Christian enactment of the drama foreshadowed in Genesis 3:15 where enmity is placed between the serpent and the woman – between the serpent’s seed and her seed.
Genesis 3:15 And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.
“Revelation 12 is unquestionably set against the background of Genesis 3,” from The Anchor Bible.
But shouldn’t we regard this woman simply as an Apotheosis – God’s ideal.
Revelation 12, Verse 1 certainly casts about her such a heavenly outline.
Revelation 12:1 And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars:
The Bible has conditioned us, however, to look for God’s ideals to make an earthly statement, to have a concrete, practical application to present living.
In fact, The Lord’s Prayer petitions that God’s will be done in earth as it is in heaven. So, the Apocalyptic Picture in verse one of spiritual womanhood as God has created her must appear at some point as answered prayer “in earth as it is in heaven.”
Matt 6:10 Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.
Otherwise, woman’s God-given dominion would remain unexercised on earth. Her spiritual potential would remain unseen. She would never escape from Eve’s mold.
Wrestling with these implications, The Anchor Bible’s author continues: “It is generally agreed that the woman of Revelation is a symbol of the people of God; however, often in the Bible, collective figures are based on historical ones. Thus, the fact that the woman represents the people of God would not at all preclude a reference to an individual who is the basis of the symbolism.” (From The Anchor Bible.)
Revelation 12, verse 2, with its Eve’s imagery of birth throes and pain contrasts with the dominion woman of verse 1: “…she being with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered.” (Rev 12:2)
As Jesus had foreseen in the Gospel of John, “…her hour is come.” (John 16:21) …
The Genesis 1 womanhood and her spiritual dominion must now be fulfilled on earth. The curse on Eve must be remedied and her stereotype transfigured. …
To exemplify this spiritual ideal is no easy task. The woman is opposed by the dragon’s animalism and its sworn enmity against life and health. This is the second sign – the great red dragon. Woman has met this symbol before in Genesis 3. It was smaller then – a serpent beguiling Eve.
Now, although John identifies it as that old serpent, it has grown to the proportions of a dragon, face to face with the woman of the Apocalypse. At this point in scripture, one could well reflect upon a young Sunday School boy’s ingenuous question: “Why didn’t they kill it when it was little?”
It may also be worth pondering that the symbols chosen – a talking serpent and a dragon – are not real entities in nature. They belong to the language of mythology. Even if a myth has ballooned for centuries, it is still a myth.
Have you noticed in Genesis there is no reported dialog between Adam and the serpent? Adam was commanded directly by God not to eat of the fruit of the tree; In fact, it is the first “thou shalt not” in the Bible. (Genesis 2:17) …The tree, then, not the serpent, represents Adam’s problem, and Jesus is the remedy for Adam, Paul tells us. That would require that Jesus gloriously succeed at each point where Adam dismally failed.
Where, for example, in Jesus’ career, do we find the remedy for the tree?
The first epistle of Peter speaks of Jesus baring our sins in his own body on the tree. (I Pet 2:24)… Although tree here is a reference to the cross, the Greek word is the same, used in the Greek Old Testament for Adam’s tree. The act of nailing Jesus to the cross thus takes on symbolically the attempt to nail him to the tree of sin and its fruit, and to see him perish in the demoralization of Adam, and in the shame and futility of the Adam race. This would have left Jesus career as barely a footnote to human history. But, Jesus solved the problem of that tree; he called himself the bright and morning star, and this was the dawning of an entirely new human race. …
Sealed by God, rather than marked by the beast – a race that could now heal in the name of Jesus of Nazareth, rather than die in the name of Adam of Eden.
But Adam was not all there was to this surrender in Eden, there was Eve. Logic would conclude that she needs to be remedied as well, in order for all Eden’s mistakes to be expunged.
God’s logic and His revelation could not be counteracted, so we should pursue what Revelation waits to disclose on this theme. Eve’s failure was listening to the serpent; she was beguiled, as Paul writes. The serpent then, not the tree, represents Eve’s problem.
Genesis 3:13 And the Lord God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.
II Cor 11:3 But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ. (Paul writes.)
