Revelation 12 Deep Study: 10-12
Revelation 12:10 “And I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ: for the accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accused them before our God day and night.”
Satan is mentioned here as “the accuser”, and he will no longer accuse believers before God because he will no longer be allowed in Heaven. Satan is tossed out once and for all - his time in Heaven is finished, and he has been kicked out and down to earth.
This is where things can get tricky - the first question that came to my mind early on, was when did this happen? Or did it happen yet? If we analyze the Bible, we can find the answer.
For starters, Satan’s fall from Heaven is symbolically described in Isaiah 14:12-14 and Ezekiel 28:12-18. Even though these passages are referring to the kings of Babylon and Tyre, they also reference the spiritual power and motivation behind those kings, which was Satan. However, these passages about those kings and their greedy and unholy motivations only add to the description of why Satan fell, but they do not allude us to when the fall occurred.
So what do we do? We start with what we know for fact from the Word:
We know when God created the angels, and it was before the earth, so Satan, Lucifer, the Angel of Light, whatever you want to call him, was one of the brightest angels God created, and could not have possibly existed until this time:
Job 38:4-7 (KJV): Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding. Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it? Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof; When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?
Satan’s fall, therefore, must have occurred somewhere after the time the angels were created, and after the world was completely formed, and obviously before he tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden. Whether Satan’s fall occurred hours, days, or years before he did this is up for debate because Scripture does not specifically say, so we can honestly only infer a general time line.
Revelation 12:11 “And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death.”
We are reminded in Romans that nothing can separate us from God, and that Satan ultimately will never be victorious against us, no matter what trivial things happen in our life. No accusation can stand against those whose sins have been forgiven because Jesus died for us. Seek Him and make Him the light of your life and actions.
Romans 8:33-39 (ESV): Who shall bring any charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written,
“For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.” No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
“They” here, are the Christians. When Jesus died on Calvary, He became the perfect Lamb sacrifice once and for all of time. In retrospect, Satan is already defeated.
We also learn something else here that is very important - the word of our testimony is when we open our mouths and declare that we believe Jesus is our Lord and Savior, and also believe He rose from the grave, and that we are saved. We must proclaim this, even if it means our life or making our life more difficult. We are not to regard life here on earth as very valuable. The life that is important is in Heaven. Earth ultimately is not the Christian’s home - not how it is right now. We are just passing through. Check out what is written in Romans:
Romans 10:8-10 (KJV): “But what saith it? The word is nigh thee, [even] in thy mouth, and in thy heart: that is, the word of faith, which we preach;” “That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.” “For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.”
Revelation 12:12 “Therefore rejoice, [ye] heavens, and ye that dwell in them. Woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the sea! for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.”
“He hath but a short time”: Knowing that his time is limited, Satan will intensify his efforts against God and mankind, and specifically target Israel (verses 13, 17).
Here we read that, as Christians, are told to look up and rejoice even when we see bad things happening, because our redemption is near. Satan has a short time left, and he knows it - and towards the end, he will specifically target Israel, as especially seen in verses 13 and 17 from Revelation 12 that we will see coming up.
The devil is in an all-out push to destroy the church as it used to be over fifty years ago, trying to dwindle it down. Unfortunately, and as the verses prepare us for such a time, he is currently succeeding in some of his small battles to turn the world away from Christianity, but it won’t last.
According to the “Status of Global Christianity” on www.gordonconwell.edu, the number of professing Christians in the world has not changed much since 1990, hovering around 30% or higher, but the value of Religious Diversity has increased about 17%, meaning that despite this hold in the average of Christianity, there has almost been a double increase in people practicing other religions not named Christianity. It doesn’t necessarily mean a dip in professing Christians or a change in tide either way, but it is a sign of things changing, especially when we see the “New Age” movement of religious practices emerging around us today at a seemingly increasing rate. This will only serve to further diversify the amount of people not practicing true Christianity, as the New Age is all about incorporating a mashup of different religions, often influenced heavily by Easter Mysticism, to create something that you agree with all the good parts, and leave out the stuff you don’t.
Satan realizes his time is running out, and he is working on the believers, trying to convert them to his way - and this is just another part of his plan. His scheme is to tell us not to be a radical Christian anymore, and that these other alternate religions are better and more comfortable. The truth is that they go against sound doctrine. I have taught this many times before.
