Good evening and welcome to EBible Fellowship's Bible study in the Book of Revelation.  Tonight is study #10 of Revelation, chapter 12, and we are going to be reading Revelation 12:9-10:

And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him. 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.

I will stop reading there.  We saw in our last study that Satan, the great dragon, is given four names here and this relates to the binding of Satan.  In Revelation 20, God uses the very same names to describe when the Lord Jesus Christ bound Satan and cast him into the bottomless pit for the figurative period of a thousand years, which represents the completeness of his binding.  The thousand years represents the entire church age, from 33 AD when Christ went to the cross until May 21, 1988, the day before Pentecost, when the church age ended after the (actual) 1,955 years.  Satan was loosed at that point.

Here, God again refers to that great dragon, “that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan.”  These four main names were given to Satan by God and each one describes something different about him.  The number “four” in the Bible points to the furthest extent of what is in view or the universal nature of what is in view.  There are four points of the compass: North, South, East and West.  Satan is active in all the world and God followed up this statement by saying that Satan “deceiveth the whole world.”  The universal judgment of Satan came upon him, as he was cast out of heaven, as Jesus said in Luke 10:18: “I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven.”  Where did Satan fall?  He fell to the earth and God also gave us language of his binding at that point because he would not be able to hinder God’s program of evangelization, as God sent forth the Gospel into the world and established the New Testament churches and congregations over the many centuries of the church age.

Before we move on to Revelation 12:10, I would like to look at a phrase that we read fairly casually, because we understand it is true and we are familiar with it, but it says of Satan, in Revelation 12:9:

…And Satan, which deceiveth the whole world:

And, of course, he does do that.  We realize he is Satan, but we also know he is not omnipresent (everywhere present), but he is a creature, a fallen angelic being.  We read, in the Book of Job, that Satan answered God that he had been going about “to and fro in the earth.”  This tells us that he is not everywhere, but he has to go from one place to another just like a person, although he can probably cover ground much faster than a person, since he is a spirit being.  So how can it be said that he deceives the whole world?  Well, he can deceive people personally to some degree.  He can also use the fallen angels that fell with him to act on his behalf to deceive people and he can used unsaved people in his kingdom.   These people are prey for him and Satan can manipulate them and use them for his own purposes.

But, more than that, this phrase, “Satan, which deceiveth the whole world,” goes back to the Garden of Eden to the point when Satan was able to deceive Eve; then Eve gave to her husband and Adam also ate of the fruit and both were deceived as a result of Satan’s lies and his twisting of the things that God had said.  When Adam and Eve rebelled against God and fell into sin and believed the lie of Satan more than the truth of God, all mankind were present “in the loins” of Adam.  Adam was our figurehead, so when he fell and died, spiritually, all men fell and all people died “in him.”  From that point on, we were conceived in sin and born into the world speaking lies.  All men were sinners. 

However, it was not as if any one of us would have done any differently.   According to the Bible, Adam was our representative and based on his action, the consequences of sin came upon us, but we cannot blame him because we are also responsible, being men and being in him in “his loins.”  God uses that same idea of a figurehead to provide salvation for the great multitude, all those he determined to save.  It works the same way, but in a positive way.  Jesus was our figurehead and “by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous,” just as by the sin of one (Adam), mankind was made sinners.  It is how God designed things to work out.

So, here, Satan is said to have deceived the whole world, but it is not only referring to the past tense because the Greek word translated as “deceiveth” is a present active participle, which means an ongoing deception, so from the Garden of Eden right up to today, Satan “deceiveth the whole world,” not just most of the world.  He deceives all the nations of the world and all the inhabitants of the earth.  Only those that are delivered out of his kingdom and translated into the kingdom of God’s dear son are able to see the truth; this is only by the grace and mercy of God as He opens the eyes of His elect people to understand the truths of the Bible.  Then these people are able to see the great deception that the world has been under since the beginning of history. 

We will look at a few verses that look at the typical state or condition of deception which this world has been under throughout time.  For instance, it says in 2Timothy 3:12-13:

Yea, and all that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution. But evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived.

