Reformational Commentary on Ezekiel 39:6
"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." (Ezekiel 39:6)
Magog, as shown in the commentary on Ezekiel 38:2, is Russia - not Turkey (a nation of very limited
influence) - and, with the armies of the barbarian nations of the East lying slain upon the mountains of Israel north of Jerusalem,
and great terror upon the godless within all the nations of the world, the Lord’s fury moves from the battlefield of Armageddon,
that "valley of decision" of Joel 3:141,
to sending "a fire on Magog", that is, the Russian heartland (and I believe corporately upon
all its allies’ cities too), and "among them that dwell carelessly in the isles (i.e. the West, as explained below):
and they shall know that I am the LORD”.
The objective of this fire sent by God is that all those atheists in Russia, China and the West, and all those votaries of Orthodoxy,
other forms of apostate Christianity and all other false religions, shall know that the Lord of the newly evangelical nation of Israel
is, in fact, Jesus Christ Himself, Jehovah the Son, the Holy One of Israel; they will see and understand in the heart, even if they openly deny it with
their lips, that God has moved in fury against the enemies of Israel and the enemies of the Gentile church which, at that time, will be spiritually
united with the nation of Israel in Christ; the other major demonstration of God's approval (this time upon the Gentile believers) at that point
will be when the West's premier nation will "fall" into the hands of the godly, as promised in Revelation 11:11-13; whereas the old English Puritan writers
considered that the blessed Gentile nation would be Britain (or France)2,
it will rather be our friends across the ocean, i.e., America.
The fiery destruction sent by God in Ezekiel 39:6 will be one and the same as the fiery destructions foretold in numerous passages in Isaiah,
a book that contains
a central theme of God's merciful deliverance of Israel the nation, its conversion to Christ that unifies it with the Gentile church transcendent, and the
dreadful strokes of Divine fury upon the ungodly worldwide in what will be God's final temporal judgment upon the nations, whereafter the golden age
of the church (as foretold in Daniel 2 and Daniel 7, among other passages), shall continue for "many generations" (Isaiah 58:12, 60:15)
until the brief Laodicean "blip" (Revelation 3:14-22) right before Christ's Second Coming.3
"And when ye [believers] see this [the miraculous and sudden conversion of the Jews], your heart shall rejoice, and your bones shall flourish like an herb [as alluded to in Romans 11:15 and Revelation 11:11]: and the hand of the Lord shall be known toward his servants, and his indignation toward his enemies. For, behold, the Lord will come with fire, and with his chariots like a whirlwind, to render his anger with fury, and his rebuke with flames of fire. For by fire and by his sword will the Lord plead with all flesh [obviously excluding the elect; this is hyperbolic speech to emphasise the vast scale of the judgment, which for its severity can only, and will be, one and the same as the "great hail" of the seventh and final of the Seven Last Plagues of Revelation 15-16 (see Revelation 16:21)]: and the slain of the Lord shall be many." (Isaiah 66:14-16)4
"The earth also is defiled under the inhabitants thereof; because they have transgressed the laws [i.e. God's laws], changed the ordinances [e.g. embracing "gay marriage"], broken the everlasting covenant [the covenant of grace, i.e., forsaken the Christ-glorifying one true faith]. Therefore hath the curse devoured the earth, and they that dwell therein are desolate: therefore the inhabitants of the earth are burned, and few men left." (Isaiah 24:6)5
Now we come to consider some special details contained within Ezekiel 39:6.
1. The Isles
The Hebrew original is transliterated as “hā·’î·yîm”, i.e., “coastlands” or “borderlands” or “islands”.
The "isles" can be rendered as the periphery of Magog or the "coastlands", but in this case, that is not the sense of it.
As the Russian Synodal Version6 puts it:
"И пошлю огонь на землю Магог и на жителей островов, живущих беспечно, и узнают, что Я Господь.", with the operative term highlighted, "Ostrovov" = "islands".
So we have even the Russian translators going with "islands" rather than "coastlands".
The same is the case with the reliable German version7:
"Und ich will Feuer werfen über Magog und über die, so in den Inseln sicher wohnen; und sollen’s erfahren, daß ich der Herr bin."
Here we have consensus traversing disparate languages, which suggests that they independently arrived at the same understanding
of the Hebrew original.
But the terms "islands" or "isles" itself, so common throughout the book of Isaiah (for example), is nuanced in Hebrew and can metaphorically
refer to, in modern language,
"far flung regions of the world", which is the only logical interpretation of it anyway, as the Russian homeland is by no means
ringed by literal islands.
