Chapter 16
The Seven Petitions in the Night
Revelation 12-14
At a glance
Over that head [of the child who prays] each of the seven [petitions] is being fought for — and the outcome has already been announced in heaven.
The dragon, and three companies
1Rev 12:9-10
the dragon
thrown down; above, a voice proclaims the kingdom
2Rev 12:14
the woman
nourished, out of the sight of the serpent
3Rev 12:17; 13:10; 14:12
the rest of her offspring
not nourished but held fast: endurance
three companies flatten a finer field; the book The Wise counts six, part-whole and not identity
4Rev 7:16
the multitude out of the great tribulation
before the throne: "they shall hunger no more"
who that multitude is, this chapter does not decide
"thy kingdom come"
the prayer asks, in the evening
"now has come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God"
the voice proclaims, in the completed form (Rev 12:10)
Kingdom and power: two of the three words of the closing line; in the place of the glory stands salvation.
Nourish twice in the whole of Revelation, both times about the woman; with the rest there is not a single verb of nourishing.
CALCULATED, over the Textus Receptus, by lemma
- CALCULATED The key words of the seven petitions across Revelation: ἄρτος, ὀφείλημα and ῥύομαι 0×.
- CONSTRUED That the petition of the evening and the proclamation of the night carry each other; the text nowhere makes that connection.
I. Thrown Down
War breaks out in heaven. Michael and his angels fight against the dragon, and the dragon fights back, with his own — and he does not hold his ground. No place is found for him in heaven any longer. Then he falls, and in that fall the text gives him all his names, as if no one may miss who is falling here:
Four names, one direction: down. And as he falls, a voice bursts out above:
The evening prayer says: thy kingdom come. It asks for something that is not yet there; that is why it asks. And in this night a voice proclaims that it has come — no wish and no prospect, but a proclamation, in the completed form.
Whoever knows the close of the prayer — for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory — hears two of its three words in that cry. Two, not three: in the place of the glory stands salvation here.
The voice also has a second half, about an accuser who has been put out of the courtroom for good. But one sentence from its mouth I take with me, because the people it speaks of return later in this night:
Then the joy turns. The same voice that proclaims the kingdom pronounces a woe:
That is the sentence that drives the rest of the night. He has not broken loose; he has been thrown down. He comes not as a conqueror but as a loser, and everything he does from here on, he does on a clock that is running out and that he did not set himself.
He does not fall into nothing; he falls toward an inhabited world — toward the inhabitants of the earth and the sea, over whom the woe has just been pronounced. And among them stands a woman. She is the first he will seek.
ExcursusWhat a Voice in Heaven Proclaims
Twice in these chapters a proclamation sounds from heaven, and both times the verb stands in the completed form.
Revelation 11:15, at the seventh trumpet: ἐγένοντο αἱ βασιλεῖαι τοῦ κόσμου, τοῦ Κυρίου ἡμῶν καὶ τοῦ Χριστοῦ αὐτοῦ — "the kingdoms of the world have become our Lord's and his Anointed's, and He shall reign as king for ever and ever." (The Textus Receptus reads the plural, "the kingdoms"; the critical text the singular. For the point below this does not bear weight: both read the aorist — happened, not impending.)
Revelation 12:10, at the fall of the dragon: ἄρτι ἐγένετο ἡ σωτηρία καὶ ἡ δύναμις καὶ ἡ βασιλεία τοῦ Θεοῦ ἡμῶν — "now has come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God." The same ἐγένετο, and before it ἄρτι: "now", "just now" — the moment itself.
Set beside it the close of the prayer, as this book prays it: "for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever." Two of the three words stand in the cry of 12:10 — ἡ βασιλεία, the kingdom, and ἡ δύναμις, the power. The third does not: in the place of ἡ δόξα, the glory, stands ἡ σωτηρία, salvation. (CALCULATED; the comparison rests on the text of the prayer as the Textus Receptus gives it in Matthew 6:13.) That the voice of 12:10 is the doxology of the prayer is therefore not claimed here — two out of three is no quotation. What is certain: in the evening the child asks "thy kingdom come", and adds at once to whom the kingdom and the power belong; and in the night a voice proclaims both as accomplished. The prayer asks; the voice proclaims. (The texts DOCUMENTED; that petition and proclamation carry each other in this way is CONSTRUED.)
The second half of the same verse — "for the accuser of our brothers has been thrown down" — is treated in The Wise, chapter 8: "a courtroom without an accuser — for good." That half verse stays there.
II. Out of His Sight
And when the dragon sees that he has been thrown to the earth, he sets off in pursuit of the woman who had borne the son. The child he wanted to devour has been taken from him — caught up to God and to his throne, beyond his reach. What he has left is the mother.
And then it turns out that she was provided for long ago.
Her place. She does not flee into a void; she flees to an address. Earlier in this chapter it already stood there, with a verb form that says everything: a place, prepared by God — made ready before anyone at all had fled. And in that place she is nourished. Who nourishes her, the text does not say; the verb stands in the form that keeps the giver silent. Anyone who has ever heard of manna recognizes that style: no barn, no stockpile, no visible hand — a place, and food, and tomorrow again.
