Satan's
Direct Assault, part I
The attack and invasion of planet Earth from other planets is the drift
of science fiction. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent every decade in
trying to see if we can discover life on other planets. Everybody wonders if
there are other rational beings out there in outer space. The Bible says, yes,
there are. There is rational life out there in outer space. It is not the other
races of Star Trek or Star Wars, they are beings created by God known as
angels. And there is a group of angels that have defected from God, have
rebelled against God, and their mission is to destroy the human race and to
enslave and to dominate it. These aliens are identified very clearly in the
Bible as fallen angels. Some are even classified as demons. These are the group
of angels who followed their leader known as Lucifer in his rebellion against
God. Lucifer is also known as the shining one, the son of the dawn, according
to the Hebrew in Isaiah 14. He is the creature who wants to usurp the
authority, the throne, the rule of God, and to rule all of the creatures for
his own glory and privilege. The course of this rebellion we refer to as the
angelic conflict, also called the angelic rebellion, the conflict of the ages,
the invisible war; there are many different ways in which theologians and Bible
teachers have explained this conflict down through the centuries.
It is very important for believers to understand this conflict because
whether we understand it or not, whether we fully believe it or not, we are
part of it. Even unbelievers are a part of it because, as we learn from 2
Corinthians 4:4 that Satan as the god of this age is blinding the minds of the unbeliever
to the truth of the gospel. It is important to understand it because one we
become believers in the Lord Jesus Christ we are indeed enlisted within the
Lord’s army. We are part of that group that fights a spiritual warfare, the
warfare that is described in Ephesians 6:10ff, and we are all a part of it. At
the instant of salvation we become a soldier enlisted in this angelic conflict
and we have to be trained. We have to learn what our weapons are, and the
weapons of our warfare are not the weapons of the flesh, but they are weapons
related to the spiritual truth of God’s Word.
Our own attentiveness to our spiritual life is not really an option. It
is in one sense, we have the free will to choose whether or not to really
exploit all that God has provided for us. It is always easy to somehow
rationalise our focus on our spiritual life and to think that somehow we have
learned enough, we know enough, we have grown enough to where we have made it.
But even the most advanced of us spiritually is far from where we ought to be
in our spiritual growth in order to fulfil our roles and responsibilities in
the angelic conflict. If we are believers in Jesus Christ we are soldiers in
this army and we can either be a hero or be a spiritual causality. The choice
is ours. Unfortunately today we live in an era when most Christians unwittingly
are spiritual casualties. They have fallen prey to the spiritual snares and
traps that Satan has sent out to ensnare our own sin natures, to attract our
sin natures so that we find pleasure in that which distracts us from our own
spiritual life, and yet we come under a tremendous amount of self-deception and
self-justification and just trying to rationalise our focus on other things
rather than our spiritual life.
Last time we saw that the focus in this spiritual warfare that we are
engaged in is our thinking. Spiritual warfare isn’t going out and getting
engaged in some kind of direct encounter with the devil. That is what we run
into in a lot of circles today. The Bible teaches that the battle here for
spiritual warfare takes place between the ears. The battlefield for spiritual
warfare has to do with our thought life: how we think and of what we think. We
have to learn how to think about everything in life from a biblical viewpoint.
We have to learn to think about every realm of God’s creation as God thinks
about it. His creation is not just limited to our spiritual life. His creation
involves every dimension, everything we can possibly think of from the
sciences, to the arts, to even drama, to the home. God has something to say
about everything He created and everything He instituted, and we can either
think about it the way God thinks about it (divine viewpoint) or we can think
about it in terms of our own experience, in terms of what is popular in the
culture in which we live. Sometimes that is called human viewpoint, the Bible
calls it worldliness, and likens it in James 3:13-15 to the thinking of demons.
The bible is very clear that we are at any given moment in our life as a
believer either thinking like God would think or we are thinking like a demon
would think. There is no middle ground, according tie Scriptures. Either we are
thinking biblically, divine viewpoint, or we are thinking in terms of human
viewpoint, no matter how good and moral that may be; it is still thinking
independently of God’s plan, purposes and revelation.