In support of this interpretation, note that Gill observes on his commentary on Zephaniah 2:11’s use of the term “all the isles
of the heathen” as follows:
...or Gentiles; not only those places which are properly isles, as ours of Great Britain and Ireland; though there may be a particular respect had to such, and especially to ours, who have been very early and long favoured with the Gospel, and yet will be; but all places beyond the seas, or which the Jews went to by sea, they called isles. (John Gill on Zephaniah 2:11).
One could reasonably conclude, therefore, that the isles term is offered in contradistinction to Magog and means all that would
be diametrically
alien to Magog, meaning, primarily the Anglo West (all the Anglo homelands being either islands, as the UK, New Zealand and Australia, or
land-masses flanked by seas, as is the case with the US and Canada), and the Anglo West further, as corporate leader of the West
as a whole, might also be a reasonable metaphor for the West as a whole, in which case Magog, as leader of the East, might likewise
be a surrogate metaphor (within the context of Ezekiel 39:6) for Russia and all the nations that follow its lead into the Armageddon
slaughter.
In plainer terms, the Lord will send the fires of judgment to the major nations of both East and West in the immediate or short-term
wake of Gog’s downfall in northern Palestine, during the final great war mankind will experience, whereafter shall the happy and
peaceable Philadelphian era take hold.
2. "...them that dwell carelessly..."
Now we come to "them that dwell carelessly" in the isles, that is, in the West, especially the Anglo West.
So what does "them that dwell carelessly" mean?
The German version has it as "securely" or "safely" ("sicher"), whereas the Russian has it as "without care" ("беспечно"
= "bes pechno"), just as the English KJV renders it.
This could, at first glance, mean that the people in those regions far removed from the Russian heartland are living in
literal security / safety or recklessly indifferent to unfolding world events.
But given that this is the opening scene of Revelation 16’s Battle of Armageddon under the final of the Seven Last Plagues,
as Gill et al propose, and given the rigours of the six preceding plagues and the rage and anger and bloodlust and desire
for all-out war that Satan and his demonic forces will have stirred both East and West up to under the sixth of the last plagues
(Revelation 16:14), there cannot really be
any apathy in the West towards the shocking destruction of Gog’s forces in the Levant.
Rather, there can only be dismay, terror and anger at the knowledge of the most undeniable demonstration of both the sovereignty and
election of God in enabling a hardened, unbelieving people to suddenly, en masse, become a Messianic, evangelical Israel and,
in so doing, triggering the restoration of God's public witness in the West and its immediate elevation to rulership in the West’s
premier nation.
Ezekiel 39:6's reference to a sense of security, or carelessness, therefore must mean something other than apathy to the terrifying world situation.
The original Hebrew, transliterated into our alphabet, has it as “lā·ḇe·ṭaḥ” which can mean “in security”, “safely”,
“without care”, “carelessly”, “unconcerned”, or “apathetic”, and since they will be neither dwelling safely at that time
nor apathetic as to world events, but infused with terror and rage, I conclude their carelessness can reduce to only one
thing: they are presently unconcerned about the destiny of their souls.
And that is because they are liberal atheists, secular agnostics, heathens (such as the Muslims and Hindus), and of course,
falsely assured apostate "Christians".
Therefore, to sum up, with such staggering world events unfolding in the Middle East after the six plagues that went before,
there is no possibility of the ungodly in the West, with their Mark and religion of worshipping the
Image,8 feeling safe and
secure; more likely they would be terrified, worried, battered, angry, worn out, but still unrepentant and paradoxically
(given the demonstration of God’s power) either still uncaring for their own souls’ eternal destiny, or more likely, no longer
"careless" about it but still not enabled by God's Spirit to repent and come to Christ for salvation.
Hence, for all the plagues that the Lord will bring upon the world in the very near future, the reprobates' hearts will abide
hardened; "they repented not to give him glory"
(Revelation 16:9) and "blasphemed God because of the plague of hail" (Revelation 16:21).
3. The Lord sends a Fire.
Ezekiel 39:6 speaks of a fire sent to the atheistic hotbeds in the world beyond Russia, “and they shall know that I am the LORD”...
atheistic, liberal, apostate "Christian", Muslim, etc., for so long, but now they shall know, when once the fire arrives, that
God is real and lives and jealously preserves and avenges the church transcendent.
When the Lord shall stop Gog’s invading force dead in its tracks, He speaks in terms of raining upon them an overflowing rain
with great hailstones, fire and brimstone
(Ezekiel 38:22), which is evocative of a direct, Divine intervention, an unmistakable
supernatural act that leaves the world in no doubt as to His existence.
