If you have ever watched Roland Emmerich’s version of ‘Midway’, you may recall that the film emphasised the importance of understanding one’s enemy. In particular, Admiral Chester Nimitz, the officer commanding the U.S. fleet in the Pacific after the attack on Pearl Harbor, said to his intelligence officer (Lt Commander Edwin Layton) that he wanted him to get inside their adversary’s head.
Nimitz needed to know what the Commander-in-Chief of the Japanese Navy’s Combined Fleet, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, was thinking: what he was going to do; how he was going to do it; where he was going to do it; and when he was going to do it. Superior intelligence is always key in any kind of warfare. In a similar vein, I believe it was Napoleon who said that one spy in the right place was worth twenty thousand men in the field. We, likewise, prayerfully and cautiously, through Scripture, need to understand our enemy.
We saw in Part 5 of our study into Christology that Jesus’ mission as The Suffering Messiah was hidden in a mosaic of scriptures that prevented The Adversary from readily understanding His mission. As Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 2:8, “None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.”
Genocidal anti-Semitism motivation
Due to Satan’s instigation of man’s rebellion against God in the Garden of Eden, God tells Satan that the “seed of woman” will eventually crush his head. Thus, God passes a delayed death sentence upon Satan.
In the fullness of time, Satan learns that this “seed of woman” will be a descendant of Abraham (through whom all the nations will be blessed); indeed, He will be the Lion of the tribe of Judah (Genesis 49:8-11 and Revelation 5:5). When Satan gains this knowledge that the One chosen to ‘crush his head’ will be a Jew, he tries to incite a genocidal hatred against the Jews. Satan wants the Jewish race to be totally exterminated in order that the “seed of woman” cannot fulfil His role to carry out God’s death sentence on him.
When Satan gains this knowledge that the One chosen to ‘crush his head’ will be a Jew, he tries to incite a genocidal hatred against the Jews.
For this reason, Satan incites Egypt’s 18th Dynasty Pharaohs, from Ahmose through to Thutmose III, against the Hebrews. Thus we have the massacre of newborn babies, from which Moses was saved by God’s grace and the actions of his mother, sister, and Pharoah’s daughter. In like manner, Israel’s first challenge after passing through the Red Sea is to face the (possibly hybrid-Nephilim giant) tribe of Amalek, whose aim is to wipe Israel off the face of the earth.
Saul’s failure to resolve the Amalek issue sees this strain rise up again some 450 years later when Haman, an Agagite (Agag was the Amalekite throne name), seeks to persuade Astyages, Nebuchadnezzar’s brother-in-law and regent during his period of madness, to kill all the Jews1. Fast forward another 550 years or so – when the Adversary learns that the baby Jesus has been born in Bethlehem, Satan incites King Herod to carry out a barbaric mass infanticide in the Bethlehem region.
A monumental miscalculation
However, when Jesus has grown into a man, and He is carrying out His ministry in Judea, Satan has no idea that Jesus is meant to die on the cross. Indeed, given the provocative nature of Jesus’ ministry (from the Adversary’s perspective2), the Adversary could have easily seen Jesus in the military conqueror mode that Jewish thinking had shaped for the Messiah.
The Scriptures, on a surface reading, mainly present the Messiah as the kingly Conqueror who comes to defeat Israel’s enemies and establish His reign of peace on earth. There is little to suggest that Messiah would come twice, and that He was initially meant to be crucified as the Suffering Servant at Passover. For Isaiah 53 and Psalm 22 are pretty lone voices that are rather obscured by all the other ‘noise’ in Scripture. So, for this reason, Satan himself stirs up trouble for Jesus, because Satan fears that Jesus will become the Ruler of the World at that time in the first century – and therefore he himself will be destroyed.
When Jesus entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday to the great adoration of the crowds, with people shouting out the Messianic greeting of ‘Baruch haba b’Shem Adonai,’ – Blessed is He who comes in the Name of the Lord – Satan must have been even more sure that the Messianic reign of Jesus was imminent; so Satan then decides to convince Judas to betray Jesus (Luke 22:3-4). This ultimately leads to the crucifixion of Jesus at Passover. Just imagine how gutted Satan must have felt when he belatedly realises that God actually wanted Jesus to die to pay the price for our sins! It must have really hurt Satan’s pride that God actually used him to fulfil His purposes – by allowing Satan to turn Judas into a traitor when that was really all a part of God’s great plan of salvation anyway!
Twentieth Century attempts to prevent Jesus’ return
Now, fast forward to the twentieth century. Satan knows that when Jesus returns – which will lead to the Adversary’s destruction – He will descend from heaven to a Jerusalem that is once again the Jewish capital city. (Zechariah 14:2-5 describes this, and both Matthew 23:39 and Luke 13:35 record Jesus saying that He will not be seen again until Jewish people in Jerusalem declare “blessed is He who comes in the name of YHWH.”) So, when the state of Israel was formed in May 1948, following the mass attempt of the extermination of the entire worldwide Jewish people known as the Holocaust, or Shoah, Satan stirred up all of his Muslim followers to try to wipe the new-born nation state of Israel off the map. Hence, we had the Israeli War of Independence in 1948-49; but, of course, God always wins.
Satan knows that when Jesus returns – which will lead to the Adversary’s destruction – He will descend from heaven to a Jerusalem that is once again the Jewish capital city.