The Scripture says that we are to war not according the flesh but
according to the principles given out in Scripture. 2 Corinthians 10:4 NASB
“for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for
the destruction of fortresses.” These fortresses are defined in terms of
thinking, in terms of intellectual thought, arguments, rationalisations, ideas,
concepts, ways of looking at art, literature, science. [5] “{We are} destroying
speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and
{we are} taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.” So we see
that this must be a life-long endeavour. It challenges us to think about our
thinking.
There are many different ways today that allow us to get doctrine and
listen on our way to work, on our way home, whatever it is. But we need to take
in the Word of God on a daily basis because it is the Word of God that washes
and cleanses our mind of a lot of garbage and refocuses our attention on what
the real priorities are, and it is the only true stress relief that we ever
have in life.
Last time we focused on the divine mandate in 1 Peter 5:8, 9 that is
really part of our study. NASB “Be of sober {spirit,} be on the
alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking
someone to devour.
Satan is continuously attacking the human race and we can categorise
those attacks in two ways. One is that there are direct assaults and the second
is that there are indirect assaults. There aren’t many of the direct assaults
in Scripture but they are very important to understand. Most of the attacks are
indirect, he uses some other means in order to assault, to distract, to tempt,
to defeat the believer.
The first direct assault in Scripture takes place in Genesis 3, the
temptation of Eve and then Adam. And the fall of Adam is the direct result of
the assault of Satan disguised as the serpent in the garden. A second direct
attack occurs in Genesis 6, the attack of those that are called the sons of God in which there is an
attempt to destroy the genetic purity of the human race by the assault on the
seed of the woman. As we go through the Old Testament period there are no more
direct assaults. There are a lot of indirect assaults on Abraham, on Abraham’s
descendants, anti-Semitism throughout the Old Testament, but the next time we
really see Satan directly active is in the period of the life of Christ. In
Matthew chapter four we have the temptations of Christ where Satan seeks to
tempt the Lord Jesus Christ to follow him, to give His allegiance to Satan
rather than to God. Then during the period of the incarnation we see a heavy
emphasis on demon possession. It is interesting that there are no examples of
demon possession throughout the Old Testament. There are no references to demon
possession in the epistles of the New Testament, but there is suddenly this
host of demonic activity when the second person of the Trinity becomes
incarnate and begins to walk on rhe face of the earth. In the modern church age
the primary assault is indirect, not direct. The solution is the Word of God.
The church age ends with the Rapture and then we go into the seven-year period
of the Tribulation. During the Tribulation period there are three demonic
assaults of the human race. The first two are described in Revelation chapter
nine, the third in chapter twelve, and these are insidious assaults that take
place and it just boggles the mind as we read them and interpret what they must
mean literally. Then the Lord Jesus Christ returns at the end of the
Tribulation, the false prophet and the Antichrist are cast into the lake of
fire, Satan is bound for a thousand years, and at the end of the Millennial
kingdom he is released and we have the final Gog and Magog revolt that is
described in Revelation 20. This is the structure of Satan’s assault of the
human race in terms of direct assaults.
Genesis chapter three. Adam has been created and placed in the garden.
He has been given a helper, originally identified as Isha. She was taken from the side of the man and her primary
purpose was to serve as an assistant to man. They are given one prohibition.
God directs His instructions to the head of the family, the head of the
marriage. They were not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Then we come to the drama of the third chapter.
Genesis 3:1 NASB “Now the serpent was more crafty than any
beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said to the woman, ‘Indeed, has
God said, ‘You shall not eat from any tree of the garden’?” Satan raises a
question to get the woman to think differently, to think according to Satan’s
categories and not the categories that God has predefined. The strategies that
Satan has to distract us are the categories related to thinking, very subtle
ways to get us thinking in wrong categories. Once we pay attention to those
wrong categories we are in trouble. [2] The woman said to the serpent, ‘From
the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat;
Genesis 3:6 NASB “When the woman saw that the tree was good
for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was
desirable to make {one} wise, she took from its fruit and ate…” At that point
she dies spiritually, but nothing happened to anything else because she is not
the determinative decision-maker, the man. “… and she gave also to her husband
with her, and he ate.