Satan, What We Believe, Part 17

Everybody's choosy about something. It might be your favorite snack. Two scoops of Rocky Road, please.

Your style. Those earrings look amazing on you. Or the things you like to do with your best friend.

Woof, woof, woof. You can be choosy when it comes to getting a COVID -19 vaccine, too. If you're thinking about getting an updated vaccine, there's more than one type available.

You can find out more at wedovaccines .com. This message was brought to you by Novavax.

OK, round two. Name something that's not boring. Laundry? Ooh, a book club.

Computer solitaire, huh? Ah, sorry. We were looking for Chumba Casino.

Ch -ch -ch -ch -ch -chumba. That's right. ChumbaCasino .com has over 100 casino -style games.

Join today and play for free for your chance to redeem some serious prizes. Ch -ch -ch -ch -ch -chumba. ChumbaCasino .com.

No purchases necessary. Full word. Belief in it by law. 18 plus. Terms and conditions apply. See website for details. One of the things we see about Satan is he's constantly trying to tempt us to evil.

Remembering, though, we don't want to forget the context of what we said. He is in one place at one time, so he can only deal with one person at one time.

OK? Granted, the other demons are working at his behest as well.

But what he is going to try to do is always be, as we saw with Job, always trying to accuse and find a way to tempt human beings to disobey

God. Rap Report with your host,

Andrew Rapoport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application. This is a ministry of striving for eternity in the

Christian podcast community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

Welcome to another edition of The Rap Report. I'm your host, Andrew Rapoport, here to look at biblical interpretations and applications to all things in Christian life and culture.

I'm joined with my co -host once again, and maybe for the last time for a little while.

We'll see if Bud comes back. But welcome, Jim. How are you? I'm doing very well.

I don't know what Bud was getting paid for this, but it was far too little. I mean, I've been filling in for him for free, and I'm looking forward to him returning.

He was getting twice what you get. Oh, that's perfect. He's worth every penny. There you go.

Hey, this week what we want to do, we want to cover the topic of Satan. Now, there is a lot that you say, well, we know stuff about Satan.

There is some misconfusion over Satan and who he is and what he can and cannot do.

And we're going to look at those things today on The Wrap Report. This is going to be a continuing in our series.

This is part 17 in our series, What We Believe. We encourage you to go to strivingforeturning .org.

Go there and look under the About section. Under there, you're going to see the statement of faith that we have, what we believe.

Open the section on angels, and we have already dealt with the issue of holy angels, fallen angels.

Now we're going to focus in on one specific angel, and that is Satan. That's going to be our focus today.

Before we get to that, let me just let you guys know, if you happen to already go out to Striving for Eternity, we have a sale that we're running on the book,

Sharing the Good News with Mormons. You can get 35 % off. That is with the coupon code

LDS. That stands for Latter Day Saints. Put LDS in when you order the book,

Sharing the Good News with Mormons at strivingforeturning .org. Go in the store there. You will get 35 % off.

So encourage you to go do that. It is a good book on just learning how to evangelize, not necessarily to Mormons, but there are a lot of different ways of approaching things.

So you'll end up seeing there's Sean McDowell, who is one of the editors of this, talks about the ways of an evidential approach.

Not really my favorite, but you'll get an idea what that is. Matt Slick has written one really dealing with the issue of can you trust the

Bible? It's the reliability approach. Each of these are different tactics or approaches that we had for how to evangelize.

And notice that those don't necessarily have to be only to those that are Mormon. J. Warner Wallace wrote one on basically the case -making approach.

We have, mine was on the open -air evangelism approach. And notice that none of those require anything to know about the

Latter -day Saints. However, if you all look about some stuff with Latter -day Saints, there's gonna be a lot that you're gonna gain of that, but you'll really learn some different ways to do evangelism.

So go to strivingforturning .org and buy the book in sharing the good news with Mormons.

And from there, you can just put the coupon code LDS LDS for Latter -day

Saints and get 35 % off. We have not put an end date for this sale as of yet, but when we run out of the current inventory, that's gonna be when we cut it off.

So my suggestion is buy it while you can, because after that, we may not do this sale again.

All right, with that, Jim, why don't, if you could, we're at strivingforturning .org under the

About section, the section that says What We Believe. We've opened up the section on angels.

And if you would be so kind as to read for us the first, well, the first three paragraphs there under Satan, this is continuing, as I said, what we looked at last week.

So if you could do that, that would be wonderful. Yeah, we've got three paragraphs here, and I just remind the listener that you can go to the website and see the scripture references here.

I'm not gonna read the scripture references because there are a lot of them here. So you can go to the website and get the scripture references on your own.

Here we are, Satan. Satan was the highest created being that fell in an act of disobedience to God.

Satan is a real spiritual person and has intellect, will, and emotions. Satan is, as all angels are, limited by God.

Satan does not know what a person thinks, nor is he everywhere affecting everything. Satan can only be in one place at one time.

