Kept, or Caught Up — and Israel Remains Israel

The woman stood beside the harlot, and the contrast was complete. But there is yet a third woman in this book, and with her it stands otherwise. She is not the opposite of the woman of Revelation 12, but her sister: the Bride, the wife of the Lamb, who at the end of the book comes down out of heaven as the new Jerusalem, "decked as a bride adorned for her husband" (Revelation 21:2; cf. 19:7). Three women, then, and it matters to keep them apart: the harlot, who is destroyed; the woman, who is kept; and the Bride, who is glorified. Whoever sweeps these three into one heap loses the thread of the whole book — and, worse still, he may accidentally define away the very people for whom this book was written.

For, to put it sharply: the woman is not the Bride. She is the mother. She brought forth the Child — the Messiah, and in Him the body that is called the Bride —; the Bride, by contrast, is the wife of the Lamb. A mother and a wife are both dearly loved, but they are not the same, and one cannot let the one be absorbed into the other without maiming both. And conversely: the Bride cannot be the woman, for the congregation did not give birth to the Messiah — He brought her forth. The woman comes first; the Bride comes forth out of her Son. Two different women, two different roles, both beloved of God.

And they are protected in two different ways. The Child, as Part I showed, was caught up to God and to His throne (12:5): up, out, before the pain. And that is not the type of the Bride but the Bride herself — Christ in His body, the fullness, born in the birth the prophets place at the time of distress, and taken away before the birth-pangs to the throne promised to the overcomer. The woman, by contrast, was kept: not up but out, not taken away but hidden and nourished, in the middle of the storm, the full 1,260 days. Two ways, and both are love. The one is carried out of the burning house; with the other, God goes and stands inside the burning house, because He will not leave her there alone. Which of the two is the greater love cannot be said; it is the same love, differently apportioned. And notice what this does not say: it does not say that the one ranks higher than the other. The difference lies in the moment and in the manner, not in the rank — and this book nowhere uses the word "station", on purpose.

There is one thing about the woman that has been left lying until now, and it grates against everything Part VIII showed. For this book places her great turning at the end: at Bozrah, when the gate breaks open and she sees the face of the Pierced One and the mourning goes over the whole house of David. That is the national recognition, and it comes late. And yet in this same book of Revelation, far before that end, stands a scene in which angels are commanded to do no harm "until we have sealed the servants of our God on their foreheads", and then a number from Israel's tribes is counted and marked (7:3-8). Marked, at the beginning. That can only be if there is already a vanguard before the great turning — a part of this people that sees earlier than the rest, not because it is better, but because God has to begin somewhere. And the prophets know that group. They even have a word for it that runs through the whole of the Tanakh: the remnant.

That is the vanguard, and in the Tanakh it has a face. Ezekiel sees, just before judgment breaks loose over Jerusalem, a man with a writer's inkhorn who goes through the city and "puts a mark on the foreheads of the men who sigh and groan over all the abominations that are done in its midst" — and only then may the slayers begin, and whoever bears the mark is passed over (Ezekiel 9:4-6). Down to the order, that is the structure of Revelation 7:3 and 9:4. Zephaniah draws the same group from the inside — an afflicted and poor people that takes refuge in the Name, and of whom it holds: "no deceitful tongue shall be found in their mouth" (Zephaniah 3:12-13), almost word for word what John says of the 144,000: "in their mouth no lie was found" (14:5). The full profile of this Remnant — Malachi's book of remembrance, Micah's oath to the fathers as the only reason they are still there, Nathanael as a portrait — is worked out in The Master Clock of Revelation, at the sealing of Revelation 7. For this book one feature is enough: the profile is Israelite and not ecclesiastical. Whoever is marked here comes from the woman: the firstfruits of her seed (14:4), sealed for their service.

But why then does their faith come so late, and why is that no reproach? Because it does not lie in their attentiveness. Paul calls it a mystery and gives its measure with it: a hardening lies over Israel — "in part", and "until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in" (Romans 11:25). In part: so there has always been a part that was not hardened. From God's side: it is no negligence from below but an ordinance from above. And with an end date: the "until" runs out. And when does it break through for them? Not only on the day at Bozrah. Zechariah sets the moment in the fire: the third part that is refined calls on the Name while it stands in the crucible, and God answers there: "This is My people" (13:9). The confession begins where the refining begins, and the refining begins at the beginning of the week.

