Why Future Events?-Part 2

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WHY FUTURE EVENTS? PART 2

In our first article concerning God’s purpose for future events we noted that God deter­mined to have a kingdom over which He could rule as a sovereign king, that He created two major kinds of personal subjects (angels and humans) to serve Him within His king­dom, that He ordained planet earth to have a theocracy as its original form of government, and that He created the first man, Adam, to be His earthly representative, responsible to administer God’s rule over the earthly province of God’s universal kingdom.

After God completed the creation of His universal kingdom, He saw that all of it was very good (Genesis 1:31). No part of His created kingdom had gone against Him yet. However, it did not remain that way very long.

Sometime after God completed the creation of His universal kingdom, the highest ranked, most exalted angel (“the anointed cherub that covers,” who was “full of wisdom, and perfect in beauty” and perfect in his ways from the day he was created until iniquity was found in him — Ezekiel 28:12, 14-15) became lifted up with pride because of how great he was (Ezekiel 28:17; 1 Timothy 3:6). Because of this angel’s sin of pride, God cast him down from His Heaven (Ezekiel 28:16).

Because pride made this angel blind to reality, he deceived himself into thinking that he could make himself like God (Isaiah 14:13-14). Because God was the ultimate sover­eign of the universe, this angel wanted to be that ultimate sovereign. Because God had a kingdom over which He ruled as a sovereign king, he wanted to have a kingdom over which he could rule as a sovereign king. Because God had both angelic and human sub­jects in His kingdom, he too wanted to have angelic and human subjects within his king­dom. But this angel had a problem that God did not have. Since he was only a creature and not the Creator, he did not have the ability to create angels and humans. The most that he could hope to accomplish was to persuade God’s angels and humans to join him in his revolt against God.

When this exalted angel began his revolt against God, God changed his name to Satan. That was a very appropriate change of name, because the name Satan means “adversary” or “enemy” (William F. Arndt and F. Wilbur Gingrich, A Greek-English Lexicon Of The New Testament, p. 752), and this angel had now become God’s great enemy.

Satan approached the other angels and succeeded in persuading a sizeable number of them to join him in his revolt against God. One indication of this is the fact that Christ and Revelation referred to the devil and his angels (Matthew 25:41; Revelation 12:7-9). Thus, there was a fall of other angels away from God.

Once Satan had angels in his kingdom He then made his approach to the first two human beings, Adam and Eve. The record of this is in Genesis 3. Angels have the ability to take upon themselves any form necessary to perform a task. Satan took upon himself the form of a serpent when entering man’s perfect environment on earth. Revelation 12:9 and 20:2 clearly identify Satan as “that old serpent.” Satan succeeded in persuading Adam and Eve to join him in his revolt against God (Genesis 3:1-7). As a result, the fall of man away from God took place.

In order to understand God’s purpose for the future events that will transpire near the end of this present earth’s history, we must note three tragic consequences of man joining Satan’s revolt against God. First, the theocracy was lost from planet earth. Since a theocracy is the form of government in which God’s rule is administered by a representative, and since Adam, God’s earthly representative, defected from God in the fall, the theocratic kingdom rule of God was lost from the earth.

Second, by getting Adam to defect from God, Satan was able to usurp the rule of the world system away from God. Satan and his forces have been dominating the world sys­tem ever since man’s fall. The Bible indicates this in several ways. First, Satan had the authority to cause all the kingdoms of the world system to pass before Christ and to offer Him the rule of that system. Satan stated that the reason he had that authority was be­cause the rule of the world system had been delivered to him (Luke 4:5-6). Who handed over the rule of the world system to Satan? Since Adam was the one to whom God com­mitted that rule, he is the one who handed it over to God’s enemy when he joined Satan’s revolt against God. Second, Christ called Satan “the prince of this world” (John 12:31; 14:30; 16:11). The word translated “prince” means “ruler” (Arndt and Gingrich, p. 113). Third, the Apostle Paul called Satan “the god of this world” (2 Corinthians 4:4). He is the one who prompts the false philosophies that characterize the world system of this present age. Fourth, the Apostle John said, “the whole world lies in wickedness” (this could also be translated “in the wicked one,” referring to Satan – 1 John 5:19). Fifth, James warned believers that any person who determines to be a friend of the present world system is God’s enemy (James 4:4). That is so because the present world system is dominated by God’s enemy, Satan. The fact that Paul, John and James were moved by the Holy Spirit to write these statements several years after Christ ascended to Heaven and was set by God at His right hand on His throne indicates that Satan continued to dominate the world sys­tem even after this exaltation of Christ (Ephesians 2:20; Revelation 3:21; Psalm 110:1).

The third tragic consequence of man joining Satan’s revolt against God is as follows: All of nature was subjected to a curse that caused radical changes. For example, when God confronted Adam with his role in man’s fall, He declared, “Cursed is the ground for your sake; in sorrow shall you eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to you; . . . in the sweat of your face shall you eat bread” (Genesis 3:17-19). It appears that the curse radically reduced the fertility level of the soil and caused other conditions that would make man’s work of growing food to sustain life more difficult. The curse also radically changed the nature of animals from being tame and vegetarian in diet to being wild and flesh-eating. Thus, the Apostle Paul declared that “the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, . . . the whole creation groans and travails in pain together until now,” and “the earnest expectation of the creature waits” for the time when “the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption” (Romans 8:19- 22).

The next article will begin to examine how these tragic consequences of man’s fall away from God relate to future events.

To pursue the subject of God’s purpose for history and how He works through time to accomplish that purpose, order my book: What On Earth Is God Doing?

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