Revelation In Overalls
Bible Prophecy Speaks To Century 21

Part VII: "Two Women, One Husband: Revelation's Recipe for Successful Monogamy"  (Revelation 19 & 20)

Sermon by Pastor Dale Wolcott

April 13, 2002

[Scripture References are from the New King James Version unless otherwise noted]

"Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her, that He might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the word, that He might present her to Himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish. So husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies, he who loves his wife loves himself." Ephesians 5:25-28

Could it be that the Book of Revelation is a marriage manual? In chapters 12 and 17, Revelation tells a story of two women – or at least it seems there are two different women. Note chapter 12, beginning at verse 1:

"Now a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a garland of twelve stars. Then being with child, she cried out in labor and in pain to give birth. And another sign appeared in heaven: behold, a great, fiery red dragon having seven heads and ten horns, and seven diadems on his heads. His tail drew a third of the stars of heaven and threw them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was ready to give birth, to devour her Child as soon as it was born. She bore a male Child who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron. And the Child was caught up to God and his Throne. Then the woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared by God, that they should feed her there one thousand two hundred and sixty days." Revelation 12:1-6

Here we see a picture of a beautiful, virtuous woman going through some very hard times. We’ve tried to represent the Revelation 12 woman here on my right. We read about this woman in our Scripture – "a glorious church without spot or wrinkle or any such thing." My wife Nancy had her ironing board in the back room Wednesday evening taking out all the wrinkles in this beautiful white garment.

All through the Bible, a woman is a symbol for the church. Jeremiah said, "I have likened the daughter of Zion to a comely and delicate woman" (Jeremiah 6:2). Isaiah told the Israelites, "Thy Maker is thine husband" (Isaiah 54:5). Hosea and Ezekiel and Song of Solomon all use the same analogy. Paul wrote to the church in Corinth, "I have espoused you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ" (1 Corinthians 11:2).

Now let’s go to chapter 17 in Revelation, beginning at verse 3:

"So he carried me away in the Spirit into the wilderness. And I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast which was full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. The woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet, and adorned with gold and precious stones and pearls, having in her hand a golden cup full of abominations and the filthiness of her fornication. And on her forehead a name was written

MYSTERY

BABYLON THE GREAT

THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS

AND OF THE ABOMINATIONS

OF THE EARTH.

I saw the woman, drunk with the blood of the saints and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus. And when I saw her, I marveled with great amazement." Revelation 17: 3-6

Here we see another beautiful woman, but with a very different kind of beauty, a seductive, deadly beauty. We’ve tried to represent her here on my left. She has a different kind of beauty, and is a different kind of woman. But still she is a woman – a symbol of an unfaithful church, a fallen church, a corrupted, polluted, adulterous church.

All throughout the Bible, when God is looking for an illustration of the relationship He wants to have with us, the illustrations He uses most often, again and again and again, are the illustrations of marriage. It almost appears that maybe this is why He created us male and female in the beginning. He designed that this experience of oneness in marriage – two separate people becoming a family, becoming one flesh – would teach us, as nothing else can, about the close, intimate relationship He wants us to have with Him. So in Revelation we have a stark contrast between a good marriage — a marriage made in heaven — and a horribly bad marriage, a failed marriage — "hell on earth." Whatever it teaches us about the church, it’s teaching us about our marriages. Whatever it teaches us about our relationships with each other, it’s teaching us the same thing about our relationship with God.

We have a worksheet that describes four characteristics of each of these women — defining qualities of a marriage, for better or for worse — a marriage "made in heaven," or a "hell on earth." (It can be found at the end of this sermon.) As we begin to look at it, let me make one very important note:

When the Bible speaks of people as being "married" to God, it always puts us humans in the feminine role (whether we happen to be male or female). God is always the husband, the masculine figure in the relationship. So when we apply this illustration to our own earthly marriages, we must remember that whatever is said about the bride, the wife, applies equally to both men and women. God is not saying to us guys that we are flawless like Him, and that whenever there’s a problem it is the woman’s fault. Is that clear? Whatever we learn from these two women applies to both halves of the marriage relationship.

Let’s begin looking at the worksheet by noting the "made in heaven" column first (Revelation chapter 12). Note the contrasts to the "hell on earth" side (Revelation chapter 17) as we go along.

