Reformational Commentary on Ezekiel 39:13
"Yea, all the people of the land shall bury them; and it shall be to them a renown the day that I shall be glorified, saith the Lord GOD." (Ezekiel 39:13)
Continuing the statement opened in the previous verse, in which the burial
of Gog's invasion force's soldiers will take seven months, the Lord says that all the people of the land shall be employed in
this work, although not literally every single newly Christian Israelite can be expected to perform the work, but many or even most of them
will (the old, the sick and the young, for example, obviously being exempted).
The Lord then adds, "and it shall be to them a renown the day that I shall be glorified", and although that statement is inserted
here, immediately after the description of the burial process, I personally cannot connect the said process or to any thought of
humanity towards the remains of Gog and his hordes, who in their lifetimes were of utter contempt in the Lord’s sight,
but rather this points to the renown assigned
to the day on which the Lord will have smitten the barbarian hordes of the East for raising a hand against His elect people of Israel,
now newly converted to Christ.
And indeed, the Lord shall be glorified in the sight of the nations when He strikes down Gog and the multinational force
accompanying him, which, to reiterate from the commentary on preceding verses, must appear as direct Divine intervention rather than
high-tech military weaponry deployed by a God-serving foreign power; and this point also brings us back to consider the obvious
isolation of Israel implicit in Ezekiel 38:13, and therefore we
must expect and anticipate the near future abandonment of Israel by its current western allies, especially the US, and this is, I
submit, a process already underway (as of early 2026) as evidenced by the
formal recognition of a Palestinian state at the United Nations
in 2025 by the UK, France,
Canada, Australia, et al., much to the consternation of Israel, and although the US formally condemned that move,
it did so duplicitously, given that its own government is every bit as much the executor of and proxy for the supranational
globalist elites of the West that every other western government is, and so the US is still "on-board" with Israel for now, until it
finds or is given a reason to decouple from it entirely (further signs of Israel losing its traditional western allies may be
observed by the seemingly choreographed surge in anti-Israel sentiment in the output of, what appears to me at least, the majority of
conservative bloggers and influencers in the US, especially in the aftermath of the
Charlie Kirk assassination in September 2025).
But what form will God's glorification take in this reference in Ezekiel 39:13?
Plainly, it shall be twofold:
- Immeasurably great dread and terror will strike the hearts of the atheists of the West ("them that dwell carelessly in the isles", as Ezekiel 39:6 puts it), and a horrifying realisation shall come upon the atheists and heathen of the nations of the East (especially the Islamists) and upon the apostate "Christians" of the Antichurch of Rome and its eastern fork, Orthodoxy, as well as upon all the ecumenical "Protestants", when all of the foregoing are witnesses to this undeniable demonstration of Divine intervention in wrath.
- The apprehension by all, or minimally, by the aforementioned apostates, of God's elective, selective, sovereign grace in suddenly
enabling an entire ungodly nation (Israel) to all at once believe in Jesus as the true Messiah after all, will deal a death blow
against the Counter Reformation doctrine of Arminianism1
that has eviscerated and Rome-orientated ostensible Protestantism since the 1800s (the era of
counterfeit revivals and the abominable hyper evangelicalism of false teachers such as John Wesley and Dwight Moody); God will thus
be glorified in demonstrating sovereign grace, that is, the much-maligned doctrines of Calvinism, and in the process He shall also
exonerate His longsuffering and abused faithful few servants who have kept their doctrinal garments undefiled (Revelation 3:4).
"Who hath heard such a thing? who hath seen such things? Shall the earth be made to bring forth in one day? or shall a nation be born at once? for as soon as Zion travailed2, she brought forth her children" (Isaiah 66:8)
FOOTNOTES
1. Arminianism is the contemporary manifestation of the Wormwood of Revelation 8 that consisted of the false doctrines of the "star that fell from heaven", namely, the British (Welsh) theologian Pelagius who, during the late era of the western Roman empire, set forth a new heresy that denied original sin and postulated the then-novel concept of man's ostensible "free will". This teaching embittered the doctrinal waters, whereof many "died", that is, were consigned to a lost eternity, and such is the tendency of present-day Arminianism to cause also, for it redefines many key doctrines of the Gospel, to such an extent as to constitute a veritable "other gospel" and one that is very much designed to facilitate a return of as many nominal Protestants to Rome as possible, either through explicit and direct reunion or through the implicit and indirect means of the detestable ecumenical movement.
2. "Zion's travail" of Isaiah 66:8 is one and the same as "Jacob's trouble" of Jeremiah 30:7, a future distress brought upon the nation of Israel just before its long awaited conversion to Christ, which happens during the Gog-Magog event of Ezekiel 38-39 as the sweet epilogue to that event speaks of an Israel reconciled at last to God and forgiven for its wanderings away from Him; and, since there is only reconciliation to God via Christ, as the converted Jew, Paul the Apostle, pointed out, it is a Messianic, that is, Christian Israel that emerges from Zion's travail (aka Jacob's trouble, aka the Gog-Magog assault):
"Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. And all things are of God, who hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ, and hath given to us the ministry of reconciliation; To wit, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them; and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation." (2 Corinthians 5:17-19)
(Special note: Paul speaks of God "reconciling the world unto himself" and this is seized upon by universalists to argue that every person ever born will eventually be saved, even those in Hell; but this Pauline phrase is classic Hebrew hyperbolic language, the same as that used by Jesus in John 3:16's "for God so loved the world" or by Luke in Luke 2:1's "there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed", none of which excerpts are to be taken as literal understandings of the whole world, but as hyperboles describing expansiveness and indeed, we ourselves use such language in modern English when we say things like "everyone knows that London is the largest city in England").
