Reformational Commentary on Ezekiel 39:23

"And the heathen shall know that the house of Israel went into captivity for their iniquity: because they trespassed against me, therefore hid I my face from them, and gave them into the hand of their enemies: so fell they all by the sword." (Ezekiel 39:23)

All of God's enemies, whether Islamist, Papist, apostate Protestant, Orthodox, Hindu, gnostic, atheist or whatever, shall collectively know that God had cast the house of Israel off for its rebellion against Him over the two millennia elapsed from Christ's ministry until their return to Christ in what will be a veritable Jewish Epiphany; and these ungodly masses referenced herein are styled as "the heathen".

But how shall they perceive this?

One might speculate that in the devastation wrought upon the barbarian armies of the East, not only shall those nations’ domestic civilian populations know that Jesus, through the sovereign work of the Holy Ghost, has intervened at an in-the-hearts level to miraculously convert the stubborn, godless Jewish people to Him and to deliver them from their assailants, but also that the Jews had been forsaken by Him for so long only because of their iniquities, they being a people who should have known better, having received such great deliverances in the Old Testament age from their enemies, having also had the privilege of prophets of the Lord in their midst, and access to the Word of God in their own native tongue, and yet for all of that, hated Christ (bar a few notable exceptions) and murderously pressed for His Crucifixion, and in time became one of the vilest and most immoral people on earth, responsible for the great corrupting of the Goyim (as they derogatively call the Gentiles) through the arts, film, pornography and other means, well documented and beyond dispute.

But will the heathen, so styled, openly admit what their eyes and ears tell them?

Presumably many will, even though one might expect it hard for them to maintain their belief structures when such overwhelming and abundant evidence against it is presented.

The argument against all of them admitting it, though (or at least, admitting it straight away), lies in the particulars of the seventh and final of the Seven Last Plagues of Revelation 16, given that, one one hand, the conversion of the Jews must occur at the transition point between the sixth and seventh plague for reasons outlined in the commentary on Ezekiel 39:22, and on the other, because the Whore of Babylon, which is correctly identified by the Reformed writers of old as the Satanic mother of all apostate forms of Christianity (i.e. Rome and her harlot offspring), must endure beyond the Jewish Epiphany until such time as the "ten horns" of Revelation 17's beast system (i.e. all the western governments) have been transformed into being controlled by the godly and made to righteously "hate the Whore" (Revelation 17:16), under the process outlined in Daniel 2's depiction of the shattering to pieces of the image in Nebuchadnezzar's dream (the toes of which are one and the same as the ten horns of Revelation 17).

That transformation shall consist of first one major western nation's government (the "one tenth part of the great city" of Revelation 11:13) falling into the hands of the godly, and then another and another, until all the West's nations have godly governments (those of the East will also follow suit, either thereafter the West becomes ruled by the godly, or concurrent with it, all in accordance with Daniel 2's "stone cut out without hands" that shall obliterate and therefore replace all the ungodly governments until the whole world is filled with godly rulership).¹

(Note that seemingly most of the old Reformed writers saw the first nation to fall into the hands of the godly as being the United Kingdom, but I think it far more likely to be our transoceanic cousins, America, where this happy event shall take place).

And so we have to allow time for all of the West's governments, i.e., the ten horns of Revelation 17, to fall into the hands of the godly, who, by their very redeemed nature, will hate the Whore, and seek and expedite her destruction, to the lamentation of those in far off lands, presumably Latin America, the Philippines and other regions where Romanism will still be the espoused creed, despite the obvious and undeniable demonstration of God's sovereignty and power in converting Israel to Christ in what will yield a very Reformed expression of faith by the Jews.

"...the house of Israel..."

For those of you who still persist in thinking that the Lord has forsaken the Jews forever and that Israel now refers only to the Gentile church transcendent, note that it is the house of Israel, that is, the literal, non-symbolic, ethnic descendents of Jacob to whom the promises in Ezekiel 38-39 are made, and note further that this is, among the Apocalyptic prophecies, perhaps the least embellished with symbolism and the most expressed with literality.

And of course, all of the above is confirmed by the Apostle Paul who reminds us that the Jews will one day join the Body of Christ (see Romans 11:25-28).