Here, on the other hand, He speaks ofsending a fire, that is, a layer of immediacy is abstracted away from the bare Divine hand,
which I think suggests that He means that this fire is something produced by human agencies under His ordained will.
"...yea, the fire of thine enemies shall devour them [perhaps their own weaponised fire, which given that this judgment falls under the final of the Seven Last Plagues, the Armageddon event set up in the sixth plague, suggests or rather confirms a coming nuclear conflagration emerging out of the Lord's intervention in northern Israel as described in Ezekiel 38-39]." (Isaiah 26:11)9
In the simplest terms possible, this is a tit-for-tat directed fire between the nations of the East and West, a no-holds-barred
all-out mutually assured destruction, fulfilling the objective of the three unclean spirits that were sent out to bring the nations
to war in Revelation 16:14 under the sixth plague (a plague which removes all geopolitical impediment to the “kings of the east” -
led by Russia – flooding into the Levant during the seventh plague).
This will be the final war that all the ungodly, both in the East and West, in their irrational, demonic rage, have been foaming
at the mouth for, and is the "great hail"10 of the seventh of the
Seven Last Plagues of Revelation 16 that shall hammer the
"New Sodom" liberal hubs of the West11
and the godless cities of the East, for which both most of the surviving easterners
and westerners shall alike curse the Lord even more, whilst tacitly acknowledging His hand in their judgment.
"...and the cities of the nations fell... And there fell upon men a great hail out of heaven, every stone about the weight of a talent: and men blasphemed God because of the plague of the hail; for the plague thereof was exceeding great." (Revelation 16:19)12
This war, call it World War Three or Armageddon, will cleanse the earth of the great majority of atheists, Sodomites,
Marxists, Muslims, and many apostates, leaving a much larger conservative portion of society standing (since conservative
people for the most part prefer to dwell in small towns, villages or in the countryside).
Among those conservatives will be many apostate "Christians", however, but some of those among them who abide unmoved to
seek Christ and turn from their error after those dreadful world events will have their own plagues when the time for
judgment upon the Whore of Babylon comes, which is the last element of the final of the Seven Last Plagues.
But far more immediately, the Lord will remove the Beast system from the face of the earth and immediately
cast it into the Lake of Fire (Revelation 19:20) along with the False Prophet (the voice of the informal influencers and experts)
in what seems like a judgment even more severe than the usual imprisonment in Hell until Judgment Day.
This instant judgment on the Beast system might refer to the removal of high-ranking devils assigned to said system and to the
False Prophet (the voice of the godless influencers that include apostate clergy, celebrities, media personalities, educators, et al)
but also and most
certainly means an instant and permanent removal from this world of Marxism and the priesthood of the narrative and its psyops,
whereas Satan himself will be permitted to remain, under increasing restriction, until Christ’s return whereupon he is to be bound
for a literal thousand years before being briefly released with the resurrected damned (Revelation 20) to rage against the immortal
believers and Christ, and all to show that Hell cannot purge sin or reform the heart, thereby demonstrably invalidating the
unbiblical doctrine of Purgatory which has long served as a sinner’s charter and occasion for the Romish Antichurch to extort
money from its members.
"...and they shall know that I am the LORD", is such a fitting outcome to a fire sent on the ungodly of the East and West, especially the
atheists who lie to themselves that there is no God.
Summarising Ezekiel 39:6
As soon as God will have demonstrated (a) His elective love for Israel by enabling it to see and embrace Christ as its Messiah, thereby
drawing it into, and unifying it with, the church transcendent and (b) His wrath and supernatural intervention against the Russian-led
armies of the barbarian nations of the East arrayed against Israel, He will then "send a fire", presumably by the instrumentality of the nations
of both East and West savaging each other in the worst but final war in history, by way of judgment upon them, a judgment set up under
the sixth of the Seven Last Plagues and executed under the seventh of them.
During that war, all or any of the developed world's governments will be decapitated, leaving a power vaccuum that will be filled in what seems
from Daniel 2's description of the "stone cut out without hands" by godly rulers in a "domino effect" process.
SPECIAL NOTE: Isaiah 34 is also apocalyptic and covers the same events as Ezekiel 38-39; specifically, it refers to Idumea,
the abode of Edom,
which Gill takes as a mystic term for the Romish Antichurch, but which I take as all implacable enemies of "Zion", that is,
the church (including by that time, the
newly Messianic Jews); those enemies are the Antichurch and its harlot offspring, plus atheism, Islam and all the false religions.
