He was a heavenly being who had it all: good looks, great skill, glorious acclaim. What went wrong that led God to cast Lucifer from heaven? Today on Turning Point, Doctor David Jeremiah continues his look at the devil's downfall. What did Lucifer want from God, and what's the takeaway for today's believers? David shares the answers as he introduces the conclusion of his message: the fallen angel.
And today we continue what we started yesterday on this intriguing subject. The idea that Satan could be called an angel surprises a lot of people, but he's the fallen angel, and he has a host of other angels who are a part of his cohort who.
Well, they do their business on this earth, and their business is to destroy, and to defeat, and to divide, and he is actively at work. Even now, right now, in your world and in mine, it is really important that we learn all we can about his strategy, so that we can stand against him and his efforts to destroy us. We'll get to part two of the fallen angel in just a moment, but first, let me remind you that. We are taking a cruise to the Caribbean right after Christmas, and this is the last day I will be telling you about this, because we only have a part of the ship, and we have a really nice group of people already registered. We're going to have a great time together as we say goodbye to twenty six and hello to twenty seven.
We'll see some beautiful sights and visit some beautiful places. We'll study the Word of God. We'll worship. Our worship leader Michael Sanchez will be with us, and we'll. Just have a great time together, and it's a great way to end the year and begin the new year.
If you have time to think about it, and make sure you get your reservation in if you're planning to go, and we'll see you in the Caribbean.
So here's part two of the Fallen Angel. In the thirteenth and fourteenth verses, there are five times where Satan or Lucifer says, "I will." If you're underlining in your Bibles, look down there and underline those five "I wills." Those five "I wills" tell you what happened in Lucifer's heart when he decided it was no longer good enough to be a perfect angel created in the beauty of God. First of all, number one. Lucifer decided that he wanted God's place. I will ascend to heaven.
That's his first. I will. Secondly, he wanted God's position. I will exalt my throne above the stars of God. Number three, Lucifer wanted God's power.
I will sit upon the mount of the congregation in the sides of the north. In this statement, Lucifer declares his desire to control all the affairs of the entire universe. The expression "mount of the congregation" is an Old Testament expression that appears several times. It speaks of absolute control. It expresses that which belongs only to God.
Here are two passages you can look at that will help you to understand it: Isaiah two two. Shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the Lord's house shall be established on the top of the mountains. It shall be exalted above the hills, and all the nations shall flow to it. Absolute autonomy and authority, which belongs to God only. Or Psalm forty eight two, beautiful in elevation, the joy of the whole earth is Mount Zion.
On the sides of the north, the city of the great King. This one, Lucifer, who said, "I want to move in and occupy heaven, and I want to bring all the angels under my absolute authority." Reached out in his desire for power and said, "I also want to bring the entire created universe under my control and included in my sphere of authority. I want to be in charge of everything. Not good enough." To be number two, I want to be number one. I want to call all the shots.
I don't want to live under the umbrella of the glory of God. Number four, Lucifer wanted God's perfection. Watch this. I will ascend above the heights of the clouds. Did you know that there are over one hundred and fifty references to clouds in the Bible?
Well, watch this. Over 100 of the 150 references to clouds in the Bible have to do with the presence and the glory of God, not where rain comes from, but the presence and glory of God. I've put a couple of the references together so you can see what I mean. First of all, Exodus 16:10.
Now it came to pass as Aaron spoke to the whole congregation of the children of Israel that they looked toward the wilderness and behold, the glory of the Lord appeared in the cloud. Exodus forty thirty four. Then the cloud covered the tabernacle of meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. First Kings eight ten. And it came to pass when the priest came out of the holy place that the cloud filled the house of the Lord.
And Matthew twenty four thirty. Then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven, and all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power. And what's the rest of it? Great glory. What was Satan saying when he said, "I will ascend above the heights of the clouds"?
What Lucifer was saying here was that he was going to take to himself a greater glory than the glory of God. And you know what? With all due respect to His Majesty Satan, that was a stupid thing to say. Because he didn't even have any glory of his own to start with, did he? The only glory he had was the reflected glory of God.
Now he's saying, "I am going to take God's glory." You know what happened to Lucifer? He no longer wanted to be a reflector; he wanted to be an originator. Do we ever have problems like that in our lives? Satan has an effect on all of us, doesn't he? When we understand what's really at the seat of his rebellion, we will understand a lot more about who he is and about some of the problems we have in our lives.
Number five, Lucifer wanted God's privilege. I will be like the Most High. When Satan wanted to do was to occupy the throne of God, exercise absolute authority over the angels, bring all the universe under his rule, cover himself with the glory that belonged to God only, and finally be responsible to nobody but himself. This one who was created to glorify God sought to glorify himself through the declaration of his own independence. I will not have him to rule over me.