If you’re a young person, listen up! You’re going to need this someday. If you’ve been married a while, here is an opportunity to take stock of your relationship. If perhaps you are not currently married, or perhaps if you have had a bad experience in marriage or in an intimate relationship in the past, God’s Word can help you assess what went wrong, and help you to be prepared to make a new start, perhaps, at some future time. If you are happily single: apply what we find in Revelation directly to your relationship with God!

There are four qualities of a successful, enduring, monogamous marriage:

The first quality I see in the happily married woman of chapter 12 is Simplicity.

In verse 1 of Revelation 12 we read that she is clothed with the sun, with star-flowers in her hair. She has what Ellen White calls "the simplicity of natural beauty." [3T 374; COL 19] Girls, if you want to be attractive to the kind of boy you’d like to marry someday, keep yourself simple. You don’t need tons of makeup. You don’t need rings or beads or chains or bracelets! Guys, when you propose to her, you don’t need to put a diamond on her finger. The Bible says, "Whose adorning let it not be the outward adorning" (1 Peter 3:3.) The happiest married people are the ones who don’t have to be made up or dressed up or fixed up in order to look good. The beauty is on the inside!

In verse 6 of chapter 12, we learn something else about simplicity. When this woman was being pursued by the devil, where did her heavenly Husband fix a place for her?

Not a city, not a walled fortress — but a wilderness! Our son and daughter-in-law are here this morning with us. Last December they attended a family campmeeting at the Seventh-day Adventist youth camp in their conference, conducted by an organization called "Restoration International." They came home excited about simplicity! One of the speakers there was Jim Hohnberger, who recently wrote a book, published by Pacific Press, called Escape to God. Jim and his family left a hectic life in a large Midwestern city to live in the Montana wilderness. It’s a marvelous story! They don’t tell everybody to literally do that. But they share a powerful testimony about the way a simple lifestyle can enrich our relationships!

Let’s quickly notice the contrasting quality to simplicity in chapter 17 – How is this other woman "arrayed," in verse 4? With "purple and scarlet, and adorned with gold, precious stones, and pearls." In chapter 18:3, John describes her by using the word "luxury." (The King James Version says "delicacies,") Now, look down to Revelation 18 and verse 7 to find another quality that goes with "luxury" like "peaches" goes with "cream."

"She glorified herself and lived luxuriously." The end of the verse says: "I sit as queen."

So in the right-hand column of our worksheet, we can write that the second quality of this woman is "egocentricity." This scarlet woman lives for herself. She doesn’t need any help from anybody else. She has relationships with lots of people — including "kings of earth" (17:2; 18:3) — but she’s only in it for what she can get out of it.

Now let’s go back to Revelation chapter 12 to see what kind of relationship the first woman has with her Husband. Let’s call this Mutuality. In verse 6 you can read that He prepares, and she flees. They are in cooperation. This is repeated again in verse 14.

In the "hell on earth" marriage, each partner fends for himself/herself; in the "made in heaven" marriage, each partner looks out for the other. They may not be equal; one may be stronger than other; but they cooperate and complement one another.

When Nancy and I started out in married life, I soon found that she was much more thoughtful than I was. She always remembered birthdays and special occasions. She remembered how I liked things fixed (food) and did it that way; she was thoughtful. I had a terrible time reciprocating — I hate to say it, but I was pretty much focused on myself in those days, I think, at least in my family. It used to bother her, and she’d get upset when I wasn’t as thoughtful as I should have been. I used to say that her strength was thoughtfulness, and mine was patience — I was very patient with her thoughtfulness! The Lord has taught us from each other. I have learned so much about Christlikeness from my wife! (You’d have to ask her how she feels about the other side of it.) But that’s how mutuality works.

