172 - Demonic Assaults [B]

Demonic Assaults. Rev. 9

Before we get into the sixth trumpet judgment we need to pause and review what the Bible teaches about demons and their involvement in human history. Again and again as we go through our study of Revelation we keep coming back to this whole doctrine of Satan and demons because God is not only bringing human history to a close in terms of judging the sins of nations and those in rebellion against Him but He is also bringing to a close the judgments upon the demons and upon Satan.

In the last two verses of Revelation chapter nine we have a conclusion to these last two judgments. After all of this horror and terror and when a third of the human race has been killed in the last trumpet judgment alone, the sixth—and that is not counting the others who have died in the other judgments—we read: Revelation 9:20 ^NASB "The rest of mankind, who were not killed by these plagues, did not repent of the works of their hands, so as not to worship demons, and the idols of gold and of silver and of brass and of stone and of wood, which can neither see nor hear nor walk; [21] and they did not repent of their murders nor of their sorceries nor of their immorality nor of their thefts." They don't change their minds, and the more intense the judgments get the more stubborn and entrenched they become in their resistance to God. "…so as not to worship demons." So we see there is active demon worship that becomes more and more overt and is a characteristic of mankind during the Tribulation period. Nothing will get their attention. This is the characteristic pattern of the "earth dwellers" who have rejected God and have their minds fixed completely upon the temporal, upon the earth, and have set themselves completely against God. The more God extends His grace, the more God brings judgment, the more entrenched and hostile they become to God. They hate God and anything related to God and that is their primary characteristic.  

We see that same trend in many cultures today that are dominated by various human viewpoint systems of thought that as people who are atheists, people who are unbelievers, resist what Christians do. They become more and more hostile. It is the truth being attacked by Satan, the truth being attacked by those who reject God, and they are not attacking these other religions because Satan is not using his different religious systems to attack one another, the focus is to destroy the credibility of the truth. It is the truth that generates hostility and the lie does not generate that kind of hostility. So to understand all of this we have to understand what the Bible teaches about Satan and demons and how human history fits within this overall framework of what we call the angelic conflict or Satan's rebellion against God.

Who are the demons and from whence did they come?

 The term "demon" describes these angels who followed Lucifer in his rebellion against God in eternity past. We recognise that God created the angels initially as perfect creatures. He created angels before He created anything else, they were intelligent beings, their bodies are immaterial, and they have volition, i.e. a capacity to make decisions related to their worship of God, their service to God which affected their destiny. He created them with different orders, different ranks, and different abilities. There are three that are most prominent, especially when it comes to the study of the angelic conflict and the study of Revelation. The first are the cherubim. When we see them in Scripture they are always associated with the operations of the throne of God—protecting the throne of God, guarding the presence of God. The first time we see a cherub in the Scriptures is when we see cherubs posted outside of the garden of Eden to protect it so that man no longer has access to the tree of life. But remember that Eden was also the place of God's presence on the earth and so they are also guarding that. Cherubs are always associated with God's holiness—His righteousness and justice. Ezekiel presents the clearest and most detailed descriptions of cherubs. They are large and quite challenging figures and they are not always presented the same way. Cf. Ezekiel chapter 41 where they only have two faces (in chapter one they had four). The cherubs were in the presence of God always surrounding His throne, and the cherub that was the most significant was the one presented in Ezekiel chapter 28:13ff, the anointed cherub who covered. He was the closest of all of the cherubs to the throne of God and he is the one in whom sin is discovered and is the one identified as Lucifer in Isaiah 14:12-14.

The second order of angels are called seraphs. They are very similar to cherubs and are also associated with the throne of God and the holiness of God. They are pictured in Isaiah chapter six and yet there is one distinction from cherubs. Cherubs have four wings and seraphs have six wings. The seraphs seem to be associated, though, with angelic worship of God, whereas the cherubs are associated with guardianship or protection of the throne.

There is a third class that is very similar to cherubs and seraphs, and that is the living creatures we see in Revelation chapters four and five. They, too, are associated with the throne of God and the worship of God. Like cherubs they are also identified as living beings, but unlike cherubs which have four wings, they have six wings. Like seraphs they also sing praise to the holiness of God.

We also note from Scripture that there is an archangel, the archangels Michael. There is one messenger angel, Gabriel, and he is specifically associated with disclosing revelation, especially that which is related to God's plan for Israel – Daniel 9; Luke 1.