How is the serpent’s apparent success to be remedied? The woman in Genesis One has dominion; this is the only remedy for manipulation and its fruits of subjection and subordination. The matrix of God’s womanhood is not the stereotype of man’s making. Only God’s type of womanhood could stand impervious to beguilement and subtlety, listen solely to God and free her seed from the magnetic pull of the dragon’s tail. Can such a role model be lived on earth as it is in heaven? Prophesy answer is an unequivocal “Yes!”
Scriptural text also foresees a serpent’s final grip on the ancient and modern history of man, both species and genera, will loosen and fall away. (Genera is plural of Genus – Def Webster)
No precedent will remain for allegiance to ought than to one omnipotent God, and the human will be found living and embodying the First Commandment.
The magnitude of these two witnesses and their mission in prophecy, as well as the divine responsibilities they bear, grow in scripturally receptive hearts and burn within them. Let us turn to Isaiah 42, verse 13 for a few moments.
Here the prophet lists the only two witness to God’s full nature and essence.
One can discover, in Genesis One, the male and female of His creating. Isaiah refers to the first representation of God’s nature thus: “The Lord shall go forth as a mighty man.” (Isa 42:13) The New England Bible continues the translation like this: “As a warrior, he will rouse the frenzy of battle; like a hero, he will shout, he will raise the battle cry and triumph over his foes.”
Isa 42:13 The Lord shall go forth as a mighty man, he shall stir up jealousy like a man of war: he shall cry, yea, roar; he shall prevail against his enemies.
Is this a prophetic summons for manhood on earth to represent the essentials of manhood in heaven, to exercise dominion on earth as the master? All this is phrased in the language of battle.
The next verse, Isaiah 42:14, interposes a time transition, and God said, “I have long time holden my peace; I have been still, and refrained myself.”
Isa 42:14 I have long time holden my peace; I have been still, and refrained myself: now will I cry like a travailing woman; I will destroy and devour at once. Z. 47:20
Then comes the prophecy of a second representation of God’s nature “Now, will I cry like a travailing woman.” The Interpreter’s Bible Dictionary translates the Bible verse: “I will gasp and pant.” For the original Hebrew words are borrowed from vocabulary peculiar to the throes of childbirth.
So, Revelation 12 is not without its antecedents in prophecy. What kind of a birth is being portrayed, however? Turn back to Revelation 12:2 to the phrase “travailing in birth.”
Revelation 12:2 And she being with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered.
In the original Greek travailing in birth in conveyed by one word, and it connotes intense pain in general – that is the physical and mental senses. The verb’s usual meaning is in anguish or being in torment with no references to the pangs of childbirth in a literal sense. The Anchor Bible comments: “The present tense indicate prolonged suffering – the terminology of no ordinary childbirth.” The phrase with child does not always refer to physical motherhood. Similarly, “cries out” is not confined to an association with childbirth.
In the Septuagint, or Greek Old Testament, it is also used for crying out to Yahweh. “In John it occurs four times in the sense of proclaiming in the face of contradiction.” (Anchor Bible) Philo, a Jewish philosopher, roughly contemporary to Jesus, uses the word, according to The Anchor Bible, “in the sense of the soul bringing forth thoughts.” The woman of Revelation 12, verse 1, wears a crown or corona in Jerome’s Latin translation. The woman of Revelation 12, verse 2, is pained or cruciator in the same Latin translation – a word that shares the same root with cross and crucifixion. In this combination of crown and cross, we have what appears to be a divine human coincidence, an event divinely prescribed, but humanly carried out. It comes as no surprise to read further in The Anchor Bible that “the woman’s symbol is almost as important as The Lamb.”…
Later in Revelation, references to the Lamb’s wife divulges her complementary role to The Lamb. Jesus calls himself the bridegroom, a prophetic word. The title, however, is not suitable unless there is a bride. ….
Going back to Genesis One, the next reference to the number two is not in numerical form, but rather illustrated in the product of God’s nature, as male and female. Both are said to be the image of God, having His dominion, and absolutely God-like – “Male and female, created He them.” For what reason we ask? – Logic responds, “To be like Him, to be two witnesses of his nature – manhood and womanhood, two luminaries, two candlesticks…
What a radical challenge this is both to our present traditions as to God’s essential being as well as to the relationships between the sexes. First, we must conclude from the text of Genesis One, that image is male and female, the original, or God, is revealing His nature, and Her nature, as Father/Mother.”
“Apocalyptic Pictures: Prophecy and Parody” by B. Cobbey Crisler**
