The Divine Council: Satan’s Assaults in History and the Future
Angelic Rebellion Lesson #17
January 7, 2021
Dr. Robert L. Dean, Jr.
www.deanbibleministries.org
Opening Prayer
“Father, we indeed live in the devil’s world. So often things have been so good, so stable, and so peaceful and calm. We’ve been living in a country where the foundation was Your Word. Our leaders, if not believers who were truly justified, they seemed to be influenced by Judeo-Christian worldview, but that is no longer the case.
“We have such antagonism and hatred and division in this nation and such distrust. We have media which doesn’t tell us the truth, cannot tell us the truth, and does not know what’s going on. That’s on both spectrums, left and right. So often we are left just wondering what’s going on and what is the truth.
“Father, we know that You are the truth. Your Word is truth. Jesus is the way to truth and the life. That’s the only truth we can rely on and depend on and that is where we get our stability. We need to get our eyes off of politics. We need to get our eyes off of current events. We need to put them squarely upon Your Word.
“We need to understand that the biblical principles are for how we as believers are to live in a culture that is completely given over to moral relativism, paganism, and hostility to the Word of God. Father, we know we can have great joy. We have examples in Scripture, everyone from Joseph at the end of Genesis, Moses, Paul, Daniel, and looking at many others who lived and operated under empires and rulers where there was a lack of freedom but there’s freedom in our relationship with You.
“Father, we pray that You would enable us to focus upon You because as Isaiah says that You keep us in perfect peace and tranquility and stability when our focus is upon You and our minds are stayed on You. We pray that You would strengthen us in that regard to put our minds on that which has eternal value and go about the mission that the Lord Jesus Christ has given us. We pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.”
Slide 2
I talked to several people over the last day or so who, not unlike me, had phones starting to blow up yesterday afternoon and evening. I do not have time to look at these. People don’t understand how much I’m having to read and focus on the Word right now and I am not going to cave into the pressure from Satan’s world to focus on what is going on.
One of the lessons that I hope we all learned this last summer is that it was very easy to allow the media to cause us to jump to conclusions about what we have seen and photographed, what we have heard, the narrative that is shaped by the media from one end of the spectrum to the other.
We should have learned that from watching how the media handled the war in Vietnam some forty or fifty years ago, but we don’t learn these lessons. One of the lessons I have learned this year is that I am waiting two or three months after an event before I form any opinion simply because we don’t know all the facts.
Think about what happened with George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and several of the others, the one situation up in Wisconsin and others. It’s months before we get all of the data. We’re all inclined to jump to conclusions and say we know what happened. None of us are omniscient. None of us were in Washington, D.C.
I will tell you this. What happened yesterday was horrible. It was tragic. It was inexcusable. There was nothing that happened yesterday in Washington, D.C. that justified any level of violence or destruction of property. Four people died yesterday and that is incredibly tragic.
We have gone through this, how many times, as a congregation over the last twelve years? When is it right to disobey law? It is only right biblically when the law is telling us and forcing us to disobey God. That’s the only time. There is no justification for civil disobedience in this situation or any others.
This always brings up questions about what about the War for Independence? We’ve gone through that. We went through that this summer. Basically, as I taught this summer, the War for Independence was a just war. It took ten or twelve years of working through the legal system, patiently and calmly, over and over again before there was ever any real violence. I’m speaking of what happened at Lexington and Concord.
Before that, there was the Boston Tea Party. If what happened yesterday has any parallel, it’s the Boston Tea Party. The Boston Tea Party was not just. The war was a just war but any just war that takes place in our world is always going to be flawed because we’re all sinners. There will be mistakes made. There will be tragic injustices that take place. That doesn’t reduce the culpability of those who were involved in destroyed the private property of tea in Boston Harbor. That was an egregious thing.
Many of those involved were believers. They were misled and they misapplied the Word. Those things will happen in a fallen world, but the believer should not be seduced into thinking that violence is the way of handling the situation at all.
It is very tragic about what happened yesterday and what took place should be condemned with the strongest voice. There are different reports of different things that happened. We don’t know all the details yet. Interesting little things come out, but not everything. Our responsibility is to focus on our spiritual life.
We should focus on that which God has called us to do. We should focus on our families. We should make sure our kids, or our grandkids understand what the biblical perspective is, understand what is going on, when many of us do not understand what is going on. We have to give them the source of stability which is God and God’s Word. Remind them of that over and over again as we need to be reminded about it over and over again. When we get our eyes on the storms of life and the storms of politics, we lose focus.
