Reformational Commentary on Ezekiel 39:17

"And, thou son of man, thus saith the Lord God; Speak unto every feathered fowl, and to every beast of the field, Assemble yourselves, and come; gather yourselves on every side to my sacrifice that I do sacrifice for you, even a great sacrifice upon the mountains of Israel, that ye may eat flesh, and drink blood." (Ezekiel 39:17)

"And I saw an angel standing in the sun; and he cried with a loud voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the midst of heaven, Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great God; That ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains, and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of them that sit on them, and the flesh of all men, both free and bond, both small and great." (Revelation 19:17-18)

There follows now in Ezekiel 39:17, in an expansion of the point introduced in Ezekiel 39:4, an appeal summoning birds of prey, vultures, carrion-eaters and land animals with a predilection for eating offal and stripping flesh from carcasses, a sight in nature that shall be so spectacular as to stand in great renown until the end of history.

And, indeed, a gruesome sight that gives itself proverbially also to the contemporaneous destruction of the ungodly forces of the West (the Beast and the False Prophet, with their representatives) in Revelation 19:17-21, when the Lord’s people shall possess the Kingdom (as per Daniel 7:18,22) and all the power and authority and rulership that the ungodly kings, princes and captains of the world shall involuntarily pass to the Lord’s children, both newly Christian Jew and Gentile Christian, as a spoil, or as flesh stripped from the ungodly rulers, the remnant of whom shall be slain by the sword proceeding from Christ’s mouth, which I submit will be their judicial execution at the hands of the godly by then in power (as per Psalm 149:5-9, and see Footnote 6 in the commentary on Ezekiel 39:11 for an explanation as to why their crimes are capital offences).

Therefore, whereas the scavenger creatures directed against the multitudes under Gog’s command in Ezekiel 39 are literal birds and animals, those in Revelation 19 directed against the West’s Satanic monoliths (the Beast and the False Prophet) are metaphorical, and I think perhaps represent nothing less than the godly, by the Lord’s enabling, dispossessing them of their power and executing Divine punishment upon their actors, which is a process that I believe begins explosively with the seven thousand executed (i.e. those wicked elites who will be resident in the US) during the great geopolitical earthquake of Revelation 11:13.

This event in Ezekiel 39:17 is, as pointed out in the commentary on previous verses within Ezekiel 38-39, the opening act of the "great hail" of Revelation 16's seventh and final plague, the Armageddon war, which will be the last and most devastating global war humanity will experience, and will see a "fire" of judgment sent by God upon the major metropolises of the modern nations of both the East and the West, as covered in the notes on Ezekiel 39:6; all of this is bundled up in the passage below, which applies not just to the localised (within northern Israel) Gog-Magog event, but to the global conflagration ensuing therefrom, and to the metaphorical slaughter of all false religions that follow on, in turn, from that:

"Come near, ye nations, to hear; and hearken, ye people: let the earth hear, and all that is therein; the world, and all things that come forth of it. For the indignation of the Lord is upon all nations, and his fury upon all their armies: he hath utterly destroyed them, he hath delivered them to the slaughter. Their slain also shall be cast out, and their stink shall come up out of their carcases, and the mountains shall be melted with their blood." (Isaiah 34:1-3)