Satan is called an evil deceiver, seeking to tempt, oppose, and accuse God and his children. He is the

God and ruler of this world, little g God and ruler of this world, the prince of the power of the air and the ruler of the demons.

As a serpent, he is crafty and guile and called the red dragon in Revelation.

Satan is God's adversary and is called belial, meaning worthless or wicked. Satan is not only a person, but he is also active in relation to Christ, God, nations, unbelievers, believers, and the world system.

Okay. You did a little correction there for those who are not reading along, which we'll get to by mentioning little g

God. So we'll get to that. I appreciate you picking up on that for those who are listening by audio. So let's dig into this.

Now, one of the things we want to do, this is building up from what we've been doing in the past couple of episodes.

We talked about holy angels. We talked about that there were those that were confirmed in holiness.

And then there was an act where several angels had fallen. And then that single act, they became confirmed in unholiness.

They were fallen angels. We refer to them as demons. We looked at that last episode. In this episode, we're going to dig into one specific demon or unholy fallen angel.

And that is Satan who goes by several names, Lucifer, Satan. We most commonly know him as Satan.

He's also referred to as the devil. We're going to look at some of the other names, adversary. But we end up seeing is, we want to start by saying that Satan was the highest created being that fell from an act of disobedience.

And we talked about this in the last episode, the fact that Isaiah 14 talks about that angels had fallen.

They were in heaven. They were cast down into the earth. And so we end up seeing there, this is from Isaiah 14, verses 12 to 14.

And it says, this is referring to Satan. How you have fallen from heaven,

O star of the morning, sun of the dawn. You have been cut down to the earth.

You have weakened the nations, but you said in your heart, I will ascend to heaven.

I will rise my throne above the stars of God. And I will sit on the mountain of assembly in the recesses of North.

I will ascend above the heights of the clouds. I will make myself like the most high.

Well, you see there's five times that he says, I will, I will, I will. You get a sense of what this disobedience was from there.

Another passage that also is, many think is a reference to Satan is Ezekiel 28, 11 to 17.

Not gonna take the time to read that whole passage, but as you read through there, you're gonna see this act of disobedience, the pride that Satan had, that his fall.

And so what you see is that out of all the fallen angels, what we see is that he was the highest ranked.

Now we've talked about this when we talked about angels, we talked about the fact that there's a ranking, there's a hierarchy. And we end up seeing that out of the fallen ones,

Satan was the highest. Now this does not mean that maybe Michael or Gabriel were higher.

Some people are of the belief that Satan, Lucifer, was the highest angel.

And some think that that's why he had the pride because he was the top ranked. He was the number one being under God.

And that is where the pride came from and fell. Now that we don't know for sure, because we don't really know all the details of how this hierarchy within the angels works.

But we do know is out of those who have fallen, it seems that Jesus in Matthew 24 refers to the fact, and we looked at this last episode, that the devil and his angels, so it seems like those that followed with him or took part in the rebellion were all under Satan.

So he would be the highest. That doesn't mean in any way whatsoever that Satan is higher than God, stronger than God, or even equal with God.

Satan though he may be the highest created being that fell in that act of disobedience, he is still a creation.

He is still something that God created and therefore is just as much as part of the creation as you and I are or any other animal or any other plant or any other planet.

He is a created being. And that's why it's important that the way we worded this here is

Satan is the highest created being. That is to point out the fact that he is a created being.

I like how Martin Luther says it, that the devil is God's devil. In other words,

Satan may have some authority to do things, but even when it came to Job, he needed

God's permission to be able to do the things he did. This is really, really important for us to understand for a couple of reasons.

One, when we look at what this is trying to address, this is addressing the fact that there are some people that treat

Satan as if he is God. I know that no one's going to say

Satan is God. Well, okay, maybe some Satanist or something, but the reality is people don't say

Satan is God. However, just like the Roman Catholic Church gives

Mary the attributes that are reserved for deity, so do many in the charismatic movement,

Word of Faith, New Apostolic Reformation, give attributes to Satan that are only true of deity.

And so it's very important to know that he is a created being. He is not all -knowing.

He cannot know what's inside your mind. He cannot read your mind. He cannot be all -powerful.

He cannot be everywhere present. These are three of the attributes of deity that are only true of God.

Satan is at one place at one time observing the things that are before him, not knowing things that he doesn't know, and he is not all -powerful.

He needs God's permission to do what he does. So when we think of him, we must always remember he is a created being.

We said this in the last episode, Jim, but there are people who they tend to forget and they speak in such a way as if when they're referring to demons, they refer to the devil or Satan and give him attributes that he doesn't actually have.

And we want to caution against that. Satan is a real spiritual person, which means he has intellect, will, emotions.

What do we mean by this? It doesn't mean he's got a physical body. So a personhood doesn't mean a body.

There are attributes of deity, attributes of personality, and attributes of morality.

God alone has attributes of deity. Angels and humans have attributes of personality, and man has attributes of morality.