We tend to think of “certain” individuals as being “evil men and seducers,” but the truth is that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.  Evil is sin, so if we have committed sin, we have committed evil and we have become evil men and women; we are guilty of having broken the Law of God, making us subject to the wrath of God.  God sees evildoers, those that have transgressed His perfect and good Law.  So it says, “Evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse.”  They will increase and grow in wickedness and multiply in their evil doings.  Then it goes on to say that they are “deceiving, and being deceived.”  This is true of the people of the world and it is true of each one of us.  We are no different.  We were born men and, therefore, born as liars and sinners.  We have been involved in “deceiving.”  We have been involved in deceiving others and we have been involved in deceiving ourselves (in our own hearts).  Remember what it says in Jeremiah 17:9:

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?

Then it goes on to say that God searches the heart and He knows it, but no man knows his own heart or the depths of the wickedness that lies therein.  If you ask people what they are like, the majority of people are going to say, “Well, I am basically a good person.”  Some may have a less “rosy” outlook on themselves, but this is the typical outlook of mankind.  They will say that they are “basically good.”  They cannot say they are perfectly good – they know that.  But they are basically good; they may lie a little bit or maybe they stole some things or maybe they did not have the best attitude toward a person or maybe they thought some ugly things of someone a couple of times, but, basically, they are “good.”  But that is not God’s analysis and that is not God’s view of people.  After searching their hearts, He sees desperate wickedness and a “heart deceitful above all things.”  This is not a minor statement to have a heart that is deceitful above all things; that is, put anything in the place of “all things,” and our natural heart (the heart we were born with and the heart we may have had for many years in this world) is “desperately wicked” and “deceitful above all things.” 

So it is no surprise that the unsaved who continue to have that kind of heart are “evil men and seducers” that “shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived.”  They are open to all kinds of deception, all kinds of foolishness and whatever ridiculous theory that someone may have (a lie).  We are wide open to it if we have this kind of heart that is “deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.”  We will believe in aliens; we will believe in little green men from mars; we will believe in psychic phenomenon; we will believe in evolution; we will believe abortion is a good thing; we will believe that gay marriage is a right people should have.  We will believe anything.  We will believe that it is somehow a good thing to walk down the street with a purple Mohawk and earrings that are twice as size of our ears.  We will believe that body piercing all over our body is really just a nice little fad.  It is amazing what people believe.  Some people think that getting tattoos all over their bodies is really something they should do. 

It is really incredible when we see the level of deception that Satan is able to work in the minds of men in so many different ways, especially concerning spiritual things and things touching the Bible; then he outdoes himself in his ability to deceive.  So Satan has been actively deceiving man since the beginning.   This is why God tells the true believer to be careful in 1John 4:1:

Beloved, believe not every spirit…

Let us stop right there.  God is saying that we are not to believe every spirit.  We are not to just believe anybody, whatever they say.  But do we leave it at that?  No, we are not leave it at that because God is not finished explaining.  It goes on to say in 1John 4:1:

Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.

So it is not that we immediately just “write off” what people are saying: “Well, I am not going to believe it.”  But when God says, “Beloved, believe not every spirit,” this is a phrase that teaches us that we must check these things out.  For instance, if someone is coming with the Bible and they are saying that this is what the Bible says, we are not permitted to just ignore it, dismiss it or write it off.  What if we were dismissing something that was actually true?  What if we were dismissing something the Bible actually taught?  That would be a wrong on our part, so we cannot do that, but we listen for the “spirit,” because it is teaching spiritual things and then we “try the spirits whether they are of God.”  And God tells us in several places how to “try the spirits.”  We must compare Scripture with Scripture and spiritual things with spiritual.  We make sure that what this teacher or preacher is saying fits, when we compare Scripture with Scripture.  Has this individual done that?  Have they examined their conclusion and made sure it harmonizes with everything else in the Bible?  That is the next part – to find harmony.  Does it fit into place like a piece of a puzzle?  That must happen.  People may be able to point to one verse, and one or two other verses that seem to go along with it, but they do not harmonize it with many other verses that do not fit with what they say. 

By the way, let us compare this phrase in 1John 4:1, “Beloved, believe not every spirit,” with Matthew 24:23:

Then if any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is Christ, or there; believe it not.