And notice precisely what sealing is in this book. It is no removal. The angels are commanded to do the earth no harm "until we have sealed the servants of our God on their foreheads" (7:3), and what the mark accomplishes stands two chapters later in so many words: the locusts may touch only those people "who do not have the seal of God on their foreheads" (9:4). Sealing is therefore protection on the spot against what is coming — precisely the mode of the woman, with a mark added. They are not taken up like the Child; they remain standing where they stand, in the land, in the week, with the dragon below — and they are not taken out of it but carried through it. And that their number in 14:1 is still complete, without a single subtraction after all that happened between 7 and 14, says that the keeping has held.

What they are not is just as important. They are no priestly class above their people, no bridal retinue allowed to go up, and no second rank that just fell short. This book knows no stations; it knows moments and modes. What they are is the first piece of the whole: the first natural branches returning into their own olive tree, the firstfruits that stand surety for the harvest from which they come. For the woman, then, they are no competitor but a pledge: God is not yet finished with the whole, and that can be read in the middle of the page where things look darkest. She still walks toward her own recognition, at the end of the days and at the gate at Bozrah; but she does not walk that road without someone of her own house already having been sent ahead, marked on the forehead, to show that the road is there.

And here this book, written for Jewish readers, must be clearest of all, for here the old, bitter mistake was made. The great error of the ages has been to let the Bride swallow up the woman — to say that the congregation has replaced Israel, that the promises to the woman now belong to someone else, that "Israel" is henceforth merely a code-word for the church. The text forbids it. The woman is Israel — clothed with the sun, crowned with the twelve tribes, the natural olive tree onto which the nations were grafted only as wild branches. Paul puts the question directly and answers it just as directly: "Has God cast away His people? By no means!" (Romans 11:1). And he closes with a word that leaves no room at all: "for the gifts and the calling of God are without repentance" (11:29). And notice what Paul is drawing on: "God has not cast away His people" is no new saying but a quotation from the Tanakh itself (1 Samuel 12:22; compare Psalm 94:14), and "without repentance" echoes Balaam's word that God is not a man, that He should repent (Numbers 23:19). The case against replacement theology therefore rests not on the New Testament set over against the Tanakh, but on the Tanakh itself. God does not take back what He promised to this people. He has not traded the woman in for a newer model; He has kept her through the heaviest night of history in order to lead her out to a wedding. The Bride and the woman are both His, and the one does not cancel the other. Israel is Israel.

I want to be honest about where the weighing lies and where it does not. Exactly how the woman, the Bride, and "the rest of her seed" relate to one another — who falls into which company, and in what order they are kept or taken away — on that careful readers differ, and this book has followed one reading and marked it as a reading: the woman as national Israel, kept through the tribulation; the Bride as the congregation of all the ages, taken out of it; and the rest of her seed as those who come to faith after that removal — and "the rest" is not one group here: the sealed stand in it too (9:4; 14:1), alongside those who believe after the removal (13:7; 20:4). But there is one point that survives every disagreement, and that point is not weighed but hard: that Israel is not replaced. Whether you sort the companies just as this book does or otherwise — the woman remains Israel, and the promises to her remain hers.

Were you ever told that the promises are no longer yours — that your people were a chapter God has closed, an old root replaced by a newer stem? Then this chapter wants, before all else, to give this back to you. The woman wears the sun still. She is borne on the eagle's wings still. She is nourished still. God has not written her off; He has, on the contrary, kept her through the fire because He could not and would not lose her — the refined third part that Zechariah saw, carried through the fire, not around it. You are no footnote in someone else's story. You are the woman with the stars in her hair, the mother from whom the Redeemer came, and the God who carried you into the wilderness is at work bringing you home. The Bride is His beloved, and you are His beloved, and His heart is large enough for both without His taking back so much as a single promise made to you.

Three women: one who perishes, one who is kept, and one who is glorified. The woman of this book is the middle one — not destroyed like the harlot, not caught up like the Bride, but carried through the night and led out into the morning. And when the morning breaks, one image remains, the most beautiful in the whole book, with which the book began and with which it ends. One last time she stands in view — no longer fleeing into the wilderness, but coming up out of the wilderness, on the arm of her Beloved.