Degenerating spirit creatures

Jesus Christ in Psalm 22: [11] Be not far from me; for trouble is near; for there is none to help.

[12] Many bulls have compassed me: strong bulls of Bashan have beset me round.
[13] They gaped upon me with their mouths, as a ravening and a roaring lion.

Notice that around the Cross there are bulls and Christ’s circled by them. You remember in Exodus 32, Moses went up on the mountain to talk to God and what happened down in the valley? They built a golden calf.

They take an ox and start worshipping that thing. Those bulls in the Bible are associated with worship; the worship of the devil.

In Ezekiel, you learn that the face of the cherubim is the face of an ox. An ox has got two horns. So, all of a sudden, you’re drawing lines between the dots.

Psalm 22:16: [16] For dogs have compassed me: the assembly of the wicked have inclosed me: they pierced my hands and my feet.

So, Christ’s got bulls around Him and then He’s got dogs around Him. By the way, who was it that was around the Cross? A bunch of religious leaders, Pharisees, Sadducees, Roman soldiers, Gentiles. He’s saying, “These dudes sitting around me, trying to have me crucified, are bulls; they’re dogs.”

Psalm 20-21: [20] Deliver my soul from the sword; my darling from the power of the dog.
[21] Save me from the lion's mouth: for thou hast heard me from the horns of the unicorns.

Who’s the lion? Satan is “the lion going about seeking whom he might devour.” Christ is in hand-to-hand combat with the lion.

“For thou hast heard me from the horns of the unicorn.” You see, these creatures exist in the spirit world.

Now when He says, “Save me from the lion’s mouth,” what does a lion want to do? He wants to devour, to tear, to consume, to destroy. I was talking to you about how we’re going to dismantle things in heaven? You think a lion wants to dismantle people, things? Sure.

Numbers 21: 5-6: [5] And the people spake against God, and against Moses, Wherefore have ye brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? for there is no bread, neither is there any water; and our soul loatheth this light bread.
[6] And the LORD sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and much people of Israel died.

There’s the problem—their souls. They’ve got some idols in their hearts and their flesh is running their life and the Lord sent fiery serpents among them. You remember that story.

Those fiery serpents, Isaiah 14, looking into the future, says, [28] In the year that king Ahaz died was this burden.
[29] Rejoice not thou, whole Palestina, because the rod of him that smote thee is broken: for out of the serpent's root shall come forth a cockatrice, and his fruit shall be a fiery flying serpent.

You say, “What is that?!” Well, you can make it all kind of things. They got pictures of dinosaurs with wings and all that stuff that go back thousands of years. But this is something bigger than that.

In John 3:14 Jesus said, “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.”

You see, there’s a spiritual counterpart; there’s some of these creatures in the spirit world, and their desire--they’re “out of the serpent’s root.” They’re a generation of Satan. That’s where they come from.

“And they should go forth as cockatrice.” A cockatrice is a dude that bites you, and when he does, he stings; he injects poison into you.

Like I’ve said, He’s describing the thing on the earth because there’s a counterpart in the spiritual world.

In Isaiah 13 is my favorite one of these guys. Talking about Baylon after it’s been destroyed: [21] But wild beasts of the desert shall lie there; and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there.
[22] And the wild beasts of the islands shall cry in their desolate houses, and dragons in their pleasant palaces: and her time is near to come, and her days shall not be prolonged.

Does “doleful creatures” sound like a happy thing? These guys are connected with sadness, drudgery and darkness. Where’s an owl live? He lives in the darkness. The only times he gets his big eyes up is when it’s dark. What does he eat? Dead things.

Notice the next one: “And the satyrs shall dance there.”

Isaiah 34:11: “But the cormorant and the bittern shall possess it; the owl also and the raven shall dwell in it: and he shall stretch out upon it the line of confusion, and the stones of emptiness.”

All four of those are unclean creatures because they’re carnivores; they eat dead flesh. The passage goes on: ‘They shall call the nobles thereof to the kingdom, but none shall be there, and all her princes shall be nothing.
[13] And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and brambles in the fortresses thereof: and it shall be an habitation of dragons, and a court for owls.
[14] The wild beasts of the desert shall also meet with the wild beasts of the island, and the satyr shall cry to his fellow; the screech owl also shall rest there, and find for herself a place of rest.
[15] There shall the great owl make her nest, and lay, and hatch, and gather under her shadow: there shall the vultures also be gathered, every one with her mate.’

You ever heard a screech owl? It’s a blood-curdling screech that penetrates the air. That’s the scariest thing you ever want to come across. These guys are putting out some real frightening sounds. They’re going to scare the britches off you if they can. The reason is they want to get you away from them.

A satyr is, by definition, a half-goat or horse and a half-man. The man’s head is sticking out of the goat. And you say, “Well, there’s no such creature as that.”

By the way, the word satyr is just the Hebrew word spelled out in English. Your translators didn’t translate it here; they just spelled it out. It’s translated in II Chronicles 11:15 by the term “devils,”’ because satyrs are a part of the satanic host.

Now, let me show you where they come from. Revelation 9: [1] And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit.
[2] And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.

