537. Behold, a great, fiery red dragon. This symbolizes people in the Protestant Reformed Church who make God three entities and the Lord two, and who divorce charity from faith, making faith saving and not at the same time charity.
These are the people meant by the dragon here and in the following verses. For they are antagonistic to the two essential elements of the New Church, namely, that God is one in essence and person, in whom is the Trinity, and that that God is the Lord; moreover, that charity and faith are one, like an essence and its form, and that only those people possess charity and faith who live in accordance with the Ten Commandments, which teach that evils are not to be done. To the extent anyone does not do evils then, by refraining from them as sins against God, to the same extent he does goods which are goods of charity and believes truths that are truths of faith.
[2] Everyone who considers it can see that people who make God three entities and the Lord two, and who divorce charity from faith, making faith saving and not at the same time charity, are antagonistic to these two essential elements of the New Church.
When we say that they make God three entities and the Lord two, we mean people who think of three persons as three gods and distinguish the Lord's humanity from His Divinity. Who, moreover, entertains any other thought, or can entertain any other thought, when he prays in accordance with the formal expression of his faith "that God the Father may send the Holy Spirit for His Son's sake"? Does he not pray to God the Father as one God, for the sake of the Son as another, concerning the Holy Spirit as a third?
It is apparent from this that even though someone intellectually may make the three persons one God, still he distinguishes between them, which is to say that he pictures them as three Gods when he prays these words. The same formal expression of his faith also makes the Lord two entities, since one thinks then only of the Lord's humanity and not at the same time of His Divinity; for the phrase, "for His Son's sake," means for the sake of His humanity that suffered the cross.
From this it can now be seen just who those are who are meant by the dragon which attempted to devour the woman's child, and which, because of the child, afterward pursued the woman into the wilderness.
[3] The dragon is called great because, with the exception of some people here and there who do not believe in the same way regarding the Trinity and faith, all the Protestant Reformed churches distinguish God into three persons and make faith alone saving. People who distinguish God into three persons and cling to this statement in the Athanasian Creed, "There is one Person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Spirit," and also to this, "The Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God" - these people, I say, cannot make one God out of three. They can indeed say they are one God, but they cannot think it.
By the same token people who think of the Lord's Divinity from eternity as a second person in the Godhead, and of His humanity in time as being like the humanity of any other person, cannot help but make the Lord two entities, despite the statement in the Athanasian Creed that His Divinity and humanity are one person, united like soul and body.
[4] The dragon is called fiery red because a fiery red color symbolizes falsity arising from the evils attendant on lusts, which is a falsity of hell.
Now because these two fundamental doctrinal tenets in the Protestant Reformed churches are false, and falsities destroy the church, inasmuch as they take away its truths and goods, therefore they were represented by the dragon. That is because a dragon in the Word symbolizes the destruction of the church, as can be seen from the following passages:
I will make Jerusalem a heap of ruins, a habitation of dragons; and I will turn the cities of Judah into a wasteland... (Jeremiah 9:11)
Behold..., there has come... a great tumult out of the north country, to turn the cities of Judah into a wasteland, a habitation of dragons. (Jeremiah 10:22)
Hazor shall be a habitation of dragons, a desolation forever. (Jeremiah 49:33)
...that it may be a habitation of dragons, a courtyard for the offspring of owls. (Isaiah 34:13)
In the habitation of dragons, her couch... (Isaiah 35:7)
I will go stripped and naked; I will make a wailing like dragons, and a mourning like the offspring of owls. (Micah 1:8)
...I cried out for help. I am a brother of dragons, and a companion of the offspring of the screech owl. (Job 30:28-29)
The iyyim 1 will reply in her palaces, and dragons in her... temples. (Isaiah 13:22)
Let Babylon be a heap, a habitation of dragons, as a hissing and an astonishment... (Jeremiah 51:37)
You have crushed us in the place of dragons, and covered us with the shadow of death. (Psalms 44:18-19)
I have made (Esau's) mountains a wasteland, and his inheritance one for dragons of the wilderness. (Malachi 1:3)
And so on elsewhere, as in Isaiah 43:20, Jeremiah 14:6, Psalms 91:13-14, Deuteronomy 32:33.
[5] The dragon here means people who are caught up in faith alone and who reject works of the Law as not saving, and I have had this attested several times by personal experience in the spiritual world. I have seen many thousands of such people assembled into companies, and at a distance then they looked like a dragon with a long tail, which seemed to be covered with thorn-like spikes, symbolizing falsities.
I also once saw a still bigger dragon, which arched its back and extended its tail up to the sky in an effort to draw down the stars from there.
I thus had it visually shown to me that these and no others are the people meant by the dragon.
Footnotes:
1. A Hebrew word אִיִּים, appearing only three times in the Old Testament (Isaiah 13:22; 34:14