For most of us we’ve never witnessed the times of instability that took place prior to 1950. We had the Korean War. We had the Vietnam War, but for most of us what happened in World War II was just in history books.
We have to realize that we have lived in an historic bubble that has led many of us to think that this is the way it should be. That’s not biblical and it’s not realistic. We need to be about focusing on what the Scripture says. The thing we need to do is wait until we have all the information before we jump to conclusions.
We have to remember that a right thing done in a wrong way is always wrong. Another way of putting that is that the end justifies the means. That is a major principle in Marxism, so we do not justify wrong behavior because it involves someone we like or a cause we like or something of that nature. It’s never justifiable.
What we need to do is be in prayer for our country. We need to be in prayer for our leaders. We need to be in prayer that there will be honest investigations of all that has been going on and that the truth will be known and that something will be done about it.
But if that doesn’t happen then we have to go forward and focus on the Word of God and not be distracted by these things. We have the promises of Scripture, and we need to cling to those and the grace of God in applying the Word that we have been taught.
That’s what we’re going to do tonight. We’re going to continue our study of what it’s like to live in the devil’s world. The devil is the god of this age. Twice, Jesus says he is the ruler of this world. We know from 1 Peter 5:8 that we are to be sober minded.
What that means is to be objective in our thinking, to understand the truth and operate on it. We are not to be distracted by all of the distractions and lies and deceptions that Satan throws at us.
This is what we’re doing in this 17th lesson. Probably Sunday morning we will be going back to Ephesians. I thought we would be in 2 Peter 2:4–5 tonight and the last half of this presentation is all about that, but I knew that there were some things we needed to tidy up at the end.
Slide 3
We need to look at Satan’s assaults in history to give us that overall perspective. The first thing we’re going to look at are these assaults of Satan. The first assault took place in the Garden of Eden. We have gone through this so it’s not new information for you.
It was in the Garden of Eden that God had created the human race. God placed them in the Garden. They were perfect and in perfect righteousness. It was an environment of perfection, an environment of justice. God, in His permissive will, allowed Satan to come into that Garden to tempt Adam and Eve.
He started with Eve and he showed his basic skill which I pointed out in the last couple of lessons. This skill is deception. He does that in extremely subtle, wily ways where there’s much, much subterfuge. The verse I put up on the slide is Revelation 5:9 because that identifies the fact that Satan, who is the Great Dragon, is the serpent of old, referring to the serpent in the Garden.
This has been the character of the human race since Adam sinned, since Eve sinned which is called the Fall of man. This world is nothing like God designed it. It is nothing like God even designed it after the Fall and the Flood. The Flood really reshaped everything.
Everything is different. We went from perfection to perfection minus one to perfection minus two. We live in an extremely, corrupt world. In our souls there is the desire for justice. There is the desire for truth. There’s a desire for that which is right.
Sometimes we actually know what right is. This is the problem in this movement for social justice today. There’s something in the hearts of mankind that looks at some situations and says that it’s wrong. That’s right. We live in the devil’s world and there’s a lot that is wrong. It’s not fixable. It’s not repairable.
There are some things we can do to ameliorate some of the problems, but we live in the devil’s world and there will be injustice. There will be failures. There will be things that go wrong. There will be plans that will be turned upside down. There will be health challenges and problems.
God uses these things to give us the opportunity to grow spiritually and to test us. This is what James is referring to in James 1 when he tells us to count it all joy when we encounter or fall into various or a wide variety of tests.
What makes it a test is we don’t see it coming. We are blindsided. Everything seems to be going great. We have our hopes and our dreams and our ideas of the future. Then we turn the corner and wham, everything is different. It can involve a weather disaster. It can involve financial disasters. It can involve health crises. It can involve personal crises, relationship crises, and all kinds of things that happen.
That’s why Job 1 and 2 is recorded. There we learn that God allows Satan to use these things to test us but God is working in a phenomenal way behind the scenes in order to mature us spiritually and keep our eyes focused upon Him so we can fulfill the mission which Christ has given us.
That’s the first attack of Satan on the human race.
Slide 4
Then Satan is going to continue to attack the human race, the second attack. This refers to the attack on the genetic purity of the human race in the antediluvian world. That’s the period before the deluge, before the Flood. Again, it’s a different physical environment. It was a different world.
The Garden of Eden was still on the planet. God still had His habitation there. The way to the Tree of Life is blocked by an army of cherubim but this is still on the planet. Then there’s that angelic incursion which we’ve studied. We’ll come back to study it when we get back into 2 Peter 2:4–5 because that’s the background for those two verses. It’s very important to understand that.