One such belief that you may see taught in a New Age religion is that Hell doesn’t exist, but reincarnation does, meaning that you have “unlimited lives” and your only real “hell” is having to live over and over again until you live a good enough life to get to Heaven. This is a primary belief in many alternative religions around the world, for example, by practicing Buddhist and Hindus who refer to this “cycle” of life and death as “samsara”. I mean, come on - what a great deal, huh? I can just murder, kill, steal, rape and destroy over and over again - as long as I do a little better each time, I’ll one day get to Heaven. Unfortunately, some New Age teachers have such a “silver tongue” they can get you to believe this, despite the staggering amount of core doctrine from the Bible and literal words from Jesus that say otherwise. They’ll often quote some eastern and/or Pagan religion, claiming them to be a “defiant source of knowledge”, even though they ignore practical statistics such as the fact that the source material they are quoting is very low on trustworthy recounts.
One such example is Buddhism - one that is heavily referenced by New Age teachers - but they seem to always forget to mention that the first recounted documents of said Buddha were written 600 years AFTER his supposed life and death. 600 years is a quite a span of time to confirm details and the existence of something - everyone who could be a literal eye witness or testimony was long dead already upon discovery. In contrast, for Christianity, the first texts were discovered to be written a mere 20 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection. These were able to be reproofed and continued and spread around the world, as the people who wrote it still lived another lifetime and passed it on to other generations, not gap of 60 decades and then “Oh…here it is, the great Buddha god story….” And this isn’t even getting into the staggering statistical numbers of the amount of Biblical recounts vs other religions or even other works of general literature for that matter. The Bible is the most historically and accurately recounted piece of literature in world history - and by far.
I’m sure everyone has heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls - a collection of over 900 manuscripts discovered in the caves around Qumran near the Dead Sea. Between 1947 and 1956, numerous excavations discovered a variety of scrolls and fragments in 11 caves, including copies of every book of the Old Testament except for Nehemiah and Esther. The manuscripts date from 3rd Century B.C. to 1st Century A.D., with some of the earliest dating to the Hellenistic era, approximately 250 B.C. Before their discovery, the earliest complete Old Testament manuscript was the Leningrad Codex, dating to A.D. 1008. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls allowed scholars to see how much of the biblical text had changed in over 1000 years of transmission. Guess what? They discovered that very little had changed and that the Hebrew Bible had been transmitted with incredible accuracy over a millennium.
In addition to this small caveat, the New Testament has been preserved in more manuscripts than any other ancient work of literature as well, with over 5,800 complete or fragmented Greek manuscripts cataloged, 10,000 Latin manuscripts and 9,300 manuscripts in various other ancient languages including Syriac, Slavic, Gothic, Ethiopic, Coptic and Armenian. That’s over 25,000 of the New Testament alone, and this is only these several groups at that! There’s even more in the world!
Satan is trying to make us not take God seriously anymore. He doesn’t mind going to most churches, because he hears very little from the Word of God anymore and no sermons on the blood of Christ. Watering down Jesus is one of his favorite tools to destroy the church as we know it.
Fast-forward to “The Great Tribulation” and we have another piece to the timeline of Satan, which will be a time of great trouble on earth, and we know this will be Satan’s final overall attempt to prevent the 2nd Coming of Christ and His reign by pulling as much of the world away from Jesus as he can:
Matthew 24:15-22 (ESV): The Abomination of Desolation “So when you see the abomination of desolation spoken of by the prophet Daniel, standing in the holy place (let the reader understand), 16 then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. Let the one who is on the housetop not go down to take what is in his house, and let the one who is in the field not turn back to take his cloak. And alas for women who are pregnant and for those who are nursing infants in those days! Pray that your flight may not be in winter or on a Sabbath. For then there will be great tribulation, such as has not been from the beginning of the world until now, no, and never will be. And if those days had not been cut short, no human being would be saved. But for the sake of the elect those days will be cut short.
Daniel 9:27 (ESV): And he shall make a strong covenant with many for one week, and for half of the week he shall put an end to sacrifice and offering. And on the wing of abominations shall come one who makes desolate, until the decreed end is poured out on the desolator.”
It will be Satan’s final attempt to prevent the return and the reign of Christ. He has only a short time to try to prevent the establishment of Christ’s kingdom. Therefore, he has great wrath and intensifies his persecution of Israel, God’s chosen nation, while setting up his own counterfeit kingdom through the Beast, the false messiah. We will get more into detail on this in the next to parts of Revelation 12, specifically with his increasing wrath against Israel.