I Kings 22, King Jehoshaphat of Judah, the good king, joins forces with Israel’s King Ahab, the bad king. Before they go into battle, Jehoshaphat persuades Ahab they must first seek counsel from God.

As Jordan tells it, “This is one of those strange passages in Scripture. Jehoshaphat says, ‘Well, before we go out, don’t you think we ought to get a word from God? Is there a prophet of the Lord here?’ Ahab answers, ‘Yeah, we got one down here in jail but he never says anything good about me. That’s why he’s in jail.’

“Jehoshaphat says, ‘Well, can’t we get a message from him?’ and the prophet comes out and says something good about Ahab. Ahab’s surprised and says, ‘That ain’t right; I’ve never had him say anything good about me!’ So then the prophet tells him something bad—about how Ahab’s going to die. And Ahab says, ‘I knew it, I knew it, I knew it!’

“As verse 18 says, ‘the king of Israel said unto Jehoshaphat, Did I not tell thee that he would prophesy no good concerning me, but evil?’

“Ahab wanted a preacher who would, like Isaiah said it, ‘speak unto us smooth things.’ In other words, ‘Don’t ruffle any feathers, don’t tell us the truth, just smooth it out.’ Psalm 55 says about the Antichrist that his words are going to smoother than butter. A real slick talker. And you see that all around you today, don’t you? That ain’t anything new.

“What I want you to see is that behind the scenes of the war Ahab’s going to engage in, there’s a spiritual conflict being worked out on a spiritual level that’s more than just what you see with your eye.

“You can look at II Kings 6 and see the same thing with Elijah and his servant, and so forth, and you can see this same thing all through the Bible.”

*****

Isaiah 14 is a prophetic passage detailing the destruction of the Antichrist at the end of the Tribulation period (the end of the 70^th week at the Second Coming) where the nation Israel mocks him as he’s cast off into hell.

“How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!” reads Isaiah 14:12.

Jordan explains, “They mock him about his original plan. You’ve done that kind of thing yourself—you see a guy go down to an ignoble defeat and you say, ‘Heh-heh, you planned all that, now look at you now buddy!’ ”

“Satan was once the ‘son of the morning.’ He started out as the light-bearer. Job talks about Lucifer’s strong right arm; he was the one, who like the Statue of Liberty, stood at the port of heaven and held forth the torch of the glory of God, and literally his responsibility was to lead all of creation in worship of Almighty God.

“That’s what he was created for; that’s why he was created the most beautiful, wisest creature in all the spirit world—in all of creation. But Lucifer did what many people do when they find out they’re smarter than everybody else—he got stuck on himself. And ‘professing himself to be wise, he became a fool.’ ‘Let him that thinketh he stand take heed lest he fall,” is the advice of Paul.

“When it says, ‘how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!’ it’s telling you that the stage of the resolution of the angelic conflict is on the earth, but the conflict starts in the heavens.

“So, he’s down here weakening the nations, trying to run the nations and cause them to do his will. When it says he determined in his heart, ‘I will exalt my throne above the stars of God. . . I will be like the most High,’ that term ‘most high,’ or ‘the most high God,’ is the description of the one who is the possessor of heaven and earth; the one who possesses all authority in the heavens and all authority in the earth. And that’s what Satan wants to be. He wants to be like; he wants to be the replacement. He’s the counterfeit of the Almighty who possesses all the authority in the universe.

“Now, his strategy’s to thwart God’s plan to exalt Jesus Christ as the ‘head of all things’ and to substitute himself—Satan—for Christ. So God engages the war, the conflict. He creates man, puts him on the earth. He gives man the mandate to, ‘Go out and restore the earth,’ because on earth—the command center of the universe—the conflict’s going to be resolved.

“And he puts a mud man out there. He makes man out of the dirt, puts him out there and says, ‘I’ll make you like me; go win the battle!’ And Satan says, ‘Boy that’s no problem,’ and he gets in the ring and there are two hits: Satan hits Adam and Adam hits the floor.

“And after the ‘fall of man,’ God comes and tells Satan something very important. He explains in Genesis 3:15 that He will use the seed of the woman to (gain the victory). You see, the seed of the woman is a miraculous thing because the woman doesn’t carry the seed; the man carries the seed. But God, in a foretaste and an intimation and a promise about a virgin birth, says, ‘I’m going to come and there’s going to be a seed of a woman—something that man can’t figure out how to do himself I’m going to do and that’s going to resolve the conflict because He’s going to destroy you, and He’s going to be the one who exalts my program.’

