Posted on 10/24/2007 8:18:14 AM PDT by topcat54
An article is circulating around the Internet that carries the title “Israel Warns World War III May be Biblical War of Gog and Magog.” It is written by Ezra HaLevi and was published in Israel National News.1 The article begins with the following prophetic claims, not unlike so many evangelical and fundamentalist end-time assurances about the end:
US President George W. Bush said a nuclear Iran would mean World War III. Israeli newscasts featured Gog & Magog maps of the likely alignment of nations in that potential conflict. Channel 2 and Channel 10 TV showed the world map, sketching the basic alignment of the two opposing axes in a coming world war, in a manner evoking associations of the Gog and Magog prophecy for many viewers. The prophecy of Gog and Magog refers to a great world war centered on the Holy Land and Jerusalem and first appears in the book of Yechezkel (Ezekiel). On one side were Israel, the United States, Britain, France and Germany. On the other were Iran, Russia, China, Syria and North Korea.
M. R. DeHaan, writing in 1951, identified “the sign of Gog and Magog” to be one of the “three most outstanding signs of the coming of Christ.”2 In 1972, Carl Johnson wrote Prophecy Made Plain for Times Like These.3 His chapter on “When Russia Invades the Middle East” includes a lengthy quotation from a message Jack Van Impe gave at Canton Baptist Temple in Canton, Ohio, sometime in 1969. Like so many who claim to know what’s on the prophetic horizon, Van Impe made his case for an imminent war with Russia on what the newspapers of 1969 were reporting. This war was so close, he charged, “that the stage is being set for what could explode into World War III at any moment.”4 In 1971, Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, followed a similar prophetic script:
Ezekiel tells us that Gog, the nation that will lead all of the other powers of darkness against Israel, will come out of the north. Biblical scholars have been saying for generations that Gog must be Russia. What other powerful nation is to the north of Israel? None. But it didn’t seem to make sense before the Russian revolution, when Russia was a Christian country. Now it does, now that Russia has become Cummunistic and atheistic, now that Russia has set itself against God. Now it fits the description of Gog perfectly.5
This familiar interpretation of Ezekiel 38 and 39 has been written about, talked about, and repeated so often that it has become an unquestioned tenet of prophetic orthodoxy. The question is, does the Bible teach it?
Ezekiel 38 and 39 has been interpreted in various ways over the centuries. The most popular view is to see the prophecy as a depiction of a future battle that includes an alliance of nations led by modern-day Russia in an attack on Israel. Chuck Missler writes in his book Prophecy 20/20 that “the apparent use of nuclear weapons has made this passage [Ezekiel 38 and 39] appear remarkably timely, and some suspect that it may be on our horizon.”6 Prophecy writers for nearly 2000 years have made similar claims, of course without the reference to “nuclear weapons.” In the fourth and fifth centuries, Gog was thought to refer to the Goths and Moors. In the seventh century, it was the Huns. By the eighth century, the Islamic empire was making a name for itself, so it was a logical candidate. By the tenth century, the Hungarians briefly replaced Islam. But by the sixteenth century, the Turks and Saracens seemed to fit the Gog and Magog profile with the Papacy thrown in for added prophetic juice. In the seventeenth century, Spain and Rome were the end-time bad guys.7 In the nineteenth century, Napoleon was Gog leading the forces of Magog-France.8 For most of the twentieth century, Communist Russia was the logical pick with its military aspirations, its atheistic founding, and its designation of being “far north” of Israel. In a word, identifying Gog and Magog with a specific nation or group of nations in the past is legion.9
As the above brief study shows, when the headlines change, the interpretation of the Bible changes. The failed interpretive history of Ezekiel 38 and 39 is prime evidence that modern-day prophecy writers are not “profiling the future through the lens of Scripture” but through the ever-changing headlines of the evening news.10
A lot has to be read into the Bible in order to make Ezekiel 38 and 39 fit modern-day military realities that include jet planes, “missiles,” and “atomic and explosive” weaponry. Those who claim to interpret the Bible literally have a problem on their hands.