The dragon does what a serpent does. He spews a river after her, water like a flood from his mouth, to sweep her away. And then the ground itself takes sides:
That is all he gets. A wilderness that closes, a river that disappears into the sand — and somewhere inside it, out of his sight, a laid table. The fourth word of the evening prayer is a bread petition: give us this day our daily bread. The word bread does not occur anywhere in this whole night. What does occur is what that word means: someone eats, day after day, from a hand she does not see.
She is nourished. He stands before a closed wilderness.
III. He Went Off
He went off. It is the barest sentence of the chapter, and a whole separation lies within it: the same night, the same people, the same enemy — and a border he cannot cross, and a battlefield he can enter. Three companies. Caught up, kept, handed over. Upward, through it, under it. One people, one time, two fates: the mother in the wilderness, sheltered and nourished; her other children on the battlefield, attacked and overcome.
The camera follows him onto the battlefield. What awaits the rest there is written down without a single softening:
It was given to him — his war too is a permitted war, with a limit drawn by another. But within that limit the pressure is total. The beast has opened its mouth "to blaspheme God: to blaspheme his name", and it writes its own name on right hands and foreheads:
No one can buy or sell. Whoever cannot buy, buys no bread either. Nowhere does the night come this close to the fourth petition, and again the word does not occur: here hunger is called market. For these people there is no nourishing word, no table, no wilderness with an address. What stands there for them stands there twice, each time where the dark is at its thickest:
And the second time with the words of the beginning added: here are those who keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus. That these two sentences — the rest of the offspring, and the saints — concern one and the same circle has already been established elsewhere: "one and the same circle, named twice." The woman is nourished; they are held fast. It is not the same, and it is not less.
For the first petition of the evening prayer — hallowed be thy name — has a front in this night, and it runs across skin. Facing the name of the beast on foreheads stands, one chapter further on, a mountain:
Forehead against forehead, name against Name. His seal does not create ownership, it makes ownership visible — whoever bears the Name there was already His. And further on in the book, beside a sea of glass, stand people whom the text calls "the overcomers from the beast", and the first thing they sing is the first petition in its completed form: "Who would not fear You, Lord, and glorify your name?"
DossierThe Three Companies
The separation itself does not belong to this chapter. It is drawn in The Woman in the Wilderness, chapter 4 — "Three companies. Caught up, kept, handed over. Upward, through it, under it", and: "of them the text nowhere says that they are kept" — and in The Wise, chapter 9: "One people, one time, two fates: the mother in the wilderness, sheltered and nourished; her other children on the battlefield, attacked and overcome." What this chapter adds is only the layer of words underneath: what the text gives each company to eat. (The counts CALCULATED over the Textus Receptus, by lemma.)
As a check, the hunger words across the whole book: λιμός, "famine", occurs 2× (6:8 · 18:8) — both times in a judgment, with none of these companies. ὑπομονή occurs 7× in the book, four of them in the seven letters; of the three remaining places, two lie with this one circle (13:10 · 14:12). (CALCULATED.) And the seventh place is 1:9, where John speaks of himself: "your brother and companion in the tribulation and in the kingdom and in the endurance of Jesus Christ". The word opens the book in the mouth of an exile and returns at its two darkest places. (The seven references CALCULATED: 1:9 · 2:2 · 2:3 · 2:19 · 3:10 · 13:10 · 14:12.)
Three marks belong with this. That "the rest of her offspring" (12:17) and "the saints" of 14:12 are one and the same circle is the finding of The Wise, chapter 9 — not of this chapter. ⚠ And that book later qualified this finding itself, and the qualification belongs here: there the field counts not three companies but six, and the relation between them is explicitly part-whole, not identity — the 144,000 are called there "the counted inner body of the seed", and "the rest of her seed" "the seed as a whole minus the child; the counted body stands within it". The wise do not stand beside it but within it, as "the teaching, witnessing vanguard". This chapter uses the three that the axis of the prayer needs and thereby flattens a field that is finer; whoever wants the finer field will find it there. And in that same book the multitude of 7:14 stands explicitly outside this triptych; its distinction from the 144,000 is marked there as weighed, and only the identification of the 144,000 with the wise is disputed; this chapter adopts both marks. Who is which company — and who is in it in that hour — is not decided here.
IV. The Seven Beside the Night
Whoever walks into this night with the evening prayer naturally looks for the words. I looked for them, all seven, through the whole book — and I found them almost nowhere.
In the whole of Revelation no bread is broken and no debt is named. The verb with which the prayer asks for deliverance does not occur in the book. And the adversary, who in the prayer is called "the evil one", bears four other names in the night; the one verse in which his prayer name does seem to stand is not about him but about a sore.
That is where things stand, and I say honestly what such an empty harvest can also mean: that there is no connection. John nowhere says that he has this prayer in view. The seven petitions lie beside the night, and this is what remains of them.
