Come and study the Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast,

The Whole Council of God. Father Stephen holds a Ph.D. in biblical studies, and it's an Orthodox

priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana. Okay, we'll go ahead and get started.

And we'll get started here in just a moment.

We're actually picking up sort of in the middle of chapter 13 of the revelation of St. John.

We're going to be picking up at chapter 13 verse 11. And we're sort of in

Beast Fest, I guess, because we've seen a dragon in one beast, and there's going to be

more beast coming up tonight. So So just to try and recap quickly,

we've talked several times now about how

Book of Revelation is organized in these sort of cycles,

these cyclical patterns, where St. John will introduce themes

and then kind of develop them in the next sort of cycle.

So each cycle goes around, but it also kind of moves forward, right, like a spiral or a corkscrew

or whatever you want to mentally imagine.

And so a new one of those started at the beginning of chapter 12.

And we saw this depiction of the birth of Christ.

We saw the dragon who was identified as being the serpent from Genesis as being the devil,

attempting to lay hold of Christ.

He was unable to do that.

And so after Christ, essentially, he goes after Christ's people.

But though he persecutes Christ's people,

they're ultimately protected.

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