Revelation 12

Today's reading, from Revelation 12 struck me in a new way today. It is the description of the Incarnation. A direct reflection of the prophecy in Genesis, where God speaks to Adam and Eve:



14 So the LORD God said to the serpent, "Because you have done this,
"Cursed are you above all the livestock
and all the wild animals!
You will crawl on your belly
and you will eat dust
all the days of your life.

15 And I will put enmity
between you and the woman,
and between your offspring [a] and hers;
he will crush [b] your head,
and you will strike his heel."

here in Revelation it says:

"3Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on his heads. 4His tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that he might devour her child the moment it was born. 5She gave birth to a son, a male child, who will rule all the nations with an iron scepter. And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne. 6The woman fled into the desert to a place prepared for her by God, where she might be taken care of for 1,260 days."

It strikes me that if, as Jehovah's Witnesses and some other small cults claim, Jesus was simply a man, as it seems the serpent was expecting Him to be, He would have been devoured by the serpent.

There are so many many reasons why Jesus had to be both true God and true man. This is only one.

There are so many Christians out there who in their niavate' believe that they can reinvent Christianity just by reading their own Bible at home. But there are so very many revelations and so much wisdom that God's Holy Church has gleaned over 2000 years of study and sacrifice for God's Church. People are truly missing out when they claim they don't need a Church or they don't need tradition.

Tradition (including well known facts about The Virgin Mary in the land where she lived out her final days, Ephesus Turkey) tells us that Mary never died. She just disappeared. Never has anyone claimed a grave site or anyone claimed to have been with her when she died.

So did Our Lady, go into the desert for 1,260 days and then was she "taken up". Or was she buried tenderly by God himself like Moses(Deuteronomy 34: 5&6)?