“And beginning in Gen. 3:15, there’s the beginning of a seed line. Not a godly line because they’re still kin to Adam, but a seed line, and that seed line—the seed of the woman—Satan attacks in the earth immediately.

“Genesis 6 says that as the sons of men began to grow, the ‘sons of God’ came down as Satan sought to corrupt the seed line with a strange, enigmatic, hybrid-type of corruption of the DNA process, making man unclean and unusable to fulfill God’s purpose in the earth.

“And God destroys that with a flood. He then puts man back out there on the earth, divides them up into nations to protect them from that, but Satan attacks the race again, and finally God chooses out one nation.

“The seed of the woman becomes the seed of Abraham. And the seed of Abraham becomes the bearer of the seed line. And now Satan, instead of attacking all the nations of the earth (he’s got them in his hip pocket), he goes after that one nation.

“Then in Genesis 15, something very interesting transpires—when God makes the Abrahamic covenant (ratifies it and makes it a contract) with Abraham, He says, ‘Your seed’s going to go down into a strange land for 400 years, and then they’re going to come out, and when they come out, I’m going to put them here in this land of Canaan.’ He tells Abraham, ‘Walk out there, kick the dirt, it’s yours; I’m going to bring them back and they’re going to take it over.’

“Do you know what that did? That gave Satan 400 years to set the booby traps in the land of Canaan! He now knows Israel’s going to go down into Egypt for 400 years and God’s going to bring them back to take over Palestine.

“You know what Satan did for that 400 years? He put a series of nations—seven of them, Deuteronomy 7 say—in the land of Canaan. They’re called ‘the sons of Belial’ and he put them in that land of Canaan to dig down the munitions so they couldn’t be blasted out.

“And when God brought Israel out of Egypt, He sent them up there (as you read in Joshua and Judges), and said, ‘You go in there and you destroy those seven nations and you don’t leave any of them.’

“Now, people argue, ‘Well, that’s terrible of God to tell them to go out and destroy them and take the little children,’ but He did that because they were a satanic seed. They were the seed of the Adversary, the seed of the devil, the seed of Satan who ultimately is the Antichrist.

“There was a spiritual conflict going on there and that’s why you read about those giants in Deuteronomy 3. It says, ‘Og the king of Bashan came out against us, he and all his people.’ That was the remnant of the giants.

“That corrupted seed line comes along again. Why? To hold that land of Israel where they couldn’t come in and take over the land of Canaan. And in Judges and Joshua, Israel doesn’t destroy them.

“By the way, the Golan Heights, Nabulus and Gaza. . . those territories go back and take those seven nations, and you know what? The territory those seven nations occupied in the book of Joshua—that Israel didn’t destroy them in—is still today in conflict!

“Jericho, the ‘house of the moon god’ in history, is still in conflict today. The reason the symbol of Islam is that crescent moon is because what Mohammed did was take the moon god and make it the one god. He destroyed polytheism by monotheism with the false god. That’s why Islam conquers with the sword.

“Israel, instead of destroying all that, let it go. They failed. Now, fast forward all through human history to the ‘last days’ in Revelation 12. That conflict goes on all through your Bible, folks.

“It’s the conflict that’s there all during the earthly ministry of Christ. It’s why all those demons were in the land. People say, ‘Why was there so much demon possession of people during the earthly ministry of Christ?’ and the answer is because Satan had called all of his hoards in!

“That demoniac of Gadera; that was a special place of darkness up there in that northern recess of the land of Galilee. A place where Satan had a special stronghold. And when Christ goes across the sea and gets off at the shore over there, and there’s that maniac of Gadera—the demon-possessed man—He says to the demon in him, ‘Who are you?’ and the answer’s, ‘My name is Legion for we are many.’

“There were so many demons; so many devils in the land of Israel at that time that there weren’t enough Israelites to occupy one-on-one, so this guy at Gadera had hundreds of them. A legion is 2,000 men. As many as that many in one guy!

“What had Satan done? He’d gotten his host there. Why? Because the kingdom of Satan, Matthew 12 says, has come in conflict with the kingdom of God and the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, and he’s come in. Isn’t that what you do when your enemy attacks and you know where he’s going to attack?

“You see, God told Satan ahead of time. It’s like Vince Lombardi used to say, ‘I don’t care if the other team knows our play, let them know. We’ll just go out and do it anyway.’ He didn’t care that the other team knew he only had five plays—if you’re good enough you just go out and do it anyway! And God let Satan know!”