And what happens is this: the words are gone, and the matters are ablaze. The name is fought over, down to the foreheads. The kingdom is proclaimed, in the completed form. Bread is handed out in a wilderness and shut off at a market. And debt — the word is missing, and in the middle of the night stands the blood of the Lamb, and there stand people who overcome by it, and a multitude that has washed its robes in it and made them white.
ExpertThe Words That Are Not There
The key words of the seven petitions, counted across the whole of Revelation. (CALCULATED over the Textus Receptus, by lemma.)
Two caveats, and they belong with the count. One: these are lemma counts. They say that the word is not there — not that the matter is not there; the two 1× cases show, moreover, that a word can stand there without carrying what it carries in the prayer: πονηρός stands there, but as a sore; θέλημα stands there, but above the night. Two: an absent vocabulary can also mean that there is no connection. The main text says so in so many words; this box repeats it, because otherwise a table seems to prove more than it does. What the table shows is this alone: whoever wants to find the seven petitions again in this book does not find them at the level of words — and must therefore look, not search.
ExpertOne Verb Form, Three Times in the Bible
In drawing up that list, one word turned out to be there after all, and it stands there in exactly the form of the first petition.
ἁγιασθήτω — "let it be hallowed", the passive imperative that chapter 3 weighed — occurs three times in the whole New Testament. Twice it is the first petition: Matthew 6:9 and Luke 11:2. And the third time stands 10 verses before the end of the Bible:
> "Let the one who does wrong still do wrong, and let the one who is filthy still be made filthy; and let the one who is righteous still be made righteous, and let the one who is holy still be hallowed." (22:11)
The counter-example belongs here at once, because the subject is a different one. In the prayer the subject is thy name; here the subject is ὁ ἅγιος, the holy one — a human being. So it is not the same sentence. What is the same is the form: the same passive imperative, and that is the only time outside the prayer that it occurs in the New Testament.
At the beginning of its prayer the child asks that a Name be hallowed. At the end of the book the same form stands over the child itself. (The count is CALCULATED over the Textus Receptus; that the two places point to each other is CONSTRUED, and the close of this book returns to it.)
Three petitions then remain, and each receives its own strange answer in the night.
The third: thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. The word will does not occur even once in the whole night. Where it does occur is above the night, in the throne room, where elders cast their crowns before the throne and sing: "You are worthy, Lord, to receive the glory and the honor and the power, for You created all things, and by your will they exist, and were created."
In heaven the will is not asked for; it is sung. The prayer asks that below may become as above already is — and the book shows both floors at once.
The sixth: lead us not into testing. The word testing stands in this book in exactly one place, in a letter to a church in Philadelphia, in a sentence on which a great deal hangs.
And the seventh: deliver us from the evil one. The prayer's word for deliver does not occur in the book. But whoever has watched this night from the beginning knows what the book shows instead of that word: the evil one himself, under four other names, thrown down — and his time measured out by another. The evening petition is one verb; the night answers with a direction: down.
And bread, finally — for of that the night has shown the most — receives not one answer but three. A woman is nourished, on the spot, day after day, out of the sight of the serpent. The rest are not nourished but held fast: endurance, twice, at the darkest places of the book.
And before the throne stands a multitude out of the great tribulation, of whom it is said: "they shall hunger no more and thirst no more [...] for the Lamb in the midst of the throne will shepherd them and lead them to springs of living water" — brought to where hunger ends. Who that multitude is, and how it relates to the others, I do not decide here.
One thing more, the smallest of this whole chapter, and it would not let me go. The voice that proclaims the kingdom in the night does not say "the kingdom of God". It says: the kingdom of our God. The first word of the prayer — the plural in which the child is placed every evening — sounds on into the proclamation. Whoever speaks there speaks in the same plural in which the child learned to pray.
Below, the dragon walks his battlefield, and he knows what time it is. Somewhere a child folds its hands: seven petitions, one by one, and then sleep. Over that head each of the seven is being fought for — and the outcome has already been announced in heaven.
HeartThe Hand That Skips No Morning
Perhaps you entered this night as I did: with the prayer in hand, looking for the words — and perhaps it startled you that they are not there. Then let me end with one petition, the fourth, because there the prayer and the night have touched for longer than this chapter has existed. In The Woman in the Wilderness I called the daily bread a manna prayer: "the prayer of those who have learned to live by the day from a hand that has never yet skipped a morning."
Look once more at the woman. Her place was prepared before she fled. Her food was arranged before she was hungry. The river was already accounted for before the serpent opened its mouth. That is how that hand works: unseen, and on time.
And when you pray tonight — for bread, for a day, for someone you cannot protect — remember what this night shows. In the darkest book of Scripture not a day goes by without someone being nourished, held fast, brought home. Three answers, and it is the same Father. Which of the three lies ready for you, you do not know in advance; that something lies ready stands there in so many words — a place, prepared, before anyone fled.
The hand that has never yet skipped a morning will not skip yours either. Whoever has learned to pray for bread for today has learned everything a person must be able to do in that night: live by the day, from that hand. And tomorrow there will be manna again.