As the highest and most influential of the angels Lucifer succumbed to arrogance. He is the poster child of the saying: "It is all about me." He was the first one to come up with that idea and he expressed it in the five "I wills" in Isaiah 14:13, 14. He became so caught up in his own abilities, his own intelligence, his own talents, that he deceived himself (a major characteristic of arrogance) into thinking that he could rule the universe better than God could. The very essence of Satan's desire is to be like God, to be worshipped as God and to run things according to his own will. God gave him time to carry out his scheme and he began to entice the other angels to follow him. Over a course of time he was able to entice one third of all of the angels to follow him. We refer to those who followed Satan as fallen angels or as demons. They are those who are aligned with Satan. They have various organisations and various leaders among them.

Eventually we know that God convened some kind of trial and He determined the sentence or punishment for these fallen angels and for Satan. This is referred to in Matthew 25:41. This mentions the fact that God has prepared the lake of fire for the devil and his angels. If the lake of fire has already been prepared (perfect tense of the verb) that indicates that it is located in a specific place today, it is in existence, but it is empty. God has not sent Satan or the demons there yet. There is a hold placed on the final execution of that sentence. So human history fits within the reason that that hold occurs. Satan apparently accused God of being unfair, unjust, of not giving him a chance to really show what he could do in ruling the angels and the universe, including the earth. Within this there are different aspects to this challenge. Satan wants to prove that he can do what God can do. So God then determined on a demonstration to give Satan the opportunity to show what he could do, but within that demonstration what God is demonstrating is that no creature is capable of running the universe. There is no creature that has the omniscience, the omnipotence to be able to carry out the goal of running something like the universe.

Five things that God is going to demonstrate within human history

1.  He is going to demonstrate His righteousness. Satan challenges God's righteousness: How can a righteous God sentence His creatures to eternity in the lake of fire? God is going to demonstrate that He is perfect righteo0usness and this is the only acceptable judgment.

2.  He is going to demonstrate His justice, that He is just, that this is a fair and just sentence. The reason is that in human history God demonstrates that even the most innocuous of sins (such as eating a piece of fruit) results in such chaos and calamity, such suffering, such heartache that we have seen in human history, that a sentence of eternity in the lake of fire is mild compared to all that flowed out of this kind of a rebellion. So God demonstrates His justice and His righteousness.

3.  He also demonstrates His love, that love is totally compatible with righteousness and justice, and that the execution of judgment on a disobedient creature is just as much a part of love as providing salvation for others.

4.  Also it demonstrates the inability of the creature to rule creation. No creature has the capacity, the knowledge or the power to truly rule creation.

5.  It demonstrates the cataclysmic consequences of sin—that sin is never just a little white sin, it always has unintended consequences and results in terrible suffering upon billions and billions of creatures.

Demonic assaults within human history

We recognise that Satan has a strategic goal in relation to the human race and to the angelic conflict, and that is to demonstrate the ability to govern creation and, secondly, that God can't accomplish His ends. He is trying to do two things. First of all, that he can truly govern creation, and secondly, to show that God can't. He is going to try to accomplish the first but the problem is that once he led Adam into sin he generated a whole lot of little gods who are in competition with him. Every human being wants to be God, just like Satan does, and the fact that there is all of this horror, all of this warfare, all of this disaster on planet earth is a testimony to the fact that Satan just can't control things. It is not that his agenda is horror and chaos, His agenda is to promote piece and stability and show that he can rule as God does. And the fact that we have all these horrors going on is testimony that he can't accomplish what he intends to accomplish. His second objective is to destroy God's ability and this primarily manifested in his assault against the Jews, because God has promised Abraham and the descendants of Abraham that he will give them that piece of real estate in the Middle East and that they will exist in peace and harmony and have a fantastic kingdom under the rule and reign of the Messiah. So if Satan can stop that by destroying all the Jews before God fulfils His promise then he can show that God is incapable of doing what He has promised to do. So there is this two-pronged strategy: to promote his own ability to rule and govern the creation and to show that God can't do it.

The second thing we note in terms of these assaults is that there are several ways in which Satan attacks the human race. The primary way is through demon influence. There is a difference between demon influence and demon possession. Demon influence is Satan's attempt to subvert and influence man's thinking. So demon influence has to do with Satan's attempt to influence the thinking of man against God. This has occurred throughout human history in both direct ways and in indirect ways. Demon influence is related to thought systems. It is related to religious ideas. There are all kinds of world religions that are promoted by Satan in order to distract people from the truth and to divert their attention from the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. All of them, with the exception of biblical Christianity, emphasise human morality or good works as a means to eternal life, a means to a relationship with God. Then there are various philosophies that don't talk anything about God but they promote different forms of morality, different forms of human enrichment. These are what are sometimes referred to as worldviews or frameworks of thinking about life, and Satan promotes these different worldviews and frameworks to get people to think and organise all that the data of life so that they think that they really understand what life is all about apart from God, apart from the truth of the Scripture. Ultimately all of these thought systems appeal to the arrogance of the sin nature, to the lust patterns of the sin nature, and to the trends of everybody's sin nature. So there is something out there for everybody that means that you don't have to admit that you are a creature who is dependent upon God, who has been in rebellion against God.