When he said he wanted to be like the Most High, he was ruling out any competitor in his life. This use of the expression "Most High," let me show you what it means from a passage in Genesis chapter fourteen. Where we read, then Melchizedek, king of Salem, brought out bread and wine. He was the priest of the God Most High, and he blessed him and said, "Blessed be Abraham of God Most High." Now, what's the last phrase in that verse? Say it out loud together.
Possessor of heaven and earth. That's what Satan wanted. He wanted to be possessor of heaven and earth. Numero uno. He wanted to be number one.
Do you remember, centuries later, when he took Jesus out into the wilderness to tempt him? He was still up to his old tricks. His third temptation to Jesus was: remember, if you will fall down and worship me, I will give you all these things. He was still trying to get Jesus to be number two. And Jesus said to him, "Away with you, Satan!
For it is written, 'You shall worship the Lord your God, and Him only you shall serve.'" Matthew four nine and ten.
Now, all of these thoughts of pride and envy, according to Ezekiel, came from what place? They came from his heart. Notice Ezekiel chapter twenty eight and verse seventeen. Your heart was lifted up because of your beauty. Lucifer's proud heart was the reason for his fall, and the Bible tells us that he did indeed fall.
In fact, Jesus said he saw the whole thing happen. Luke chapter ten and verse eighteen, Jesus' words, and he said to them, "I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven." Jesus saw it happen. You know, when he fell, he didn't go by himself. He was so influential and so powerful within the angelic realm that he went around among the angels and got people to follow him. You know, the same kind of thing happens today in just about any setting you can imagine.
Somebody gets rebellious and they never want to rebel by themselves. They always want company, so they gather a group together and they get people to follow him. And that's what Satan did. And you know what? Revelation tells us.
Revelation tells us that he was able. To get one third of the entire angelic creation to go with him in the fall, one third. I don't know how many that is, but that's a lot of angels, and that's why there's so many demons today because those are Satan's demons. Jude six says, "And the angels who did not keep their proper domain, but left their own abode, he has reserved in everlasting chains under darkness for the judgment of that great day." And Second Peter two four says, "God did not spare the angels who sin, but cast them down to hell and delivered them into chains of darkness to be reserved for judgment." So what happened was Satan's heart was lifted up in pride. He wanted to take over God's place, and he was banished from heaven.
And he took a bunch of the angels with him, and that's how we got Satan and evil in the world today. I know what some of you are thinking.
Some of you are thinking, but Pastor Jeremiah, how did this happen? I mean, did God know that the pride in Lucifer's heart would be there when He created him? Yes, because God is omniscient; He knows everything. Could He have permitted it? I have to again say yes, because He's omnipotent and He's all powerful.
Then why did He? And I'm tempted to say right here, I don't have a clue. Because that's pretty much what most of the commentaries say, and some of you preachers out there know exactly what I'm talking about. You open the commentary, and you want to find out this answer to problem of evil in the world, and Paul calls it the mystery of iniquity. Isn't that interesting?
The mystery of iniquity. It is a mystery, isn't it? How did sin get in the world? Here's another part of that question: How could a perfect, holy being fall? Satan didn't have any sinful world to tempt him.
He had no tempter to push him. He had no innate sinful nature to overpower him. How could the first unholy affection arise in his angelic being? The answer to both of these hard questions, I'm convinced, lies in the fact that Lucifer was created by God, just exactly like you and I have been created by God, with a freedom to choose. God could have created all of us, including the angels, as a bunch of robots.
Do you know that? He could have programmed us to do what He says, to walk where He wants us to walk, to say what He wants. We wouldn't come to worship on Sunday of our own volition. We would march in here under the same cadence, file into our rows like some sci-fi film, and we would sing praise to God because we were programmed to do it. And I want to ask you a question: How does God in heaven get glory to His name like that?
The way God gets glory to His name is when He creates His creatures with full choice, and they have the opportunity to say yes to Him, and of their volition, of their will, to praise Him. And two thirds of the angels, from what I can understand, have still chosen to worship and honor God with their lives, but Satan chose not to.
Someone I read wrote this. He was the first, from among men and angels, who volunteered to haunt the halls of hell because he chose to do it. May I say here for just a moment that when we stand before God someday, if we have not received Christ as our Savior and we are consigned to hell for eternity. We will have all kinds of excuses as to why we are going in that direction, but there will only be one reason, and that is because we chose to do that. You say, "Well, I never chose to go there." No, but if you chose not to receive Christ by virtue of your choice, you have determined your destiny, just as Lucifer determined his.
Now, having looked at these two passages, what do we learn from all of this? I'm always intrigued when I study a doctrine like we're studying right now to ask myself, how does this affect me? I've written three things down in my notes, and I want you just to remember these. Number one, lesson number one is the power of pride. The power of pride.
