For this showdown which Satan plotted against the man of God, he assembled a very select audience. He got together Paul’s captors (the soldiers), other prisoners like him, both of which groups Paul had preached to in the previous chapter, as well as the barbarians of the island of Melita. What a select audience of enemies, ‘church members’ and strangers, before which to disgrace Paul!
It is amazing sometimes how Satan schemes, and the kind of places and people before whom he seeks to disgrace those who have worried his kingdom. Satan is a schemer. He plotted to have Samson disgraced before the same Philistines whom God had used him to humiliate. For example, Gaza, the famous city whose solid gates he had only recently shamed and plucked off like chicken feather, was the first city to which Samson was dragged; to be paraded in disgrace soon as he had lost his belt and his eyes during the unfortunate heavyweight contest in Delilah’s brothel rings (Judges 16:1-3, 21). The same devil laid a terminal snare for Moses in the course of his routine duties before the same people he had so gloriously led out of Egypt.
32 They angered him also at the waters of strife, so that it went ill with Moses for their sakes:
33 Because they provoked his spirit, so that he spake unadvisedly with his lips (Psalm 106:32-33).
That is how much Satan struggled to smuggle in a paragraph into the last chapter of Moses’ glorious book, so that that great man was no more able to enter the Promised Land for which he had been preparing and labouring in the past eighty-plus years. Like a red-carded striker, he was only allowed to watch the rest of the match on the screen from the isolated distance of Mount Nebo’s dressing room (Deuteronomy 34:1-5).
Why did Satan choose an audience like this before which to execute his proposed plot? Scandal. Blackmail. The watching barbarians, when they saw what had happened, wasted no time in concluding that Paul was certainly a bad person, a murderer, although they had never met him nor heard anything of him. That was the kind of testimony Satan wanted them to carry about him, and for which he had selectively gathered them. Paul’s several enemies would no doubt have said, “You see, even strangers who have never met him have the same terrible opinion of him! Paul’s badness needs no proving. It is so rife that every sensible person sees and smells it several islands away.”
In the end, however, this audience before which Satan had meant to discredit Paul was the audience before which Satan fell, disgracefully. He even lost the island altogether to Paul and his God. The viper had lost the battle. Paul had won the day. Everyone wanted to be associated with him, even to be prayed for.
Satan may have assembled the worst of men so as to amplify the disgrace he intends against you. But, certainly, God knows how to turn Satan’s own game against Satan himself. Keep trusting.
YOU ARE READING
THE LAST CHAPTER of Your Life
SpiritualA book is remembered more often for how it ends than for how it starts. We are a book that God is writing. Often, the tricky devil, when he can no more stand the zeal of our early days, takes a break from the middle chapters of our life, waiting t...
