THE BAD NEWS FIRST, SATAN IS TO BE RELEASED FROM PRISON. This—after he is gladly disposed of and the key is thrown. But we won’t have to worry about that for at least another thousand years, shall we? So now for the good news. Satan is to be defeated once and for all—soon after his impending release, that is. Revelation chapter 20 informs us of these still-distant but coming events; that the great deception by which he currently birdbrains the entire Earth into believing—it is indeed a long laundry list of foolery—will serve only as a fading memory. Upon receiving parole he will desperately need a new carrot-like boondoggle to dangle before the humanist mind. A thousand years is ample time to coordinate and strategize, I suppose. There’s no better place for a man to be alone with his own thoughts than a cell; or in Satan’s case, a bottomless pit.

At any rate, what this new deception will look like, fashionably speaking, is impossible to tell, but repeating Copernicus and Kepler’s “New Astronomy” all over again would certainly be laughable. The general’s war diary, if you will, shall be published and available for grade school reading—theoretically, of course—and “Globe Earth” will be forever deflated. Amen.

For example, it is by no means a stretch of the imagination to conclude that every resident within God’s holy city and beyond will understand very basic and elementary concepts and principles, such as: “water always remains level.” It’s surface cannot arch or have convexity to it.

Perhaps the Holy Spirit is trying to clue us in to the fact that Satan’s final rampage is prophetic in more literal ways than we have previously come to consider when he spoke through John: “And they [Satan and his sad-sap army of deceived souls] went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city. (Revelation 20:9)”

See, in the Greek, the actual word used for breadth is “platos.” Think plateau in French. We might therefore translate this as: “And they came up on the broad (or flat) plane of the earth.”

This leads me to conclude that mankind’s new and final deception will not be of the Copernican nature. That the inhabitants of this coming age will shake their heads at the delusional minds of our own brothers and sisters today is also imaginable. As Satan approaches to “compass the camp of the saints….and the beloved city (Revelation 20:9),” he will have no choice but to go about his business with the understood logic by all involved that he is traveling across a created order which resembles a plane.

I am not worried about it—the shape of this coming deception. And you shouldn’t be either, if you keep to the unshakable rule of “Scripture interprets Scripture”—as opposed to the longstanding and mostly unspoken exemption to the rule, which every Globular Christian defiantly clings to. “Scripture interprets Scripture…except when ‘Science’ interprets it.”

Wait, what?

No-no! That’s silly talk! The Holy Ghost will not have us fall for the deception of “Globe Earth” or any other shape of the Earth—a pear perhaps—should we obey His Testimony and consider Him trustworthy and true. Currently in the age of grace we have His Word to cling to. But in the City of God we shall have Jesus Yeshua in the flesh to rest upon. He is our Word. By Him all things were spoken into being. So worry not. We will have the Creator of heaven and earth easily accessible when Satan makes his last great wizardly attempt at damnable deceptions. Put it in another way, we shall not fall for Satan’s cunning mastery of the cosmological hustle so long as we exemplify the rule which drinking from the water of life will fundamentally require: “Jesus Yeshua interprets Jesus Yeshua.”

It is unfortunate that a great many sad souls will be deceived—but that is the nature of things—those who live not by the rule but the exemption: “Jesus Yeshua interprets Jesus Yeshua….except for when ‘Science’ interprets Him.”

Let’s not be presumptuous. Perhaps Satan will not call it ‘Science’ a thousand years from now. Still, I have little doubt it will be the same cunning lie. Has it really changed since the garden? “God didn’t really mean that….” Next time, just as it was with the first, we can expect that line, only presented with the laces and the bows and the trim of a slightly different-sized package and glitter of parcel paper. In the meantime, let’s call it what it is—the antichrist religion.

Or as we specifically know it today, Scientism.

“And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four corners of the earth, Gog, and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea. And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city: and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them. (Revelation 20: 7-9)”

Maranatha!

Noel