One thing that really baffles me is all the people who dismiss the significance of the actual names of Gog and Magog appearing in Revelation 20, but then treat the parallels between Ezekiel 39:17-21 and Revelation 19:17-21 as smoking gun proof they are describing the same battle.
The language those passages share is also shared by other Hebrew Bible passages, Deuteronomy 28:26, Psalm 79, Jeremiah 7:31-33, 16:4, 19:7 and 34:20, 1 Samuel 17:44-46 and it was even earlier in Ezekiel 29:5, and the Pharaoh Oracles of Ezekiel 29-32 have other Parallels to The Beast of Revelation 13-19, like the “Great Dragon” and having a Mortal Head Wound.
Revelation 19’s version leaves out the beasts of the Field in order to avoid category confusion with its symbolic beasts. What Revelation 19 and Ezekiel 39 share that the others don’t is the concept of someone announcing to the Fowls that this feast has been prepared for them. But in Revelation it’s an Angel literally standing in the Sun, but in Ezekiel it seems to be Ezekiel instructed to do this.
The Beast and the False Prophet are cast alive into the Lake of Fire while Gog is killed and buried. I have a different view from most of what being cast alive into the Lake of Fire means, but it’s certainly not just a poetic way of saying he died, this is done in contrast to the armies who are killed.
I view Ezekiel 38-39 as the same as Revelation 20:7-8. Chris White argued that view from a Futurist/Premillennial perspective, but for me that view is consistent with also viewing the end of Ezekiel 39, from verse 22 on, as about the Parousia like Joel Richardson does.
It’s one thing when someone who doesn’t think Ezekiel 38-39 happens in Revelation at all dismisses the use of those names in chapter 20 as just a comparison of whatever. But it’s bizarre to me when people who want to identify it with something in Revelation are going to decide that mere poetic language for the aftermath of a battle is a more important identifier than what passage uses the exact same names.
I shall now address some of the alleged inconsistencies first by repeating things I said as BibleNerd64 in a comment on a Joel Richardson Video, but adding stuff I didn’t there and hopefully improving how I say things.
Richardson made a big point in his Gary DeMar debate about Ezekiel referring to Gog as the one Prophesized by all the Prophets, to me that language proves he is the final Human Enemy of Israel defeated, not someone defeated a thousand years previous to the final Invasion of Israel. John is one of those Prophets who foretold Gog by name.
Revelation 20 is to me clearly quoting Ezekiel 38 and 39 in a way that says, "this is what that always was", I believe part of the purpose of Revelation is to explain how all prior Prophecies fit together. The names are not the only similarity, being destroyed by Fire from God is also a pretty explicit similarity.
Any apparent inconsistencies need to be looked at the same as apparent inconsistencies between how The Gospels describe the Birth, Life, Ministry, Death and Resurrection of Jesus. Same for apparent inconsistencies between Samuel-Kings and Chronicles parallel histories which actually provide a useful precedent here.
1 Chronicles 21:1 describes Satan doing something that 2 Samuel 24:1 describes YHWH doing, Neo-Marcionites use that to try and prove YHWH is Satan but it's really just consistent with Job where God uses Satan to accomplish His purpose. This is repeated in comparing Ezekiel 38-39 to Revelation 20, in one it's YHWH who inspired them to invade Israel and in the other it's Satan, the same apparent contradiction has the same resolution.
I believe the phrase that is often translated "Gog and Magog" in Revelation 20 should be “Gog and his Magog”, according to how “kai ton” is used earlier elsewhere in Revelation it means “and his” or “and their” or "and the". Meaning yes Gog is also an individual in the text of Revelation 20, and Magog is his Tribe or Ethnos.
Salvation in New Testament theology is ultimately about the Bodily Resurrection of The Dead, that is the clear message of 1 Corinthians 15. No individual can be said to be fully completely Saved until they are risen from The Dead. Therefore All Israel cannot be said to be Saved until every Israelite who ever has or ever will live is Bodily Risen from The Dead. The end of Revelation 20 is when that happens.
Romans 11 also tells us that the Fullness of the Nations will be grafted into first and then All Israel will be Saved, Magog and his allies are the last Gentile Nations to resist being grafted in.
The Bible sometimes uses Hyperbole, Revelation 20's language does not mean every single nation with no exceptions. In The Bible the “ four corners of the earth” is an idiom for each of the cardinal directions, in this context it means nations coming at Israel from every direction, it doesn’t mean as far away as they could possibly be. Gomer and Togarmah come from the North, Persia from the East, Cush from the South and Phut from the West.
The biggest issue to Joel Richardson is his view that there is zero success for Gog and his Magog in Revelation 20 but they are very successful in Ezekiel 38-39. I honestly find reading these passages odd.
Revelation 20 is less detailed overall, so it focuses its Hyperbolic description on how the Invasion will fail, but it is also ultimately a failure in Ezekiel 38 and 39, they invaded the Land but nothing says they reached Jerusalem or Zion. It is implicit in Revelation 20 that they do invade Israel because they surround the City. The City is not the entire Land. The return from this final exile is The Resurrection of The Dead that happens at the end of Revelation 20.
But another reason for this apparent inconsistency could be the audience. Israel has both Jewish and Christian populations. It could be Ezekiel’s subject is the Israelites who still don’t follow Jesus. While Revelation 20 is about the Camp of the Saints, an idiom that in the New Testament typically means Christians. The Beloved City could be Jerusalem, or it could be Zion The City of David which The Bible especially The New Testament identifies as Bethlehem. New Jerusalem is a very specific term in Revelation for something that does not exist on Earth till chapter 21. This Camp of Saints can be viewed as still the 144,000 on Mount Zion back in Revelation 14.
But I'm hesitant to go all in on that idea. Ezekiel 39 opens with a clarification, God brings Gog to the Mountains of Israel to break him there. That is the main takeaway.
When Dispensationalists and other Christian Zionists like Joel Richardson start talking about modern Israel being in "unbelief" is when it starts becoming clear why actual Jews are often uncomfortable with their support.
I am a Christian but one who believes in Universal Salvation and Inclusivism. I don’t think whether or not modern Israel is right with God has anything to do with whether they follow Jesus or not. Everyone, both Christians and non Christians are judged based on our works, if anything those nominally Christian will be judged for their evil works even harsher. I think even while currently dominated by a party I don’t like that Israel is more right with God than most Christian nations.
But it’s not just from a Christian perspective that modern Israel can be said to not be faithfully following the God of Israel who spoke through The Prophet Ezekiel. The Anti-Zionist Haredi and Religious Zionists of various forms think the current State of Israel is too Secular and a true restoration of Biblical Israel requires just using The Torah as their Constitution.
But as a Leftist, as a Gentile fan of the early Labor Zionists who views Moses Hess as the Moses of Modern Israel, I would argue that modern Israel has slowly been betraying its divine mission as it’s been dominated for decades by the Likud Party.
The Labor Zionists can be described as Secular in their Political Vision, but so were the Revisionist Zionists and Maximalists, the Right Wing of the early Zionist movement. In fact I would argue that both Yitshak Ben-Zvi and David Ben-Gurion were personally more religious than either Ze’ev Jaboninsky or the Stern Gang or even Menachem Begin. Begin was more religious than Jabotinsky only that he adopted Edmund Burke’s view on a society needing a religion to function.
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