Jesus Triumphant (Chronicles of the Nephilim Book 8) (38 page)

Three times in the Gospel of John, this Accuser named Belial, is called “the ruler of this world” (Jn. 12:31, 14:30-31, 16:11), in 2 Cor. 4:4, “the god of this world.” In Eph. 2:2 he is called the “prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience.” In fact, when Jesus was tempted by the satan in the desert, he offered Christ all the kingdoms of the world for his own “domain and glory; for it has been handed over to me, and I give it to whomever I wish” (Luke 4:6). It seems as if the satan is the only Watcher god in authority over the nations, like he has all the power. What happened to all the other ones?

Walter Wink points out a possible key to the solution. In the intertestamental period “much tradition identified Satan as the angel of Rome, thus adapting the angels-of-the-nations idea to the situation of Roman world-hegemony. Since Rome had conquered the entire Mediterranean region and much else besides, its angel-prince had become lord of all other angel-princes of the vanquished nations. This identification was already explicit at Qumran, where Rome and the Romans (the ‘Kittim’ of the War Scroll) are made the specific allies and agents of Satan and his host.”
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The Dead Sea Scroll 11QMelch interprets Psalm 82 as describing Satan/Belial as the chief of the gods in the divine council to be punished for his unjust authority over the nations.
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Another Jewish intertestamental document, the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, lists in several places Beliar, synonymous with Satan, as holding captive mankind.
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In the post-New Testament religious text The Martyrdom and Ascension of Isaiah (1st century A.D.) the name of Satan is used synonymously with the names Sammael and Beliar.
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But in the later text of 3 Enoch (5th century A.D.), Satan, Sammael, and Beliar are considered separate entities, with Sammael and Beliar being Satan’s underlings (3 Enoch 26:12).

But the real twist is that in this same text, Sammael is called
the Prince of Rome
, just as Dubbiel is called the Prince of Persia (remember the “Prince of Persia” from Daniel 10?).

3 Enoch 26:12

Every day Satan sits with Sammaʾel, Prince of Rome, and with Dubbiʾel, Prince of Persia, and they write down the sins of Israel on tablets and give them to the seraphim to bring them before the Holy One, blessed be he, so that he should destroy Israel from the world.
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Just like the satan in the New Testament, Sammael is called the “prince of the accusers who is greater than all the princes of kingdoms that are in the height [heaven]” (3 Enoch 14:2). And just like the satan in the New Testament, Sammael’s name means “god of the blind” (2 Cor. 4:4).
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So in these texts Sammael is the Watcher prince over Rome under the authority of the satan, or Sammael is the name of the Watcher prince over Rome who also has the heavenly position of being “the accuser” (the satan).
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But what about this notion of the ruler (
archon
), or god of this world? Is the world something bigger than the realm of this satanic Prince of Rome? To answer that, we will have to look at the idea of
the
world
as presented in the New Testament.

It is common in the Bible to refer to the Roman Empire as “all the world” (
oikoumene
) which meant the known inhabited world under Rome’s power. Luke writes that when Caesar ordered a census of the Roman Empire, he made a decree that “all the world (
oikoumene
) should be registered” (Luke 2:1). Jesus said that the Gospel would be proclaimed “through all the world (
oikoumene
) as a testimony to all the nations” (Matt. 24:14). At that time, all the nations (and their allotted Watchers?) were under Roman rule. When Paul writes that within his own lifetime, the Gospel “has been proclaimed in all creation under heaven” (Col. 1:23), it is an obvious expression of
the inhabited world of the Roman Empire
, not the entire globe as we now know it.

