Every type and shadow in the OT has it connection to Christ, we need to let the Law and the Prophets be our guide in the book of Revelation. For without them, we are slaves to our own imaginations and the imaginations of other uninspired commentators. That said, if we commit ourselves to reading of Revelation in light of the whole Bible, then we can read it with anticipation that we will find overlapping images from the Old Testament that bring us face-to-face with the exalted Christ. 

Any time you read Revelation, it is like stepping out of reality and into a carnival of mirrors. Only those mirrors do not, or should not, reflect our own faces, so much as they reflect the prophets of the Old Testament, whose faces were reflected the glory of God’s Son.
While Revelation is a book that is filled with signs, those signs have a registered trademark—a trademark found in the Old Testament. And anytime we read Revelation we should labor to understand the book in its canonical context. To that end, let me offer three words of how to interpret and apply this chapter.
These three exhortations come from my last sermon on Revelation 12. But they would apply to any passage in this glorious and mystifying book.
First, Revelation is a book signs and symbols.
In Revelation 1:1, John uses the word for signs to describe what God has “indicated” (better: signified) to him. And in Revelation 12, we find two signs mentioned. In verse 1, John sees a great sign in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. Then, in verse 3, another sign in heaven appears, a Red Dragon ready to devour the woman’s son
In these two signs, we see a symbol of the woman and her seed and the serpent and his seed. Accordingly, Revelation 12 can be seen as a chapter that comments on Genesis 3:15 and the history of seed warfare between God’s people and God’s enemies. Therefore, to understand this chapter (and this book), we need to see how the signs relate to the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent (as well as a host of other Old Testament prophecies). 
Second, the interpretation of these symbols comes from the Old Testament.
If you are like me, you’ve seen enough end-times movies to know that not everyone who reads Revelation does so with the Old Testament in mind. But such immediate appeals to modern weapons and contemporary geo-political actors is a failure to read Revelation in its biblical context.
In the nineteenth century, George Tyrell, a Jesuit priest who was defrocked for his liberal theology, mocked other liberal theologians for making Jesus look like themselves.  He said famously, “The Christ that Harnack sees, looking back through nineteen centuries of ‘Catholic darkness,’ is only the reflection of a Liberal Protestant face, seen at the bottom of a deep well.”
To put it plainly, this is how one scholar dunks on another. In today’s post, I don’t want to dunk on anyone, but I do want us to avoid reading our face or our place into the Bible. And this is what I do see with many who read Revelation a secret decoder ring for the future.
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First and foremost, Joe Biden is a person made in the image of God. He’s likely battling fear, pride, and a swirl of other emotions. My prayer is that he will find his rest in Christ. And that those on the right and left will restrain from dehumanizing him–either by propping him up because of their own political calculations or by mocking him in the hopes it will help their opposing party.

The year was 1806. John Newton, the author of Amazing Grace, was 81 (almost 82). He vowed that as long as the old African blasphemer had breath in his lungs he’d ascend to the pulpit and proclaim the Jesus who saved him.
But there was one problem. Newton could barely string together coherent sentences at this point. Always an extemporaneous preacher, Newton would begin one point and then launch into an entirely unrelated point. His eyes were so dimmed that he couldn’t even read the scant notes he brought into the pulpit.
He was no longer helping his congregation.
When he was in his mid-30’s Newton had been struck by this quote from Cotton Mather: “My usefulness was the last idol I was willing to give up; But now I thank the Lord, I can part with that also, and am content to be anything or nothing, so that His wise and holy will may be done!”
In his 70’s Newton wrote to a young John Ryland, Jr. about this “trial” of old age.
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“I’ve been delegated to synod four times now, and each time increasingly feels like war,” pastor and Abide clerk Aaron Vriesman wrote after Synod 2023. “The CRC’s existential crisis has been building for some time. Each synod is a battle of opposing visions for the CRC, with diametrically opposing values. While synodical sermons trumpet Christian unity and the worship times lead us to rejoice together in one circle, the reality among the delegates and throughout the CRC is a battle for the soul of the denomination.”

