Ezekiel;- Gog of the land of Magog

Several of the Old Testament prophets have prophecy which appears in a number of different forms, but carries this general message;
“The time will come when there will be just one more attack on our people from those outside.
The assault will be repelled with God’s help, and even reversed, and this trouble will then come to a permanent end”.
The name they give to this final enemy varies according to the nations which are prominent in their own time.
Micah calls them “the Assyrian”.
The last ruler in Daniel is called “the king of the north”.
Joel and Zechariah speak of “the nations round about” and “all the nations”.

In Ezekiel’s case, the leader of the final assault is “Gog of the land of Magog” (ch38)
In Ezekiel’s world-view, Assyria has been destroyed, Egypt is about to be destroyed, and Babylon was commissioned to do God’s work. So he forms his great coalition of the future
out of the more obscure nations that are left.
Most of the peoples at the heart of the movement are found in the north, in Anatolia and the area south of the Caucasus.
Gog himself is the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal. The arc of northern tribes runs through Gomer and Togarmah into Persia.
The northern peoples had already helped the Babylonians to destroy the Assyrian empire, back in the days of Josiah, and after Ezekiel’s time a similar coalition would bring down Babylon itself.
In Revelation, though, the phrase “Gog AND Magog” covers all the nations “at the four corners of the earth” (Revelation ch20 v8).
If this chapter is just another version of the prophetic theme “The outsiders in general come against God’s people”, the exact geography of the hostile coalition may not be very significant.

Gog is introduced onto the scene by a declaration from the Lord, which puts him in his place;
“I am against you… and I will turn you about and put hooks into your jaws”.
Thus we know, from the outset, the true state of the relationship between these two powers, and we can also guess the outcome of the events that will follow.

We are told that they will come up against God’s people at a time when they have been living at peace.
“You will go against the land that is restored from war… its people were brought out from the nations and now dwell securely”.
It will be a land of unwalled villages, without bars or gates. That’s how safe and secure the people will feel.
Ezekiel predicts “You will be mustered… you will go against the land… You will advance, coming on like a storm, you will be like a cloud covering the land”.

But why will this be happening?
The answer is ambiguous.
On the one hand, it will be a decision they have made for themselves;
“On that day thoughts will be coming into your mind, and you will devise an evil scheme”.
They will be looking for spoil, hoping to “carry off plunder”, both cattle and goods. The merchants of Sheba and Dedan will be hoping to benefit from the spoil by trading it on, just as Tyre benefited by the destruction of Jerusalem.

At the same time, there is a sense in which God himself is moving them into action.
“I will turn you about and put hooks into your noses and bring you forth” seems to refer, in the first place, to bringing them into action.
“You will be mustered” may imply that God is the one who will be mustering them.
Then God spells it out more clearly;
“In the latter days I will bring you against my land, that the nations may know me, when through you, O Gog, I vindicate my holiness before their eyes” (v16)

This is a mysterious theme which appears on a number of occasions in the Old Testament.
In brief, human power decides to do something which contravenes God’s will.
God himself determines to allow them to do it, and this permission is described as God causing them to do it.
Thus God and man are working together to the same end, as frequently in scripture, but in this case the human “partner” is quite unconscious that this is happening.
The classic example is the “hardening of Pharaoh’s heart” in Exodus.
God’s purpose in the exercise is to demonstrate his power by “giving them rope” and then frustrating them. He is leading these people, but he is leading them up the garden path.

When Gog does come up against the land of Israel, “my wrath will be roused”.
The Lord God goes into detail about the way this wrath will be experienced;
“There shall be a great shaking in the land of Israel”. It will be felt by all the living things of the land- fish, birds, beasts, creeping things, and of course men. Mountains and cliffs will fall down. In short, it will be felt by the whole of creation there.
Gog will experience pestilence and bloodshed, torrential rains and hailstones, fire and brimstone.
Their abandoned weapons will make firewood for the land, enough to last seven years.

