Demons' late prediction of temple destruction

What wonder is it, then, that when the overthrow of the temples and idols was already at hand—the overthrow that the prophets of the most high God had predicted so long before—the demon Serapis disclosed it to one of his worshipers just before it happened, so as to commend his own quasi-divinity by departing or fleeing, as it were?

For these demons are put to flight, or even bound by higher commands and dragged away and removed from their places, so that concerning the things over which they ruled and for which they were worshiped, the will of God may be done. God predicted this long before throughout all the nations, and commanded that it be accomplished through his faithful ones.

But why should the demon not be allowed to predict this, since he already foresaw that it was imminent? For this prediction would both bear witness to the prophets by whom these things were written down, and give the wise an opportunity to understand how watchfully one must beware the deceit of demons and flee their worship. They had kept silent in their temples for so long a time about these future events, which they could not have been ignorant were predicted by the prophets. But after these events began to draw near, they wanted to predict them, as it were, so that they would not be thought ignorant and conquered.

Since it had been predicted and written down so long before—to pass over other things for now—what the prophet Zephaniah says: “The Lord will prevail against them and will exterminate all the gods of the nations of the earth, and all the islands of the nations will worship him, each from his own place” (Zephaniah 3:9)—either those who were worshiped in the temples of the nations did not believe these things would happen to them, and for that reason did not want to spread them through their own seers and fanatics—as their poet introduces Juno not entirely believing what Jupiter had said about the death of Turnus: “Now a heavy end awaits the innocent man, or I am deceived about the truth. Would that I might rather be mocked by false fear, and that you, who are able, might turn your undertakings to the better!”—or the demons, that is, the airy powers, doubted that these things predicted by the prophets could happen to them, and therefore did not want to celebrate their prediction—and from this one may understand what sort of beings they are—or, since they knew with complete certainty that these things would come, they kept silent in their temples so that they would not begin even then to be abandoned and despised by people of understanding, because the prophets who forbade worshiping them bore witness to the future overthrow of their temples and idols.

But now, after the time has come when the prophecies of the prophets of the one God are being fulfilled—the God who calls these false gods and most vehemently commands that they not be worshiped—why should they not also be allowed to predict the fulfillment itself? From this it would appear more clearly that they had either not believed these things before, or had feared to announce them to their worshipers, and that at the end, as if having nothing more to do, they wanted to display their divination even there, where they are now exposed as having long pretended divinity.