How Did a Dragon Get Into the Christmas Story?

Long-time readers of my blog posts know how much I despise the way that Christmas has become such a cash cow for merchants. In fact, the only aspects I enjoy about the holiday are that songs about Christ are occasionally sung in public and I like to see reindeer because they're beautiful animals

Imagine my surprise when I went to Londonderry Mall in 2015 and saw a great red dragon among the Christmas decorations. Its reptilian presence dominated The Log Barn kiosk located at the intersection of four hallways.

The Holy Spirit arranged one of those amazing coincidences at the time by letting me hear John MacArthur's sermon on Revelation 12:1-6. Here's what the verses say in the Bible in Basic English:

    1   And a great sign was seen in heaven: A woman clothed with the sun, and with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars.
    2   And she was with child; and she gave a cry, in the pains of childbirth.
    3   And there was seen another sign in heaven; a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and on his heads seven crowns.
    4   And his tail was pulling a third part of the stars of heaven down to the earth, and the dragon took his place before the woman who was about to give birth, so that when the birth had taken place he might put an end to her child.
    5   And she gave birth to a son, a male child, who was to have rule over all the nations with a rod of iron: and her child was taken up to God and to his high seat.
    6   And the woman went in flight to the waste land, where she has a place made ready by God, so that there they may give her food a thousand, two hundred and sixty days.

In metaphorical language, John told the story of how Herod sought to kill Christ and had all the children under two years in Bethlehem killed, hoping Jesus was among them.

This was the first  of several attempts which Satan made on Christ's life. Only when it was time for Jesus to be crucified was the Devil allowed to take the Lord's life. Even so, he had power to lay it down and take it up again.

Though we don't like to consider it, there's more to the Christmas story than a newborn who was God incarnate. He came to die for sinners who surrender their lives to him. Without Christmas, Easter couldn't have happened. Without Easter, Christmas would lose its meaning.

I hope to keep the emphasis of Christ's atonement front and centre in my next book called You Think You're Going to Heaven? This is thee most important truth which all of us must deal with.

WAS A CHURCH PAINTING PROPHETIC?

When I think back to the fifteen years I spent in a toxic house church, I notice how superstitious the elders of it were. This is especially true when it came to its leader and his supposed visions. One of them involved a painting on the plaster of the basement wall above the baptismal tank.

When I returned from my summer holidays at my parents place to the house church, I immediately noticed that somebody had painted a picture of a river and impossibly steap green hills behind it. When I remarked about it to Sister Roberta, she crowed, "Brother Herald had a vision. He saw the city of refuge in the Nahanni Valley  mentioned in Revelation Chapter twelve."

As I admired the painting, Sister Roberta continued, "The swirles in the plaster matched exactly the hills and river in the vision so we painted them."

I stood and gawked in amazement at this supposed vision. We had been taught that when the mark of the beast was imposed on the world, the weak christians would be taken to a city of refuge in the Northwest Territories for three and a half years. The able-bodied Christians would fight the mark of the beast while the young and infirm believers would be kept safe in that northern location.

Now I realize that what we had been taught was completely wrong. The books of the Bible were written for us but not to us, as Hank Hanegraaff of the Bible Answer Man show rightly says. Consequently, the last book of the Bible was written to seven churches in what now is the nation of Turky.  Though we learn much from Scripture, none of it was written to twenty-first-century believers.

In Revelation 12:1-6, John portrays in symbolic form the life of Christ. The woman is Mary who fled to Egypt with Joseph and the Christ child.  The readers of the letter that John wrote to the seven churches would have recognized the allusion to Old Testiment apocolyptic language immediately. John used it to amplify his message to these congregations. That's why Revelation seems such a mysterious book to us. We can't relate to Old Testiment figures of speech. For more on the subject of the Bible being written for our instruction but to ancient peoples, check The Christian Research Institute's web site.

If I had only known how to read the Bible for all it's worth, and all its wealth, I would never have fallen for a blasphemous minister and his twisted lies. Even so, I feel that God wanted me to publish How I Was Razed: A Journey from Cultism to Christianity. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Virtual Bookworm Publishers.

CONTEXT IS CRUCIAL WHEN READING BOOKS.

Everybody knows how to read a book, right? If that's so, why do so many people come up with different ideas of what the Bible says. I believe it's because they don't read verses in the context of the rest of the passage.

The minister of a cultic house church that I attended for more than fifteen years certainly was guilty of this. One example of his misreading was Deuteronomy 33:17. "His glory is like the first born of his bullock, and his horns are like the horns of unicorns: with them he shall push the people together to the ends of the earth: and they are the ten thousands of Ephraim, and they are the thousands of Manasseh." Brother Herald, as i referred to him in my book, assumed this meant America and Canada. He reasoned that since the United States has ten times the population of Canada, they must be Ephraim. Canada was, according to his warped understanding, Manasseh.

Brother Herald also reinforced this belief with Psalm 72:8. "He shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth." Since Canada stretches from the Pacific to the Atlantic and from the Saint Lawrence River to the high Arctic, he assumed that it was a prophecy about the nation.

Another of Brother Herald's off-the-wall notions was that God would fly weak Christians to a city of refuge in the Nahanni Valley. He claimed that Revelation 12:1 to 6 justified this belief. "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: And she being with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered. And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth: and the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, in order to devour her child as soon as it was born. And she brought forth a male child, who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron: and her child was caught up unto God, and to his throne. And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared of God, that they should feed her there a thousand two hundred and threescore days." From the metaphorical language, the meaning of this passage is the story of Christ's incarnation, not some future event.

Thanks to John MacArthur, Hank Hanegraaff, Alistair Begg, and many other biblically astute teachers, I know the proper way to read the Bible. Like any literature, it has cultural contexts, literary devices, symbolism, and similar attributes which need to be understood. Cherry-picking scriptures and forcing them into one's own notions does violence to the text and misleads naive believers, such as I was at one time.

I wrote extensively about that house church in my newly-published memoir, How I Was Razed: A Journey from Cultism to Christianity. Please check it out at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Virtual Bookworm.