And that genuine caring, that unselfish loving, produces the third quality of a "made-in-heaven" marriage: Intimacy. Intimacy is something that’s not so easy to talk about. After all, if I talked to you about the intimate things of my marriage, they wouldn’t be intimate any more, would they? Hollywood has horribly cheapened marriage by taking cameras into the bedroom. So in Revelation 12, the intimacy of this made-in-heaven marriage is only hinted at. Solomon, in the Old Testament, was a little more forthright when he said, "Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of [thy] life" [Ecclesiastes 9:9, KJV], and again, "Rejoice with the wife of thy youth.... Let her breasts satisfy thee at all times; and be thou ravished always with her love." "Drink waters out of thine own cistern,... let them be only thine own, and not strangers’ with thee." [Proverbs 5:18, 19, 15-17, KJV] That is intimacy — shared secrets.

Some years ago Howard and Charlotte Klinebell wrote a book called The Intimate Marriage [Harper and Row, 1970], in which they defined intimacy as not only sexual, but also emotional, intellectual, and spiritual. As someone said, intimacy begins in the kitchen. Intimacy means listening as well as talking. Intimacy means sharing one’s whole life with another. Intimacy means learning how my mate is different than I am, and why. It is learning to understand those uniquenesses, and treasuring them, and ultimately, making them my own, because we two are one.

And as I learn to be truly intimate in my marriage, I am learning to be intimate with God.

So how do we know that there is an intimate relationship here in chapter 12, between the woman and her heavenly Husband? Hint: it’s in verse 2 and again in verse 5. Do you see it there? Yes, they have a child! This is not a child that comes by accident; it’s not a child of convenience or of rash passion. This is a child that is the product of committed, faithful, covenanted, married love, the child of a deep, intimate closeness. This child knows who His Father is! The parents of this child are faithful to each other.

Now: what’s the counterfeit of intimacy? The scarlet woman in chapter 17 is intimate with any and everybody, isn’t she? Seven times in chapter 17 she’s called either a harlot or a fornicator. The word here is sensuality. True intimacy can only occur after there has been a marriage. Anything else is counterfeit. The world today has totally forgotten this fundamental fact. We need to be very upfront with our young people, both boys and girls, that any sexual activity outside of marriage is fornication, and fornication is bad because it short-circuits intimacy. Trying to be intimate without being married is like trying to quench your thirst by drinking salt water. It doesn’t work. Another way to say it: Having sex before marriage is like building a roof before you’ve put up the walls. It will fall flat. (If you are someone who has already been through that experience — don’t despair! God can rebuild that building in your life — He works miracles!)

So, intimacy is a growing oneness, as a couple perseveringly shares all of life with each other in the presence of Jesus.

The fourth quality of a marriage is the product, or result, of intimacy. God designed that marriages will produce what? Children! Before we write down #4, let’s answer this question: Whose husband is this scarlet woman’s? To whom is she married? We might say that she’s unmarried, but I don’t think so. In prophecy, we know that a woman represents a church. And who is the husband of the church? God! Notice chapter 17:3 – where does John find this woman? In the wilderness. At the end of chapter 12, where was the pure woman? In the wilderness! Revelation seems to be saying that the heavenly Bridegroom took a beautiful pure woman as his bride, and after the wedding she turned herself into a harlot! Our title today was, "Two Women, One Husband," but God is not a polygamist! He marries just one bride — and then she turns out to have a split personality. What a tragic, devastating experience for a husband! God knows what it’s like to experience a failed marriage.

There’s a vivid parable about this in Ezekiel 16. Read that chapter sometime; it’ll break your heart. But that’s another sermon.

Now notice in Revelation 17:5 that the scarlet woman does have children. The final quality of the "hell on earth" marriage is Progeny.

And the progeny of lust, the progeny of harlotry, is more harlots. She is the mother of harlots. A self-centered marriage will produce self-centered kids.

Just this month, I heard a caller to a radio show bragging to the talk show host: "My husband and I don’t let our kids run our life." Then she gave an example. She said:

"My husband and I were at an awards banquet where my husband was receiving a trophy for landscape architecture for the whole Midwest of the United States. While at the banquet, we got a call from a hospital saying that our son had been in an accident. He’d been thrown off his bicycle and was in the emergency room."

The Host asked: "What did you do?"

She answered, "Well, I made sure he was all right; but I wasn’t going to leave the banquet just to go hold his hand in the emergency room."

The talk show host was aghast. But the Bible says that in the last days, men (and women) shall be "lovers of their own selves," "without natural affection." [2 Timothy 3:2, 3] So a hell-on-earth marriage has progeny – children precious to God, but terribly handicapped because they are left to fend for themselves. They grow up with nothing but egocentricity, so they all too often reproduce it.

