J Philip Bible Readings

⁷ And when the thousand years are ended, Satan will be released from his prison ⁸ and will come out to deceive the nations that are at the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them for battle; their number is like the sand of the sea. ⁹ And they marched up over the broad plain of the earth and surrounded the camp of the saints and the beloved city, but fire came down from heaven and consumed them, ¹⁰ and the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulphur where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night for ever and ever.

Scripture plainly teaches that in the end-time there will be increased activity of evil, leading to an almighty clash, and here we have a description of Satan's little season, in which he is loosed, and which heads up into his final destruction. This idea of a 'show-down' is no 'accident', for it is inherent in the moral sphere that evil develops alongside good, and, as it were, parallel to it. The fact is 'progress' is a very ambiguous word as applied to civilisation, for with every development towards good in mankind (whether socially, technologically or otherwise), has come a corresponding propensity towards evil. The potential for evil of 'good' inventions, is infinitely greater and more sinister than it was a hundred years ago, or even fifty! But why should Satan be loosed after being bound? It is not that he escapes from God. He is loosed by Him, and this can only be in order that God may draw evil out into the open so as to destroy it utterly. The operative phrase in this binding and loosing of Satan is the deception of the nations. Broadly speaking, it is true that since the time of the early Church there has been a 'Christianising' influence in the world (cf - the parable of the mustard seed in Matthew 13) largely under the direction of the 'Christian West' - that is, until now, when disorder and chaos are on a world scale, and gigantic movements are dividing nations as if by superhuman powers. It is not difficult for us today to see the force of this prophecy, or to imagine that it is beginning to be fulfilled before our eyes, when we think of the pressures that have been laid upon God's people behind the 'curtains' of the East, and try to assess the significance of the 'anti-missionary' trend in most missionary lands. Whether this is the end-time or not, what seems to be happening in our day is fundamentally a deception of the nations. It is surely plain for those who have eyes to see that Communism has exercised an almost mesmeric power over a large part of our modern world, and this may well be the forerunner of even grimmer things to come.