What is Satan’s role in the tribulation?

Question 08079

Satan’s role in the tribulation is described more fully than at any other point in Scripture, and Revelation gives us a sequence rather than a snapshot. He is thrown down, he pursues, he empowers, he deceives, and finally he is seized and bound.

I write as a pretribulational premillennialist, so I take that seven-year period as a future reality in which God resumes His programme with Israel and the church is not present. That framework shapes everything below, and I think it is what the text requires rather than a grid imposed on it.

Where Satan Stands Now

Before the tribulation, Satan retains a permitted access to God’s presence for the purpose of accusation. Job 1 shows him presenting himself among the sons of God, and Revelation 12 calls him the accuser of our brothers who accuses them day and night before our God.

So his present activity is not primarily what films suggest. He accuses, he tempts, he deceives the nations, he blinds the minds of unbelievers, and he works through a network of fallen angels rather than personally attending to individuals. I have written on his current activity in what Satan is doing now.

That present arrangement changes sharply during the tribulation, and understanding the change is the key to the whole question.

Satan’s Role at the Midpoint

The decisive moment comes in Revelation 12:7-9. War arises in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon, and the dragon is defeated so that there is no longer any place for them in heaven. The great dragon is thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satanas, the deceiver of the whole world.

I place this at the midpoint of the seven years, and the reason is the timing given in the surrounding verses. The woman is nourished for one thousand two hundred and sixty days, which is three and a half years, and the same period governs the beast’s authority in chapter 13.

From that point Satan’s role becomes desperate rather than strategic. Revelation says he comes down in great wrath because he knows his time is short, and the whole second half of the tribulation is coloured by that knowledge.

The Pursuit of Israel

What does he do with his remaining time? He goes after Israel. Revelation 12 pictures the dragon pursuing the woman who gave birth to the male child, and the earth helping her, and the dragon becoming furious and going off to make war on the rest of her offspring.

This fits the wider prophetic picture exactly. Jeremiah calls it the time of Jacob’s trouble. Daniel speaks of a time of trouble such as never has been since there was a nation. Jesus warned those in Judea to flee to the mountains when they see the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place.

Satan’s role here is the last and most violent expression of a hatred that runs through the whole of Scripture, from Pharaoh to Haman to Herod. If Israel’s covenants are to be fulfilled literally to ethnic Israel, and I hold that they are, then destroying Israel is the one move that would overturn everything God has promised.

Empowering the Beast

Alongside the persecution comes the political and religious structure. Revelation 13:2 says the dragon gave the beast his power and his throne and great authority. The Antichrist is not a rival to Satan but his instrument, and the authority he wields is delegated.

Paul describes the same figure in 2 Thessalonians 2 as one whose coming is by the activity of Satan with all power and false signs and wonders, and with all wicked deception for those who are perishing. The imitation is deliberate throughout. A false trinity, a false death and resurrection, a false prophet, a mark that parodies the sealing of God’s own.

So Satan’s role at this stage is that of the power behind a throne, and the throne is global. I have written more on the partnership in the relationship between Satan and the Antichrist.

Deception on a Global Scale

The tribulation is marked above all by deception. Signs and wonders are performed. Fire comes down from heaven in the sight of people. An image is given breath and speaks. Whatever the mechanism, the effect is that the world worships the dragon and the beast, and the worship is enthusiastic rather than coerced in every case.

Paul adds a sobering detail. Because they refused to love the truth and so be saved, God sends them a strong delusion so that they may believe what is false. The deception is Satan’s work and it is also judicial, which is a hard thing to hold together and yet plainly what the text says.

This is not new behaviour, only new scale. He was a liar from the beginning, and the tribulation is that character given a global platform for three and a half years. See also whether Satan can perform miracles.

The Limits That Never Move

It is worth stating plainly what Satan’s role does not include, because prophetic teaching can leave people frightened. He is a creature. He is not omniscient, not omnipresent, not omnipotent, and every scrap of authority he exercises during those years is permitted rather than seized.

Notice how carefully Revelation words it. Authority was given to the beast. The dragon gave him his throne. He was allowed to make war on the saints. The passive constructions run all the way through, and they all point back to a God who is directing the sequence.

Even the timing is fixed. Forty-two months, and not a day more. A being who knows his time is short is a being working to someone else’s clock.

How It Ends

The tribulation closes with the return of Jesus in glory, the destruction of the armies gathered against Him, and the beast and the false prophet thrown alive into the lake of fire. Satan himself is not sent there yet.

Instead, Revelation 20:1-3 describes an angel coming down with the key to the bottomless pit and a great chain, seizing the dragon, binding him for a thousand years, and shutting and sealing the pit over him so that he might not deceive the nations any longer.

So Satan’s role in the tribulation ends not with a battle he loses but with an arrest he cannot resist. One angel, one chain, one pit. For what follows see why Satan is released after the millennium.

Why This Matters for Us Now

Believers in the church age will not be present for any of this, and I hold that firmly. The Rapture is imminent and signless, and 1 Thessalonians 5:9 says God has not destined us for wrath but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus.

That is not escapism. It is the plain sense of the promises, and it should produce two things in us. The first is a settled peace about the future, which the world cannot manufacture. The second is urgency about people who are not yet in Jesus, because the door does not stay open indefinitely.

And I will say what I always say when this subject comes up. Nobody knows the day or the hour, date-setting has an unbroken record of failure and embarrassment, and anyone naming a year has told you all you need to know about their teaching.

Satan’s Role and the Question of Israel

There is one further dimension to Satan’s role that deserves saying plainly, because it explains the intensity of the persecution. God has made unconditional promises to ethnic Israel concerning land, seed and blessing, and those promises are yet to be fulfilled in the way they were given.

If Israel were destroyed, those promises would fail, and a God whose word failed would be no God at all. That is what makes Israel the target. Satan’s role in the tribulation is not random malice but a final attempt to falsify God’s covenant faithfulness, and it is the same attempt he has been making in different forms since the seed of the woman was first promised in Genesis 3.

Read that way, the whole of biblical history has a thread running through it. Pharaoh’s edict against the Hebrew boys. Haman’s plot to destroy the Jews across the Persian empire. Herod at Bethlehem. Satan’s role has been consistent, and Revelation 12:17 shows it running to the very end when the dragon becomes furious with the woman and goes off to make war on the rest of her offspring.

So, now what?

It is worth adding a word about how to hold prophecy generally. Satan’s role in these events is described so that we might be sober rather than frightened, and informed rather than speculative. The purpose of the book is stated at the beginning and the end, which is the revelation of Jesus and a blessing on those who keep what is written in it.

Any reading of Revelation that leaves you more interested in the dragon than in the Lamb has misfired somewhere, however accurate the details.

Read Revelation 12 and 13 straight through this week without a commentary, and simply notice how much of what happens is described as given, allowed or permitted. That single observation settles more anxiety than any chart.

Then let the certainty of the ending do its work on your present. The dragon’s career finishes with a chain held by an unnamed angel, which tells you exactly how much of a contest this ever was.

Who do you know who needs to hear about Jesus before any of this begins?

“And they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death.”

Revelation 12:11, ESV