NOTES for Rev 12:17

The birth of Christ means the defeat of the devil: with Christ the Kingdom also entered the world, and the very fact of its entry into the world means the end of the power of Satan and the dark forces. But the end does not come in a single instant; it is a process stretched out in time. Its essence is shown to the apostle with complete clarity: it is the confrontation between the 'seed of the woman,' which is clearly identified with Christians, and the dragon, for whom Christians now become the chief enemies. This is the essence of all Christian history, the history of the age in which we have had to live.

It began with the coming of Christ and will end on the day of His return and the final triumph of the Kingdom. History after the coming of Christ has no other meaning. But if one looks from the point of view of eternity, it turns out that the devil has already been defeated. Indeed, the Kingdom is eternity; it is the fullness of all times and all spaces that exist in the world created by God, except for those that were torn from it by forces opposing God and by wills resisting Him.

And if the Kingdom has entered our world, this means that the world has already ceased to exist in its former quality, as something separate from the Kingdom, from God's great world. The only question is how strong the inertia of the former movement and former processes will prove to be, processes that prevent the Kingdom from entering the world to the end, and prevent the world, also to the end and in fullness, from becoming the Kingdom. The forces of darkness need this inertia; in it lies their only hope and support.

The struggle of the dragon with the 'seed of the woman' comes down to subjecting Christians to the inertia of the fallen world's movement, a movement directed not toward the Kingdom but away from it. Objectively, such movement means spiritual inversion. The whole world of God is His Kingdom, and movement in the opposite direction means falling into emptiness, into a kind of existential black hole, onto that underside of creation that in the New Testament books is called the outer darkness. Outer, of course, in relation to God's world, to the Kingdom. To make the underside become the front side: this is the devil's overriding task, which he tries with all his strength to solve.