Satan took the commanders first

Genesis 3: [4] And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:

[5] For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

"These gods are living creatures and they know good and evil. Eve is acquainted with them because obviously if she didn't know who they were it would have been no temptation at all," explains Richard Jordan. 

"She sees these angelic creatures functioning on the earth. Adam and Eve's responsibility is to win the earth back from them so she knows who they are; she knows they have knowledge.

"Idols and images that are made by the heathen are made to represent these creatures in the spirit world. Psalm 96: [5] For all the gods of the nations are idols: but the LORD made the heavens.

"The gods are God-made living creatures, but they inspire their followers to make representations to them. You see in I Corinthians 10:20 that in their worship service they have cups of devils and a table. They have counterfeited God's program with the nation Israel to the place where they just reproduce it, but they corrupt it.

"In Job 48, the sons of god are there when God laid the foundation of the earth. When He goes through that six-day creation in Genesis 1, these angels are already there. They're shouting, being educated by what He's doing there.

"Jesus told them in Matthew 25 that hell was prepared for the devil and his angels. I mean, these creatures have been around for a LONG time.

Ephesians 6: [11] Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.

[12] For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

"That 'high places' there is not saying someone's the mayor or the president. They are high; they're UP there in the heavenly places. But they're 'spiritual wickedness.'

"There's a real battle; a real conflict that is not visible to the flesh-and-blood realm. Only the eye of faith can see it. That battle's been there all along.

"In the heavens, Satan took the commanders first and decimated the government of heaven that way. They chose him to be their god. Humanity did the same thing.

II Corinthians 4: [4] In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.

"That's why Satan could take Jesus up on the high mountain and show Him all the kingdoms of this world in a moment of time and say, 'These are all mine, and whoever I give them to.' Why? Because he stole them; he usurped them. He's taken them away.

Joel 2:11: [11] And the LORD shall utter his voice before his army: for his camp is very great: for he is strong that executeth his word: for the day of the LORD is great and very terrible; and who can abide it?

"What you're reading about here in these first 11 verses is a detailed description of a supernatural army that will accompany the Lord Jesus Christ when He comes out of heaven. In Revelation 19 He comes out of heaven and the armies of heaven follow Him at the Second Advent.

Joel 2:7: [7] They shall run like mighty men; they shall climb the wall like men of war; and they shall march every one on his ways, and they shall not break their ranks:

"In other words, they're going to be moving straight forward and they're not going to break their ranks; it's just going to be one column of these soldiers coming and following the Lord.

[8] Neither shall one thrust another; they shall walk every one in his path: and when they fall upon the sword, they shall not be wounded.

"When you read that you know immediately this is a supernatural army that has the capacity beyond what humans have. 

[9] They shall run to and fro in the city; they shall run upon the wall, they shall climb up upon the houses; they shall enter in at the windows like a thief.

"There's going to be house-to-house urban warfare; they're literally going to come back and swarm like ants over the territory as they go through it and they're going to take out everything that offends and destroy it.

[10] The earth shall quake before them; the heavens shall tremble: the sun and the moon shall be dark, and the stars shall withdraw their shining:

"We already studied that in Joel 2 about the atmospheric turbulence and so forth that surrounds this army as they come through that region.

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"Throughout the Old Testament, Israel was constantly tempted to bring physical idols into their temple, the physical house of God for expressing His truth.

"All the physical starts with the spiritual; 'out of the heart are the issues of life.' The piano is a physical instrument with a physical piece of sheet music in front of it that the pianist plays off of, but you know really the music is a spiritual thing. It's not a physical entity. It has a spiritual origin. You can take a sledgehammer to the piano and burn up the sheet music, but you didn't destroy the music; just the physical representation.

"The physical is the expression of the life and idols were an expression of a doctrine of error, of the gods.

"In II Chronicles 33, Manasseh had a great daddy, Hezekiah, but he wasn't much of a son. He was 12 years old when he began to reign and he reigned 55 years in Jerusalem.

The passage says 'he did that which was evil in the sight of the LORD, like unto the abominations of the heathen, whom the LORD had cast out before the children of Israel.

[3] For he built again the high places which Hezekiah his father had broken down, and he reared up altars for Baalim, and made groves, and worshipped all the host of heaven, and served them.

"He goes out and reestablishes all of the false religion that his daddy had run out of Israel by taking the Word of God. Manasseh lets the darkness come back in.

"Notice verse 4: [4] Also he built altars in the house of the LORD, whereof the LORD had said, In Jerusalem shall my name be for ever.

"He literally brings in this Baal worship, with all these idols and idolatry, and puts an altar in the temple of the Lord for worship of all that false religion.

"Verse 5: [5] And he built altars for all the host of heaven in the two courts of the house of the LORD.

"All the angelic intervention, all the angelic host, all the stuff that goes all the way back to Genesis 11 when they built the Tower of Babel, where on the top they were going to reach to heaven.

"Manasseh, by the way, was to the southern kingdom of Judah what Ahab was to the northern kingdom of Israel. Ahab made Baal worship the official religion of the northern kingdom. Manasseh did for 55 years the same in the southern kingdom.

"His focus was so corrupt he brought it all the way into both the temple's outer and inner courts, and there he's sacrificing children to the gods, putting them through the fire. He's got all these abominations. He completely pollutes the whole thing with idolatry."