We see this in Genesis 6:1 that as mankind began to multiply on the face of the Earth, they had daughters. The “sons of God” is a technical term for all angels, not just fallen ones but all angels. We’ve studied this so it’s some of the fallen angels who decide they want to have a physical, human body in order to experience this sexual intimacy which they witness brings such great joy and distraction to human beings.
In some way they’re able to transform their immaterial body into a material body. We see examples of angels doing that throughout Scripture and they are able to have sexual relations with human beings. It’s not just something lust driven unless you’re talking about power lust. What Satan wants to do is destroy the Seed of the woman in Genesis 3:15 when God announced to the serpent that the Seed of the woman would ultimately destroy Satan’s seed.
What Satan wants to do is prevent the Seed of the woman from coming. He understands the Seed of the woman must be pure humanity. If he can corrupt the human genome, if he can corrupt the human DNA whatever is involved in it, then that will prevent the coming of the Seed of the woman, who must be fully, truly human.
He attacks the genetic purity of the human race. This is so phenomenally horrid and wicked that to fix it, God has to take out all but eight human beings. He has to remove all human life and reduce it down to those eight. You hear people say that we all go back to Adam and Eve and that’s true, but we all go back to Noah first.
Everything goes down to just Noah and his wife. They become the new Adam and Eve. We all go back to that. God had to destroy everyone else on the planet because the corruption that came was so horrid and so wicked that God had no choice but to destroy the human race and start over. This is Satan’s attack on the genetic purity of the human race.
Slide 5
Just because there’s the Flood doesn’t mean evil stops. It continues and the next time we have clear statements about Satan’s attacks and demonic involvement is related to idolatry in the Mosaic Law. This is so interesting to read through these passages because there is something, I think, in the post-enlightenment mentality of Western Civilization that causes us to look at idols as something simply manufactured from stone or wood or metal, and that’s all it is.
That’s not what the Scripture says. It says that these false gods are demons. There is something more there than just wood, stone, or metal. There is something evil, palpably evil, that is behind these idols. I’m not getting into these ideas that if you have a Buddha or if you picked up this in a trinket shop you picked up a demon with it, so you’ve got to exorcise it in your house. That’s a pagan mentality.
Let’s see what the Scripture says. Leviticus 17:7 says, “They shall no more offer their sacrifices to demons.” In the Mosaic Law this is talking about Israel, that they’re no longer sacrifice to idols. Here it clearly states that those idols are demons. It’s looking at the real power behind all of these false gods, whether you’re talking about the thousands of idols that are in various forms of Hinduism or whether you’re talking about Zeus and Apollo and others in the Greek or the Roman pantheon, whether you’re talking about Baal and Ishtar and the gods and goddesses in the Canaanite pantheon or the Egyptian pantheon with Isis and Osiris and all of the other gods and goddesses in all the different pagan religions.
You can come over to Mexico and look at all of the Aztec gods and goddesses and they’re all demons. That’s what this is saying. “They shall no more offer their sacrifices to demons after whom they have played the harlot.”
This term “playing the harlot” has to do with a metaphor for unfaithfulness. Israel was to be faithful to God. God had taken them as a covenant partner. By breaking the covenant which begins with you having no other gods before God, this was unfaithfulness. That is what is meant by spiritual adultery.
Spiritual adultery is limited to worshipping a false god and breaking your covenant with the true God of the Bible. Deuteronomy 32:7 repeats this idea, “They sacrifice to demons, not to God, to elohim they did not know.” We studied this extensively. It’s using the term elohim not in the sense of deity, true deity, but as those spirit beings who inhabit the immaterial sphere, the celestial sphere of Heaven. This specifically identifies them as demons, which means they are false gods. They want to be worshipped as gods, but they are not intimate, personal gods, at all. They are new gods. They are in actuality fallen angels. They are demons.
Slide 6
Psalm 96:5 says, “For all the gods of the peoples are idols.” That’s a pretty strong statement, isn’t it? All the gods of all the peoples are idols “but the Lord made the heavens.” See these gods, these elohim of the people are just idols. They are little gods with a little “g”. They are not creators. They are not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
Slide 7
Psalm 106:37–39 is talking about Israel and looking back on their history. They even sacrificed their sons and their daughters to demons. Now what can be more horrific than that? Taking their infant children, not just babies, but infants up to a certain age, and they would put them on the fiery altars of Chemosh and various other gods, Baal, and they would roast them alive in these fiery furnaces as a sacrifice to these gods. How selfish can you get? How horrific could they possibly be?
