Such is the general conception of the first paragraph of this chapter. The individual expressions need not detain us long. The woman's raiment of light has been already spoken of. Passing therefore from that, it need occasion no surprise that He who is Himself the Giver of light should be represented as the _Son_ of light. God "is light, and in Him is no darkness at all."[288] Jesus, as the Son of God, is thus also the Son of light. No doubt the conception is continued even after we behold the woman in her actual, not her ideal, state. Jesus is still her Son.[289] Yet there is a true sense in which we may describe our Lord not only as the Foundation, but also as the Son, of the Church. He is "the First-born among many brethren,"[290] the elder Brother in a common Father's house. He is begotten by the power of the Holy Spirit[291]; and they that believe in His name are "born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God."[292] So close indeed in the teaching of St. John is the identification of Christ and His people, that whatever is said of Him may be said of them, and what is said of them may be said of Him. Human thought and language fail to do justice to a relation so profound and mysterious. But it is everywhere the teaching of the beloved disciple--in his Gospel, in his Epistles, in his Revelation--although the Church may not fully understand it until she has lived herself more into it than she has done. Her "life" will then bring her "light."[293]
The dragon of the passage is _great_ and _red_: "great" because of the power which he possesses; "red," the colour of blood, because of the ferocity with which he destroys men: "He was a murderer from the beginning;" "Cain was of the evil one, and slew his brother;" "And I saw the woman" (that is, the woman who rode upon the scarlet-coloured beast) "drunk with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus."[294] The dragon has further _seven heads_,--seven, the number of completeness, so that he possesses everything to enable him to execute his plans; and _ten horns_, the emblem at once of his strength and of his rule over all the kingdoms of the world. Upon the heads, too, are _seven diadems_, a word different from that which had been employed for the woman's "crown" in the first verse of the chapter. Hers is a crown of victory; the diadems of the dragon are only marks of royalty, and may be worn, as they will be worn, in defeat. The dragon's _tail_, again, like the tails of the locusts of the fifth Trumpet and of the horses of the sixth, is the instrument with which he destroys[295]; and _the third part of the stars of heaven_ corresponds to "the third part" mentioned in each of the first four Trumpets. The figure of _casting the stars into the earth_ is taken from the prophecy of Daniel, in which it is said of the "little horn" that "it waxed great, even to the host of heaven; and it cast down some of the host and of the stars to the ground, and stamped upon them."[296]
The dragon next takes up his position _before the woman which was about to be delivered, that when she was delivered he might devour her child_; and the first historical circumstances to which the idea corresponds, and in which it is realized, may be found in the effort of Pharaoh to destroy the infant Moses. Pharaoh is indeed often compared in the Old Testament to a dragon: "Thou didst divide the sea by Thy strength: Thou brakest the heads of the dragons in the waters;" "Speak, and say, Thus saith the Lord God; Behold, I am against thee, Pharaoh king of Egypt, the great dragon that lieth in the midst of his rivers, which hath said, My river is mine own, and I have made it for myself."[297] The power, and craft, and cruelty of the Egyptian king could hardly have been absent from the Seer's mind when he employed the figure of the text. But he was certainly not thinking of Pharaoh alone. He remembered also the plot of Herod to destroy the Child Jesus.[298] Pharaoh and Herod--men quailed before them; yet both were no more than instruments in the hands of God. Both worked out His "determinate counsel and foreknowledge."[299]