Queen's Road Cell

 12 a. What do you learn from chapter 22 about Satan's plan for... Jesus (22:3-6) His b etrayal (cf. Jn 13:2, 27) But contrast Satan's actions at the Temptation  (4:1-13). There has been a change of strategy: if the Son of God can be persuaded to avoid the Cross and submit to him, He should be made to do so. Now, when it is clear that Jesus will not submit and is destroying his work (10:18, 11:18, 13:16), Satan determnines to destroy His ministry.    Did Satan know what would happen at the Cross? Through Peter Satan tried to dissuade Jesus from suffering, dying and being raised again (Mt 16:22). Satan may have grasped the fact that God had a plan at the Cross, but he would not have known the full consequences of Christ's work there in completely destroying his work ( ...by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triump...

 In the fourth year of King Darius, the word of the Lord came to Zechariah on the fourth day of the ninth month, which is Chislev. 2 Now the people of Bethel had sent Sharezer and Regem-melech and their men to entreat the favor of the Lord, 3 saying to the priests of the house of the Lord of hosts and the prophets, “Should I weep and abstain in the fifth month, as I have done for so many years?” 4  Then the word of the Lord of hosts came to me: 5  “Say to all the people of the land and the priests, ‘When you fasted and mourned in the fifth month and in the seventh, for these seventy years, was it for me that you fasted? 6  And when you eat and when you drink, do you not eat for yourselves and drink for yourselves? 7  Were not these the words that the Lord proclaimed by the former prophets, when Jerusalem was inhabited and prosperous, with her cities around her, and the South and the lowland were inhabited?’” 8  And the word of the Lord ...