That’s what they were doing. In reality, God says they’re doing this to demons and they’re shedding innocent blood, the blood of their sons and daughters whom “they sacrifice to the idols of Canaan and the land was polluted with blood; thus they were defiled by their own works and played the harlot by their own deeds.”
There’s that imagery again. It’s unfaithfulness to God. They no longer were worshipping God as the one, true God.
Slide 8
Fourth we see Satan’s attacks on Israel in the Old Testament and the rise of Gentile anti-Semitism. This has a history, really, that goes back to Egypt. This is one of the reasons, I believe, that God brought Jacob and the family down to Goshen, down to Egypt. It was because He knew that their tendency to assimilate into the Gentiles and to intermarry with them would cause them just to fade into these other ethnic groups.
This would stop in Egypt, though. The Egyptians were such racists. They hated the Semites. They wouldn’t eat at the same table with a Semite. They would not have anything to do with a Semite. They hated and despised them and so you could basically say this was the creation of the first Jewish ghetto in history in Goshen.
This kept them isolated and away from the rest of the population. Later, they become slaves, but no self-respecting Egyptian would ever have relations with a Jew. Never. Their prejudice, hatred, and bias, their racial hatred and bias, of Jews was a thousand times worse than any Ku Klux Klansman ever had for an African, period. That’s how intense it was.
Then you have anti-Semitism also manifested among the Syrians, the Babylonians, and later among the Persians after they defeated the Babylonians. We have that one Book in the Bible, Esther. It never mentions the name of God, but what you see here is the hidden hand of God protecting the Jewish people when they are the object of the anti-Semitism of this evil character named Haman, who is going to twist his little way into the favor of Artaxerxes, Ahasuerus in the text, in order to get him to allow Haman to allow him to murder all of the Jews. Hitler wasn’t the first. Haman was the first we know of. That is all covered in the Book of Esther.
There’s not a whole lot said in the Old Testament about Satan and the fallen angels. There’s certainly no mention of demon possession. There is demon influence. We understand from the New Testament that it has to do with ideas, so there’s clearly demonic influence but there’s nothing mentioned about demon possession. There’s not a single incident anywhere in the Old Testament of demon possession.
Demon possession, as we learn from the New Testament language, always has to do with a demon going inside, inhabiting the person, and taking control of their body. The prepositions all have to do with inside. If the demon is taken away, he is cast out of and he comes out of. It’s in and out language. You don’t have those prepositions used that way in the Old Testament.
When Saul was being tormented by an evil spirit, it says the evil spirit came upon him. It doesn’t say this evil spirit went into him. You don’t have the proposition bu; you have the preposition aul. It’s completely different.
Slide 9
You don’t see anything like that until Jesus comes on the scene and this explosion of demonic activity occurs. It’s absent from the whole Old Testament. The first time we see it is Satan’s attack on Jesus in the temptation of Christ recorded in Matthew 4 as well as in the parallel passages in Mark and Luke.
Satan is attacking Jesus. As I pointed out in previous lessons, remember Satan doesn’t know what God’s plan is for Jesus. He has some vague ideas. He knows He’s the Seed of the woman, but he thinks that Jesus’ mission is solely focused on establishing the promised Davidic kingdom, that he doesn’t see that there’s a salvation, a sacrifice that’s going to be there.
He’s working to take Jesus out. He’s working to destroy Him. That was the purpose of the temptations. Yet, Jesus passes all of those tests proving that He’s qualified to later be the perfect sacrifice.
Slide 10
The sixth thing we see is that the demonic assaults on Israel during the time of the Incarnation are demon influence and demon possession. The demon influence is manifested through the legalistic religion of the Pharisees, the anti-supernatural religion of the Sadducees, and the legalism of the scribes and all of that antagonism. It’s all an attempt to stop the coming of the Kingdom.
There’s a full-bore assault and one way we see that is when Jesus cast the demon out of the Gadarene demoniac. There was a legion of demons. They ask him not to put them in the Abyss yet. When is Satan cast into the Abyss? At the beginning of the Kingdom.
See, they’re thinking and wondering what’s going to happen now that the King is here, and he’s going to establish His Kingdom and send them into the Abyss now and they didn’t want to go. They’re anticipating the wrong thing. God has distracted them from what He’s actually doing.
Satan thinks he can kill Jesus and that will stop the Kingdom from coming, but God surprises him with the resurrection. Satan didn’t know about that and that’s what seals his defeat. The Seed of the woman defeats the seed of the serpent.