These Antichristian behemoths will be annihilated at that time, but I assess that the Antichurch will survive the longest among them,
based on the wording of Daniel 12's latter verses.
FOOTNOTES
1. The Valley of Decision will be either a literal location where Gog and his forces meet their demise, or a general
or low lying ground in the midst of northern Israel's terrain (including as far south as the north parts of Jerusalem itself, but will be further
taken as a synonym or metaphor for Gog's ruin, and the destruction of the armies of the East following him, just as Waterloo is frequently used
in modern English as a metaphor for anyone's undoing, hence phrases such as "He finally met his Waterloo".
By the same token, "the day of the LORD" in Joel 3:14 (which appears to be one and the same as "that great day of God Almighty" in Revelation 16:14),
while referring to a literal day when Gog and his forces shall be destroyed, will also (and
already can) be used to refer to the very period of terrible events that are alternatively known as "the valley of decision" (also Joel 3:14 ),
just as we commonly
deploy terms such as "in Hitler's day" to refer to a general period rather than just one literal day; and so we have these dreadful Joel 3
events, which are the very same events as described in Ezekiel 38-39, couched in terms of both a time and a place.
2. John Gill himself thought the nation in which the Kingdom of Daniel 7:18,22 would begin would be France, on the
basis of that being the country in which the
Huguenots were massacred by the Antichurch of Rome and
therefore France as locus for the
turning of the tide would (in Gill's mid 1700s estimation) constitute a fitting "volte face" in the state of affairs; but from what I
can deduce from my own observations is that most of the old writers presumed Britain would be the recovery locale. However, for reasons too lengthy
to enumerate here, it is my view that the only feasible country for this happy turn of events to begin in is the United States of America.
3. Today, thanks to the near total acceptance by the careless, sloppy, lazy, late-era Sardis church (or professing church!) of
the Jesuit eschatological model called
futurism, almost every professing believer
in Christ proclaims that Jesus is about to return, pretty much "any day now".
In a prophetic model that was designed from the outset to deflect scrutiny from the Papacy as the Antirchrist, i.e., the "man of sin"
(2 Thessalonians 2:3-12), there is no place for all
the largely ignored prophecies so beloved by the Reformed faith of yesteryear, such as:
- Daniel 2's and 7's prophecy of nation-after-nation falling into the hands of godly rulers.
- Revelation 3's prophecy of a golden age for the church (see my article, Why the Age of Missionaries was NOT the Philadelphian Church Era).
- The conversion of the Jews to Christ and the great blessing (including doctrinal purity and doctrinal unity) it will bring to the church transcendent.
- The godly governments of the West destroying the remains of the Antichurch of Rome and removing all false religion from this world by governmental decree, in accordance with Revelation 17:16, when the ten horns (western governments en bloc, albeit more than ten in literal number) fall into the hands of the Lord's faithful servants, as Gill correctly points out.
4. Hereby some of the Jews have historically projected, as Kimchi did in respect of Micah 5:4 (according to Gill) that "the name of the Messiah shall be magnified, after the judgment of the wicked", but to speak clearly from a Reformed Protestant perspective, this is not the eternal judgment of the wicked, but rather, the final temporal judgment of the nations in what will be the greatest conflict in human history, through which the ferocity thereof notwithstanding, the nation of Israel and the church transcendent beyond will be unhurt, to which end one might reasonably expect the Lord to providentially forewarn them through the alarming world developments before that war to prudently hide, i.e., to relocate away from major cities, just as Lot withdrew from Sodom; I speculate that the coming mass civil strife in every major western city might be used of God to alarm His faithful few still living therein to relocate.
5. Isaiah 24 is an apocalyptic passage in that glorious and wonderful book, detailing why exceptional temporal judgment
will fall upon the earth when God stirs to remove the ungodly from power and bring His final display of wrath (in this scene of time, separate to
the eternal judgment that comes much later) against ungodly humanity; that is to say, for me Isaiah 24 refers to the events that start in Ezekiel 38-39, i.e., the fires of
judgment, the dissolution of the present world order (Isaiah 24:19-20), the overthrow of ungodly rulers (Isaiah 24:21-22), the destruction of
false religion ("the moon shall be confounded", the moon being the luminary of matters of the night, i.e., spiritual or afterlife
affairs, and "the sun ashamed", the sun being the luminary of the matters of the day, i.e., temporal governance, all in Isaiah 24:23, the sense being the
whole ungodly system of false religion (including atheism) and the godless being in charge of the nations will be at an end, as Daniel 2, Daniel 7
and Revelation 11:12-13 foretell).