I wrote this down in the margin of my Bible. Listen to me. Pride turned an angel into a devil. Pride. Did you know what the Bible says about it?
In a statement that could be written over the career of Satan, Proverbs sixteen eighteen says, "Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall." I found this intriguing passage in the New Testament where Paul was writing to Timothy and telling him about how to build leadership in the church, and he was encouraging him to be careful about taking brand new people in the faith and putting them in a position of authority. And in one Timothy three six, he says this: "Not a novice, lest being puffed up with pride, he fall into the same condemnation as the devil." Isn't that interesting? Pride is a destroyer. Pride is powerful, and that's why we read in Romans chapter twelve and verse three. For I say through the grace given to me to everyone who is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think soberly, as God has dealt to each one a measure of faith.
Have any of you ever had problems with that? Figuring out who you are. I told some of you some years ago that back when I first started preaching, I was living in Fort Wayne, and I was asked to go to the Moody Bible Institute to preach because Charles Stanley got sick and he couldn't keep his appointment. I was close by, so they said, "Would you come?" And I said, "Sure, I'll go." And I got there. They took me into the room to wait, and I was listening to the speaker.
And all of a sudden, I realized that the speaker who was on before me was Warren Wiersbe. And I'm a young preacher, and Warren Wiersbe's the best Bible teacher in the land, in my estimation. And I'm thinking, how did I get myself in this mess? But then I looked at the clock, and I realized that he couldn't possibly speak until it was my turn. There'd be somebody else, and he quit, and Charles Swindoll took over.
And I said to myself, how did I get myself in this mess? And I walked around in that room, just you know, thinking. I remember when I got in front of the group. Finally, I said, "If you ever ask me to pinch hit again, I want to know what the batting order is." I'm gonna tell you what. But you know what was going on in my heart?
This thing right here. Who am I? You know how do I stack up? How do I measure up? When I first moved to California, everybody used to ask me from my friendships back in the Midwest.
Well, Jeremiah, you're out there on the star-studded coast, and they'd start up north and start naming all the famous preachers all the way down the coast. And I was clear down here almost in Tijuana. You know what? I found out. I found out I don't need to stack up to anybody.
I found out I just got to be who I am before God. But you know what? That's a battle that we fight all of our lives, isn't it? Because pride wants to get in and separate us from our brothers on the basis of envy and the grain sickness.
So you can see that Lucifer's sin that turned him into a devil was the sin of self-originated pride. And that's what turned him into the black sheep of God's family. That is what brought God's curse upon him because of his pride. The devil became an enemy of humility. And I want you to know that today, man's pride makes him a friend of the devil.
Do you know what the Book of Isaiah says in that famous verse that we all have learned by heart? All we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned each one to his own way, and we've been fighting that fatal flaw in our existence since the day that sin came into the universe. The second lesson I've learned is the purpose of Satan, not only the power of pride, but you know what Satan wants to do. Watch now.
What did Satan do as soon as his heart turned to evil and he decided to rebel against God? What was his first major action? To go get others and take them with him, he corrupted all the other angels that he could get his hooks into. And you know what? That's his purpose for you and for me.
Listen to me. If you're not a Christian today, if you've never received Christ as your Savior, I want to tell you. I know what Satan's purpose for you is. He wants to so deceive you that he ultimately takes you to the lake of fire and to hell with him. That's what his goal is.
He wants to take as many people to hell as he can. He wants to keep heaven unpopulated if he can.
So if you're not a Christian, here's what he'll do: he'll keep you from hearing the Word of God. He'll turn you off to the witness of your wife or your husband or your children. He'll bring you to church and have you daydream so you don't listen to what the preacher's saying. Or he'll bring you to a place where you know what you ought to do, and then you'll postpone it. And then after you postpone it, you won't feel the power of the Spirit in your life anymore, and you'll walk away from it.
Satan's goal is to take you to hell with him. You ought to know that. And for those of you who are Christians, he wants to destroy and devour your testimony. He wants to take you as a Christian and corrupt your life in such a way that you are a bad advertisement for God. Is he doing that today?
People ask me all the time, "What's happened in all of the churches where there's been leadership that's been corrupted and moral problems among the pastors and the staff, and what's going on among God's people that there's such a low morality?" Satan's doing his work, my friend. He's doing everything he can to destroy the testimony of God's people. And if you don't know that, then you are not listening to what God is saying to you from His Word today. He wants to do that to you. One time Jesus was talking to Peter.
In Luke twenty-two thirty-one, he said, "This, Simon, Simon, Satan has asked for you that he may sift you as wheat." And First Peter five eight tells us that we are to be sober and be vigilant because our adversary, the devil, walks around like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour. What Satan wants to do to us, what he wants to do to me, what he wants to do to my family, is he wants to devour us, to destroy us, to drown us out, so that we have no voice or testimony for Jesus Christ. And he will do it if we allow him to. I was thinking about the fact that in the Bible there are over forty names for Satan. This is what the Bible says about Satan.
