By God’s ordinance, Satan must be released from his prison so that he might deceive the nations into gathering for war. The divine ordinance making this release (and deception and gathering) necessary stems back to God’s words in Genesis 3:15: the seed of the woman will crush the head of the serpent. Through releasing the serpent, the Lord would bring about the gathering of all his enemies into one place at the same time so as to finally crush them all. As we are dealing with the book of Revelation with its abundant symbolism, we are not to think that this battle is physical or fought at a locatable spot on the map of our planet.