Slide 11
Satan and demonic assaults occur primarily through the Kosmic system in the Church Age. I spell Kosmic with a K for those who are just listening. That relates to the Greek word KOSMOS, which has to do with that orderly system of thinking. It can be religions. It can be philosophies, or it can be just disordered, disconnected, illogical ways of thinking, but it is a way of thought that opposes God.
Satan primarily influences today through the Kosmic system. It is not direct in the sense of a visible assault. It is not direct in the sense of demon possession. There may be demon possession in the Church Age, but I believe the Epistles are sufficient for the Christian life.
What that means is that God in His revelation has told us what all the problems are we’re going to face and what the solutions are. There may be demon possession in the Church Age, but the solution is just giving people the gospel because their personality is not eradicated. It is simply overridden by the demon that possesses them. They can still believe. They can still exercise their own volition and they can still hear the gospel and believe the gospel and that’s what frees them.
You don’t have “casting out demons”. One of the things that I said to another pastor, and he’d never heard it before. I was surprised because I knew who he was. I told him the disciples never exorcised any demon. EXORKIZO is the Greek word for exorcism and that word was only used of the Jewish magicians and other pagan diviners who were attempting to gain power over someone who was demon possessed.
When Jesus or the disciples cast out a demon it always uses the word EKBALLO. It never once uses the word EXORKIZO, so that refers to pagan magic that attempts to control demons and it is not biblical.
What we have in the Church Age is described by Jesus in talking about Satan is the “ruler of this world”. Satan is the ruler of this world. He became the ruler of this world when Adam sinned. Adam was created to be the ruler of the world but when he sinned, Satan took charge. He stole the title.
Slide 12
Jesus refers to him as the ruler of this world twice, John 12:31 and 14:30 and this is the problem. That’s why in Romans 12:2 Paul says, “Do not be conformed or pressed into the mold of the way the world thinks.” The world identifies problems and identifies solutions in ways that are contrary to the Word of God.
You have great systems of thought out there that are going to teach you how to have a wonderful life apart from total radical dependence upon the Bible and upon God. Just because it sounds good, and it works for a lot of people doesn’t mean a Christian should get involved at all because the Bible is teaching us to walk by the Spirit and to walk in complete radical dependence upon God. Walking by light and walking by faith. Not by walking according to the gimmicks and the plans and the methodology of the world system.
Slide 13
This is what distracts a lot of believers. They get into demon influence by buying into the world’s way of solving things. 1 Timothy 4:1–2 tells us, “Now the Spirit expressly says that in latter times some will depart from the faith giving heed to deceiving spirits and doctrines of demons.”
When are the latter times? The last days for the Church began on Pentecost of AD 33 because they didn’t know how long the Church Age was going to last. The return of Christ was imminent. We have been in the last days for the Church since day one.
Now there’s another term using latter days which refers to Israel. Israel’s latter days are during the Tribulation period, so you have to make that distinction. In the Church Age we’ve been in the last days for 2,000 years. When people ask the question how we will know if we’re in the last days, the answer is that the Bible says it started when the Church started.
This trend has been there the whole time. In the latter times means now and all through the Church Age some will depart from the faith. That happened in the apostolic period. It happened under Paul. It happened under Peter. That’s what Peter is warning people about, these false teachers, in 2 Peter 2:1–3.
“It expressly says in the latter times some will depart from the faith—that is the body of truth, the orthodox biblical view—giving heed to deceiving spirits and doctrines of demons.” These false ideas and doctrines of demons are the teaching that comes from demons, “Speaking lies in hypocrisy, having their own conscience seared with a hot iron.” That is the time in which we live and the times in which our grandparents and great-grandparents lived and all the way back to the beginning of the Church.
This is demon influence. Demon influence is what we find in any system of thought, no matter how moral it may be. Satan always has to borrow a lot of ideas from God because he can’t make anything work without a measure of morality and a measure of spirituality, but it’s counterfeit. He’s always coming up with things that sound good. It’s not the 99% of water that’s bad for you; it’s the 1% arsenic that you put in it that is bad for you. Just because it’s mostly true and it seems to fit with the Bible in a lot of ways doesn’t mean you drink it. There’s too many Christians who are drinking the water of their culture which is demon influenced and they’re just using Scripture verses to sort of patch things up, so it gives it the appearance of being biblical but it’s just Satanic deception.
