There are only a few times in Scripture where you read about Satan’s direct assault on a person. In the crucifixion of Christ, for one example, Satan got personally involved by “entering” Judas. Most of the time he simply relies on his “troops” to do all his dirty work.

In the Book of Job, Satan asks God for permission to attack Job. At the end of the book, you learn Job, who is eventually delivered from the satanic captivity, is a picture of the nation Israel.

“Israel is in Egypt and they’re under the oppression of satanic captivity,” explains Jordan. “There’s a reason there are 10 plagues. God tells Moses, ‘Go tell Pharaoh to let my people go; I’m gonna deliver them,’ but then he says, ‘Wait a minute, Moses, I got something else I’m gonna do first. Before I deliver them, I’m gonna whack all 10 of their gods,’ and when you read in Numbers about the plagues, it was so that all the nations of the world would know the God of Israel bested the gods of Egypt.”

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In the Book of Acts, you start out with Satan assaulting the Little Flock (the believing remnant in Israel) and by the book’s end he’s attacking Paul directly.

“Satan knew the program changed even if nobody else did; Satan always focuses on what God’s doing,” says Jordan. “In Genesis, he focused on ‘the seed of the woman’ of all of mankind, but then after the calling of Abraham, he focused just on the seed of Abraham. Why? Because the seed of the woman had become the seed of Abraham. That’s what God was doing and he’s interested in what God’s doing.”

With Paul, Satan was directly involved in getting some of his human thugs to go down to Thessalonica and stop Paul’s preaching just as Paul was seeing “a great multitude” of people turn from their idols to worship God.

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As Luke reports on the wild scene unfolding around a Jewish synagogue, “And some of them believed, and consorted with Paul and Silas; and of the devout Greeks a great multitude, and of the chief women not a few.
[5] But the Jews which believed not, moved with envy, took unto them certain lewd fellows of the baser sort, and gathered a company, and set all the city on an uproar, and assaulted the house of Jason, and sought to bring them out to the people.”

Jordan explains, “When it talks about ‘lewd fellows of the baser sort,’ there was a criminal underworld. ‘Lewd’ is their character, and ‘baser sort’ is their reputation.

‘When it says they had ‘taken security’ against Paul, that means they took out a kind of peace bond. When people are fighting and someone’s threatening you, you go to court and get a bond on that person where if they come within 100 yards of you or whatever, and that’s why Paul says, ‘Wherefore we would have come unto you, even I Paul, once and again; but Satan hindered us.’

“The way Satan hindered him is he got the unbelievers to get the authorities involved, and got a court injunction against him, and turned the government against him.

“So Satan literally used the powers of the government at Thessalonica (actually the Roman government because he’s talking about accusing him of things against Caesar—an appeal to a higher authority) to stop Paul from coming back. Paul understood what was going on and he understood who was behind it. It was the Adversary.”

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In the Bible, the number 22 is associated with spiritual knowledge, light, insight, and revelation. The first time the word “love,” for example, occurs in any of its forms in the Bible is in Genesis 22.

“In Genesis 22 happens to be one of, if not THE greatest, macro codes on the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ in the Bible,” says Jordan. “God tells Abraham to take Isaac. God’s not authorizing human sacrifice here, He’s laying out a pattern and a type and it’s one of the most complete ones.”

Genesis 22:2 reads, “And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.”

Jordan explains, “We know ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son.’ When He said that to Abraham, Abraham had another son but Ishmael wasn’t the seed line. He had only one son that God recognized. But it was more than that, because when He says, ‘Thy son, thine only son whom thou lovest,’ it’s sort of like saying He’s the apple of his eye. He’s the one whom his father set his love upon as he set it upon no one else. God said about the Lord Jesus Christ, ‘Here’s my beloved Son in whom I’m well-pleased.’

“By the way, if you were to go to Genesis 23:1 and check the age, you’ll find that Isaac at this point is 33 years old. Just another one of those little ‘Ahas!’ as you read through here.

“Abraham’s going to go out to a mountain in Moriah, which became known as Mount Moriah. Later on in the Bible, if you know the history of this mountain, it was the place where Onan had the threshing floor that David purchased from him as the site for the Solomon to build the temple.

“If you come down through history a little further, you’ll find that it was that little mount that had a little peak on it that becomes known as the place called Golgotha. All this happens in Genesis where nobody knew anything about the crucifixion of Christ.”

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Genesis 22:4 reports, “Then on the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes, and saw the place afar off.”

Jordan says, “He sees it and when he saw it, it isn’t just that he sees the place, you know, just physically seeing it, but it gets to be pretty clear here that Abraham understands there’s something more going on than just the event.

“You notice it is on the third day that Abraham lifted up his eyes? Abraham’s had that boy, they’ve gone two days and on the third day, here’s the place where he’s going to go and sacrifice him. In Abraham’s mind, the boy’s been dead two days, three days. Jesus Christ is dead for how long? Three days.

