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"Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, in whom you were sealed for the day of redemption." (Eph 4.30)
"The day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night." (1 Th 5.2)
"Encourage one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near." (Heb 10.25)
As today draws closer and closer to The Day, all the evil, antichrist powers (5) - both spiritual and human - will ever-increasingly and with greater and greater vehemence and violence, resist the inevitable and lash out against all that represents their doom. For they either know or intuit that when Jesus returns they will be slain "with the breath of his mouth", and destroyed "by his appearing and his coming". (2 Th 2.8)
How else to explain the utter madness of the final hours of Hitler's Reich. Little boys sent out to fight against battle-hardened Allied soldiers? Defeated SS thugs continuing to murder Jewish and Christian people...sometimes within hearing distance of the heavy artillery of the liberators? This kind of demonic insanity will be even greater and wilder in the Last Days. (The Carmelite nun, Edith Stein - herself a martyr of the Nazis - described this as, "The flesh of sinful human nature riots against the Spirit.")
You see, there was once a time when our world was a part of Heaven. This was the place where the Lord God took time-out, "walking in the garden in the cool of the day". (Gen 3.8) But when the human race separated itself from our Maker, Heaven withdrew entirely back into Heaven, and hell came up and occupied the earth. After the victory of the Cross, Resurrection and Ascension, Jesus declared war on satan, first-of-all "in heaven" where "Michael and his angels" fought "against the dragon; and the dragon and his angels fought, but they were defeated and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. And the great dragon was thrown down...he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him." (Rev 12.7-9)
Ever since then, the Lord has been waging war on and against satan through His Church here on earth. On The Day, satan and all of his followers will be thrown down and off the earth, just as they were thrown down and out of Heaven.
"And he said to them, I saw satan fall like lightning from heaven." (Lk 10.18)
"Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven...And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil and satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and threw him into the pit, and shut it and sealed it over him." (Rev 20.1-3)
Any person (let alone any Believer) who actually thinks this penultimate conflict will scarcely cause a ripple upon the face of the waters of history, is either just plain ignorant or deceived. This struggle will be as vicious as it is momentous; as cataclysmic and disruptive as it is real and universal. And on top of all of that...victory for God and His People is entirely and absolutely assured. Faithful Christians cannot lose. Even those who are killed for Christ's sake, becoming casualties during this conflict, are nevertheless rendered winners...holy martyrs.
