Lucifer's Last Stand

by Brent King

CHAPTER SIX

  “The barricades are falling,” I cried, as I rushed in late before the assembly. “Many of God’s protectors of the earth are moving north into the heavens.”

  The host of my companions crawled with anticipation. Legions of discordant voices rose as one.

  “It’s time!” they screamed, “It’s time! Let’s finish them!”

  Lucifer held up his hand to quiet the bedlam.

  “Comrades,” he said, “fellow ministers of darkness! The world is now more within our control, and we will take every advantage of that to fill the world with strife and desolation—and blame it all on God. However, knowing God, I know He hasn’t given up the hope—heh heh heh, the fool’s hope—that he will be able to pull off the unachievable with men. We must wait for the total failure of God’s plan before we will be allowed to totally obliterate men from the earth. The time will come when we will kill them all, but first God must accept the failure of his foolhardy plan.”

  “Can you remember God ever accepting failure,” I asked, as countless demons rushed to plunder the earth. I could tell that the “ever” irked Lucifer. He glared at me.

  “There is always a first time,” he said.

  His eyes glowed as they swept our assembly.

  “Yes, at some point he will be forced to abandon his latest shot at creation. I never thought the creation of a physical world was such a great idea anyway. Now we all know just how faulty and pathetic it was! His quality control has obviously decreased considerably since he made angels.”

  I dared not utter my thoughts to our leader as my mind flashed back to the time we first learned of God’s plan to create man. God meant him to be the crowning act of his creation, made in his image and designed to be his counterpart. No other creature is capable of such improvement, such refinement, and such nobility as man. His capabilities include constant mental progress.

  Though men can’t conceive their potential when united with God, we can. No wonder Lucifer hates them. Thousands of years of jealousy boil in his spirit, fueling his obsession for their destruction.

  Lucifer continued to speak, and the narcissism he flaunted irritated me. He spoke as if he were God.

  “For over two thousand years you have beheld the supremacy of my power in the total failure of God’s church. Everything I predicted has happened. God’s people remain impure, distracted, and impotent. His messenger, Ellen, was at least right about one thing: we have sent God’s church into the wilderness for hundreds of years.”

  He paused, and the cruelty in his expression ran through me. I tried to remember our life before we waged this war on God, but those memories were slipping away. I seemed cut off from love, and I struggled to recall the age of our innocence.

  “They are all the same,” he continued. “Was there ever a chance that any of them could contend with evil—with me? Through the years I have carefully enticed them. They are too weak to resist me, and their lives are skewered through with ambition, addiction, and depravity. Most of them don’t even realize that God sits in heaven and watches them; much less that He wants to live in them and tries to speak to them. Few can hear his voice for I have effectively shouted it down.”

  “But there are a few,” my voice broke the flow of Lucifer’s egocentric accolades, “a few who are attempting to resist our enticements. They seem to find strength in God like Jesus d…”

  “There must be many!” shouted Lucifer, “and their obedience must be perfect. This is doubtlessly an impossible accomplishment for weak men who have sinned all of their lives! God has underestimated the ability of a fallen creature to keep His law. It is exceedingly broad. It takes into account the thoughts and intents of the heart. It judges motives as well as acts, thoughts as well as words. Commandment keeping means entire sanctification, a holy life, unswerving allegiance to right, entire separation from sin, and victory over it. Men will never be sufficient for these things!”

  Irritation or no, I was compelled to agree.

  “It’s true,” I said, “Even the best of them leave little loop-holes here and there in their lives for sin. They have never dared to come to the place where they actually believe that they could live sinless lives.”

  “Nor must they ever,” cried Lucifer. “We must keep them ever from looking at even the possibility that they could do what Jesus did. Instead, we will keep them making excuses for their moral defects with a belief that God saves them while they are still sinning; that since fallen men can’t possibly keep his moral law, Christ’s death saves them in their sins instead of from their sins. Heh heh heh—like God can make a legal adjustment on the books of heaven without a character adjustment on earth, like he is going to ignore their little besetting sins just because he loves them unconditionally! He can’t, he can’t, and still refute my charges! They must never have a clue of their peril with this line of thought…”

  Lucifer paused and spread out his wings, thrusting himself upward to a position high above us. He began to laugh, at first low and guttural, but slowly increasing to a delighted shriek.

  “They think they worship God,” he howled triumphantly, “while they worship me! And all along they are lost! They are fodder in the war between the gods!”

  Lucifer’s revelry slowly abated, and the seriousness of death gripped his voice.

