Reformational Commentary on Ezekiel 38:23
"Thus will I magnify myself, and sanctify myself; and I will be known in the eyes of many nations, and they shall know that I am the LORD." (Ezekiel 38:23)
"...and all flesh shall know that I the LORD am thy [Israel's] Saviour and thy Redeemer, the mighty One of Jacob." (Isaiah 49:26)
"And the Egyptians shall know that I am the LORD, when I stretch forth mine hand upon Egypt, and bring out the children of Israel from among them." (Exodus 7:5)
"And I will send a fire on Magog, and among them that dwell carelessly in the isles: and they shall know that I am the LORD." (Exodus 7:5)
In one fell swoop shall the Lord make known His judicial disdain for the Marxist and Islamic nations of the East, and at the same time His
enduring love for the Jews whom He at that stage will have just transformed from the "synagogue of Satan"1
to biblical Christianity
(Revelation 3:9), and likewise His love for His faithful public witness that had been lying lifeless for three years and six months in the West
(the three and half days of Revelation 11:11),
but now raised from the dead and ready to be beckoned in a metaphorical cloud to the political heavens of a major western nation
(Revelation 11:11-13), which, as I have proposed before, will be the US.2
And, evoking the language of Exodus 7:5 in which God assured Moses that the Egyptians, through the terrifying judgments to fall upon
them would know that “I am the LORD”, all the modern nations at that moment shall know that the Lord is God, scattering all notions about
atheism or Allah like the chaff they are in the wind.
How fitting an epitaph to the fiery temporal destruction, therefore, that those
"who dwell liberally" (liberal atheists) shall know that "I am the LORD".3
But, as we proceed into Ezekiel 39, we see attention turn towards the nations of the Beast-controlled crypto-Marxist West and the liberal,
ungodly masses there, and how the Lord shall make them too know that He is God, in the most emphatic and terrifying fashion.
"They shall know that I am the LORD"
In the Bible, whenever the name of the Lord is capitalised as "the LORD" or "GOD", it is the
Tetragrammaton and always refers to God's
Hebrew name, Yahveh, i.e., Jehovah (see commentary on Ezekiel 38:1 for more details).
This term is consistently deployed in the Old Testament, as the above-quoted verses should demonstrate, to the Lord intervening on behalf of the
ethnic Hebrew nation and for good reason, as it is God's name given in the process of establishing (or more accurately, adding more detail to)
the covenant of grace with Abraham and Jacob.
Accordingly, here in Ezekiel 39:23 the sense is that all the nations of the world, among many of whom the hated (and indeed, very much despicable) Jews
abode, will now see that God has not cast them off forever and that He has, in fact, remembered and fulfilled all His redemptive promises made
to their remote ancestors.
Hereby the cynical world beyond will know that the Lord is the covenant God whose name is rendered in English as Jehovah.
FOOTNOTES
1. The term "synagogue of Satan" applies to present day Jews primarily in their Talmudist state, but some of the old writers
(e.g. John Gill) argued that it can also apply to apostate forms of Christianity, i.e., the Antichristians of the Antichurch of Rome, its eastern fork
(Orthodoxy) and all forms of apostate "Protestantism", a view which I share.
2. The English Puritan writers generally understood the blessed nation referred to as "one tenth part of the great city" in Revelation 11:13 to be Britain but, as I argue in commentary on that passage, it cannot be my home nation; rather, it is our "cousins", the United States of America.
3. See commentary on Ezekiel 39:6.
