Actor Chadwick Boseman playing king T’Chala in The Black Panther.
On top of all the mounting issues we’ve experienced throughout this COVID-19 pandemic, such as the political crisis that threatens our democracy and the egregious systemic racial injustice plaguing America, many of us were heartbroken to hear the news that actor Chadwick Boseman had died from a private battle with cancer. Many of you know him for his role as king T’Challa in the ground breaking film The Black Panther. I’ll never forget something that stood out to me as I watched this film with my beautiful wife. There were many aspects of king T’Challa, aka the Black Panther, that mirrored the story of King Jesus. He was a good king with many loyal subjects living happily under his reign. He had an adversary seeking to dethrone him and rule in his place. He dies fighting the adversary on behalf of his people and then rises again to defeat his enemy and re-establish his reign. Yet the thing that struck me the most about the character of this king was his unwillingness to completely destroy his enemies. When one challenger to his reign, who ruled a neighboring kingdom, fought with him, he mercifully spared his life, urging him to stop fighting and saying, “… your people need you.” Then towards the end, he has an epic battle with his primary enemy, Killmonger. This battle leaves Killmonger severely wounded, yet king T’Challa offers to heal him so he wouldn’t have to die. But sadly, Killmonger takes his own life, rather than live under king T’Challa’s reign.
Well, this fictional story is only echoing the true, epic, unfolding story that Scripture is inviting us into, of the reign of God being re-established on the earth through the life, death, resurrection and eternal reign of King Jesus. Within this story, God has an Enemy that is similar to Killmonger, who has challenged His universal reign of love. This Enemy is the originator of all evil and suffering on planet earth. It isn’t very hard to see the evidence of his diabolical, destructive work all around us, in our lives and in our world. I mean aren’t you tired of selfishness, oppression and losing loved ones to diseases like COVID-19? Aren’t you tired of hatred, racism and corrupt government leaders that continually lie to you? Aren’t you tired of religious hypocrisy, the abuse of children and people being sexually violated? Aren’t you tired! Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m tired. I’m tired of seeing humans suffer. And at some point you’ve just got to get sick of experiencing evil! And though the Scriptures reveal that God is love and is therefore slow to anger because He seeks to bring people to repentance that He might save them. Make no mistake about it! He also promises to bring evil to an end in just judgment.
Yet as I witnessed some conversations on Facebook regarding Killmonger, I realized that there were some people that actually sympathized with his rebellion. And when it comes to God’s final judgment against evil, there may be some who want to sympathize with Satan’s rebellion and those lost people who joined him, and therefore may be tempted to question God’s fairness and justice in their utter destruction. So how does God bring an end to evil in a way that leaves no one wondering about the justice of His judgment? Well, I invite you to come with me to Revelation chapter 20 where I believe the Holy Spirit will give us clarity on how this is going to happen. You and I stand there in holy awe as we see Satan’s earthly rebellion against God crushed by the glorious appearing of Jesus Messiah. His global system under the dominance of what Scripture calls “the beast” and “the false prophet”, have been reduced to ashes as if with a flashing blaze of fire, while all of us who have trusted in the grace of Christ have been safely rescued from the earth. And then we see something amazing in Revelation 20:1-2, which says…
“Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven with the key to the bottomless pit and a heavy chain in his hand. He seized the dragon—that old serpent, who is the devil, Satan—and bound him in chains for a thousand years. ”
The apostle John wastes no time in telling you who this prisoner is. He is the old serpent, bringing your mind back to his first sinister appearance in the garden of Eden. He is Satan, which means enemy or adversary, and he is the Devil, which means accuser and slanderer of someone’s character. And here we have the prophetic, poetic imagery of a powerful heavenly angel locking Satan up for a thousand years on a bottomless pit or an abbys. Well, what is this abbys, you might ask? Well this is the same word used at the beginning of the Story, in Genesis, to describe the dark, empty, formless, watery and desolate condition of the earth in the very early stages of the first day of creation. In other words, upon the epic soon return of Jesus to rescue His followers, like a bride, His glorious appearing will also return the earth to this same desolate, wasteland-like state. And it’s here that Satan will be bound, locked up, chained with his demons in absolute misery, with no one here to feed their sick addiction to destroying people’s lives. It’s almost as if I can hear an onlooking crowd saying in the background, “Lock him up! Lock him up!” My friend, here’s what this is telling you. God will bring evil to a transparent end by first…
ARRESTING SATAN
It’s like the feeling a parent would get if their child was kidnapped while they were shopping in a mall. And then after three long hours of emotional turmoil, they get the good news that the authorities have rescued their child and the kidnapper has been arrested. Can you see the tears flowing down their face as they hug their child tightly when they’ve been reunited? Can you sense the relief that these parents would feel, because the nightmare is over and the criminal has been arrested? Well, this is just a small glimpse of how we’ll feel because Satan will finally be arrested!
Verse 3 tells us that as Satan is locked up, the primary charge against him is his deception of the nations. And this is why he is an enemy and slanderer of character, because his primary method for bringing about the destruction of nations, of human lives is by telling them lies about the character of God. He does not want human hearts and minds to perceive and get settled into the truth that God’s character really is love. Because he knows that we act out of what we see, think and feel about God. This has been his primary mode of operation since the war he started in Heaven and since the deception of Adam and Even in the Garden of Eden, which plunged the world into suffering, evil and death. This is why Jesus says of Satan in John 8:44 that,
“When he lies, it is consistent with his character; for he is a liar and the father of lies.”
But now he and his demons are lock up for a thousand years with no one to lie to, no one to tempt and no one to lead into self-destruction. They can’t feed their vile addiction of causing the suffering and evil that destroys human lives.
God wants you to know that the one who’s really been lying to you, hurting you, hurting your loved ones, the one behind all injustice and the real Enemy behind all enemies, is going to get locked up! His whole operation will be shut down. He won’t be able to hurt, tempt or deceive you anymore! God wants you, right now, to feel the relief in your heart that Satan and all those who have hurt you and violated you, that ultimately side with Satan, are not getting away with it! Your mind can rest assured that God is going to hold all evil accountable, wherever and whenever it has been manifested!
Yet, I can almost hear some of you asking in your mind, “Why is Satan merely going to be locked up? After all the suffering and pain he’s caused humanity, why isn’t he immediately cast into the lake of fire, as the land beast and the false prophet are depicted at the end of chapter 19? Why is he released for a short time after the 1000 years? And these are good questions. Yet there’s something that God wants to fully disclose to us first, as we’ll now see beginning in verse 4…