In the Garden of Gethsemane, we see the devil making his final attack upon the God-man by trying to drive a wedge between the Father and the Son. To accomplish this, he aimed his fiery darts at our Lord’s spirit, soul, and body. All the hosts of hell were united in that spiritual battle to keep Him from the cross. And now he works in every conceivable way to keep the Body of Christ from appropriating and abiding in the victory He gained for it at the cross and shares with it from the throne. Against both the corporate Body of Christ and its individual members, the devil is massing his hosts, for he knows the time is now near when the sentence against him will be executed.

To understand his present method of attack, we must remind ourselves that he has two accomplices: the world and the flesh. The flesh is the material in human life upon which he works, and the world is flesh in the aggregate. We must also understand just what the devil is doing in this world, which is wholly under his leadership and control.

As we have seen in chapter 5, his aim is the dethronement of God. To accomplish this, God’s authority must be undermined in every relationship He bears with man, and a democracy of self-will must be established in its place. To achieve this success, Satan planned a worldwide revolution in government, society, and religion. His plan is to destroy government through anarchy, society through debauchery, and religion through apostasy.

The daily papers chronicle his successes in his worldwide revolution in government. Under the deceiving guise of fair-looking but falsely working nationalism, he is seducing countless men and women in various countries, some of whom are truly honest patriots at heart, into action that must inevitably end in the overthrow of a stable government.

His successes in the worldwide revolutions in society are no less apparent. The immodesty and indecency in women’s dress, the surrender of the outward marks of gracious womanliness for an aping mannishness, the laxness in the marriage vow as evidenced in the frequency of divorce, the insubordination of children and lack of parental discipline, the fading of the fair bloom of purity from the heart life of countless boys and girls; the growing unfaithfulness in the sacred relationship of husband and wife which reaches its height in the hell-born doctrine of free love; the feverish pursuit of pleasure on the part of both old and young: all are but a few of the manifestations of the social debauchery into which the devil is leading the world.

His successes in the worldwide revolution in religion are a topic of daily conversation in almost every country today. The devil would have no religion but devil worship; he would do away with all authority but that of self-will. The authority of the sovereign God delegated to the incarnate Word and revealed in the written Word is set aside as something obsolete in the modern world. The right of every man to be a law unto himself in all matters of religion is the basic principle in the present appalling apostasy.

One passage of Scripture clearly outlines this terrible condition that God so plainly predicted would be seen in the last days. In the following verses, we see the full-blown flower of anarchy, debauchery, and apostasy.

2 Timothy 3:1-8

“But know this, that in the last days grievous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, haughty, railers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection, implacable, slanderers, without self-control, fierce, no lovers of good, traitors, headstrong, puffed up, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God; holding a form of godliness, but having denied the power thereof: from these also turn away. For of these are they that creep into houses, and take captive silly women laden with sins, led away by divers lusts, ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth. And even as Jannes and Jambres withstood Moses, so do these also withstand the truth; men corrupted in mind, reprobate concerning the faith.”

Source: “Life on the Highest Plane” by Ruth Paxson

Gracious Lord, thank You for warning us that we should not be ignorant of Satan’s schemes but should put on God’s full armor and stand firm against them.