The battle in Ezekiel 38 and 39 is clearly an ancient one or at least one fought with ancient weapons. All the soldiers are riding horses (38:4, 15; 39:20). These horse soldiers are “wielding swords” (38:4), carrying “bows and arrows, war clubs and spears” (39:3, 9). The weapons are made of wood (39:10), and it is these abandoned weapons that serve as fuel for “seven years” (39:9). Tim LaHaye describes a highly technological future when the antichrist rises to power to rule the world. “A wave of technological innovation is sweeping the planet. . . . The future wave has already begun. We cannot stop it. . . . [T]he Antichrist will use some of this technology to control the world.”11 How does this assessment of the near prophetic future square with a supposed tribulation period when Israelites “take wood from the field” and “gather firewood from the forests”? (39:10). There is nothing in the context that would lead the reader to conclude that horses, war clubs, swords, bows and arrows, and spears mean anything other than horses, war clubs, swords, bows and arrows, and spears. And what is the Russian air force after? Gold, silver, cattle, and goods (38:12–13). In what modern war can anyone remember armies going after cattle? How much cattle does Israel have? Certainly not enough to feed the Russians! The latest claim is that Israel will discover oil, and this is what will attract the nations to Israel. Where in the Bible do we find this claim?12
Chuck Missler attempts to get around the description of ancient war implements by claiming that the various Hebrew words “is simply 2,500-year-old language that could be describing a mechanized force.”13 The word translated “horse,” “actually means leaper” that “can also mean bird, or even chariot-rider.” He tells us that the Hebrew word translated “sword” “has become a generic term for any weapon or destroying instrument.” In a similar way, “arrow” means “piercer” and “is occasionally used for thunderbolt” and could be “translated today as a missile.” We are to believe that “‘Bow’ is what launches the [missile].”14 Is Missler trying to tell us that when Ezekiel wrote “bow” and “arrow” he really meant a launching pad for a missile? To follow his interpretive methodology requires us to believe that the meaning of the Bible has been inaccessible to the people of God for nearly 2500 years. Missler, like nearly all end-time prognosticators, breaks all the rules of exegesis.
2. M. R. DeHaan, Signs of the Times and other Prophetic Messages (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1951), 74.
3. Carl G. Johnson, Prophecy Made Plain for Times Like These (Chicago: Moody Press, 1972).
4. Jack Van Impe, The Coming War With Russia (Old Time Gospel Hour Press, n.d.). The quotation is taken from a message that Van Impe gave at Canton Baptist Temple, Canton, Ohio. The talk was recorded and available on a as an LP. Quoted in Johnson, Prophecy Made Plain for Times Like These, 82–83.
5. From an address that Ronald Reagan gave at a dinner with California legislators in 1971. Quoted in Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1992), 162.
6. Chuck Missler, Prophecy 20/20: Profiling the Future Through the Lens of Scripture (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2006), 155.
7. Francis X. Gumerlock, The Day and the Hour: Christianity’s Perennial Fascination with Predicting the End of the World (Powder Springs, GA: American Vision, 2000), 68.
8. T.R., “Commentary on Ezekiel’s Prophecy of Gog and Magog,” The Gentleman’s Magazine (October 1816), 307.
9. Wikipedia
10. Gary DeMar, Islam and Russia in Prophecy: The Problem of Interpreting the Bible Through the Lens of History (Powder Springs, GA: American Vision, 2005).
11. Tim LaHaye, “The Coming Wave,” in Ed Hindson and Lee Fredrickson, Future Wave: End Times, Prophecy, and the Technological Explosion (Eugene, OR: Harvest House Publishers, 2001), 7–8.
12. This claim will be discussed in a later chapter.
13. Missler, Prophecy 20/20, 165.
14. Missler, Prophecy 20/20, 165.
God rewards those who diligently seek Him.
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INDEED. As I have done mostly and quite earnestly since about age 11.
Welllllll,
God would, no doubt, be happy to teach dispensationalism to the Replacementarians if they’d merely open their ears, eyes, minds, biases to a more fair-minded approach to Scripture.
The Scriptures are pretty straightforward in most aspects of such prophecies.
I am not however, Pentecostal.
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LOL.
I’m sure an A of G, Calvary Chapel, Vineyard or Four Square church/pastor/group would be happy to cure that.
Some people here that read Revelation think Jesus is going to appear as a half-god half ram.
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BALDERDASH. It seems to me it is well known that THAT ASSERTION IS 100% FALSE, UNTRUE, . . .
NO Dispy on this thread has said such a thing.
The Replacementarians have been ranting about that long after the bad joke. But no one has said such a thing is the spiritual nor literal reality.
I’d have thought honesty had a higher priority on this thread.
God will reveal what He wants to reveal to whomever He wills and at time(s) of His own choosing.