Note finally that Isaiah 24:22 applies these words to the ungodly rulers of this world: "...after many days shall they be visited", a clear
pointer to the fact that their removal from power will come in the distant future from Isaiah's perspective and a near verbatim facsimile of the
"after many days" wording in Ezekiel 38:8 applied to Gog, which is fitting given that both Isaiah 24
and Ezekiel 38 refer to the same very near future period.
6. The Russian Synodal Bible is the most faithful Russian translation according to the Trinitarian Bible Society.
7. The 1912 Luthertext is the most faithful German translation according to Trinitarian Bible Society.
8. Throughout the book of Revelation, there is a symbiotic relationship between bearing the Mark and worshipping the Image of the Beast, as these references show:
- Revelation 13:15-17 (Mark + Image associated).
- Revelation 14:9-10 (Mark + Image associated).
- Revelation 15:2 (Mark + Image associated).
- Revelation 16:2 (Mark + Image associated).
- Revelation 19:20 (Mark + Image associated).
Though in the most abstract sense all who reject Christ bear a mark of unregeneration, the Mark in Revelation is somewhat more specific (as explained below).
Meanwhile, the Image of the Beast constitutes all that the ungodly ruling system of the West wants us to bow down to and comply with (hence it
is styled in Revelation as an image, i.e., an idol); in yesteryear,
that would have entailed conforming with apostate Christianity, whereas in the present age it includes the woke agenda (in Europe at
least) or any revival of counterfeit Christianity sponsored by ostensible conservatives; in all instances, it reduces to any abominable, self-animated
thing that demands compliance with itself upon pain of "death" (i.e. ostracisation, "cancellation", fines, imprisonment, restrictions, etc.)
The Mark of the Beast, meanwhile, is any open dispay of conformity to the demands of the Image of the Beast and is something that
the ungodly do to themselves, i.e., at the urging of the Beast system, they mark themselves as worshippers of the Image (and indeed,
the verb in Revelation 13:16 can be rendered to convey a reflexive, that is, self-inflicting, act).
9. Isaiah 26 is yet another apocalyptic passage in that exquisite book of prophecy, concerning the glorious aftermath to the Lord's final terrible judgments upon humanity in the temporal realm, those judgments being the Seven Last Plagues of Revelation 15-16, among which the fires of God's fury in the coming last great war (which I submit will be a nuclear war as part of the seventh last plague) will constitute no small part in what Isaiah 26:9 calls God's judgments:
"...for when thy judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world will learn righteousness." (Isaiah 26:9)
With most if not all of the major cities of East and West destroyed under Ezekiel 39:6's fire sent by the Lord,
a vast swathe of godless humanity will lie dead, with (probably most) liberals, atheists,
apostate Christians, et al, slain in great numbers; thereby God shall wipe the slate clean, so to speak, with the ungodly governments collapsed and wicked rulers
arrested, bound in chains and executed (Isaiah 24:21-22, Psalm 149:5-9 and the seven thousand slain (which I take to refer to the West's elites)
in Revelation 11:13's "great earthquake" (geopolitical reordering)).
Then, with the ungodly governments and the wicked elites they front for all captured or executed, a great power vacuum will appear; God has
ordained that this will be filled by His own faithful servants, as Daniel 2's portrayal of the destruction of Nebuchadnezzar's dream's image
logically confirms, because ungodly governance is removed and replaced by a Christ-approved governance that grows to fill the whole world,
thereby confirming the following happy maxims at last:
"He that ruleth over men must be just, ruling in the fear of God." (2 Samuel 23:3)
"when the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice.” (Proverbs 29:2)
10. For a long time, we in the Anglosphere use the metaphor "a hail of bullets", but I think I have also heard (in military jargon) some speak of a "hail of missiles".
11. Russian and Chinese strategic nuclear doctrine is predicated on, that is, postured for, a first strike against
the US and its allies (who, conversely, are postured defensively), but with targeting confined to government, military and
command-and-control installations, in what is known as a principally
"counterforce" policy, as opposed to the
"countervalue"
approach of targeting population centres.
However, we might reasonably suppose that Russia and its allies, being so horribly devastated
by the Lord’s intervention in the Middle East, might just pursue a Götterdämmerung /
"Samson Option" all-out barrage on cities and
military-governmental targets.
12. This I take to be a more literal description of the destruction of the major metropolises of both East and West, but a secondary fulfilment in which the lesser cities or large towns that survive will, in the not too distant future, fall into the hands of the godly, perhaps starting when elect survivors in the Antichurch come out of her before her plagues (per Revelation 18) fall.
