Revelation 12:2

And she was in pain to deliver. Thus the Lord in the Gospel: A woman, when she is in labor, has sorrow because her hour has come; but as soon as she has given birth to the child, she no longer remembers the anguish, for …

And being with child, she cried out in travail. The Church, spiritually, both gives birth to those she brings forth and continues to labor for those already born. As she herself says: My little children, for whom I labor in birth again until Christ is …

And she being big with child,....

And she being with child cried, travailing in birth, etc. - This, when taken in connection with the following verses, is a striking figure of the great persecution which the Church of Christ should suffer under the heathen Roman emperors, but more especially of that long and most dreadful one under Diocletian. The woman is represented as Being with child, to show that the time would speedily arrive when God’s patient forbearance with the heathen would be terminated, and that a deliverer should arise in the Christian world who would execute the Divine vengeance upon paganism.

And she being with child cried, travailing in birth ... - That is, there would be something which would be properly represented by a woman in such circumstances. The question now is, what is referred to by this woman? And here it need hardly be said that there has been, as in regard to almost every other part of the Book of Revelation, a great variety of interpretations. It would be endless to undertake to examine them, and would not be profitable if it could be done; and it is better, therefore, and more in accordance with the design of these notes, to state briefly what seems to me to be the true interpretation: (1) The woman is evidently designed to symbolize the church; and in this there is a pretty general agreement among interpreters. The image, which is a beautiful one, was very familiar to the Jewish prophets. See the notes on Isa 1:8; Isa 47:1; compare Ezek. 16. (2) But still the question arises, to what time this representation refers: whether to the church before the birth of the Saviour, or after? According to the former of these opinions, it is supposed to refer to the church as giving birth to the Saviour, and the “man child” that is born Rev 12:5 is supposed to refer to Christ, who “sprang from the church” - κατὰ σάρκα kata sarka - according to the flesh (Prof. Stuart, vol. 2, p. 252). The church, according to this view, is not simply regarded as Jewish, but, in a more general and theocratic sense, as “the people of God.” “From the Christian church, considered as Christian, he could not spring; for this took its rise only after the time of his public ministry. But from the bosom of the “people of God” the Saviour came. […]