Reformational Commentary on Ezekiel 38:17
“Thus saith the Lord GOD; Art thou he of whom I have spoken in old time by my servants the prophets of Israel, which prophesied in those days many years that I would bring thee against them?" (Ezekiel 38:17)
The Lord now addresses Gog in Ezekiel 38:17 as if speaking to him in the year of the attack on Israel and in a recursive sense
that invokes the preceding verses of Ezekiel 38 as well as, it seems, Joel 3’s "the heathen", Isaiah 27:1 (where Gog is styled "Leviathan"1),
Micah 5:5 (where Gog is "the Assyrian"2), Zechariah 14 and Revelation 16, and directs
those passages now at Gog in his lifetime, to name, frame and shame him for the enterprise he is about to engage in against the nation of Israel.
Here the supreme sovereignty of God over the hearts of men is displayed; a reprobate man, born and made for Hell as a vessel of wrath fitted for
destruction (Romans 9:22), is raised to power by God (as all rulers are)
given an irresistible urge to lead the barbarian nations of the East, both Marxist (of varying shades) and Islamist (of varying shades), on a
terrifying resource-grab rampage against
Israel; this assault would, no doubt, be seen by the Muslim faction as an opportunity to once and for all wipe the nation of Israel from the face
of this
earth, and which ambition the Marxist party would be cognisant of and conniving at, in pursuit of their own resource-grab and a statement victory
for the new super bloc of the East over western hegemony.
And here also, the person that is Gog is singled out as a special end-times character.
Whereas the futurist camp fixates on a non-existent super politician Antichrist whom it foolishly styles "the beast"3,
the Word of God directs
us instead to Gog as the most temporally dangerous individual of these latter days.
Gog is the one who shall be eviscerated and obliterated in the sight of the world; the Antichrist, on the other hand, is "that wicked" who is
to be consumed by the brightness of Christ’s coming, which brightness is the Philadelphian-Kingdom age, specifically during those years in which
the newly Christian ten horns (the western governments) shall hate the Whore that is Romanism (along with her apostate Protestant harlot offspring)
and strip her naked and destroy her (Revelation 18).
Gog’s humiliation and destruction, therefore, is the more imminent event and designed to (a) show that the Lord has not forgotten
His promise to convert "the house of Israel" (see, for example, Ezekiel 34:30) to Christ and (b) at the same time execute terrible, horrifying vengeance on the Marxist and Islamist
hordes arrayed against Israel, and promptly thereafter bring on the horrible worldwide fires of Ezekiel 39:6 as part of
the final of the Seven Last Plagues (Revelation 16).
FOOTNOTES
1. John Gill relates that the Jewish commentator "Kimchi" (either Joseph Kimhi
or his son David Kimhi) also understood Isaiah 27 to refer to the Gog-Magog events of Ezekiel 38-39 (see his
commentary on
Isaiah 27:1).
I know not how Kimchi arrived at that conclusion, especially since, being a Jewish teacher, he would have rejected the book of Revelation as
authoritative, it
providing my personal basis for understanding that Leviathan is, being named after the largest and most powerful marine animal (the whale),
effectively king of "the sea"; in Revelation, "the sea" is a metaphor for the nations beyond the "civilised world", i.e., the barbarian lands,
or what is nowadays
called the East, in contradistinction to the West.
Gog therefore, as leader of modern Magog (Russia), is not just chief prince of Magog, Meshech and Tubal, but chiefest king of the nations of the
East and, as
students of the anticommunist writers and the defector literature will know, Russia - NOT China (despite its huge economy and armed forces) - is the
leader nation of the non-western world.
2. The prototype "Assyrian" was the literal Assyrian king,
Sennacherib, who invaded much of Israel in the days of the godly king
Hezekiah and whose officer, Rabshakeh, infamously threatened Hezekiah and Jerusalem in a tirade involving manifold proud boasts and
blasphemies against the Lord (see Isaiah 36-37). After Sennacherib's highly punitive demise, he, as the definitive "Assyrian", became a pejorative for
any future existential attacker of Israel, hence Gog of Ezekiel 38-39 is rightly considered to be metaphorically referred to as "the Assyrian" in
Micah 5:5.
Some have sought to stretch the synonym further and apply it to any enemy of Israel or any enemy of the church in abstract (fuelling the inevitable
nonsense from the
futurist interpretive camp about the
Antichrist attacking Israel), but it holds a peculiar
specificity on account of the military prowess, the pride, the arrogance, the blasphemous disregard for God and His power, and the actual action in
invading the land of Israel that is matched only by one explicitly prescribed future enemy of the Jews (and by proxy, of the church), and that enemy
is the man Gog, the leader of Russia when Israel shall be invaded in the very near future.
3. The beast of Revelation 13 is the second phase of Daniel 7's fourth and final beast, the one that seems to have so disturbed
Daniel in the vision God gave him of a succession of world empires (styled as "beasts" in Daniel 7).
To summarise extremely briefly, those three phases of Daniel 7's fourth beast are:
- The Great Red Dragon of Revelation 12 - the pagan Roman empire that attacked both the nation of Israel and the early church.
- The Beast from the Sea of Revelation 13 - western European civilisation (including its colonial offshoots) filling the vacuum left when the Roman empire collapsed; this took on a Christian veneer by espousing the Antichurch of Rome; it was one of its heads (i.e. the Papacy) that received the deadly wound when the Reformation came, a wound that healed when the Reformation essentially fizzled out through tremendous apostatising, especially through the proliferation of Arminianism and Fullerism in the 1800s; and it was one of its horns that was the Little Horn of Daniel 7:8 before whom three kingdoms were plucked up in the form of the Donation of Pepin in the mid 700s, which marked the commencement of the Beast from the Sea's 1,260 year tenure, ending last year (in 2025).
- The Scarlet Coloured Beast from the Bottomless Pit, that was, is not and yet is - the West (as a power bloc) in its final, ripe-for-judgment form; it is now blatantly hyper-Socialist (Marxist) in its ideology (despite that ideology supposedly having been defeated at the close of the Cold War) hence it is scarlet (bright red) the colour of a communism that "was, is not, yet is" (hiding behind names such as globalism).