If you want more information on that, just go to Striving Fraternity under the Academy. Take our free course that you can take on systematic theology.

In the first several weeks, we're going to cover those three areas and the attributes in those. But God, all these attributes come from God.

Some he communicates to angels and to men, and some just to mankind.

And that's where we start to see differences. But he is a spiritual being. First off, what that means is, as a spiritual being, he's not physical.

We've discussed this kind of every week that we've been talking about the angels, but angels have an ability, it seems, to be visible at times.

They can reveal themselves. It seems that they might need God's permission to do so, but it seems that they can do that.

So he is a real spiritual person. So he has the attributes of personality, as I mentioned, things like intellect, will, emotion.

He's not some force. He's not just some good versus bad force that we have in the universe.

This isn't the Jedis. Star Wars isn't real. But the thing that is,

Satan is a real spiritual person. He's real, so he's not an imagination.

He's not something that's developed for literary style as a good versus bad argument.

He's not a physical person. He does have attributes of personality. So that's why we say a real spiritual person.

Now, I mentioned in here that he has three of the attributes that's communicated from God to Satan as with any other angel, intellect, will, and emotions.

Now, Satan's intellect, I think, is far better than ours. His will is clearer and his emotions are clearer.

Not in a good way, but he has a better understanding than we do.

He doesn't have a failing body where our memories kind of fade. I don't know, Jim, you probably aren't old enough to start having that experience where you just can't remember words anymore.

Happens once in a while, mostly when I'm preaching. That's the worst time for it to happen. Yeah. But Satan has an intellect, which means he can't be a force.

This is one of the things that there are some groups that will try to say that Satan is just something that is just an imagery that God created just to show an anti -type of himself.

And I think what you find is people that do that also want to deny things like hell because that's the real goal of it.

If they say that there is no hell, but there is this supernatural evil person of Satan, that creates a dilemma because, okay, so God is then not just because he's not punishing

Satan. So what some will do is as they throw out hell in their thinking, they end up having to throw out

Satan. That's the reason we're saying he is a real spiritual person.

He's capable of intellectual thought, of having a volition, having emotions.

And these are the things that he's going to try to twist when he tries to tempt human beings because he understands those.

Now, in this section that Jim read, there's a lot of scripture passages here that you can go and look up.

And we don't have the time to go through this and exegete all the passages though I might be tempted to, but we do want to get through this series at some point.

I'm going to refrain, but you can go to the website and check them all out. The next thing that we talk about is that Satan is, as all angels are, limited by God.

Now I've stressed this and I keep trying to stress this because when it comes to Satan, this is what

I find is the number one problem when people talk about Satans or demons.

They have this view as if Satans are unlimited, that they're all powerful, as if they can do things that God would say they can't do.

I already addressed Job 1 and Job 2. You see that Satan cannot do things without God's permission.

That's important for us to know because that shows us that Satan is bound and limited.

Now, this is important. We mentioned this a bit last episode, but I want to dig into this more because there is a group...

I'm going to say this very broadly. There's a group within what's called Christianity. I'll put it that way, but we wouldn't really see them as Christians, though there may be some that are

Christians within the group, and that group is Word of Faith and New Apostolic Reformation. Now, I personally find it very hard to believe that anyone that truly is a

Christian, following and understanding what God says in his word can be part of Word of Faith or NAR, New Apostolic Reformation, and understand its doctrines.

Why do I emphasize that last bit? Well, there's probably many Christians that are caught up in Word of Faith, NAR teaching, and don't really understand what it's teaching.

They don't understand that it's teaching that you, human being, can be a little God. You could be like God.

In fact, so much so that God has to obey what you say.

You are the one that gives God instructions, and he listens to you, very different than what you read in Job.

In Job, God has to give permission for Satan to do what he does. However, what

Word of Faith does is they see that and say, Satan was the one to go before God and demand it, and God had to listen because Satan is the

God of this age. I've heard that many times. Jim, maybe you could give a little bit of a background of what it is that the

New Apostolic Reformation, and more specifically, Word of Faith theology, teaches with their view about who

Satan is and the role that he plays. Yeah, the New Apostolic Reformation, Word of Faith, they would say that Satan is, as you've described him, the little g

God of this world. Since that's how scripture describes him, they would say that he has absolute sovereignty in this realm.

He is the sovereign over this realm. And that because he has tricked Adam into sinning, he has gained access into this creation, and now has kicked

God out so that the true God no longer has access into this creation. He has no access into this world.

The true God cannot do anything unless you and I, as God's representatives in this world, by a confession of faith or by an act of faith or by the words that we speak or the prayers that we pray, give him access into this creation.

So they would say that prayer is us giving God permission to act in this realm. It's almost like they would say

God really, really, really wants to do great stuff here in this realm. He wants to heal. He wants to conquer the nations.

He wants to save people, but he lacks power and authority and access to do that, and he needs us to give it to him.

So in their view, Satan is, in terms of this realm, more powerful than God because Satan can do anything he wants here.