Slide 14
In this Church Age we have the continued Satanic assault through Christian anti-Semitism, one of the most horrific things to come out of overt Christianity, out of visible Christianity that is known as Christendom which is the assault on Israel. This began as early as the late 2nd century AD and it is based on a lot of different factors, mostly on an allegorical interpretation of Scripture where the term Israel no longer refers to genetic Israel, the physical descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
Christian anti-Semitism as well as other forms of anti-Semitism such as Islamic anti-Semitism or secular anti-Semitism all oppose Israel because God has made certain promises to Israel. In order for Satan to think he can win he’s got to keep God from fulfilling those promises. If he can wipe out every last Jew, then that will mean he can win. He will have checked God in His plans for Israel.
We have to watch out for this Satanic assault.
Slide 15
Ninth, Satan attacks the purity of the gospel and the teaching on the spiritual life. Both are under assault. In Galatians 1:6–8 Paul writes, “I marvel that you are turning away so soon from Him who called you in the grace of Christ to a different gospel.” All manner of legalism from the subtle legalism of lordship salvation to the overt legalism of claiming you have to live the right kind of life along with believing in Jesus or you have to be baptized or you have to be part of the right denomination are false gospels.
When you add anything to faith you destroy faith. That’s a false gospel. That’s exactly what Paul is explaining in the next verse when he says, “This different gospel is not another (of the same kind) and there are some who trouble you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven—remember, Satan’s demons show up as angels of light—preach any other gospel to you than what we have preached to you, let him be accursed.”
Satan tries to destroy the gospel both in terms of the exact message of faith alone in Christ alone and not by works of the Law. When we trust in Christ, in that instant we are given the righteousness of Christ and declared just, as it says in Galatians 2:14.
Slide 16
We also see the solution in 1 Peter 5:8–9 and numerous other passages we’ve gone through, “Be sober; be vigilant, because your adversary, the Devil, walks about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour.” The solution is not to attack him but to resist him, steadfast in the faith. We resist by standing strong in doing what the Scripture says to do, believing and acting on what the Word of God says.
Slides 17 and 18
Now we come to the category of the future. What are Satan’s assaults in the future? We basically have four assaults. The term Antichrist is used the first time in 1 John. We use that as a title for the first beast, but there are various other ways in which he is identified.
There are two beasts that come out of the world in Revelation 13. These are the first beast and the second beast, the false prophet. The first beast will be indwelt by Satan after he is apparently killed at the midpoint of the Tribulation and then miraculously brought back to life. That’s the starting point just like Judas is under the influence of Satan until the Last Supper. Then in the Last Supper the Scripture says, “And Satan went in to him.” At that point Judas is indwelt by Satan.
It’s the same thing with the Antichrist. He is influenced by Satan up until that point of his resurrection, the false resurrection and then he is going to be indwelt by Satan. He will lead an intensified attack on all of Israel.
Slides 19 and 20
I want you to go ahead and open your Bibles. We’ll look at Revelation 9 and then we’ll look at Revelation 12. This is the next attack, the first demon assault army in the fifth trumpet judgment. Here’s a chart. The Rapture is in 1 Thessalonians 4:16–17 and is alluded to in Revelation 4:1 as a door opening and John goes up into Heaven and that’s the heavenly vision.
Then we have a timeline for Daniel’s 70th week, three and a half years each time. The seven seal judgments take place in the first half of the first three and a half years. Then the seven trumpet judgments take place. What we’re going to look at here are the fifth and sixth trumpet judgments. They occur before the midpoint of the Tribulation, which is when the Antichrist is going to set up his image in the Temple to be worshipped as God. Immediately after that he’s killed and then raised from the dead from his miraculous head wound. Then the last three and a half years are covered by the seven bowl judgments.
Slide 21
In Revelation 9:1 we read, “And the fifth angel sounded and I saw a star from heaven which had fallen to the earth and the key of the bottomless pit was given to him.” Notice it was given to “him”. It’s not to “it”. This wasn’t talking about an asteroid or a meteor or some other object out of the sky; it is talking about an angel.
We’ve seen that a star in Heaven is a term for angels and the key of the bottomless pit is given to him. The phraseology we’re given here we’ll see on the bottomless pit is what we have in the third column of the chart on Slide 22. It is the word in the subtitle, the word ABYSSOS, which is brought over or transliterated over into English as the Abyss. It’s the pit. It’s the underworld.
Slide 22
What we have here is that there are compartments to Sheol or Hades. In the Old Testament this is where Old Testament believers went when they died. Then Old Testament unbelievers went to a place called Torments. Then there is the Abyss, which is where this demon army is and this is where Satan is confined. Then there is the area of Tartarus, which is where the sons of god, the angels who committed the sin of Genesis 6, are imprisoned. That’s according to 2 Peter 2:4–5.
