<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Amazing Facts

Doug Batchelor

A Woman in the Wilderness

This presentation is brought to you by the Friends of the Amazing Facts Ministry.

Have you ever heard of James Sterling Moran?

Probably not, but chances are you've heard of publicity stunts which he's credited with creating.

James Moran was born in 1907 in the state of Virginia, and he entered the publicity field in the 1930s where he excelled at drawing the public's attention to his clients.

Some of his more famous stunts were sitting on an ostrich egg for 2 weeks until it hatched, tanning half of his body in California and half in Florida, or leading a live bull through a Manhattan china shop.

Then there was the needle in the haystack.

For this stunt, Moran had somebody hide a needle in 2 tons of hay.

Amazingly, he successfully located the needle after more than 82 hours of tedious searching.

You know, when you consider that there are more than 40, 000 denominations in the world today that claim to be Christian.

Finding the true church is something like looking for a needle in a haystack.

The Bible gives us specific guidelines to help us clearly identify God's end-time people.

So join me now as we take a closer look at this important topic.

Pray for me as I share with you tonight because we've got a lot to cover and I want to do my best to present this subject in a very clear and practical way.

We're gonna be talking about a woman in the wilderness, and it's based on Revelation chapter 12.

And I think it's always a good idea to start by reading the passage that we're gonna be considering.

A woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a garland of 12 stars.

Then being with child, she cried out in labor and pained to give birth.

Behold, a great fiery red dragon having 7 heads and 10 horns and 7 diadems, or crowns, 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.

And she bore a male child, who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron.

And her child was caught up to God in his throne.

Then the woman fled into the wilderness, where she had a place prepared by God that they should feed her there for 1, 260 days.

Now when the dragon saw that he had been cast to the earth, he persecuted the woman who gave birth to the male child.

But the woman was given 2 wings of a great eagle that she might fly into the wilderness to her place where she's nourished for a time and a times and half a time from the presence of the serpent.

So the serpent spewed water out of his mouth like a flood after the woman that he might cause her to be carried away by the flood.

But the earth helped the woman, and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed up the flood that the dragon had spewed out of his mouth.

And the dragon was enraged with the woman, and he went to make war with the remnant or the rest of her offspring that keep the commandments of God and have the testimony of Jesus." Who is this woman?

A Woman that flees into the wilderness, woman that brings forth a man-child.

Right here in the center of Revelation is 1 of the key characters and 1 of the most important studies in the topic or the subject of Revelation.

So the lesson is a woman in a wilderness.

We always like to begin with a historical.

We like to tie the old and the New Testament together.

Most of us know the story of Solomon, how he prayed for wisdom and God said, I'm going to give you wisdom unlike anyone who is before you.

And 1 of the many examples of his wisdom that's very famous is it tells us in the Bible that there were 2 women that had children.

They both got pregnant about the same time.

They gave birth about the same time, and then 1 night 1 of the ladies when she was sleeping she accidentally overlaid her little infant child and suffocated it.

When she woke up during the night to nurse the baby and saw it was dead, she was devastated.

And then she heard her companion's baby whimpering and she thought, I'm too ashamed for anyone to know what I've done.

She put her dead baby in that place and took the live baby to herself.

Well when the women got up in the morning, the 1 woman went to go nurse her baby and it was dead.

And she looked at it and said, this is not my baby.

And the other 1 said, no, that's your baby, this one's my baby.

The judges didn't know what to do with it, so it came to the king.

And you know of course what Solomon said, he said, well 1 of you is saying the living baby is yours and the dead baby is hers and vice versa.

He said, well the only thing you can do is split the baby in 2, which has become a proverb in our society to divide the baby.

And Solomon told his soldier, let's divide the baby.

And the real mother threw herself down before Solomon and said, oh, my lord, the king, don't do that.

And the other 1 said, no, it's a fair thing to do.

Solomon said, well, obviously this is the real mother.

And people were so impressed by his wisdom that was revealed when the soldier pulled out his sword.

Now, what does the sword represent in Bible truth?

It tells us that the Word of God is quick and powerful and sharper than any two-edged sword, Hebrews chapter 4.

What does a woman represent in Bible symbology?

And when we look in Revelation 12 at this beautiful glorious woman, close the light, she must be the true church.

Then there's another woman, there's only 2 women in Revelation.

You got a counterfeit woman in Revelation 17.

So you don't have to guess if she's good or bad, right?

So we're going to be talking, we'll be using the sword of God's spirit to figure out how do you identify the true church in a world today where you've got hundreds if not thousands of different Christian denominations.

And I want to reiterate that I believe there are Christian people in many different churches.

There are people that love the Lord and 1 denomination does not have a copyright on salvation.

But God does have a people and a movement in the last days and he's going to pull people together.

How does Revelation picture God's true church?

Now we just read this to get our background.

You read in Revelation 12 verse 1 pictured as a what?

And you can look around, if you look at a lot of the medieval art, you'll often see Mary standing on, paintings and sculptures of Mary, standing on the moon, 12 stars above her head, she's holding the baby, and she'll have a halo of like sun behind her.

It says she flees into the wilderness where she's persecuted for 1260 years.

This is a broad picture of God's true church.

Jesus said to the church, you are the light of the world.

God made the sun, God made the moon, God made the stars.

Back to Menu

A Woman in the Wilderness

Transcript

Sponsor

Recorded

Related

Cleansing the Sanctuary

Cleansing the Sanctuary Part 1

28m

Windows in Heaven

28m

Our Crucial Need for the Holy Spirit

28m

The Wonder of the Word

The Wonder of the Word, Part 1

28m

Bricks Without Straw

02 Bricks Without Straw

28m

The Supreme Sacrifice

28m

Prophecy Encounter

The Great Judgment Day Pt. 1

28m

Commands of the King

Commands of the King, Part 1

28m

Refusing Babylon’s Buffet

Refusing Babylon’s Buffet, Part 1

28m

Prophecy Encounter

A Woman Rides a Beast, Pt. 2

28m

Dream of the Empires

28m

Prophecy Encounter

A Woman Rides a Beast, Pt. 1

28m

Sound Doctrine