God cannot. And in terms of cosmically speaking, Satan and God are at least equal in power and authority as there is this sort of back and forth pushing, shoving match between the two of them.

And Satan becomes somebody who at times gets his victory over God rather than Satan being the one whom

God controls and whom God, by his sovereignty, gives reign and access in this realm.

And see, we would say God is giving Satan access in this realm for a period of time. And in doing so, what we end up seeing is that in this teaching, though I would think that many that are following under it don't think this through thoroughly, those who are teaching it clearly because they're actually arguing these things, but what it actually is doing is it is lifting

Satan up on high and lowering God to a subservient role. Now, folks, do you understand why we made the emphasis on that Satan is a created being?

The creation is never greater than the creator. The creator is always the sovereign, always the one in greater authority, power.

But what they do in their teaching to try to justify that God wants everything in this world for your best interest.

Now, that actually shows you what they're really all about, self. Go through and look at the scriptures.

Does scripture say that everything's about me? No, scripture says everything's about God. Oh, by the way, for the covenantalists out there, it's not about Christ, it's about God.

That's the difference between, one of the differences that we would hold different, right? Everything's about God's glory.

But what we end up seeing in this is that as we look at that, they will argue that Satan is the ruler.

He's the one in charge. He's the one that can control all things and do all things.

And that's why this very next statement is there, which says, Satan does not know what a person thinks, nor is everywhere affecting everything.

Satan can only be in one place at one time. That is very important.

That's why I keep reiterating this and emphasizing this over and over. Because the fact that we have to realize is we need to know

Satan's place. We can't be lifting him up to a position he doesn't rightfully hold to, nor should he.

Satan is a created being known as an angel that fell in disobedience, is now in a category we call demon, but he is created.

And as a created being, he is under God, like the rest of God's creation.

So we want to take the time, this is why I asked Jim to explain some of that, because what you end up seeing is when you end up talking to someone who is word of faith, you're gonna hear these things come out.

Had a guy just this past week doing some work in my house, a contractor. And as he comes in, he's mentioning things and we're just going, yep, word of faith right there.

Why? Because he's mentioning things about Satan's role in this world. Easy to pick up on that.

Well, easy if you know how they think about it. And that's why we want you to see these differences.

And that's why we have this statement that so carefully delineates this so that you see all that's behind a good doctrinal statement.

There's a lot behind this to try to explain some of these things. So that it's clear on what we are saying we believe and what we do not believe.

Now, some of these things we would see, as Jim and I joke around with different people within Christianity, covenant theology versus dispensationalism, that we would see those as people who are still brothers in Christ, even though we disagree.

But somebody who's holding that Satan is the God of this world and God is subservient to Satan, no,

I have a hard time seeing that they're someone that I'd call a brother in Christ. Because they don't have a right view of who

God is, nor a right view of who Satan is. But start off with the major one, they don't have a right view of who

God is. Yeah, isn't that really the heart of idolatry? That's what idolatry is. It's fair to call them an idolater in that sense.

Yeah, that'd be true. That'd be true. So before we get onto the next paragraph, talking about how

Satan works with human beings and how he tries to deceive us and things, let us take a quick word from our sponsor at this moment.

And that's MyPillow. MyPillow is American -made products that they have here, great products.

Those of you who are regular listeners, you know that I promote this. I promoted it before they were a sponsor.

I went out and sought them as a sponsor because I love their products. And we're grateful that they decided to partner with us and to support us in that way.

So every time you wanna get some great products from them, get great discounts, they always have sales.

You go to their website and you look at the prices and then notice that it'll say, they'll have a price with a promo code.

Well, use our promo code SFE, striving for eternity. That's what it stands for. Go to MyPillow .com,

use the promo code SFE to get not only your discount, but it helps them to know that you are finding out about them through us.

You buy more products, continue to use our promo code so that they know that you heard about them through us and they will continue to sponsor us and support us.

That not only gets you a great night of sleep with their great products, but it helps us to continue to do the work that we do at Striving for Eternity.

And so we're very grateful for MyPillow. Want you to check them out. So the next paragraph we have, it says,

Satan is called an evil deceiver seeking to tempt, oppose and accuse

God's children. Now there's a lot there. And there's a lot of verses there that we will look at some.

And so as we look at this, this is giving us the description of not only who

Satan is, but what Satan does. For example,

Zechariah chapter three, verse one. Then he showed me Joshua, the high priest, standing before the angel of the

Lord and Satan standing at his right hand to accuse him.

And so that's the first thing that you end up seeing is that he's an accuser. He's there, the word there in Hebrew for accuse is to be at enmity, to be hostile toward.

That's what he does. And you say, well, he does that to the point of the saints. Well, no, not actually, not just the saints, because if we look at Matthew chapter four, we see he's a tempter.

And he was even willing to try to attempt God himself in the flesh, Jesus Christ.

And so one of the things we see about Satan is he's constantly trying to tempt us to evil.

Remembering now, we don't want to forget the context of what we said. He is in one place at one time.