  “Men must never realize that the justification God gives them when they first believe is based on more than Jesus’ death alone. If they ever learn that justification is theirs only when its prerequisite gifts from God are appropriated, we are finished. Under no circumstances can we let them understand that if they refuse to surrender to their convictions of God’s will and fail to receive the gift of his power to carry it out, their justification is lost. Sanctification must be reduced to an unspecified, never-completed work which functions only as proof that a person has been justified.”

  Lucifer grinned. It was the prototype of the grin of a spider pouncing on a fly to wrap it in a tomb of paralysis.

  “Hear! Hear!” I interjected. “Look at them! In believing this way they have cultivated sin instead of forsaking it. They stumble and fall endlessly instead of standing humble, repentant, and acquitted before God. They fail to continually surrender their will, and instead embrace incessant dis-obedience, consequently losing their justification.”

  “Indeed!” said Lucifer, chuckling gutturally, “and they make my point for me: God’s law is too broad for them to keep. But someone needs to prove me right and bring down God’s megalomaniacal ego. Men were created to do that! We may not be able to destroy them yet, but we can turn up the heat. When the frying pan gets hot enough, we will see how many will stand for God!”

  It didn’t take us long to make the world of men sizzle. I watched as millions of them perished in cataclysms un-paralleled since the flood in Noah’s time. The earth reeled before such sudden and unexpected disaster. The effect was predictable. Thanks to us, men have always viewed God as a destroyer, and the religious leaders implored the world to turn back to Him before His wrath cut them all down.

  Soon the nations of the world put laws in place to make sure that all bent the knee before this tyrant god. Yet some resisted. I reported these immediately to Lucifer.

  “They say that God does not desire forced worship,” I said to our leader, “that he wants love that is voluntary and comes from the heart.”

  “And what would they know about God!” Lucifer rolled his eyes in disgust. “They’ve never even seen him.”

  “That’s not quite true,” I said. “They’ve seen Jesus, and that is their case in point. They maintain that if Jesus was not a tyrant, then neither is God the Father. They say he is a gentleman and will not force himself on others or remain where he is not wanted; that if he is driven out of the world by men and deprived of any chance of saving or protecting them, then he cannot be blamed. They actually believe that God does not have a heart of wrath, that the calamities falling on the earth come…”

  I paused, fearful of the conseq
uences of continuing.

  “…come from us.”

  If there is one thing Lucifer hates, it is the truth. His countenance shifted like a chameleon, blotching red, then pale, then red again. Yet before he could speak, another dark lieutenant fell from the sky, forcing his way before us in obvious distress.

  “The…the…Seventh…Day…Adventists!”

  He gasped out the words, his troubled mind grasping for more with no success.

  Lucifer paused mid-color, settling into a shade more on the pale side.

  “What about them,” he asked and, as the angel continued to grapple for words, he struck him.

  “Speak up!” he said.

  “It’s the message of the atonement,” the lieutenant finally managed. “Come into the most holy place, they say, and be cleansed while Jesus is still there.”

  The angel shook, and his voice quavered as he continued.

  “They’re preaching the truth,” he said, “the truth about what Jesus is doing and the great antitypical Day of Atonement. Didn’t we trample the fire of that message? Didn’t we completely obliterate it?”

  Lucifer stepped back and grew even paler. He took a deep breath and, as he let it out, we could faintly catch one word.

  “Ellen,” he breathed.

  “Come back from the dead?” I asked.

  “No,” he snapped, “She said we could wage war on the message, but we wouldn’t be able to stop it.”

  “Well,” said the angel, “it’s the same old message. You’d think in a couple hundred years they would get a bit more creative.”

  “Yes,” I said, putting on my best preacher’s voice, “We now live in a time that is different than ever before. As important as the sacrificial atonement is for salvation, the atonement process didn’t end there. A final atonement must yet happen to complete God’s plan of salvation. Without it, an end cannot be brought to sin and sinners. An antitypical Day of Atonement is needed to finally remove sin from the universe. Forgiveness is just the halfway house of salvation. The only way Jesus can step out of His position of mediator is for us to stop sinning. The final atonement that we are now in is about ceasing to sin, about cooperating with God so he can finish his work.”

  I paused, smirked, and rolled my eyes.

  “I can do a better job of it than they can,” I said.

  “Ha!” the angel responded. “Any one of us could do as well. We’ve only endured the tedium of listening to it for centuries!”

  “Imbeciles!” cried Lucifer. “We all know how powerful God is. He is serious about this message. If we are going to force his hand and win this war against him, then we must take it seriously too. I don’t like it. The unique Adventist message is being heard. We cannot let this happen. If Christians stop focusing exclusively on the sacrificial atonement and begin looking at the final atonement, it will bring men that much closer to proving God’s point. If our best efforts to remove these things from the mind of all Seventh-day Adventists have failed, then we will make them wish they had forgotten them. Men are comfort creatures. They balk under pain.”