Another Greek word occasionally used for the Roman world was
cosmos
. Cosmos was not the physical universe as we would understand it, but rather more like the zeitgeist or the godless “world system” or “world order” of estranged humanity.
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And that world order was of course Rome. Paul writes that the very Gospel preached in the Roman Empire “has come to you, as indeed in the whole world (
cosmos
)” (Col. 1:6). The Roman Christian’s faith had been “proclaimed in all the world (
cosmos
)” (Rom. 1:8), the Gospel “has been made known to all the nations” (Rom. 16:26) at the time of Paul’s writing to those Romans in the first century.
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In the New Testament, the “world” (cosmos) and the “inhabited earth” (
oikoumene
) as well as other global language was used interchangeably to refer to the known inhabited world of the Roman Empire. All the known nations were encompassed in its power and worldview, so it seems those angelic entities over those nations would therefore also be under the authority of the Watcher of Rome.

If the satan therefore was “god” or “ruler” of that “world,” then most likely he had become the angelic authority over Rome, and it would make sense that the New Testament would focus on the satan over the other Watchers. Rome had become the ultimate enemy of God’s people and had authority over
all the nations of the world
. So much so that Daniel’s vision was of the Messianic stone (Jesus) that would hit the Roman empire and ultimately crush it as the apex of godless empire (Dan. 2:44-45).

This theory is further evidenced in the book of Revelation where the Dragon of Revelation 12, clearly described as “that ancient serpent, who is the devil and the satan” (20:2), is the angelic principality of power that gives authority to both the Beast of the Sea (13:1-2) and the Beast of the Land (13:11-12).
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Readers of the
Chronicles of the Nephilim
will be very familiar with the sea beast of Leviathan and the land beast of Behemoth. As explained in previous appendices, these are chaos monsters, symbolic of both foreign nations and rulers against whom Yahweh battles to establish his covenanted order.
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Leviathan’s sea dragon imagery is linked with the satan’s serpentine chaos nature.

Revelation is notoriously difficult to interpret, and there are a plethora of interpretations of who or what the Land and Sea Beasts represent. But there is a common thread for the interpretation of the Sea Beast among most all the interpretive schools. Robert Mounce explains it:

There is little doubt that for John the beast was the Roman Empire as persecutor of the church. It comes onto the land from the sea, just as the Roman troops did when they invaded the eastern Mediterranean. The beast is that spirit of imperial power which claims a religious sanction for its gross injustices.”
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In his book,
The Beast of Revelation
, eschatology expert Ken Gentry points out that the Beast imagery of Revelation paints a fluid picture of both an individual and a kingdom of spiritual chaos and oppression. That kingdom is the Roman Empire that was also embodied in its emperor.
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The third of other angels that the Dragon’s tail cast with him to earth (Rev. 12:4) are then the Watchers of the other nations under Rome and therefore under the satan’s authority.

In this understanding, When Jesus the Messiah arrives and inaugurates the kingdom of God, he does so by “binding the strong man” the “god of this world,” the satan. His casting out of demons was a herald of casting down the satan’s power (John 12:31; Matt. 12:28-29), and taking authority over his world. It was as if one fell swoop of the highest heavenly power over the nations brought down all the enemies with him. He destroyed the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil (Heb. 2:14). But why is he still prowling around like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour? (1Pet. 5:8).

Because his overthrow is not absolute. It’s a qualified binding. Let’s take a closer look at the “binding” of the satan.

Magic and the Binding of Spirits

Through the entire
Chronicles
series, I have used a concept called “binding” of angels, demons, and Watchers. This binding is accomplished through imprisonment in the earth or Tartarus.

This binding notion originates theologically from the binding of Satan in the ministry of Christ as noted above in Matthew 12, as well as the binding of angels in “chains of gloomy darkness” in Tartarus in Jude 6 and 2 Peter 2:4. And these New Testament Scriptures are paraphrases of the Enochian narrative of the antediluvian Watchers who at the Flood were “bound” “for seventy generations underneath the rocks of the ground until the day of their judgment” (1 Enoch 10:12).