So he can only deal with one person at one time. Okay? Granted the other demons are working at his behest as well, but what he is gonna try to do is always be, as we saw with Job, always trying to accuse and find a way to tempt human beings to disobey

God. So one of the things he's called an evil deceiver.

Now that right off the bat should be a warning. We don't usually put trust in a deceiver.

Now this always puzzles me because in the Quran, you end up having God referred to as the great deceiver.

And he was because if you believe the Quran, if the author of the Quran was right, because the author of the

Quran claims that God fooled his own followers in thinking that it was

Jesus on the cross when actually it was a lookalike, it was a substitute and God just made him look like Jesus.

So who did he fool? He fooled his own followers. Okay, if Allah is going to fool his own followers, why in the world would you trust him?

It's like trusting Joe Biden when he lies to us over and over again and go, oh, now we can believe him on a war in Ukraine.

Really? Like he hasn't lied about everything else he's doing? No, once someone shows they're a deceiver, don't put trust in them.

Simple thinking, but he's not just a deceiver. He's an evil deceiver. Now, some could argue, well, there's good cause for deception.

I mean, in warfare, there's deception. It's part of a war ethic where you can deceive someone.

You're not going to go and tell everyone your plan. Well, okay, I'm sorry, I forgot. That is exactly what Joe Biden did.

He gave all the plans we had for Russia with the invasion, before the invasion, three weeks before the invasion, he gave it all that to the

Chinese, who are not our friends, who gave it to the Russians, duh. Okay, so yeah.

Some people do say exactly what they're going to do. I mean, Biden did say, okay, we won't do anything,

Russia, if you go just this far. And so Russia said, oh, thank you, we'll go that far. And then once we get there, we'll go further, right?

Okay, so in battle, people don't reveal or shouldn't reveal their war plans.

Satan actually does reveal his plans. Why? Because he knows they work. He has a three -pronged attack.

It's not very hard. He knows it works. It works consistently. It's recorded in scripture, so we know what he's going to do.

He's going to have the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life.

Those are the three. It worked in the garden with Eve, and he hasn't had to change that plan.

He continues to use the threefold plan of his. But all of those have an evil deception because though they sound good, think about what happened in the garden with Eve.

Oh, God is trying to spare you from something good. He's trying to keep you from having any fruit of any tree.

That was his argument. This is good for you, and God wants to keep it from you. He's deceiving with evil intention.

And what does he do? He's looking to tempt. He's looking to oppose you as a

Christian. He's looking to accuse you. He stands before God accusing Christians and saying, oh, look at how bad they are.

It's exactly what he did with Job. Attacked Job's character, saying how bad

Job was. Job's only doing this, God, because you keep a hedge around him. And then he goes to Job and he's trying to tempt him.

Even uses Job's wife, right? The only one that he doesn't kill, the wife.

Why? Because the wife was used for the temptation. Just curse God and die. Notice, after he said no to the wife, you don't see the wife anymore.

I don't know, maybe it's that she just said, okay, I've had it, I'm leaving because I just liked the money he had or the wealth and now he's got none of it.

But she's out of the picture after that. When she's no longer useful to Satan as a temptation, I guess that she's out of the picture.

But this is who Satan is. This is how he's described and this is what he does. Now, as Jim correctly read this, with emphasis for those who are listening on audio, referring to Satan, it says he is the

God and that's lowercase g God. He is the God and ruler of this world, the prince and power of the air and the ruler of demons.

Now, this is something we see in scripture. So this is not though the way, as we said, the word of faith described him.

So when you end up seeing this described, John 12, 31, as we look at that one, it says, now judgment is upon this world.

Now the ruler of this world will be cast out. That's referring to Satan. He's described as the ruler of this world.

That's a description. Now that doesn't mean he's not under authority of God. He is, but God has allowed him this role of being cast down to earth, having all of the demons under him and he has some authority over the demons and has some reign that he can do.

Now he's referred to as a God, lowercase g in 2 Corinthians 4, 4, in whose case, the

God of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving so that they may not see the light of the gospel or of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.

So he is referred to as the God of this age. Now, Jim, as you explained, many jump on that to say, oh, see, he's a

God. He has replaced God and he's the God of this world. And therefore he has the authority

God would have. And therefore Jesus had to be ransomed and pay a debt to Satan.

And what Word of Faith will actually teach is when Jesus died on the cross, he had to go to hell and pay a punishment in hell for three days and pay

Satan off. And Satan had to get paid. Yeah, and that's not the meaning of that phrase at all.

If that phrase in 2 Corinthians 4, 4 is referring to Satan and some people have argued that that being a judgment passage, that the title

God of this world is actually a reference to Yahweh. And that what is being described there is

God blinding the minds of those who do not believe as an act of judicial judgment. But if we take the phrase

God of this world or ruler of this world, and he is called, Satan is called the ruler of this world. It simply means that he is the one whom unbelievers worship in all the various forms.