Ezekiel also goes into detail about what will happen to the bodies.
They will be buried “in the valley of the travellers, to the east of the sea”. He doesn’t specify which sea; the valley of Lebanon lies east of the Mediterranean, but there was also a well-established trade route on the eastern side of the Sea of Galilee.
The valley and a nearby city will receive a name meaning “multitude”, referring to the number of bodies.
It will take a symbolic seven months to bury them all, so that the land will be cleansed, and even then it will be necessary to be on the look-out for bones which have not been noticed.
They will be bones, because all the beasts and the birds of the air will have been summoned to consume the flesh.
It will amount to a great sacrifice in the Lord’s honour, because this is what normally happens in sacrifice- the Lord accepts the accomplished death, and the flesh itself is consumed by others.

In essence, all these details are an elaborate visual metaphor concerning the completeness of their defeat.
The object of the exercise is that the world will see him to be decisively victorious;
“My holy name I will make known in the midst of my people Israel; and I will not let my holy name be profaned any more, and the nations shall know that I am the Lord, the Holy One of Israel” (ch39 v7).
It will then be clear that Israel suffered their previous captivity because of their iniquities, not because he lacked the power to defend them.

He will then “restore the fortunes of Jacob”.
He adds that he will bring them back from their exile among the nations and restore them to the land. A little confusingly, because the original premise of the prophecy was that they were already living peacefully in the land.
At first sight, this looks like a recapitulation of the previous promise to bring them back from the Babylonian exile.
However, we may note one important difference.
In his previous prophecies, we were told that the restored Israel would continue to remember their past sins, and would be ashamed of them.
In this case, though “they will forget their shame” (v26).
There will be a more complete, more final, restoration..
“And I will not hide my face any more from them, when I pour out my Spirit upon the house of Israel, says the Lord God” (v29).

Judah never, in the Biblical period, reached the level of security implied at the beginning of this passage, with complete freedom from any visible external enemies.
Nor does it seem likely that modern Israel will ever secure that freedom.
So it isn’t easy to imagine how this prophecy could be fulfilled, on the preliminary condition that God’s people are living in peace on a literal stretch of territory.
Also, as I observed, the end of these two chapters confuses the issue by promising another “return to the land”.

Revelation offers the possibility of a less literal interpretation.
Before the nations are gathered as “Gog and Magog”, God’s people, the church, have been living in freedom from the power of Satan.
Now Satan’s main function in Revelation is motivating the persecution of the church, as conducted by the Roman imperial authorities. This persecution came to an end with the victories of Constantine.
Therefore it could be argued that the era of Constantine is the time when Satan was “bound and imprisoned”, no longer allowed to assault the church in this way.
Then the subsequent period of freedom from general persecution would be the church’s “living in peace”.
And the significance of “Gog and Magog” would be that the general persecution was being renewed, before the events which bring the cycle of history to an end.

Gog and Magog were later brought into English legend as the mythical giant Gogmagog, one of a race of giants overcome by the first human invaders.
He gave his name to a range of hills near Cambridge.
They were also represented by two huge wooden statues at the Guildhall in London, where Charles Dickens overheard them telling stories to each other. These were finally destroyed by Hitler’s bombs.
And in the semi-mythical novel “Gog”, by Andrew Sinclair, they symbolise two strands of tradition, one gentle and the other malevolent, running through British history.

My encounter with Individualist

Once when I was a student (and still an atheist), I was intercepted outside the gates of the college by an amateur prophet who used the name “Individualist” on his literature. He pressed upon me a couple of sheets which had been run off on a duplicating machine (ask your grandfather about duplicators). He told me, more than once, that he had written to the Foreign Office and the Foreign Office had replied, though he did not tell me what they said. One of the sheets, indeed, carried the hand-written comment “The F.O. answered this!”, and also “Avoid Jehovah’s Witnesses- set you trap!” The message being offered to the Foreign Secretary was about the imminent impact of Biblical prophecy on foreign affairs. The Individualist believed he was demonstrating from scripture, especially from Ezekiel, how the might of the Soviet army would soon be moving south and invading Israel, causing our age to end in confusion. One of his articles was written in 1964 and predicted this event for1970; the later one postponed it into 1974. In fact the first deadline was already six months out of date, and the world now knows that the Russian invasion missed the second deadline as well. So much for Biblical prophecy in the modern age.