Slide 23
This is another chart. You have Paradise which goes to Heaven according to 2 Corinthians 12:1–4. That just leaves the three compartments of Sheol, where there’s punishment for unbelievers. Torments for all unbelievers. Tartarus for the demons who left their first estate in Genesis 6 and then the Abyss, which is where this demon army is located where Satan will be confined in Revelation 20.
This attack of this demon army that is described in Revelation 9:1–2, which says, “He opened the Bottomless Pit and smoke arose out of the pit like the smoke of a great furnace so the sun and the air were darkened over the whole earth because of the smoke of the pit. Then out of the smoke locusts came from the earth.” These aren’t real locusts. These are the locusts of the demon kings. They have been confined to the Abyss throughout all of creation.
“Out of the smoke locusts came upon the earth and to them was given power as the scorpions of the earth had power.” It’s going to be some kind of horrible sting. They have the potential to harm the grass of the Earth and other things of the Earth, but they’re prohibited from doing it. “And only those men who do not have the seal of God upon their foreheads are going to be tormented by them.”
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In Revelation 9:7 we read, “The appearance of the locusts was like horses prepared for battle and on their heads appeared to be crowns like gold, and their faces were like the faces of men.” This is quite a bizarre looking creature.
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“They had hair like the hair of women, and their teeth were like the teeth of lions. They had breastplates like breastplates of iron and the sound of their wings was like the sound of chariots.” When Hal Lindsay read that, he said it was like Huey helicopters when he wrote Late Great Planet Earth. I think he misses this. This is a demonic army coming out of the Abyss. This is not a human army using human military equipment.
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“They have tails like scorpions and stings; and in their tails is the power to hurt man for five months.” They don’t have the power to kill men. “They have as the king over them, the angel of the Abyss; his name in Hebrew is Abaddon, and in the Greek he has the name Apollyon.” This means the destroyer. So he’s the one who kept them in and ruled over them in the Abyss.
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Then we have the second demonic attack or demon assault described in the 6th trumpet. This judgment will kill a third of mankind. Remember this is all in the first half, the second half of that first half, of the Tribulation. It’s the 6th trumpet judgment. In the seal judgments a quarter of mankind is killed and now a third of the rest are killed. That means half are killed by this point. Now we have about 6 or 7 billion people on the planet. I can’t keep up. That means there will be 3 or 4 billion who die in a three-and-a-half-year period. You can’t bury them fast enough.
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So the sixth angel sounds and he sees there are four angels who are bound at the great River Euphrates and they have been prepared for this hour and day and month and year and they are released to kill a third of mankind. This is in Revelation 9:15.
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Revelation 9:16, “Now the number of the army of the horsemen is two hundred million.” This isn’t a Chinese Communist army coming across from the Far East. This is a demonic army that is released upon mankind at this particular point in time. John describes them, “I saw the horses in the vision. Those who sat upon them had breastplates of fiery red, hyacinth blue, and sulfur yellow; and the heads of the horses were like the heads of lions and out of their mouths came fire, smoke, and brimstone.” This isn’t some tank of the future. This is demonic.
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Then fourth we see in the second half of the Tribulation, Satan will intensify his assault on Israel. This is seen in Revelation 12, specifically starting in verse 12. In that verse we read, “Therefore rejoice, O heavens, and you who dwell in them. Woe unto the inhabitants of the earth and the sea for the devil has come down to you.” In the first part of this chapter is when Satan is cast out of Heaven and he and the demons are in a huge battle with Michael. They’re thrown out of Heaven; they’re thrown to the Earth. They become visible on the Earth and now they are active on the Earth. They have great wrath because Satan knows he has a short time.
Revelation 12:13, “Now when the dragon saw he had been cast to the earth he persecuted the woman who gave birth to the male Child.” The woman who gave birth to the male Child is Israel. So there’s intensified anti-Semitism. This is Satan’s last shot. He has three-and-one-half years to annihilate every Jew on the planet so he is going to bring out everything he has to wipe out Israel.
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God intervenes. “The woman was given two wings of a great eagle that she might fly into the wilderness.” We’ve studied this. It’s across the River Jordan over into the area of the modern kingdom of Jordan, near Bozrah or Petra, in all of those canyons hidden away. This is where the remnant of Jewish believers who remember the words of Jesus who said when they saw these things happen, they were to flee to the mountains. Only believers are going to listen to Jesus.
So they flee. They leave Israel. They go to this hiding place which God has prepared for them for three and one half years. We know that because it’s a time, that’s one, a time, that’s two, so two plus one equals three, and a half of a time. So it’s three and a half years. It’s the second half of the Tribulation.