Fast forward again to 1967 and to 1973, and Satan fomented two more large Arab-Israeli wars in his efforts to obliterate the nation of Israel. Satan is desperate to make sure that Jesus cannot return to earth, which he does by seeking to ensure that Jerusalem is unavailable. However, in the 1973 Yom Kippur war, Satan revealed his ignorance of the significance of Yom Kippur in God’s great master plan. Just as no-one fully understood the significance of Jesus being crucified at Passover until after the event, so likewise no-one fully understood the significance of a Jewish Jerusalem being attacked at Yom Kippur until some time after the 1973 Yom Kippur War was over.
The Yom Kippur war was a full dress-rehearsal for the final battle of Jerusalem at the end of the age, as described in Zechariah chapters 12 to 14. However, it is only in more recent years that we have come to grasp that the Bible strongly indicates that this battle will reach its climax at the Appointed Time of Yom Kippur, with the so-called ‘Autumn Feasts’ constituting the overall timeframe for the return of Jesus. Let me be quite clear, though: now that “we” (believers) understand the significance of the ‘Autumn Feasts’, so does Satan – which means that Satan will now very likely try to avoid Jerusalem being attacked at Yom Kippur, precisely because he knows that Yom Kippur is the Appointed Time when Jesus returns to destroy all the armies that are attacking the holy city.
Significant timing
This now brings us up to the present time. Satan knows from reading biblical texts that Jesus said He would return to Jerusalem when the religious Jews were ready to welcome Him there with the Messianic greeting ‘Baruch haba b’Shem Adonai’ (Matthew 23:39). So, in order to stop Jesus from returning to earth, Satan could readily draw the conclusion that what is needed is to make certain that there are absolutely no Jews in Jerusalem to welcome the Lord Jesus. This would mean that Satan would need to ethnically cleanse the Jews from the city of Jerusalem at the very least, and preferably (in Satan’s mind) from the entire land “from the river to the sea”.
However, any war to remove the Jews from Jerusalem cannot be commenced during or just before the ‘Autumn Feasts’, because this would play right into the timeframe of God’s plan to send Jesus ‘riding to the rescue’ at Yom Kippur. This limits the time when Satan can instigate a war against Israel. It would be logical to come to the conclusion that Satan’s best option would be to instigate a war against Israel at whatever occasion allowed the maximum possible time for Israel to be wiped off the map before getting too close to the ‘Autumn Feasts’. (Indeed you could argue that this was what happened in the 1973 Yom Kippur War: the Arab attacks were designed to take advantage of Israel’s national holiday and disrupt the Autumn Feast Cycle. As many will remember, the battle was precariously balanced for three days until Israeli forces were able to turn the tide and advance towards Damascus.)
It would be logical to come to the conclusion that Satan’s best option would be to instigate a war against Israel at whatever occasion allowed the maximum possible time for Israel to be wiped off the map before getting too close to the ‘Autumn Feasts’.
Well, obviously, the start-date of a war that allows as much time as possible before the ‘Autumn Feasts’ would be the day immediately after the last ‘Autumn Feasts’ had just ended. The final day of the ‘Autumn Feasts’ (which begin with the new year, Rosh Hashanah, followed by Yom Kippur) is the seventh day of the seven-day Feast of Tabernacles, a day known as ‘Hoshana Rabah’.
Therefore, Satan’s best option would be for him to instigate a war against Israel that commenced on the day immediately after ‘Hoshana Rabah’. This is the day known both as ‘Shemini Atzeret’ and also as ‘Simchat Torah’ – a holiday of ‘new beginnings’ when the Jews begin their annual cycle of Scripture readings at Genesis 1:1.
Last year, ‘Simchat Torah’ was on Saturday 7th October – and there are no prizes for guessing why Satan stirred up the Islamic Nazi terrorists of Hamas to launch their evil attack against Israel on that very day. Whilst the Hamas terrorists themselves probably have no idea of the significance of ‘Simchat Torah’, Satan knows that he now has as much time as possible to achieve his war aims before getting too close to the ‘Autumn Feasts’ in 2024. (Actually, this is a year when Satan also has the extra month of Adar Bet, because it is also a Jewish leap year.)
The Lord will triumph
Now, we know, because Jesus told us, that no-one but the Father knows when He will return. However, an insight of this nature into the possible thinking behind Satan’s plan can inform our own thinking when we pray that God’s plans will triumph. I can also say that I am more than a little interested to see how God might “use” Satan to achieve His own plans and purposes at the very end of the age, just as God “used” Satan in Part One of His Plan. The apostle Paul described in this way:
“On the contrary, we are communicating a secret wisdom from God which has been hidden until now but which, before history began, God had decreed would bring us glory. Not one of this world’s leaders has understood it; because if they had, they would not have executed the Lord from whom this glory flows” (1 Cor 2:-7-8).
Notes
1. Modern Christianity tends to place the account of Esther in the Persian period, but traditional understanding, based on historians such as Xenophon and Herodotus, together with the accepted timescale in 2nd Temple Judaism, puts it firmly in the Babylonian period.
2. The adversary may have seen Jesus’ focus on the Bashan region as particularly provocativ. Bashan is a region around Mount Hermon that was ground zero for much of the rebellious activities of the false gods. The fallen angels are recorded in Enoch as coming down to Mount Hermon. The false god Pan made his lair around the base of Mount Hermon, indeed, there are links here to the Epic of Gilgamesh, and, right where Peter declared Jesus to be God’s Messiah, Pan’s cave, known as the ‘gates of hell’ was located. Right across Bashan are the megalithic dolmen structures which David labelled as the valley of death in Psalm 23, and it was the home of Sion and Og, whom Moses defeated prior to Israel entering the land.