His approach was combining two faults.
He was applying prophecy to specific modern peoples, and making predictions about specific times.
I’ve criticised both practices on other occasions.
Prophecies against the nations
The futility of date-setting
Those two faults are frequently seen together, because they are both inspired by an impatient anxiety to know more details about the “end-times” than God or the Bible are willing to provide.

I think our real information about the end-times is limited to three things;
1 God's enemies will make one final devastating assault on his people.
2 When that happens, he will deal with it (in his own time).
3 When the first thing happens, our task is to remember the second thing, and respond with faith rather than despair.

No worries. God is on our side. So I have been told.

a reply to: schuyler
Yes, that's the gist of the chapter.

Former President W. Bush would completely agree with you. He started a war based on Ezekiel, according to the memoirs of the French President Jacques Chirac.

It’s early 2003, and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq is looming. President George W. Bush is on the phone with his French counterpart. He’s trying to convince Jacques Chirac to join the "coalition of the willing" against Saddam Hussein. But the call is counterproductive.

One of Bush’s arguments in particular rubs Chirac the wrong way. War is inevitable, Bush says, because “prophecy is being fulfilled.” Dubya explicitly refers to Gog and Magog, evil empires from the Old Testament. This sends a chill down the French president’s spine. Is this guy for real?

As soon as he puts down the phone, Chirac orders his staff to produce a report on the Gog, Magog thing, et vite! If the mightiest country on Earth is going to base crucial foreign policy decisions on obscure Bible verses, he needs to know everything about it. A few hours later, the phone rings in the office of Thomas Römer, a theology professor at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and an expert in the Old Testament...

Big Think

I don't mean to derail this thread into politics, so I apologize about that, but I think it may be important that some of the wealthiest elites and world policy makers think that we are already in these prophesied end times and they are shaping foreign policy around it.

a reply to: Kharron
He would not have been agreeing with me, because I don't agree that Gog etc. should be identified with specific nations in the modern world. See again the first two paragraphs of the OP, and also the fourth post.

originally posted by: Kharron
Former President W. Bush would completely agree with you. He started a war based on Ezekiel, according to the memoirs of the French President Jacques Chirac.

It’s early 2003, and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq is looming. President George W. Bush is on the phone with his French counterpart. He’s trying to convince Jacques Chirac to join the "coalition of the willing" against Saddam Hussein. But the call is counterproductive.

One of Bush’s arguments in particular rubs Chirac the wrong way. War is inevitable, Bush says, because “prophecy is being fulfilled.” Dubya explicitly refers to Gog and Magog, evil empires from the Old Testament. This sends a chill down the French president’s spine. Is this guy for real?

As soon as he puts down the phone, Chirac orders his staff to produce a report on the Gog, Magog thing, et vite! If the mightiest country on Earth is going to base crucial foreign policy decisions on obscure Bible verses, he needs to know everything about it. A few hours later, the phone rings in the office of Thomas Römer, a theology professor at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and an expert in the Old Testament...

Big Think

I don't mean to derail this thread into politics, so I apologize about that, but I think it may be important that some of the wealthiest elites and world policy makers think that we are already in these prophesied end times and they are shaping foreign policy around it.

Or Bush was advised to use Bible references as part of his appeal to certain foreign leaders. Doesn't mean Bush understood or believed any of it. Just the possibility that an old prophesy was used to change the course of world history in any way validates the prophesy. In your story Chirac even expends time and resources on the prophesy.

It can be debated whether the prophesy was used to fulfill it or taking out Saddam was an attempt to thwart its fulfillment. Gog and Magog are the ancient Scythians, which are the Russians. They have been supplying and advising all of the armies opposed to Israel with all of their armaments and training since it's refounding.

The last hold outs are Syria and the Persians. Notice they are former ancient World Powers. Syria is in ruins but still clearly supported by Magog, as are the Persians. Egypt attempted to rise but the Muslim Brotherhoods rulership was brief and fleeting, utterly defeated. Magog couldn't get control of supplying and advising Egypt's military, as Sissi stayed in power in control and supported by the US throughout the uprising.