“But also in the Bible, a day sometimes represents how long? A thousand years. So after two thousand years, these events take place. And if you look at the top of a reference Bible, you’ll see that Abraham at this time—this is about two thousand years before the time of Christ so there’s all these little straws in the wind flying by here.”

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In Genesis 22:5, Abraham says to the young men, “Abide ye here with the ass; and I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come again to you.”

Jordan explains, “Now when he says he’s going to come again to them, obviously Abraham believed he was going to go up there on that mountain, sacrifice his son and God was going to raise him up and then he’d bring him back down and they’d all go to go home. So Abraham understands something’s going on here bigger than just the events.

“Verse 14 says Abraham called the name of the place Jehovah-jireh ‘as it is said to this day, In the mount of the LORD it shall be seen.’ It’s like Abe understood when he saw that place that there’s some prophetic things going on because he gives the name of the place a prophetic label like he knew he was acting out a prophecy. Certainly he knew he was acting out the prophecy of the resurrection. He believed that his seed would be resurrected and that’s exactly what’s happening there.

“Over in John 8, when Jesus said Abraham ‘rejoiced to see my day: and he saw it,’ this is what he’s talking about. The day there is the day of resurrection. So, when you go through this, Isaac gets edited out of the picture here. You read nothing about Isaac coming back with Abraham.

“In the text of Scripture, the Holy Spirit just edits him out until you get over to chapter 24, and the next time you see Isaac is when he receives his bride. There’s a lot of typology going on here.

“Abraham said, ‘My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering.’ Now Abraham didn’t know what he was saying in the context we think about it but we know things he didn’t know. We can go back and look at that and say, ‘Whew, isn’t it interesting how God put that in His Word and what you see here is God already had some things planned. You can see those kinds of things in a typology like this.”

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Psalm 22 is all about the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and is, in fact, the mental conversation Christ has with God the Father while He’s on the Cross. In the very first verse, He says, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’

Jordan says, “There’s a point in the darkness on the Cross where those words actually come out of the mouth of the Lord Jesus Christ and you know what’s in His mind because you hear what comes out of His mouth and He’s crying exactly what this text is saying.

“At the point where he cries this in the darkness, verse 6, the Lord Jesus Christ, at that moment, was suffering in his soul the transformation that the Bible calls the second death. It was the death of our inner man that Jesus Christ was experiencing personally for you and me on the Cross, and one of the great testimonies to that is what you read when you hear him cry the words, ‘My God why hast thou forsaken?’ and you see in the text things that no one could have understood until after the events.

“In verse 22 he begins to talk about the resurrection and the glory of the kingdom that’s going to come and so forth. Oftentimes, the No. 22 gets associated with things in which the spiritual light and knowledge isn’t necessarily right on the surface but will be there in the text under the surface waiting to be illuminated later.

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Psalm 119 is divided in verse markings and there are 22 sections. In verse one is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. There are 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet and each paragraph begins with one of the letters. In other words, there are 22 sections of eight verses that match the 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet.

What’s fascinating is the word “letter,” either singular or plural, occurs in the New Testament 22 times. Also, there are 22 “letters” in the New Testament once you subtract out the Gospels and the Book of Acts.

Jordan explains, “In the New Testament, it’s the epistles that begin to give light and revelation and knowledge and understanding to the events, whether it’s for the Body of Christ or for the tribulation saints.”

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In Psalm 119, there are 10 terms for the Scripture and they occur in all but three verses. The Book of Lamentations does very much what Psalm 119 does and in chapter 1 and 2 of Lamentations, there are 22 verses. Then you notice chapter 4 and 5 have 22 verses. This is because each one of the verses in Chapters 1-5 begins with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet.

“Chapter 3 has 66 verses so if you divide 22 into 66 you get three so 66 is three times 22,” says Jordan. “What happens in Lamentations 3 is every third verse begins with the next Hebrew letter.”

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In Exodus 25, talking about the Tabernacle, it says it’s made of layer after layer of animal skins and is pitch black dark inside. There aren’t any windows, there’s no illumination except for this candlestick.

“The thing that gives physical light in the tabernacle is that candlestick because it’s got bowls of fuel oil in it,” says Jordan. “In Scripture, oil is a type of the Holy Spirit. The light the Holy Spirit gives; the illumination, the knowledge, the wisdom, the understanding, and, by the way, on that table of shewbread are 12 loaves of bread. And there are six on one side and six on the other. The Bible’s called ‘the bread of life’ and it just happens to have 66 books in it.

“Verse 34 says that in the candlestick ‘shall be four bowls made like unto almonds.’ That’s three branches on each side; each branch has three bowls that come out of it. Three times six is 18. I’ve got 18 bowls. How many did he say were in the shaft?

“In the candlestick shall be four bowls. In the shaft of the candlestick, you’re going to have four bowls. So, if I’ve got 18 in the branches and four in the shaft, how many bowls are there? 22. What’s that candlestick doing? It’s giving light. The oil is giving illumination to the bread of life so the prayers of the saints can apply the bread of life to the details of their lives and it just happens to be 22 bowls.”