The idea of binding spirits is a common one in ancient religion and magic. Michael Fishbane notes that in the ancient Near East, incantations and spells were used by sorcerers and enchanters to bind people and spirits in spiritual “traps, pits, snares, and nets,” using venomous curses from their lips like serpents. In response to some of these verbal sorceries, the Psalmist himself calls upon Yahweh in similar utterances to reverse the spells upon his enemies that they would be trapped, ensnared and bound by their own magical devices (Psalm 140; 64; 57:4-6).
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Exorcists of the first century used incantations to cast out demons in Jesus’ name (Acts 16:18), the same incantation used by Demons
against
Jesus before being cast out (Mk 1:27).
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Ezekiel 13:18 refers to a specific form of hunting and binding spirits in a practice of women “who sew magic bands upon all wrists…in the hunt for souls!” I reversed this pagan version of using magical armbands by creating a heavenly version of the archangels with armbands of indestructible Cherubim hair for their hunting and binding of evil spirits. The hair is wrapped as bands around the arms of archangels and used like a rope to bind the Watchers’ hands and feet.

Scholars have pointed out that the binding of Satan that occurs in Matthew 12 is evidently not an exhaustive or absolute binding, since he is still active after the ministry of Christ and even into the New Testament era (Acts 5:3; Rom. 16:20; 2Cor. 12:7; 1Thes. 2:18; Rev. 2:13). But then how does this continuing satanic activity fit with the notion that Satan “was thrown down to the earth” (Rev. 12:9), “fell like lightning from heaven” (Luke 10:18), was disarmed and overthrown in triumph (Col. 2:15), destroyed along with his power of death (Heb. 2:14), and all of this accomplished through the death, resurrection and ascension of Christ (Matt. 12:28-29; Heb. 2:14)?

Revelation 20:2-3 provides a theological solution to the dilemma. It says that Satan is bound and thrown into a sealed pit for a thousand years, “so that he might not deceive the nations.”
Deceiver of the world
is a Biblical epithet of Satan (Rev. 12:9; 20:7), ever since the beginning in the Garden (1 Tim. 2:14; John 8:44). So perhaps the binding of Satan is the muzzling of his deception over the world, as Jesus now has all authority, so that the Gospel can go forth into all the nations as it is now doing (Matt. 28:18).

This notion of Satan’s binding is a problem for those who interpret that act as occurring in the Millennium, which they interpret as not having occurred as of yet. Revelation 20 is notoriously difficult to conclude any eschatological view. But we don’t need Revelation 20 to make the point, because Jesus does in Matthew 12:

Matt. 12:26–29

And if the satan casts out the satan, he is divided against himself. How then will his kingdom stand?...But if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you. Or how can someone enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man? Then indeed he may plunder his house.

Jesus said that his ministry on earth of casting out demons from the Promised Land was a binding of the satan. The satan could not stop the kingdom of God (ie: the Gospel) from inaugurating on earth.

This binding is like a legal restraining order on the satan. In the Old Testament, the satan is a divinely ordained legal role as a kind of prosecutor within God’s heavenly court. He would test God’s law and righteousness through accusation against God’s people (1Kgs. 22; Job 1, 2; Zech 3). In Rev. 12:10, it describes the satan’s fall from heaven as “the Accuser of our brethren being thrown down,” also at the inauguration of God’s kingdom. With the advent of Christ, the satan/Accuser has effectively been exiled from the divine council of Yahweh and no longer has any legal power of accusation against God’s people (Rom. 8:1-4).

Yes, many nations are still in the lap of the evil one, but whereas the Kingdom of God under the Old Covenant was exclusively located in a small patch of land in the Middle East, surrounded by pagan Gentile nations, now under the power of the New Covenant, people from every nation are getting saved from all over the earth. The entire earth is Messiah’s inheritance, not merely the land of Israel (Psa 2:8). The Good News of Christ is currently drawing all nations into heavenly Zion (Isa. 2; Heb. 12:22). The kingdoms of man are right now becoming the kingdoms of God through the proclamation and spread of the Gospel (1 Cor. 15:24-28; Heb. 2:8-9).