  * * *

  “Christ has come!”

  The cry spread from one corner of the earth to the other. Lucifer took center stage on the earth. He projected the splitting image of Jesus, speaking some of the same words that he spoke on earth. We all conjured his credibility with the masses. I must admit that we pretty much knocked it out of the park. Under the spell of Lucifer’s charisma they easily accepted his Sunday instead of God’s seventh-day Sabbath. The vast majority of men were worshipping our leader, not having a clue that he wasn’t God!

  In the midst of our revelry, a howl of rage ascended into the heavens. The wrath was Lucifer’s.

  It happened live on national television, as Lucifer enjoyed the limelight. Like Elijah of old, a young man emerged from the crowd onto the stage of the mega-coliseum. Our angels and security seemed helpless to stop him.

  “Is there no God in heaven,” he exclaimed, “who is jealous of His law? Yet you have deliberately trampled that law, setting up a spurious sabbath in its place. The Sabbath commandment is part of the Ten Commandments. Would God ever say that the Ten Commandments are a covenant that is now obsolete and has been removed? Other than the 4th commandment, no Christian would even say that. If it is still good to keep all the rest of the Ten Commandments, then why isn't it still good to keep the 4th one also? Why do Christians esteem all of the Law except when it comes to the 4th commandment?”

  He took a few steps directly toward Lucifer and pointed his finger at him.

  “Men follow and worship you like God Himself,” he said in a piercing voice, “since you perform such mighty wonders on the earth. Yet you give yourself away. It is not enough for you to reject the Sabbath; you also presume to change it.”

  Though Lucifer seethed, he didn’t blink. Instead, he responded in a gentle voice.

  “I am that I am,” he said. “Shouldn’t your God be able to change His own law?”

  “God is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow,” the young man answered. “Now hear the word of God: ‘I am the Lord, I change not! You have set aside My commandments in order to keep your tradition. You have trodden on the seal of My law, and you shall not escape judgment!”

  He turned away from Lucifer and faced the camera.

  “Men of earth,” he cried, “listen to my words. Fear God, and give Him glory, for the hour of His judgment has come. Do not worship those who speak softly but break God’s law. Worship instead He who made all things. Those who worship the beast and his image and receive his mark will drink the wine of the wrath of God.”

  Behind his façade, Lucifer snarled and gnashed.

  “How dare this loathsome creature openly defy me!” he screamed in a voice that rang only in our ears. “Kill him!”

  Yet all that men could see was a mild leader rising to his feet and raising his hand. The young man continued obliviously.

  “Come out of her, my people. Do not partake of her sins or receive her plagues for her sins have reached unto….”

  A thunderclap shook the stadium as lightning struck the man mid-sentence. His eyes rolled back in his face, and his limbs contorted and smoked. Lucifer spoke in his beatific roll as Christ.

  “This deluded young man was right about one thing,” he said in an angelic voice as they dragged the charred corpse away, “I am a jealous God, and the hour of my judgment has come. Those who do not serve me will indeed drink the wine of my wrath and, as this poor soul failed to quote from scripture, be tormented with fire and brimstone.”

  Thus, more and more, we struck down the resistance with death and torture.

  * * *

  “How,” exclaimed Lucifer, “with all the vigilance of hell against them, do they manage to get past us? Are you all inept? Am I the only one around here with any intelligence? Are we….”

  Lucifer continued his tirade, but none of us were listening. His fuming was obviously futile. Even as he spoke, a man stood before a camera with an audience of millions, talking about the atonement of Jesus in the sanctuary. The light of heaven shown through the very molecules of his face, emphasizing his message—the very message we didn’t want the world to hear.

  “The very first work in the cleansing of the ancient sanctuary,” he said, “was the cleansing of the people. Having confessed their sins, the people of Israel were completely cleansed on the Day of Atonement. Sin was separated from them so that they were holy, stainless, and without blame. We live in the reality of the great antitypical Day of Atonement today. Christ’s final ministry of grace in the heavenly sanctuary is happening now, as He replaces forgiving grace with enabling grace in the hearts of His people. It is the final atonement, God’s last step in the process of bringing us into full reconciliation with Him.”

  The man’s words slowly burned into Lucifer’s awareness mid rant. He stopped as his dark mind grasped the intensity of their danger to our cause.

  “Kill him!” Lucifer vomit
ed the words with a guttural hiss.

  “We can’t,” I cried back in desperation. “We can’t penetrate the wall of God’s angels protecting him.”

  “Then I will break through myself!” he cried.

