Daily Devotional For July 29, 2025
And the woman fled into the desert, where she has a place prepared for her by God, in order that she might be nourished there for a thousand two hundred and sixty days. Rev 12:6.
Bible scholars generally agree that the woman of Revelation 12 represents the church suffering at the hands of Satan, particularly after the resurrection of Jesus. Persecution, of course, can come in many forms.
I was born on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, . . . when it was relatively poor (today that neighborhood contains America’s most expensive real estate). My parents soon found affordable housing across the Hudson River in New Jersey. But while I grew up in another state, my family and I still thought of ourselves as New Yorkers. We went to church in Manhattan, and when we could afford it, my brother and I went to Adventist schools in the city as well.
It was tough growing up Adventist in New York City. Not only were most of the people on the street secular, we didn’t even feel at home with Christians of other denominations. We were a tiny, scattered community in the midst of an enormous world of skyscrapers and forbidden attractions. Like most New Yorkers, we hurried from one familiar place to another through a vast jungle of strangers with unfamiliar faces. To grow up Adventist in New York was to be a stranger in a strange land.
I can’t say I was ever really persecuted for my faith. I knew I was different, even strange. I wanted to be liked but the neighbor kids knew I was not like them. I didn’t go to the movie theaters with them. I never showed up at the school dances on Friday night (I went to public school for five years). When my friends asked if they could come over on Saturdays I made some excuse or other. When offered a beer or a smoke I declined as politely as I knew how (although I suffered many guilty struggles at the neighborhood candy shop). Persecuted? No. Abused? No. Scorned and rejected? Not really. My non-Adventist friends and neighbors were really nice people. A fish out of water? Yes. A stranger in a strange land? Definitely.
Growing up I felt more at home in the book of Revelation than I did in my neighborhood. John seemed to understand my struggles with the world. He understood the forbidden attractions, the sense of being different, even weird. He portrayed the kind of world I was living in. When I read about the woman in the desert, I felt she represented me. The Roman world as understood by Bible scholars was a lot like my world.1 Christians in Asia Minor, even if they weren’t persecuted, struggled with how to live as Christians in a pagan world.
Lord, train me in the relatively easy times to be faithful in the hard times that Revelation tells us are coming.
1 For more detail about the experience of Christians in the first-century Roman world, see Jon Paulien, The Deep Things of God: An Insider‘s Guide to the Book of Revelation (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald Publishing Association, 2004), 17-32.