Jogging in Central Park near Columbus Circle one night recently, I could hear helicopters overhead and realized they were hovering above Lincoln Center where the masochistic magician, David Blaine, was near-ready to be televised live on national network TV trying to hold his breath underwater for a record-breaking nine minutes.

The two-hour ABC special capturing all this, called, “David Blaine: Drowned Alive,” was just beginning when I returned home so I sat down to take a peek and ended up parked in front of the TV until the bitter end, when Blaine held his breath for a little over seven minutes before he started convulsing and they had to drag him out of the tank and give him oxygen.

His intense agony at the end reminded me how in the Bible, especially in the Psalms, there are many allusions to God’s wrath poured out being just like someone drowning.

Psalm 88:7, for one example, reads, “Thy wrath lieth hard upon me, and thou hast afflicted me with all thy waves.”

In Psalm 69:14, David pleads, “Deliver me out of the mire, and let me not sink: let me be delivered from them that hate me, and out of the deep waters.”

Recently, I wrote about how demons have an affinity for water, fire and high places (Editor’s Note: Scroll down to “Muhjahademons,” dated May, 6, 2006).You see evidence of this all through pagan religious rites, ceremonies, festivals, etc.

I notice, for example, that in practically every episode GlobeTrekker, a PBS series that documents the cultures of countries around the world, there is footage of some religious ritual involving fire and/or water.

Throughout the Bible, there is a constant connection between fire and water in Satan's realm. You’ll see connections with one or the other, or with both of them.

In Mark 9, when Jesus Christ asks about a boy who is being tormented by a demon, the father explains, “And ofttimes it (the demon) hath cast him into the fire, and into the waters, to destroy him.”

The obvious question then is where does this demonic attraction to fire and water originate?

Part of the answer is in Isaiah 14, where we’re told that Satan, as the light-bearer Lucifer, was “lifted up by pride” and instigated an angelic rebellion against God, determining in his heart, “I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north.”

The “mount of the congregation” was a place in the northern recesses of the universe where God came to meet with the angelic creation busy carrying on the business of the heavens. Essentially, the angels came to give an account of their activities and stewardship.

We know from Ezekiel 28 that in this judgment hall were stones of fire (Note: Fire in the Bible is a symbol of judgment) and Satan got it into his head to take over the place, deciding, “That judgment hall’s going to be mine and I'm going to ‘walk up and down in the midst of the stones of fire.’ Judgment is going to be mine—I'm going to be the judge over all of the universe.’ ” (Eze. 28:14)

As my pastor, Richard Jordan (Shorewood Bible Church, Rolling Meadows, Ill.), explains, “When you ‘walk up and down’ something, it's because you own it. You have access to it. It belongs to you. Now, the trick was on Satan because when he rebelled, look what happened to him.”

Specifically, in Eze. 28:16 God assured Satan, “I will cast thee as profane out of the mountain of God: and I will destroy thee, O covering cherub, from the midst of the stones of fire.”

God further promises in Eze. 28:18 that He’ll “bring forth a fire from the midst of thee, it shall devour thee, and I will bring thee to ashes upon the earth in the sight of all them that behold thee.”

Jordan explains, “Here’s this guy wanting to ‘walk up and down’ and possess the judgment hall, and be the judge of all the earth, and God says, ‘I’ll take that fire of judgment and I’ll bring it forth from the midst of thee and destroy you with it and devour you.’ ”

Jesus Christ, in Matt. 25:41, is the one to tell us, in part, that God took the judgment hall and turned it into “everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels,” i.e., hell.

Now, the water part of the equation gets its introduction with Lucifer’s pronouncement, "I will ascend above the heights of the clouds.”

“When he talks about the clouds, he's talking about the clouds that surround the throne of God in the third heaven,” explains Jordan. “He's talking about going up above where the creation is out there and literally sitting on the throne and being ‘like the most high God’—‘I'm going to go take over God's throne which he's worshipped from.’ ”

David tells us in Psalms 18:11 that in God’s “pavilion round about him were dark waters and thick clouds of the skies.”

“What would be the ‘thick clouds of the skies’? Well, that's the vapors holding water,” explains Jordan. “The fire had to do with the judgment hall and the water had to do with that water out there in Gen. 1 that's called ‘the deep’ and God's throne is above that. Satan said, ‘I'm going to get up here and take over where God is.’ ”

“He wants to get above the throne of God and have that position above the waters, but it turns out that the waters are what actually pour out the billows of the wrath of God against him.”

The question then becomes why would Satan and his demon cohorts hold an attraction to the very elements that spell their ultimate doom?

“You can understand that when fire and water represented the workings of God, Satan would say, ‘I want them; I'm fascinated with them,’ but why still the fascination once they've turned into the implements of destruction and the agony and wrath of God upon him?” says Jordan. “The answer is in Rev. 2:24, where it refers to ‘the depths of Satan.’ ”

As Jordan explains, the ‘depths of Satan’ is where rebellion against God leads.

“It leads to something so sinister and inexplicable and it's demonstrated by these guys’ continued fascination with the fire and the water,” he says. “To be fascinated by the fire when hell is prepared for you and it’s your place and yet you're still drawn to it, that’s what we call sadism—people who get pleasure out of causing themselves pain.

“When you get somebody who's a sadist, and they get used to causing themselves pain and torture—physical pain and agony; the cutting, body piercing and all the bondage kind of stuff—they want to cause pain to someone else, and the masochist wants to cause pain to himself. That expression, ‘the depths of Satan,’ is where that thing goes.”

The Apostle Paul’s warns about this very thing in Rom. 1:32 when he writes of those unbelievers, “Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.”

“These people with reprobate minds don’t want what God has to say, and knowing the judgment of God’s on those who do the things they do, they go out and say, ‘Woo, look at me! I’m doing it!’ and they don’t just do it themselves, they get other people to do it too, and have pleasure in the people they can enlist into doing exactly what they know will damn them,” says Jordan. “That's sadistic, masochistic behavior. . . There’s something real bizarre that has to do with the nature of sin and it has to do with what sin does to your thinking process.”

A passage in Ezekiel 32 prophesying about Satan in the ‘last days,’ says Pharaoh the king of Egypt (front man for the devil) will see all the people who’ve gone down into hell and “shall be comforted over all his multitude.”

“Comforted by the damnation of people—now that's the depths of Satan,” says Jordan. “Being drawn to the thing that damns you is part of the depths to which sin carries a person. Sin is such a thing that it can never be satisfied. It just gets deader and deader and every time it gets dead, it takes a little bit more to stimulate it, and a little more to stimulate it, a little more to stimulate it, and that's how you get down into the depths of it.

“You get so twisted, and that rascal can look out over the souls of the damned and be comforted by it. You say, ‘Whoa, what is that about?!’ Well, that's the depths of Satan. “That's why these creatures have that affinity to these things. It was what they were seeking. It's what Satan's ‘wise plan’ is all about. It turned into their own damnation, and their continued fascination with it demonstrates their complete, total reprobate condition.

“If that would tell you anything, it would tell you, ‘Stay away from sin. Don't even chance it. Don't even risk it.’

“There's an old saying down South that says, ‘All the devil’s apples have worms in them.’ You know what’s worse than having an apple with a worm in it? It’s taking a bite out of it and finding half a worm.”