“Where she is nourished for a time and times and a half of time from the presence of the serpent. So the serpent spewed water out of his mouth after a flood after the woman so he might cause her to be carried away by the flood.” That’s a picturesque way that Satan is going to throw everything he’s got at these surviving Jews to try to destroy them.
Slide 33
“But the earth helped the woman and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed up the flood which the dragon had spewed out of his mouth and the dragon was enraged with the woman and he went to make war with the rest of her offspring who keep the commandments of God and have the testimony of Jesus Christ.”
So this could be other saved Jews who weren’t in the land because Jesus told those who were in the land to flee. There could be other Jews elsewhere in the world and of course, this would include Gentile believers, so I believe that refers to those who keep the commandments of God and have the testimony of Jesus Christ.
This concludes this. There’s one more attack and that’s what happens at the end of the Millennium. When Jesus returns in Revelation 19, He will destroy the armies of the Antichrist and the False Prophet. In Revelation 20:20 it says, “Then the Beast was captured and with him the False Prophet who worked signs in his presence and deceived those who received the mark of the beast and those who worship his image. These two were cast alive into the Lake of Fire burning with brimstone and the rest were killed with the sword which preceded from the mouth of Him who sat on the horse and all the birds were filled with their flesh.”
Revelation 20:1, “Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, having the key to the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand and he laid hold of the dragon, that serpent of old, who is the devil and Satan and bound him for a thousand years.” So, he’s bound for a thousand years in the bottomless pit called the Abyss.
Revelation 20:3, “So that he should deceive the nations no more until the thousand years were finished. After these things he must be released for a little while.” When that happens, he will lead a rebellion against God. In this rebellion against God, he will be crushed and incinerated and sent to the Lake of Fire.
We’re told in Revelation 20:7–8, “He will go out to deceive the nations which are the four corners of the earth, God and Magog, to gather them together to battle whose number is as the sand of the sea.”
Even under the perfect government of Jesus where there’s perfect justice, perfect righteousness, perfect education, almost perfect environment although there will still be sin because of those who are born in the Kingdom, an innumerable host like the sands of the sea are going to rebel against Jesus Christ. You can hear people say until they’re blue in the face that they want justice and they do not want justice. They want what will take care of them and provide for them, but they do not want real biblical justice.
This tells us that no human being, no fallen human being, that has rejected God wants real justice. When you hear these people who are screaming for social justice, they are deceived. They are self-deceived. They do not want social justice. Do not try to compromise with them. To compromise with them is to compromise with evil.
That same thing is going to happen at the end and these people reject the justice of God and they rebel against Christ and we’re told in verse 10, “The devil who deceived them is sent into the Lake of Fire and brimstone where the Beast and the False Prophet are and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.”
God will send fire from Heaven and destroy the human army and the devil will be sent to the Lake of Fire and all of his angels. That brings us to the broad scope of what is covered in Scripture related to the assaults of Satan. We live in the devil’s world. We can’t expect perfection and we can’t expect things to be as good as they ever were in this country again, I do not think, apart from a miracle of God.
We have to prepare ourselves to live in a totally different world than that which we may have envisioned for ourselves, but God is faithful. He was faithful to Daniel when he took him and three other young men out of Israel and put them in Babylon. He was faithful to the Jews who were there. He was faithful to the Jews who went to Israel. He was faithful to Jeremiah.
God is going to take care of us. What we have to do is trust in Christ to deliver us, protect us, and provide for us and go about our mission, which is teaching others about the gospel and teaching others about the Word of God and being a light in the midst of a wicked and perverse generation.
Closing Prayer
“Father, thank You for this opportunity to be reminded that this world is not our home, that this world is the devil’s world. We are not to get comfortable or compromise or get accustomed to the comforts of this world. This world is hostile to us as believers.
“We are to focus not on political solutions, not on psychological solutions, not on educational solutions, and not on economic solutions. We are to focus on the spiritual, biblical solutions of Your Word and that we are to be going about our Father’s mission for us to take the gospel to the whole world, to teach the whole counsel of God, and to challenge people with the truth of Scripture and trust in You to watch over us.
“We pray for our nation. We pray for our leaders. We pray that You would expose the plots, that You would expose the evil, and that You would expose those who seek to destroy this country and may they be tripped up by their own devices.
“Father, even if that doesn’t happen, we trust in You to take care of us like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego said that God could deliver them, but even if He doesn’t, they were going to trust in Him. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.”