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 of 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 that was 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.”