He is the one behind idolatries. He is the one behind false doctrines. He's the one who controls the world system in terms of that system of thinking and living that leaves

God out. Satan is the one who is behind all of that in the sense of directing all of the worldwide rebellion against God.

It doesn't mean that he has as much or more authority than God, the true God in this world. It simply means that right now, he is on a very long leash and he really has the run of this planet in terms of fostering and crafting the rebellion that has allied itself against the one true

God. And I do think I am coming to the point of thinking that 2 Corinthians 4 is, as you said, is referring to Yahweh.

A judgment passage, yeah. As I've been studying through that a couple of years ago, I started starting to move to that.

There's another phrase that he's used is used as the prince of the power of this air. And that's in Ephesians 2, 2, which says in which way you formally walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that now is working in the sons of disobedience.

Now, this isn't saying that he's controlling all of these things.

You know, even as you said, Jim, with the view that he is the God of this world, what you end up seeing there is many people will look at this and say, well, then he has some authority and he's controlling all the evil in the world system.

No, he's the one that started the rebellion, the initial rebellion. He's the one that has got his demons doing his bidding.

He and his demons are out tempting, but he's not doing it all by himself. And so that's an important thing for us always to remember this.

But he does have a role that God has allowed him to have in this world that is the idea of him being referred to as the prince of the power of the air, that he has some rule.

And we want to recognize that, but that rule is limited and it's limited by God.

And so we want to be careful with that to see, but this describes a little bit more about him.

He is a leader. He is someone who is in charge. He does have some authority that God gave him, but then we have some more description of him.

As a serpent, he's crafty and guile and called quote the red dragon unquote in revelation.

And so we end up seeing this. This is the first time we see reference to Satan is Genesis chapter three and verse one.

And in Genesis three, one, we see him in his role of deceiving Eve. And as he's doing that, we get to see a little bit about him and what he is doing.

And it becomes an issue that he is there to be crafty, to deceive her.

This is the role that Satan does. This is what he's about. And so it's why

I never understand people that want to say, well, we're going to look at what this description of Satan as if he could be trusted, right?

Just think through the word of faith ideology. So God falls or God is subservient to Satan.

Satan's in control and Satan's going to say, well, okay, if you just give me Jesus, you know,

I'll let things go for a little while. I'll give up some of this power. But no, an evil deceiver doesn't do that.

He would double down and try to hold onto power any way he can. You want proof? COVID emergency orders.

I mean, two years now, we've learned how to live with this now, folks.

But even though Biden's going to say, at the state of the union, we need to live with COVID.

So what happens? Right away, Republicans say, okay, let's vote. And in the Senate, they voted to end the emergency orders.

And what happened? No, no, no, no, no, no. Even if the house votes for that, I'm going to veto it. Well, they put it to the test and oops, it failed.

That's what evil does. They want to hold onto power, okay? And so when you have someone like Satan, who is an evil deceiver, he's not going to release power and just give it up.

He's going to try to do everything he can to keep it. And that's what he's trying to do. I think that even though Satan knows the end, he knows his end.

He still probably in his own mind is so prideful to think he can still get around it, even when Christ died on the cross and he tried to prevent that, but he ended up fulfilling that.

I think he still thinks he can figure a way around this so that he can be able to overcome

God's plan. And so he's described as deceiving Eve with his craftiness.

Well, that's what he looks to do with you and I. I know he's referred in Revelation as the red dragon.

And so sometimes he's called a serpent. Sometimes he's called a dragon. By the way, folks, dragon, serpent, they're used in similar terms in some ways.

We think of a serpent as a snake, but it wasn't always a snake. It could be referring to some sea creatures.

Serpents were used for other animals other than snakes, that lizards, things that don't have feet, any kind of slithering creature.

Dragon is a term, by the way, that we know very well and we think of as these flying beasts that breathe fire, but they actually are something else that we're familiar with.

They're called dinosaurs. Before there was a word dinosaur, remember the word dinosaur is not that old of a word.

150 years that that word's been around or so. And so before that, they would call the, what we call dinosaurs, dragons.

And so great beasts, but they weren't all, I mean, not all dinosaurs were these large beasts.

In fact, the average size of a dinosaur is the size of a cow. So you had some that were very large and some very small.

And so what we end up seeing is he's referred to as a red dragon. And the idea of that, when we see the word dragon, we do have the imagery of this great big beast that would terrify.

And that's what we, the description of Satan. The next sentence we have here is that Satan is

God's adversary and is called Beel, meaning worthless or wicked.

And you see this in Zechariah 3, 1, Matthew 4, 10, 2 Corinthians 6, 15,

Revelation 12, 9, and 20 verse 2, where you'll see him referred to this way.

And this tells us what Satan is doing. Satan is an adversary of God. He is constantly trying to fight against God.

Everything he's doing, he wants to do to fight God, to rebel against God, to try to thwart what

God is doing. That is his agenda. Now, this ends up helping us with some things.