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Plenty of truth in that, imho.
Until the Council of Jerusalem in 49 AD which affirmed that Jesus would return after the times of the Gentiles to restore Jerusalem and set up the kingdom from there in Acts 15:
"Simeon hath declared how God at the first did visit the Gentiles, to take out of them a people for his name. And to this agree the words of the prophets; as it is written, After this I will return, and will build again the tabernacle of David, which is fallen down; and I will build again the ruins thereof, and I will set it up: That the residue of men might seek after the Lord, and all the Gentiles, upon whom my name is called, saith the Lord, who doeth all these things."
Some things I guess were just hard to forget for those Jewish apostles, especially when filled with the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.
Yes, and I really do believe that dispensationalists aren’t reading the bible. they are reading the opinions of men regarding the bible.
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I can only speak for myself on that score. But for all the formative years on the matter, I read the KJV, period. God made a number of things clear over those years through my reading, praying, prayerfully pondering and waiting on Him.
It’s still my preferred way though I do certainly consider a diversity of inputs on such things nowadays.
The only problem is that you believe that it won’t happen for at least a thousand years. So much for the words that heaven must contain the Lord until the restoration of all things.
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More mangling of Scripture and super flawed mind-reading of Dispy’s.
I’m beginning that Replacementarians have NO CLUE what I believe.
I personally do not think any Dispy has the sequence of Prophetic Scriptures all flawlessly worked out.
I peronsally believe that God deliberately has structured in some mystery on such scores.
I personally believe that some such things will become clearer the closer we are to fulfillment and that some things will be come clear at the time of fulfillment and some immediately after.
Clearly there will be
A MASSIVE AND FAIRLY THOROUGH RESTORATION of Israel as well as of Christians to a state of ruling and reigning with Christ during the millenium.
What happens at the end with satan tempting those born during the millenium and then the evident New Heaven and New Earth etc. . . . remains to be seen.
I personally believe that the time when the earth is thrown entirely out of it’s orbit will be at that time. But, I suppose it’s possible during the Great Tribulation.
And, you are FALSELY presuming that just because something existed before it must be restored later.
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I don’t read Uncle Chip’s position or statements that way at all. I find him to be exceedingly Biblical in such expectations and constructions on prophecied realities to come.
How very true. That which I don't now comprehend is not because God sows confusion - it's because I've not matured enough in his Spirit to yet understand. Strange as it may seem, ofttimes I see his handiwork in a past-tense condition, making me understand why Moses was only abled to see the backside of God's presence - it's because we're all hind-sighted creatures. Then I realize - I know nothing.
Labels? To be numerated among those of his is the only label one ought seek. Nothing satisfies the soul like that peace he imparts.
You need to find another verse and you need to explain how the restoration of all thing isn’t the restoration of all things.
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I think it would be more fitting and more fun for the Replacementarians to find another Scipture clearly and specifically documenting their perspective on the “all things” issue. I don’t think there is one.
a better use of our time would be to work on perfecting the world in front of us today.
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Though I do spend a lot of time in such activities . . .
I basically disagree.
Scripture makes it clear that God has scheduled to purify the earth with fire this time.
Further, that all flesh driven “perfectionism” is little more than a stench in His nose.
He alone is worthy; He alone is able to cleanse the world, perfect the world; restore the world to Eden’s pristine state.
I don’t presume to know the roles he might have us play in the millenium.
I’m convinced however, that the bulk of the cleansing and probably all of it of any significant or dramatic substance . . . will have already been done supernaturally by God—KING OF THE ANGEL ARMIES as Scripture repeatedly calls him.
TRUE. TRUE:
Labels? To be numerated among those of his is the only label one ought seek. Nothing satisfies the soul like that peace he imparts.
Actually, if you read the passage in Acts 15 very carefully you will see that what James is referring to is the then present calling of the gentiles, since it was the nature of that calling that was the present dispute before the council (whether gentiles needed to convert to Judaism after coming to faith in Christ). If was not the future, but the present that was James and Peter’s concern. As was their custom, the interpret the OT prophecy and apply it to Christ and the present, not the far distant future (the lone habitation of the dispensationalist).
Once again your futurist presuppositions cloud the plain reading of the text.
At least Jesus' disciples got it, which is more than can be said for some folks around here.
Praise God!!!
I confess joy every time you have followed up one of my posts with one of your own, revealing powerful Scripture to underscore the point being made and further underscoring the point with excerpts from Reformation authorities.