You remember where that beast the Antichrist came from? He came out of this pit. Look at what’s in this pit: “And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power.”

Verse 7: “And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared unto battle; and on their heads were as it were crowns like gold, and their faces were as the faces of men.”

You’ve got the body of a horse and the face of a man. How you going to do that? What does that sound like? It sounds like that dude we read about called a satyr, right?!

It gets better. The passage goes on, “And they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions. And they had breastplates, as it were breastplates of iron; and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle.
[10] And they had tails like unto scorpions, and there were stings in their tails: and their power was to hurt men five months.”

This creature is a combination of a horse, a man, a woman, a lion and a scorpion. Now you draw that for yourself! Submit that to the movies and you might make some money! My point is, what a satyr is, is what these creatures here are. They are part of the degenerated form of spirit creatures that are in the bottomless pit.

Over time, sin degenerates everything it touches and it’s the same way in the spirit world. Those spirit creatures are degenerating too.

These creatures that have all this terrible form, they’re beginning to suffer that degenerative process and what you’re seeing is, they’re held in the bottomless pit waiting to be cast into the lake of fire, and that degenerative process goes on.

My point is the satyrs are not myth, and when they show up in Isaiah 13 and 34, there are two things to notice. These are two passages that describe places in the earth where there are shafts. or openings, or hallways, that go down into hell. Hell has many compartments to it. It has the bottomless pit; it has the torment and so forth where once it had paradise in it.

So there are different chambers there, but they’re on the earth in certain places; places where you can go . . . you see, when a lost man dies, he doesn’t just fall off--he’s got to go get checked in and pass through the gate. This stuff’s actual, folks! There are the gates of hell. Jesus Christ has the key to death and hell. Those things are real; they’re not just metaphorical.

That’s why in those two passages from Isaiah you see the satyrs, because the satyrs are in the bottomless pit. These passages, when they look toward the last days and the Second Coming, these dudes are going to be able to be visible and observed there because you’re going to have the ability to look down into those things.

All of this gives us the ability to understand the nature, the realm of our spirit warfare. I’ll give you an illustration. In Deuteronomy 32, he talks about the poison of dragons and the poison of asps. One of the things they want to do to you, one of their tactics, is to poison you.

Psalm 140 talks about “the poison of asps is under their lips.” What would that tell you? There’s poison in their words. There’s poison that comes out of their mouth.

So what happened in Genesis 3? Satan comes along and he speaks. He says, ‘Yea, hath God said?’ First thing he does is he attacks God’s Word and then you know what he did? He lied to Eve. He said, ‘You will not die.’ James 3 says their tongue’s “full of venom.” False doctrine, lies. There’s this spiritual venom that comes out. The dragon, folks, will poison you.

Paul says in I Timothy 4:1, “Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils.”

What do you think those flying, fiery serpents want to do? They want to leave scar tissue on your soul so the Word of God doesn’t penetrate and get its job done. How are they going to do it? They’re going to have the poison of the asp, or Satan.

They want to live in darkness where there’s no knowledge of what God’s doing. The answer is turn on the light. And what’s the light? “You were children of the darkness but now you’re children of the day.”

Your protection is in the light of God’s Word to you. Now, they’ll take God’s Word and use it too, and twist it and do what the fowl did—steal it away. But if you take God’s word rightly divided, then you get “the eyes of your understanding enlightened,” and the light dispels the darkness.

They live in dark holes and places of desolation. Houses full of doleful owls. Satyrs in desolate houses. Notice where they’re living is in the uninhabited, empty, dark, abandoned places.

Isaiah 34:13: “And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and brambles in the fortresses thereof: and it shall be an habitation of dragons, and a court for owls.”

When you abandon a place what happens to it? It gets overrun by the vegetation, the thorns, the bugs, the animals. So what happens? When Israel, who was the light of the Lord, left, what happened? It became the habitation of darkness.

You see, when truth goes out, error comes in. When the light goes out, darkness comes in. When the people of Israel are taken out of this area, the satanic creatures come in.

Jeremiah 9:11: [11] And I will make Jerusalem heaps, and a den of dragons; and I will make the cities of Judah desolate, without an inhabitant.

Jeremiah 10:22: [22] Behold, the noise of the bruit is come, and a great commotion out of the north country, to make the cities of Judah desolate, and a den of dragons.

You see, they want to live where people aren’t. Now, you remember God told Noah that he was to scatter. And he was going to “put the fear of man in the beast of the field.”

So when man shows up, they leave. Noah was God’s man and they left. Here, God’s people are taken out and the beastly creatures come back in because that’s where they want to exist.

Jeremiah 49: [33] And Hazor shall be a dwelling for dragons, and a desolation for ever: there shall no man abide there, nor any son of man dwell in it.

If they get the son of the man out, then they can dwell there. The whole point here is when the son of man is gone, here come the dragons, the birds, the bats, the owls, the satyrs and all that stuff. You get rid of the Son of Man and you can have control.

In Romans 1, the conclusion Paul makes is, [28] And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient.

They didn’t want to talk about God. They knew they couldn’t get rid of God, so Satan just took God out of their thinking process. How often have we said that lately? They’ve done exactly that to our culture today.