There's many people that think, oh, well, Satan is attacking me. Well, first off, Satan is not attacking you if you're not in line with God's plan, okay?

If you're not living like Christ, Satan is not worried about you.

He is actively going against those who are making a difference.

Satan is not in the bars or the strip joints or any of those. He's fine with those things.

Satan is gonna be active in church. That's where he's gonna be active. In those who are actively serving

God, that's where demons are gonna be most active. They're gonna be attacking those who are serving

God the most. So if you're sitting there and you're kind of a mediocre

Christian, you show up to church, and that's about the extent of your Christian life, I don't think the demons are all that worried about you.

But if you're Jim Osmond and you're preaching faithfully every week, you got a couple of demons that are constantly trying to tempt you.

You got that temptation of the brand new jet and the... No, I guess not. That didn't happen.

Constantly trying to find a pilot. Pilot like a car? Yeah, yeah. Not a airplane pilot.

But no, I mean, that's the reality is that we have to recognize that the fact is that Satan, and we'll look at this later,

Satan's gonna perform, he's a deceiver. He's gonna come as an angel of light. He's gonna come looking good.

He's gonna come having just enough truth to deceive. And that is what he's gonna do.

So people think as if, well, everything Satan's gonna do, Satan is gonna constantly be just gonna be clear to see

Satan's role because it's gonna be out there and open. He's gonna come in a red cape with a tail and horns on his head and a pitchfork, right?

No, no. He comes dressed as an angel of light because he's looking to deceive.

One of the ways he deceives is to come up with all of these man -made religions, religions that teach you can be right with God by good works.

Everything he's trying to do is convince people away from the truth. Satan doesn't care if you go to church and believes your baptism saves you.

Why? Because you're never gonna be saved as long as you believe that. Your baptism isn't gonna save you. But if you believe that, if he can convince you that religion is the right religion and you get prideful about it, you're never gonna hear the truth.

You're gonna turn away from the truth because you think you have it. That is what Satan's gonna be actively doing, trying to get his demons to convince humans of things like that, of trying to set up a system where people are giving into their own pride, their own wishful thinking of man -made religions.

As long as you're not teaching salvation by grace alone, through faith alone and Christ alone, all for God's glory alone, you know, it's okay.

But you start teaching the truth and that's a problem. Kind of like I recently posted on Truth Social.

Are you on Truth Social yet, Jim? No, I'm not. Okay. I'm waiting for this.

Hopefully this will be the replacement for Parlay and Twitter and Facebook and all the others. But I recently posted something about the fact that I noticed that there really wasn't a need for quote unquote fact checkers until people started telling the truth that the media didn't want known.

Right? You notice that? Yeah. It's the same with Satan. He doesn't have a need to fact check with falsehood and misinformation unless the truth is being out.

Wherever the truth is, that's where he and his demons want to attack and deceive and oppose to try to turn what's true into falsehood.

And that's why we see the current world the way it is where everything's turned on its head and people can't even figure out what a boy and a girl are.

Yeah. You know, my wife and I, there's not much good you can watch on TV. So my wife and I have been watching I Love Lucy, shows like 60 years ago.

Yeah. And it's funny because 60 years ago in I Love Lucy, there's an episode where Ricky Ricardo turns to Lucy and says, look, there's only two.

It's either boy or girl. Yeah, Ricky Ricardo didn't live long enough to realize that, oh no, there are 50 other genders that we make up as we go.

That is the foolishness of trying to take what is simple truth and turn it on its head because that's what

Satan is about. So let's look at this last statement that we have, and it says, Satan is not only a person, he is also active in relation to Christ, God, nations, unbelievers, believers in the world system.

Now, we're going to break each of those out. I would like to think we'll break those all out in one episode, but I'm not so silly to think that.

It'll probably take us two episodes. But what I want to do here is just to give the overview of what we're going to cover in the next couple of episodes dealing with Satan.

We're going to look at the fact that Satan, we already emphasized he is a person. He's created, but there are areas that he is active.

We looked that he's active in tempting Jesus in Matthew 4. We're going to see other ways he's active with Christ.

We see that he's active with God as we looked at with Job. He's actively opposing everything that God is trying to do.

We're going to see that he's active in the nations, that he's very active in trying to wipe out the

Jewish nation throughout history. One of the things that there's still a Jewish nation, or at least a tribe of Jewish people, is something that you look at all the ancient cultures of that area, and there's no

Canaanites and Pezites and all the other ites, they're gone. But the Israelites still are there because God preserved them.

And so Satan is trying to actively wipe them out because if he can wipe out Israel, he could wipe out all of God's plan.

You know, what was the Holocaust about? Wiping out Israel. That was, I would say, a supernatural evil in what they were doing in an attempt to wipe out all of the

Jewish people for the very simple reason that if there were no more Jewish people, there could not be a fulfillment of all the promises

God made, and he would be a failure. Now, by the way, that only works in a premillennial view, by the way.