Satan uses his attempts to influence man two ways: directly and indirectly. Mostly it is indirectly, but we have some examples in Scripture of his direct attempts to influence man. The first is in the garden of Eden. Satan, speaking to Eve, misquoted God, but he had already predisposed her thinking by the way he chose to question her. He influences her thinking by the questions he asks her because that gets her focus on the wrong thing. So it is necessary to be careful before answering certain question. You have to think through questions very carefully. So we see this direct way in which Satan sought to influence the woman. A parallel to that is Satan's attempt to influence the thinking of Christ in the temptations in the wilderness. These are direct attempts, but mostly Satan uses indirect attempts through human thought systems and appeals to the sin nature.

One example in the life of Christ is in Luke 22:31 where Jesus warned Peter that he will betray Him. Peter has adamantly stated that he will never betray the Lord. ^NASB "Simon, Simon, behold, Satan has demanded {permission} to sift you like wheat." There is no picture anywhere in the betrayal of Christ by Peter of Satan overtly and directly influencing Peter. It is done subtly through indirect means through his sin nature. Another example from Peter occurs in Matthew 16:23 and that context occurs immediately after Peter has made this profound admission that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. Immediately after that Christ began to warn the disciples that He would be taken to Jerusalem and be killed and raised on the third day. Peter does an about turn, moving from the high point in his spiritual life and recognition of truth to the high point of his sin nature and his arrogance, and he rebukes the Lord: "God forbid {it,} Lord! This shall never happen to You." The Lord turns to Peter and says: "Get behind Me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to Me; for you are not setting your mind on God's interests, but man's." Peter is not indwelt by Satan but he is being influenced by satanic thought, which is any kind of thought that is antagonistic to the truth of God's Word or is in opposition to it. Peter is operating on human viewpoint at that time which is just another form of demonic influence. Satan is consistently promoting his agenda through these various thought systems and this is what lies behind warnings like 1 Peter 5:8 ^NASB "Be of sober {spirit,} [think objectively on the basis of the Word of God] be on the alert [carefully look at what you are thinking]. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour." The context of 1 Peter 5 is the context of arrogance—don't succumb to arrogance but be humble.

Demon influence affects believers and unbelievers alike. Whenever we operate on any kind of a thought system that is apart from the Word of God we are operating on demon influence. Any kind of human viewpoint is demon influence. If it is not biblical then it is demon influence. The solution to demon influence (also called worldliness) is to take in and to study the Word of God and let the Word of God change the way in which we think. Romans 12:2 ^NASB "And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind…" That's how we get rid of all that demonic influence that is in our souls—through the study of the Word of God. Also Ephesians 6:10-17 describes putting on the armour of God to protect us from demon influence, and ultimately that has to do with the Word of God and the Spirit of God.

The other way in which Satan seeks to influence things is through demon possession. Demon possession occurs when one or more of these immaterial demons, also called evil spirits or fallen angels, invade the body of an unbeliever and take over the control of his body. It doesn't destroy the personality or the consciousness of the individual because an individual who is under demon possession can still respond to the truth of the gospel. And that is the only way in which they can be delivered from that demon and that that demon can be removed from them—by trusting Christ as their saviour. Demon possession can only occur in unbelievers. A lot of believers can become psychotic or come under all kinds of emotional disturbances and have other problems that may imitate the characteristics of demon possession, but it is not demon possession. 1 Corinthians 3:16 tells us that the believer's body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, and that word for "temple" is one of two words used for temple in the New Testament. One word describes the entire temple complex. Anyone could go into the courtyard of the outer temple. But the other word that is used for temple in the New Testament is the word naos [naoj] which refers only to the inner sanctum where only the priest could go, and this is where the presence of God is. If anything unclean, anything that had not gone through the ritual processes of cleansing, went into the holy of holies or the holy place then they would die instantly. That which is unclean cannot come into the presence of God in the inner sanctum. That is what this passage talks about. It is not just the fact that the believer is indwelt by the Holy Spirit but that the believer is made a special sanctified holy place for the indwelling of the Lord Jesus Christ. It makes it impossible by that terminology to be indwelt by a demon.

