The Last Remnant, Part 1

The time frame of this verse is significant. The previous verses (Revelation 12:14–16) show us that the dragon’s wrath was kindled due to the events at the end of the 1,260-day prophecy in AD 1798. It was as the Scriptures had predicted: “The saints [were] … given into his hand” (Daniel 7:25)—that is, the Catholic Church’s—only until the end of that prophetic time period. At that time, Satan’s plots against the people of God were curtailed: The Roman Catholic Church was officially defeated upon the capture of its pope, and Protestants, now free from persecution, had already begun dispersing throughout the globe.

The 1,260 years are also described in Daniel 11:33–35. The saints “fall by sword and flame, by captivity and plundering” (v. 33). Verse 35 tells us that the persecution stops at “the time of the end.” We know from the 1,260-day prophecy what date that is: AD 1798. We can thus conclude that Scripture denotes all time after the year 1798 as “the time of the end.”

In today’s verse, we see that Satan, “enraged” by the defeat, centers his counterattack on “the rest of her offspring” living after 1798, which we can now denote as those living in the end times. The “her” refers to the woman, God’s true church. The King James renders the phrase “the remnant of her seed.” The term “remnant” means what is leftover, what remains. In the Bible, a remnant is preserved recurrently through the ages: Noah and his family (Genesis 7:23), Elijah and the true prophets in Israel (1 Kings 19:18), Daniel and his friends (Ezekiel 6:8).

What they have in common is that they all kept their faith after the majority of God’s people fell away. Through them, essential Bible truths have been passed down through the ages. After the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the remnant transitioned from the Jewish nation to the Christian church, spiritual Jews, where now “there is a remnant according to the election of grace” (Romans 11:5).

My Deliverer, thank You for the assurance of Your unfailing grace, which has continually saved a remnant out of destruction.

For Further Study: Genesis 3:15; Romans 9:27; Revelation 3:10, 11

Key Bible Texts

And the dragon was wroth with the woman, and went to make war with the remnant of her seed, which keep the commandments of God, and have the testimony of Jesus Christ. (Revelation 12:17 KJV)