This is who he is. He's your adversary. He's your enemy. He's the evil one. He's the father of lies.
He's a murderer. He's a roaring lion. He's a tempter, and he's the serpent. That's who Satan is, and he wants to destroy your life. Finally, lesson number three.
I want to go back to where we started, and then we're finished. Satan is not God's opposite; he is a created being. I want to say this loud enough for all of you to hear it, so you don't ever forget it. He is not in God's league; he's a minor leaguer. God's in the major leagues.
He's not there. He can create a lot of stress and a lot of trouble, and he's a powerful creature who's done a lot of damage. But when it comes to measuring him up against God, it's a no contest, and we already know who wins. When Jesus went to the cross and died, and came out of that grave victorious over death, Satan was ruined, and the judgment has already been pronounced against him. We're just waiting for the sentence to be carried out.
So we don't need to be walking around terrorized by the enemy. We already know about him, don't we? We know what's going to happen to him. He's dead in the grass, and he's going to end up in hell forever. The Bible tells us to watch against him, to give him no place, and to resist him, and we can be victorious.
Greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world. Amen. Amen. And we don't have to walk around here feeling like we're upset. The last part of the century, an artist who was a great chess player painted a picture of a chess game.
The players in the picture were a young man and Satan. The young man manipulated the white pieces, and Satan the black pieces. And the issue of the game was this. Should the young man win, he was to be forever free from the power of evil in his life, and if the devil won, the young man was to be his slave forever. This picture, which hangs in a gallery in Cincinnati, Ohio, obviously was a testimony to the fact that the artist who painted it believed in the supreme power of evil, because he presented the devil as the victor in the picture.
In the conception of the artist. The devil had just moved his queen and had announced a checkmate in four moves. The young man's hand hovered over his rook; his face paled with amazement. There was no hope. The devil wins.
He would be a slave forever. For years, this is a true story. This picture hung in the art gallery. Chess players from all over the world would come and view it and study it. They acquiesced in the thought of the artist: the devil wins.
After several years, a chess doubter arose who studied the picture and became convinced that there was but one chess player on the earth who could give him assurance that the artist of the picture was right in his conception of the winner. The chess player, some of you who have played chess, know about. His name was Paul Morphy, a resident of New Orleans, Louisiana. Morphy was a supreme master of chess in his day, an undefeated champion, and he was brought to Chicago to view this picture. In the gallery, he stood before the picture for over thirty minutes.
He was all concentration. He lifted and lowered his hands as if, in imagination, he was making and culminating moves. Suddenly, his hand paused, and his eyes burned with the vision of an unthought of combination. Suddenly, he shouted, "Young man, make that move! Make that move!
That's the move!" And to the amazement of everyone who had studied that picture, all of the old masters who had come to observe, this great master had discovered a combination that the creating artist had not considered, and the young man defeated the devil. I got to tell you something. I know how the chess game comes out, don't you? I know what the last move is, and I know that while I look sometimes at the board today. And it looks like I'm in trouble, or we're in trouble, or the church is in trouble, and there aren't any moves left to us.
The one who's playing the pieces from above already knows, and I want to say this: Satan, you are checkmate, because God has won the victory, and we are going to be victorious in Him.
So. We don't fight for our victory. We fight from our victory. The victory we have in Jesus Christ. He's already defeated Satan, and He's just waiting, waiting for the sentence to be carried out in due time, and.
In the meantime, he is very much a part of the world in which we live today. We've just come through some pretty ugly days as we headed toward the midterms, and it was certainly evident to me that Satan was alive and well, and continues to target this nation.
So why would we not be on his target list? And why would you not be one of the people he's after? Learn about him. Learn how to defend yourself against him. Stand strong, and you don't have to be a victim.
You can be a victor. We'll see you on Monday. Have a good weekend. God bless you all. The message you just heard originated from Shadow Mountain Community Church and Dr.
David Jeremiah, the senior pastor. Turning Point is also on radio and TV this weekend. To learn where you can find it, visit our website davidjeremiah. dot org slash radio. That's davidjeremiah.
dot org slash radio. Or call eight hundred nine four seven nineteen ninety three. Ask for your copy of David's book, Angels: Who They Are and How They Help. It's yours for a gift of any amount. You can also purchase the Jeremiah Study Bible in the New International and New King James versions, available in several handsome and durable cover options.
Let us know how God is using this ministry by writing to Turning Point P. O. Box 3838, San Diego, California 92163. This is David Michael Jeremiah. Join us Monday as we continue the series "Angels: Who They Are and How They Help" here on Turning Point.