Another way in which Satan attacks the human race has occurred in terms of direct demonic assault. There is one in the Old Testament and there are three in Revelation. The Old Testament one is what gives us a pattern for understanding the ones in Revelation. It has to do with the demonic assault that occurred in Genesis chapter six. Genesis 6:1, 2 ^NASB "Now it came about, when men began to multiply on the face of the land, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves, whomever they chose." So there was this episode that occurred before the Noahic flood where there was this group called "the sons of God" who see the beautiful daughters of men and take them as their wives and they produce children. Who are these "sons of God"? Job 2:1 and 38:7 use this terminology, "sons of God," a term in the Hebrew which always refers to angels, because they had been created by God. It is a term that is applied to both fallen angels and to holy angels. So what we have is a situation where these fallen angels have figured out a way to transform themselves into human being look-alikes in a way that is able to sexually generate offspring. The purpose was to destroy or dilute the pure humanity of the human race in order to keep God from fulfilling the promise that he had made in Genesis 3:15 that the seed of the woman would crush the head of the head of the serpent—Satan. The seed of the woman ultimately is the Lord Jesus Christ. So the promise then is that God would provide a solution through the human race and that the saviour needed to be true humanity in order to be a substitute for the human race. Satan tired to stop that by destroying the gene pool of the human race through this interbreeding with the fallen angels. And God stopped that.

Two passages in the New Testament affirm this. One is in Jude 6, 7 ^NASB "And angels who did not keep their own domain [original place], but abandoned their proper abode, He has kept in eternal bonds under darkness for the judgment of the great day, just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around them, since they in the same way as these indulged in gross immorality and went after strange flesh, are exhibited as an example in undergoing the punishment of eternal fire." The key phrase: "since they in the same way as these." That seems a little unclear in the English. Who is they and who is these? The "they" refers to Sodom and Gomorrah, it is a feminine pronoun. Sodom and Gomorrah are cities and would be referred to in the feminie pronoun. "These" is a masculine pronoun, and that refers to the angels. So what Jude is saying is that Sodom and Gomorrah did something in the same way and did the same kind of thing that these angels did. Sodom and Gomorrah were engaged in homosexuality. That is going after strange flesh; it wasn't what God had designed. The sin of Sodom and Gomorrah is a sexual sin and it is compared to the ultimate sexual sin of these angels. So we have a very clear statement there related to the Genesis 6 angels.

Peter has two passages. 2 Peter 2:4 ^NASB "For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to pits of darkness, reserved for judgment." That is not talking about the original fall, it is talking about the Genesis 6 event. This can't refer to the fallen angels as a whole and the act of following Lucifer because that would mean that all the fallen angels are chained in darkness and reserved for judgment, but we know from episodes in the life of Christ that there are certain demons who are still free to operate. It can't refer to all the fallen angels but only to a group of them. This sin of theirs is related to the time of Noah in 2 Peter 2:5.

Then in 1 Peter 3:18-20 ^NASB "For Christ also died for sins once for all, {the} just for {the} unjust, so that He might bring us to God, having been put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit; in which also He went and made proclamation to the spirits {now} in prison, who once were disobedient, when the patience of God kept waiting in the days of Noah, during the construction of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through {the} water." So it identifies their sin with something that occurred "in the days of Noah." So this gives us a pattern in the Old Testament for what appears to be almost science fiction. But that could occur in that dispensation because God allowed it. We live in a period of time in a civilisation between the flood and the Tribulation period when God has restricted this kind of activity from the demons, but He is going to allow it again during the Tribulation period in order to bring to a head both the judgment of man and the judgment of the angels together in His final judgment of evil. Once we see this within the pattern of Scripture it makes perfect sense.

The role of demons in relation to believers in the church age

The role of demons is restricted in the church age. They are not visible; they are not as overt as they were at certain times in the Old Testament or as they will be in the Tribulation. But they are still the agent of Satan and very much involved in promoting primarily demon influence among the human race. Believers don't need to worry and focus on Satan or demons because the focus needs to be on the Word of God. We need to understand the truth of God's Word and, as Paul says in Ephesians 6, we need to put on the full armour of God. It is through the Word of God that we are protected and it is on the basis of God's truth that God takes care of believers. We need to arm ourselves with the truth of God's Word and that is our only protection.   

Illustrations