Reformational Commentary on Ezekiel 38:7

"Be thou prepared, and prepare for thyself, thou, and all thy company that are assembled unto thee, and be thou a guard unto them." (Ezekiel 38:7)

This directive is addressed to Gog, the Russian leader at the time of the spoliation-focussed raid on Israel, and asserts that the Lord will work two things in Gog's heart:

1. A special determination to be extra prepared for this assault, perhaps in light of the debacle that was Russia's rash and ill-conceived initial assaults on Ukraine in 2022.
2. That the raid on Israel should be protected with exceptionally extensive defensive arrangements, covering not just Russia’s army, but those of its allies, and presumably, covering their respective homelands also, so that no threat of reprisals from Israel or Israel's erstwhile allies in the West can shake their confidence in the enterprise they will be set on embarking on.

According to the defectors from Russia and China with whom the anticommunist writer, Jeff Nyquist, is very familiar (and some of whom he has interviewed), there exists an arrangement between those two nations that Russia should provide the bulk of the strategic missile saturation and China the bulk of the troops in any major global war.

In this regard, and also in the regard that Russia (a) has the best intelligence capability of the nations of the East and (b) leads the way among those nations in defensive missile technology (e.g. its S-300, S-400 and S-500 systems, the latter of which are considered by many to be superior to their western counterparts), Russia is very much positioned as the grand protector of the rest of the barbarian nations.

The Word of God repeats the imperative directed at Gog (“Be thou prepared, and prepare for thyself, etc.”), the inference being that Russia’s leadership – and by further inference, the nations following its lead – will not act until they consider themselves redundantly prepared, that is, doubly or “ultra” prepared.

Speaking from what is known of the state of the Russian and Chinese armed forces, we can assess the following strategic preparations as necessary before Moscow could reasonably be expected to mount a broad assault on Israel:

• Gog being extra diligent in securing his own borders, especially his western flank; as of 2026, with Finland’s accession to NATO, that seems a tall order, and yet, note that NATO remains postured – despite Russian propaganda to the contrary – to contain a Russian breakout, not to invade Russia. For one thing, NATO lacks the manpower to do so and the US, to whom Europe has been looking for protection for so long, has a mere ten army divisions, which would struggle to cope with both a Chinese breakout in the Pacific and a Russian action in Europe. NATO's defensive (as opposed to offensive) posture can also be observed in the anti-tank defences, trenches, man-made swamps, minefields, and layered defences being built along its eastern frontiers with Russia (see this presentation). To secure Gog's western flank, therefore, a state of continual manoeuvring and mobilisation of Russian land forces in eastern Europe might be deemed enough by him to keep NATO occupied and diverted from the Levant, but even more so if China or North Korea become militarily active on their side of the Pacific Rim.
• Russia and China need to secure more food stockpiles prior to a major confrontation with the West, which is likely another key objective in Russia’s assault on Ukraine. China, meanwhile, has been busy on a massive “food-grab”, buying up as much as it can from all around the world¹.
• China, as Russia’s number one ally, must complete its own preparations, not just in terms of stockpiling supplies and psychologically preparing its people for war (both of which have been ongoing at fever pitch for several years now), but (a) in expanding its armed forces, especially its navy, to out-match America’s, (b) in finally achieving a western-quality ability to perform joint operations between all branches of its military (an issue which has historically dogged China), and (c) in purging corruption from its military administrative apparatus, as that stands as a critical impediment to a well oiled war machine (Russia also suffers this shortcoming and some believe it is the number one factor in the bungling of their invasion of Ukraine, but I submit that it will remedy this in time for the attack on Israel).
• The West must be sufficiently weakened economically, militarily and in every other strategic sense, and perhaps also diverted and stretched by a Chinese breakout in the Pacific (as part of the symbolic "great river Euphrates" becoming dried up in Revelation 16:12, which applies to this Gog-Magog scene within the Armageddon event). Even though the West is presently at its weakest ever state militarily, compared to Russia and China, the barbarian nations of the East probably desire and require it to be even weaker economically, militarily², socially, morally, etc.
• Russia and China would have to enact emergency conditions domestically if a global war were to be pursued, which in plainer terms reduces to an extremely locked down and regimented environment in both countries, as well as in their allies, with what remaining pretensions to liberty in the barbarian lands being dispelled. This falls under the fourth of the Seven Last Plagues (in which the “sun” of tyrannical government scorches (oppresses) the masses - see Revelation 16:8-9); this requirement would appear even more of an imperative given that the second of those plagues consists of the destruction of the current quality of life and economic conditions in the non-western nations styled in Revelation 16 as "the sea".
• Russia itself would have to have absorbed the painfully taught lessons from its bungling invasion of Ukraine and to have updated its military equipment and tactics accordingly.
• Russia might also esteem, as necessary to consolidating its position as leader of the barbarian nations, a tactical nuclear deployment adjacent to, or within, the Ukrainian theatre, although there is a strong argument against Putin doing so within Ukraine due to his statement that Ukrainians are essentially Russians themselves and therefore, goes the reasoning, it might be a tough sell deploying nuclear weapons against his “own people”; counter to that, his statement has not stopped Russian forces from allegedly committing atrocities against Ukrainian soldiers and civilians.

All of those objectives, bar the last one, are going to take time, so alarmist predictions of imminent global nuclear war (as of mid decade) are amiss; the clearer and more present danger we face is the induction of western society into the CBDC-centric, woke-and-carbon-based social credit system, which remains on-track for ca. 2028.

I should also add that the double directive from God (“Be thou prepared, and prepare for thyself”) might also point to the inalienable fact that the Russians, as a people, are notoriously chaotic and haphazard in many of their enterprises, to the extent that they make jokes about this aspect of the national character on their televised comedy shows; whether it be organising a barbecue, a vacation abroad, or the invasion of a neighbouring country, everything tends to be stamped with the imprimatur of last-minute disorganised bedlam; Putin’s shambolic invasion of Ukraine would also corroborate that, and numerous other observations I have made of them, at first hand living among them for years, supports that view to me also.