In contrast, the marriage made in heaven has not merely progeny but productivity, fruitfulness. (Let me just say that a marriage does not have to include children. Some couples find their marriage fruitful in other ways, even though they have no biological children.) But the woman of Revelation 12 has children, the fruit of her marriage to her husband. The firstborn, of course, is Jesus as we saw at the beginning of the chapter. Then at the end of the chapter, the Bible talks about the "rest of her offspring" — the King James Version says the "remnant of her seed" — the true church at the end of time. That’s us! And the qualities of that mother are reproduced in her kids: they "keep commandments of God" and "have the testimony of Jesus."

A couple of years ago a book was published entitled The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study. [Judith S.Wallerstein, Julia M. Lewis, Sandra Blakeslee. NY: Hyperion, 2000.] These researchers interviewed over 100 children whose parents had divorced. They followed these children for the next 25 years — and had periodic in-depth interviews with them. They also interviewed a similar control group, children from the same communities and same neighborhoods, but whose parents stayed together.

The author says of these 2 groups: "Children of divorce live in a separate . . . universe. . . . I did not expect to find these contrasts so clearly defined between youngsters brought up on the same block and attending the same schools" [pp. xxxii, xxxiii]. The researchers concluded that divorce profoundly damages a child’s capacity to have a healthy marriage relationship of his/her own.

This is a secular book, and by the grace of God a child who knows the love of Jesus can overcome those barriers! Hallelujah! Some of you have seen God work those miracles in your own life. So let’s not be discouraged. But the point is that we now know that divorce is more devastating to kids than most of the experts have thought it was. Ever since the ’60’s, conventional wisdom has said that it’s better to get out of a bad marriage than to stay in "for the sake of the kids." People have said kids are resilient and that they’ll get over it. We now know that they don’t get over it!

The author tells a story of an interview with a young adult named Gary whose parents didn’t divorce. Gary’s home wasn’t always happy. He remembered one night when mom and dad had such a bad argument that dad walked out and was still gone the next morning. Gary rode his bike to school, and on the way he stopped by his dad’s shop to see if dad was there. Dad was, and when he saw his boy at the door he left a customer standing at the counter and went straight out to the sidewalk. Dad asked if everything was OK at home, and Gary said it was. Dad looked relieved, and he took his son into the back office and they sat down and talked. Dad pointed to an old sofa against the wall, and explained that sometimes when he got too angry at mom, he’d come and sleep over here. Gary said, "Are you and mom going to get a divorce?"

I want to let the author tell the rest of the story:

[Gary said,] "I’ll always remember this part. [Dad’s] face went all saggy like he was going to cry and he reached out and hugged me hard. ‘Let me tell you something, Sport. Marriage is like a roller coaster. It has real highs and real lows. The lows have been worse than I thought and the highs have been better than I thought. The big picture is that I love your mother, and you kids are the high point of our marriage. The picture right now is your mother and I are in a slump, but we’ll work our way out of it. I know we will because we love you kids so much. Our marriage has been challenging, but it’s been a good ride and I’m hanging on till the end.’"

Gary was choking up as he recalled his father’s words and blinking back tears. We smiled at each other.

"Your father gave you a great gift. Very few dads talk that way to their young sons."

He nodded silently, unable to speak. Finally, he said, "That was one of the most important conversations of my whole life." [p. 43]

My brother, my sister, we live in a sin-damaged world. Satan would have us believe we are all children of divorce! But we have a heavenly Father who doesn’t give up. The day is soon coming when His rocky marriage with His fickle bride is going to be consummated in the greatest celebration in history — that’s in chapter 19 and it’s what we’ll study next month. In the meantime, by God’s grace we can choose to build the qualities of the Revelation 12 woman into our own marriages, our own relationships —

simplicity (a focus on inner beauty, relationships rather than possessions);

mutuality (cooperation instead of competition);

intimacy (truly knowing the one we love); and

productivity (rejoicing in the fruit of our love).

Your home can be a little heaven on earth to go to heaven in — but only if you keep the love of your heavenly Husband at the center of it.

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