No doubt I have inadvertently caused a lot of angst with other posters over the years by using the terms "leaning" and "musing" to weight my own posts.
Musings are merely my personal comments on a subject. They are offered with few, if any, Scriptures and are intended only as "food for thought" in the discussion. They are not important to me and shouldn't be taken that way by anyone else.
Leanings on the other hand refer to understanding I have received in following the Spirit's leading (Romans 8). They are usually very short on narrative and very long on Scripture. The salient part, the powerful part, is the Scripture. Whatever narrative I offer usually just connects the dots in the same path I was led to receive them. To me, they are important though they may or may not be important to someone else.
If you have any suggestions for better words to weight my own comments, I'd love to hear them.
The same happens if we apply the Law of Identity to God, e.g. Trinity v. Mormon doctrine, Catholic v. Orthodox on the filoque and so on.
And again, when we filter the revelations of God by science because methodological naturalism excludes miracles on principle. So some of the enlightened (ahem) modern doctrines pitch the resurrection, Mary as a virgin, Creation week, Noah flood, Jonah and the whale, etc. The red sea was parted by a natural phenomenon, etc.
Love God. Believe Him. Trust Him.
It really is that simple.
3. Christ as unity. Christ undefined is not a unity. The Nicolaitans claimed Christ but Christ did not claim them. We must assume there was a unity amongst the seven churches about Christ that Nicolaitans did not hold. The Nicolaitans may have claimed to be lead by the Spirit through their experiences yet we know that not to be true. It seems clear there must be another grounds on which we judge beyond spirit and experience.
To avoid false doctrine, we must discern the spirits (I John 4), test what we hear against Scripture (Acts 17) and discern the spiritual fruits (Matt 7 and Gal 5). These responsibilities should not be delegated.
But I personally draw the line at pointing to an individual and saying "you are a lump of coal."
For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. - Matt 7:2
Therefore thou art inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art that judgest: for wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself; for thou that judgest doest the same things. - Romans 2:1
Not exactly. They were also wondering about what happened to the promise of the restoration of the kingdom to Israel since there were so many Gentiles coming into the church. The declaration of the council is quite clear: First the Gentiles would be brought into the Church [the times of the Gentiles], then after this Jesus would return to rebuild Jerusalem and restore the kingdom from there. Here read it again:
"Simeon hath declared how God at the first did visit the Gentiles, to take out of them a people for his name. And to this agree the words of the prophets; as it is written, After this I will return, and will build again the tabernacle of David, which is fallen down; and I will build again the ruins thereof, and I will set it up: That the residue of men might seek after the Lord, and all the Gentiles, upon whom my name is called, saith the Lord, who doeth all these things." [Acts 15]
Once again your preterist presuppositions cloud the plain reading of the text. Does your Bible have the words "After this" in it? Are the words "I will return ..." yet still in the future? You preterists need to get yourself some Bibles with all the verb tenses in them -- Past, Present, and F-U-T-U-R-E.
Well let's see what Jesus' disciples did get. Let's review what we have so far:
After "forty days, and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God ... and when they therefore were come together, they asked of him, saying, Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel? And he said unto them, It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power."[Acts 1]
Then after this in Acts 3 after being filled with the Holy Spirit, Peter declares to the Jews:
"But those things, which God before had shewed by the mouth of all his prophets, that Christ should suffer, he hath so fulfilled. Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, when the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord. And he shall send Jesus Christ, which before was preached unto you: Whom the heaven must receive until the times of restitution of all things, which God hath spoken by the mouth of all his holy prophets since the world began."[Acts 3]
And then later at the first council of the church in Jerusalem comes this declaration:
"Simeon hath declared how God at the first did visit the Gentiles, to take out of them a people for his name. And to this agree the words of the prophets; as it is written, After this I will return, and will build again the tabernacle of David, which is fallen down; and I will build again the ruins thereof, and I will set it up: That the residue of men might seek after the Lord, and all the Gentiles, upon whom my name is called, saith the Lord, who doeth all these things." [Acts 15]
So we have the restoration of the kingdom to Israel yet future in Acts 1, the restitution of all things [that the Jewish prophets said would be restored] in Acts 3, and the restoration of Jerusalem [the capital of the Kingdom of Israel] in Acts 15.
Does that sound to you like God has forgotten his promises to restore the kingdom to Israel???
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