  Lucifer immediately hurtled the mighty force of his superior strength at the line of angels linked about the man. Like lightning he struck, yet in an instant another mighty angel met his onslaught with a flash of glory. As they trembled there, locked in determined embrace, Gabriel spoke.

  “You need to learn to play fair,” he said. “How can God prove His point with you unless you give Him a chance to do it?”

  “Fair!” bellowed Lucifer, “All’s fair in love and war!”

  Gabriel nodded, and his eyes narrowed.

  “We understand that about you,” he answered, “And we utterly reject your methods. You have never intended to give God a chance to prove Himself. You are the one who accused God of making a selfish and faulty law that it is impossible for men to keep. Yet, when Jesus came as a man to prove you wrong, did you play fair? No! You tried to kill Him before He had a chance to keep the law. Then when He did keep it, you claimed He had an advantage because He was both God and man.”

  “To the pit with fair!” Lucifer coughed up the words with a shudder. “What is fair about a perfect god forgiving sinners who will always be guilty? Why not forgive me too? I want the bliss and power of a position in heaven as much as anyone. If God is going to accept men who have done such horrible things back into his family without cause, then he must accept me back also."

  “I’ve listened to your story before Lucifer,” said Gabriel, “too many times! It’s getting old. You have had no choice but to concede to God’s truth and wisdom at every point so far.”

  Lucifer’s eyes flashed, and he called down every curse upon the mighty angel wrestling with him.

  “I will still have the last word,” said Lucifer. “God has hoodwinked the lot of you! You can either have a law, and then no one goes to heaven, or you can have grace, and everyone goes to heaven, including me. You can't have it both ways. Grace and law are incompatible. You can have one or the other, but not both at the same time!"

  Lucifer’s curled lip sharply contrasted Gabriel’s noble expression.

  "When will you get it?” Lucifer continued, “No one can keep God’s law. It’s impossible. Besides, to make his point, God would have to have more than a few isolated cases. He would have to have a host of obedient men!”

  Lucifer squinted, eyeball to eyeball with Gabriel.

  “Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!” he cried, “there must be many, and their obedience must be perfect. There can be no doubt that it is impossible for God to do this! Good luck finding even a few good men on this planet. All of them have sinned all their days, and they are weak. Go ahead. Show me God’s commandment keepers! Where are they?”

  “You will see, as will universes of the rest of us that are watching,” said Gabriel. “In the mean time, you will play fair!”

  Lucifer didn’t answer, except to scream as Gabriel pushed him back.

  As Lucifer paced, cursing, the man on the television continued to speak, completely unaware of our conflict.

  “This is different than the atonement of forgiveness that has been operating in our world for millennia,” he said. “It is a cleansing atonement, with the end result being clean from all your sins before the Lord, as it says in Leviticus 16:30. We are to enter with Jesus into the Most Holy Place and cooperate with Him to purify our souls here on earth in sync with His cleansing of the sanctuary in heaven. The work of this serious time is to confess every sin and put them out of our lives by God’s enabling grace. In this way, we can stand face to face with God and live in the consuming fire when Jesus is finally able to quit His work as mediator.”

  For a moment I tried to remember the experience of being clean before the Lord, but the memory was gone. I then realized that I no longer had any desire to be clean, only to be forgiven. Why must God have such an obsession with cleanliness and purity anyway? Why couldn’t he just let it go and let the room get a bit messy? After all, what is the hurt of a few strewn articles and a bit of dirt?

  The clear, ringing voice on the airwaves brought me back from my thoughts. I glanced over at Lucifer. Desperation twisted his face.

  “The ultimate success of Christ's atoning work depends upon His people finally deciding to let Him clean up their lives. The heavenly sanctuary can’t be cleansed from sin until our hearts are cleansed from sin, just as mom isn’t finished cleaning up the kitchen floor until the kids stop tracking across it with their muddy boots. As long as a fountain of sin flows into the heavenly sanctuary from our hearts, Jesus must remain there to administer forgiveness until we decide to let God help us clean up our boots. It is only when the final atonement shows that God can stop the flow of sins from our hearts that God can justly remove our sins from the sanctuary above and complete His work for men’s salvation. Then it will be seen that the sacrifice, priesthood, and ministry of Jesus in the sanctuary does take away sins, and perfect forever them that are sanctified, as it says in Hebrews….”

  At last the airwaves turned to static as the signal was lost. Yet the voice of God’s church was not lost, nor could it be quenched. It rang with a clearer vision of God than the earth had ever known. We frantically tried to assuage the breach in our lines of defense and offense, but the cry of God’s people was like the voice of many waters roaring to the sea; as the voice of a great thunder rolling through the sky.