Yeah, that's right. If you don't have a premillennial view, I guess you don't have a problem with, you know, Satan could be successful in wiping out

Israel, and you'd say, oh, so what? But there seems to be a reason that God keeps Israel around, just saying.

And notice what God did from that. He made Israel a nation again and began the process of gathering them back into the land and fulfilling the

Old Testament prophets. Funny how he does that. Satan also is active with unbelievers.

Now, that shouldn't surprise us too much. We looked at last week that demons can possess unbelievers.

One specific unbeliever that I think Satan possessed and had in relation was

Judas, and what he did ended up leading Jesus to the cross. But he's also active in relation to believers.

And then a last area we'll look at is in this world system. Satan is active in the world, very active.

It's the only way to explain our current culture. There's no other way to explain it than a supernatural evil that exists that people can't even use common sense to figure out what's male and female anymore.

That we now have it, which is a crazy thought. We have China and Russia that are arguing for biblical principles of manhood and womanhood.

And we have the Christianized nations that are arguing for gender fluidity.

You look at this and you go, well, how does this all make sense? Well, it makes sense in the fact that right now in our culture, in our countries, what we see is we have countries that deny the existence of God.

Now that the people deny that God even exists, they can hold to principles that will help them flourish because biblical principles always lead to flourishing, not in a monetary way always, but the fact is that cultures will do better when you follow biblical principles.

And so what you end up seeing is those cultures are now turning to that. Where the cultures that teach there is a

God and you need to be accountable to him, those cultures have to be destroyed by taking the truth and making it falsehood.

That is the world system that Satan is behind. So Jim, with all of this, especially since this may be your last episode, we'll see if Bud's going to come back on time, but any last words that you have, anything you want to wrap up with?

No, if this is my last episode, I appreciate the chance to sit in and listen and contribute, make my meager contribution for whatever it's been worth.

And I think you did a really good job of wrapping up everything that we've read there about Satan so far.

So folks, I do want to recommend if you want to listen more to Jim, if you go to christianpodcastcommunity .org,

you will see Kootenai Community Church Worship Service. That is the church that Jim is pastor at.

It is a good podcast to listen to. It is his sermons that he goes into quite a bit of detail on going through, and right now in Hebrews, and he's been there for a while, he'll be there for a while, but it's some good stuff.

Also, June 3rd and 4th, out at Kootenai Community Church, if you want to make it up to Sandpoint, Idaho, it's probably lovely weather in the summer.

I can't say it was lovely weather in the winter, but it's amazing. It's amazing. If you want to get up there, they're going to be having their conference they have each year.

This year is going to be the first time they have two speakers. It's going to be the guys from the Just Thinking podcast, Virgil and Daryl.

They're going to be up there speaking. So if you want to make it out to there, go to Kootenai Community Church, check them out and make sure you register for that because seating is limited.

And I will say that it's going to go quickly. So, you know, you just need to build a bigger facility there,

Jim. Oh wait, you are adding on. We already did. We built a new facility. Yeah, well,

I know you're working upstairs in your facility, so that's good. Add some more. We are, yeah. Yeah, so folks, if you want to check out some other podcasts at the

Christian Podcast Community, go to christianpodcastcommunity .org. We have a lot of different podcasts for you to listen to.

Lots there on almost every topic you want. You can check those out. And if you want to check out, we have a podcast called

Theology Throwdown. We meet once a month, all the podcasters from the Christian Podcast Community get together.

Well, we don't all get together, but it's open to all of us. And we get together and have different topics. And so we have discussions.

The last one that we will record, but by the time you're listening to this, it'll have been recorded, is what do you do when you have someone who is a close family member or friend that is dying and they're an unbeliever?

How do you deal with that? That's going to be a theological topic we will address. Probably not having too many different views, but with the

Christian Podcast Community, we do have a lot of different theologies or theological positions there.

And so I encourage you to check out some of the other podcasts that are there. And with that, Jim, you know what?

What's that, Andrew? That's a wrap. This podcast is part of the Striving for Eternity ministry. For more content or to request a speaker or seminar to your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

Rutgers Health takes an integrated approach to educating students, providing clinical care for our communities, and conducting innovative research to create life -changing health for all.

As New Jersey's academic health center, Rutgers Health brings discoveries in the lab directly to patients across the state and around the world.

Our eight schools, Behavioral Health Network, and four centers and institutes are located just outside New York City in Newark and New Brunswick.

Together, we're breathing new life into health. Judy was boring. Hello. Then Judy discovered

ChumbaCasino .com. It's my little escape. Now Judy's the life of the party. Oh, baby, mama's bringing home the bacon.

Whoa, take it easy, Judy. ♪ Ch -ch -ch -ch -chumba ♪ The Chumba life is for everybody. So go to ChumbaCasino .com

and play over a hundred casino -style games. Join today and play for free for your chance to redeem some serious prizes.

♪ Ch -ch -ch -ch -chumba ♪ ChumbaCasino .com. No purchase necessary. Void where prohibited by law. 18 plus terms and conditions apply.