In this same era another former Ancient world power has been brought to it's knees economically, Greece. And to start the era off just prior to Israel's refounding, Rome(Italian Empire) was utterly defeated.

That includes Egypt, Syria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome, all failed to rise again in these latter times.

originally posted by: DISRAELI
a reply to: Kharron
He would not have been agreeing with me, because I don't agree that Gog etc. should be identified with specific nations in the modern world. See again the first two paragraphs of the OP, and also the fourth post.

I'm sorry I didn't make myself completely clear -- he would agree with the story, even though there are different sides. I have inserted myself into a religious conversation as a non-religious guy and this is not my forte. I just thought it interesting that this same prophecy of end times is already being applied by our leadership, regardless of what side they choose.

So even though I may not believe in all this, it makes no difference, our Presidents do and they are forming foreign policy based on it.

a reply to: TinfoilTP

Thank you for the good info.

originally posted by: DISRAELI
a reply to: schuyler
Yes, that's the gist of the chapter.

I was being sarcastic. Everyone thinks God in on their side. It's stupid.

a reply to: DISRAELI

When comparing Ezekiel 39:17-20 and Revelation 19:17-20, it's clear that the battle taking place in Ezekiel 38 & 39 is the battle of Armageddon as mentioned in Revelation 16. This battle ends with the Beast and the False Prophet being thrown into the Lake of Fire.

After the battle of Armageddon, there will be a millennial period of true peace. At the end of the millennial reign of peace, Satan will be released from the Abyss to try and gather everyone to battle for the last time, but will be conquered and thrown into the Lake of Fire with the Beast and the False Prophet.

a reply to: DISRAELI

Not to try and distract from the thread. But just curious. You said when you were an atheist. Why were you an atheist? And what made you change your mind?

thanks for post/discussion

my understanding is that the Gog/Magog war in Ezekiel is very close in prophecy.
most scholars believe Russia is Gog; I have heard one or two that think Gog is Turkey.

I also understand that there will be another attack on Israel at the end time. This is the one Jesus referred to when he spoke of jump off and don't go in the house.

at the end of the Gog/Magog war Israel will have seven years worth of fuel, which suggests the happens before (perhaps at the beginning) of the rapture.
this is before the Abomination that causes Desolation, which usually is seen to occur halfway through the tribulation.

my understanding is that the antiChrist army will be beseieging Jerusalem at the end.

Gog Of Magog is a collation of nations opposed to true christian worship and will attack it after the Great Tribulation begins.
And will most likely be lead by what the bible calls the King Of The North, which is likely Russia. They are already attacking anything other than the state sponsored religion, even now, which sets the stage for future brutality.

So GG, WP, Greek Orthodox church, but you still lose.

originally posted by: Blue_Jay33
Gog Of Magog is a collation of nations opposed to true christian worship and will attack it after the Great Tribulation begins.
And will most likely be lead by what the bible calls the King Of The North, which is likely Russia. They are already attacking anything other than the state sponsored religion, even now, which sets the stage for future brutality.

So GG, WP, Greek Orthodox church, but you still lose.

You mean Russian Orthodox I'm pretty sure. Every thing else is spot on.

a reply to: redletter
The question has come up before, so I did a thread;
How an atheist became a Christian

originally posted by: DISRAELI
a reply to: redletter
The question has come up before, so I did a thread;
How an atheist became a Christian

That was the most decent, and naked thread I've read in a long time from someone like you. Did you know, when I asked you about this, I figured you had a thread already made, and already knew how to answer it.

This touched me a lot:

"For example, could a break in a rain-storm be an answer to prayer?"


I can tell you for a certainty that God's mood with us follows us with the weather.

Even when Jesus died the weather changed.

I can tell you with all assurity, and full faith, and without doubt, Jehovah's Witnesses have the truth faith.

a reply to: redletter
I suggest meeting on the ground that faith in Christ is the truest faith.