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Key Bible Verse: A woman … gave birth to a boy who was to rule all nations… . Then there was war in heaven (Revelation 12: 1-5). Bonus Reading: Rev. 12:1-17

One view of Christmas I have never seen on a card, probably because no artist could do it justice. Revelation 12 gives us a glimpse of Christmas as it must have looked from somewhere far beyond Andromeda. Instead of shepherds and wise men it pictures a dragon leading a ferocious struggle in heaven. A woman clothed with the sun and wearing a crown of 12 stars cries out in pain as she is about to give birth. Suddenly the enormous red dragon enters the picture, his tail sweeping a third of the stars out of the sky. He crouches hungrily before the woman, anxious to devour her child the moment it is born. At the last second the infant is snatched away to safety, the woman flees, and all-out cosmic war begins.

In daily life two parallel histories occur simultaneously, one on earth and one in heaven. Revelation, however, melds them together. On earth a baby was born, a king caught wind of it, a chase ensued. In heaven the Great Invasion had begun, a daring raid by the ruler of the forces of good into the universe's seat of evil.

—Philip Yancey in The Jesus I Never Knew

My Response: This Christmas Day I'll thank the Father for his initiative in launching the Great Invasion.

Thought to Apply: God our deliverer, whose approaching birth still shakes the foundations of our world, may we so wait for your coming with eagerness and hope that we embrace without terror the labor pangs of the new age. —Janet Morley

Adapted from The Jesus I Never Knew (Zondervan, 1995) by permission.

Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today International/Men of Integrity magazine.
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Prayer for the Week

This Christmas, God, let me see behind a Jesus sanitized and neutered over the years to your actual battle-scarred, dragon-slaying Son.

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