This is the exact same thing which 1John 4 says, “Beloved, believe not every spirit.”  Some people just want to point to Matthew 24 and say it is talking about the end of the world and we are not to believe when a date is given.  Of course, they are reading all kinds of things into that and they are trying to come up with a conclusion and they want to justify the fact that they are ignoring information from the Bible concerning the timing of the end, so they can just dismiss it.  Yet, they are failing to see that this expression “Believe not every spirit,”, when we compare Scripture with Scripture, locks into 1John 4, “Believe not every spirit, but try the spirits.”  God does not give this additional information in Matthew 24, but that is how God writes the Bible.  He gives us enough of the phrase to refer us back to 1John, chapter 4, and then it is up to the reader to be careful and diligent and put the two together.  Someone that is not careful or diligent will just superficially take a phrase and assume they know the meaning and use it to go in a wrong way.  That is what some people do.

Also, concerning deception, we read in 1John 4:5-6:

They are of the world: therefore speak they of the world, and the world heareth them. We are of God: he that knoweth God heareth us; he that is not of God heareth not us. Hereby know we the spirit of truth, and the spirit of error.

The word “error” is a related word to the word “deceiveth” in Revelation 12, verse 9.  The word “deceiveth” is Strong’s #4505 and the word “error” is Strong’s #4506 and they are translated both as “deceiveth” or “error.”  So, here, God indicates that there is a “spirit of truth” and a “spirit of error.”  This is why you “try the spirits,” and if it is of God, will be the “spirit of truth.”  The “spirit of truth” is something defined by the Bible, as we compare Scripture with Scripture and which harmonizes with the entire Bible.  Remember, it says in 1Corinthians, chapter 2, when we compare spiritual with spiritual, “the Holy Ghost teacheth,” and that, obviously, would be truth.  When people do not follow God’s methodology to arrive at their conclusion, then they are not using the Bible to come to right doctrine.  Most of the time, they will arrive with something that is a “spirit of error,” a deception. 

God’s people are given ears to hear, but it is not like we can listen and know automatically just by the “sound,” but we can have a tendency in a certain direction.  For instance, I like to use the example of Mr. Camping when he was teaching the Open Forum in times past.  I remember when I first began to listen, having no real knowledge or understanding of the Bible or of what was right or wrong in the spiritual realm.  I would hear a pastor of a church here and there, but then I heard Mr. Camping, talking with authority and referring only to the Bible: this is what the Bible says and then he would read what the Bible said so I could match up what he was saying and what the Bible said, so I could see it was one and the same.  So you just have a “sense” and a “tendency” that God gives through His Spirit to lean in the right direction, but we must still not just automatically believe it, but we are to “try the spirits.”  We are all responsible and obligated to check it out to see if it is so in the Scriptures.  When the believer does so, oftentimes we were correct in our understanding and it confirmed that Mr. Camping was a true man of God and that Family Radio (at that time) was a faithful ministry of God, so we began to listen more and to follow the things being (correctly) taught.

Well, let us go to Romans, chapter 1.  In this first chapter God gets into a discussion of the time of the end of the world, Judgment Day, when He “gives man up.”  It says in Romans 1:26-27:

For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.

This is that same word “error” that we found in 1John 4:6.  It is a related word to “deceive.”  This word “error” is also translated as “delusion,” where God says He will send them strong delusion so that they would believe a lie, in 2Thessalonians 2:11.  In that verse it overwhelmingly has to do with the churches and congregations that believe all kinds of lies today; they are solidly entrenched in lies.  But, also, Satan (who deceiveth the whole world) has deceived the nations and the peoples of the world to a large degree today into thinking, more and more, that certain evil things are good, but they are wicked things because God says they are: like when He says we are not to kill; or when He says there is not to be marriage except between a man and a woman and the two are to be one flesh; or when He says that divorce is an evil thing or remarriage after divorce is an evil thing; or any two men attempting to marry is an evil thing; or any two women attempting to marry is an evil thing. 

Evil is that which is contrary to the Law of God, the Bible, and God, here, speaks of giving men up to these things so that they would eventually receive the “recompence of their error” or their deception, as men are deceiving others and being deceived.  So, people are simply deceived about these things: they are deceived about abortion; they are deceived about evolution, and so on.  It is really a world that is operating on an entirely different level than the kingdom of God.  God operates with truth and with honesty and with goodness and light, but the world operates with lies and with darkness and with dishonesty and with that which is evil and wrong.  This is the normal operation of the world throughout its history, but at the time of end, “Satan who deceiveth the whole world” is given a special ability to deceive men at the time of the end, both in the churches and in the world.

We will look a little bit more at Satan’s increased activities of deception in the world, when we get together in our next Bible study.