Two years ago, in a move that surprised almost everyone, the synod of the Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRC) voted 123–53 to affirm that “unchastity” in the Heidelberg Catechism includes adultery, premarital sex, extramarital sex, polyamory, pornography, and homosexual sex.
“What now?” asked an article in the denominational publication, The Banner, two weeks later. “How will this decision play out?”
It was a good question. Some wondered if the vote wasn’t an accurate reflection of the denomination but instead a “coup” by a few well-organized conservatives. The FAQs released by the denomination included ways to change synod’s decision and ways for pastors, elders, or deacons to stay in office while disagreeing with the denomination’s position on sexuality. They could submit a “confessional-difficulty gravamen”—which is “a personal request for information and/or clarification of the confession”—to their church council.
In other words, you could tell your church you weren’t sure about the CRC’s position on sexuality, then continue to serve indefinitely.
In 2023, a fresh batch of synod delegates took another run at the issue. The vote splits looked much the same as the year before, and the confessional status of the definition of “unchastity” was upheld.
Then, as time was running out on the last afternoon, a vote was finally called on gravamina—to clarify they were temporary, not a permanent way to operate in the CRC while disagreeing with her confessions.
It felt rushed; the discussion had only been 10 minutes long. And to progressives, it also felt predetermined; the conservatives had won every vote so far. Emotions were running high when a handful of delegates said they no longer trusted the body, took off their name tags, and walked out in protest.
Out of time, synod voted to delay the issue another year. The CRC had never done that before. To conservatives, it felt like the liberal members had just won more time to maneuver their way out of church discipline.
“I was weeping,” said Jason Ruis, chair of the committee that proposed limitations on gravamina. “I thought we just saw the death of the denomination. I thought the vast majority was in agreement with what we were putting forward, but it got hijacked again by a small group of people. I thought [fellow] conservatives were going to say, ‘I’m done with this. Let’s go someplace else.’”
But they didn’t. This summer, the gravamen issue was the first that synod took up. By a vote of 137–47, they gave office-bearers three years to work through their difficulties. Synod also voted 134–50 that publicly affirming churches needed to stop and to publicly repent within a year or, at the most, two.
Next year, only delegates without gravamina will be allowed to serve in regional gatherings or at synod, effectively ending the debate. For a denomination that has slid leftward since the mid-1990s, this has been a remarkably quick and decisive shift back to orthodoxy.
“To feel like I’m part of this denomination, and part of that reshaping that is happening right now, is super exciting,” California pastor Patrick Anthony said. “To be the one denomination that was going liberal to have it not happen—why would God be so gracious to us?”
Dutch Reformed to Mainline-ish
Founded in 1857 by Dutch immigrants, the CRC draws from an old, rich history of Reformed theology and love of education. Less than 20 years after it began, the CRC founded a college and seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and named them both after John Calvin. Later, another CRC-affiliated college would name itself after the synod in Dordrecht, Holland, that outlined the five points of Calvinism. (I sit on the board there.)
Membership in the CRC grew fairly steadily until 1992, when it peaked at more than 315,000 members in nearly 1,000 churches. The average church size was 300.
And then things seemed to fall apart.
In 1995, after 25 years of arguing over women in office, synod finally said each congregation could decide for itself. Thirty-six complementarian churches left, and their 7,500 attendees formed a new denomination—the United Reformed Churches in North America (URCNA).
The CRC’s numbers never recovered. Over the years, more conservative churches left to join the URCNA, and the CRC’s numbers began to follow the mainline path of decline. Fewer babies were born, fewer teens enrolled at Calvin University, and fewer young people stayed in the denomination.
The CRC also followed the mainline in a decline in personal piety. For about 25 years after the split, CRC members reported reading the Bible less, praying less, and having fewer personal and family devotion times.
Perhaps most concerning were the implications for belief. Studies show mainline church members are less likely than evangelicals to believe the Bible is the word of God. Was the CRC losing that too?
Progressive Leadership
Certainly, with the rise of Donald Trump, prominent CRC leaders were distancing themselves from American evangelicalism. “I Never Was an Evangelical, and I Never Want to Be,” CRC member and Calvin professor of English Debra Rienstra wrote in 2017. Her colleague Kristin Kobes Du Mez published Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation in 2020.
“I devoted more of my career than I can believe to help recover and nurture the better part of the CRC tradition in the hope that it might occupy some space between both the mainline and Evangelical sides of American Protestantism,” Calvin professor emeritus of history James Bratt wrote in 2022. He, Rienstra, Du Mez, and Calvin philosophy professor James K. A. Smith have all signaled LGBT+ support. In 2021, about 150 Calvin professors and staff told the administration they opposed a CRC report supporting biblical sexuality.
Until 2020, those faculty were required to be members of a CRC church. Because of geography—the CRC headquarters was four miles down the road—they often ended up in the same churches as the CRC leadership. In that corner of Grand Rapids, there are 21 CRC churches within about 10 miles of each other. Their classis, or regional body, is called Grand Rapids East.
“Many denominational employees are part of those churches,” said Orland Park CRC pastor Derek Buikema, president of synod this year. “And a significant number of professors and members of administration at Calvin University and Calvin Seminary also go to those churches. Classis Grand Rapids East churches dominate the ethos of the entire denominational apparatus.”
In 2011, Grand Rapids East asked synod to revisit its historical perspective on human sexuality. When it declined, members in two of its churches founded All One Body, an organization that advocates for “unrestricted membership and full participation” in the church of those living LGBT+ lifestyles.
Five years later, Grand Rapids East released its own report, which it also submitted to synod. It explained the advancements in scientific and theological thinking and recommended the CRC allow for diverse views on sexuality.
That same year, another classis—this one from Alberta, Canada—suggested synod appoint a panel of LGBT+ advisers. And another report, this one official, advised synod to allow CRC pastors to use their discretion when asked to attend a same-sex wedding or make their facilities available for a same-sex wedding. CRC pastors should also be allowed to officiate civil same-sex ceremonies, they said.
But the 2016 synod wasn’t amenable. The delegates turned down the LGBT+ advisers and voted by a 60 percent majority to tell pastors they couldn’t officiate, participate in, or allow their buildings to be used for same-sex weddings.
In response to Grand Rapids East’s report, they appointed an official study committee on human sexuality. Every person on it, they said, must “adhere to the CRC’s biblical view on marriage and same-sex relationships.”
Conservative Synod
The committee had five years to do its work—and then six, when Synod 2021 was canceled for COVID-19. During that time, Neland Avenue CRC—a member of Grand Rapids East—installed a female deacon who was in a same-sex marriage (perhaps hoping to force the issue at synod). Calvin University students elected an openly gay undergrad as student body president and a Calvin professor officiated a same-sex wedding for a Calvin staffer at a campus-based research center.
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