The Divine Taunt: God's Controlled Burn
Introduction: Scared Rabbits and a Roaring Lion
We live in an age of evangelical anxiety. For the last century and a half, a significant portion of the church has developed an eschatology fit for scared rabbits, perpetually twitching its nose at the headlines, certain that the final beast is about to emerge from the European Union, or a supercomputer in Belgium, or the latest dust-up in the Middle East. This is what happens when you read the prophets with a newspaper in one hand and a dispensational chart in the other. You get a theology of panic, a worldview of retreat. You get a people who are more adept at building bunkers than discipling nations.
But the prophetic word was not given to us to make us tremble at the machinations of wicked men. It was given to us to make us marvel at the absolute, meticulous, and exhaustive sovereignty of God. The God of the Bible is not a nervous deity, wringing His hands in heaven, reacting to the devil's latest move on the chessboard. Our God is the one who invented the board, carved the pieces, and wrote the script for every move, including the final, futile checkmate that His enemies think they are about to deliver.
Nowhere is this glorious sovereignty more vividly displayed than in the prophecy against Gog of Magog. This is not a chapter to be decoded by foreign policy analysts. This is a divine declaration of war, but with a twist. It is a war in which God openly taunts His enemy, commanding him to get his affairs in order, to muster his troops, to bring his very best shot. God is not simply predicting a future battle; He is commissioning it. He is orchestrating the rebellion against Himself in order to crush it so utterly, so publicly, that His own name will be magnified among the nations. This is not a nail-biter. This is a divine setup. It is a controlled burn, designed to clear out the refuse of rebellion and sanctify the name of the Lord in all the earth.
So when we come to this text, we are not coming to find clues about modern Russia or geopolitical turmoil. We are coming to see the character of our God. We are coming to have our spines stiffened. We are coming to learn that the most fearsome armies of men are nothing more than puppets, and our God is the one holding all the strings.
The Text
Be prepared, and prepare yourself, you and all your assembly that are assembled about you, and be a guard for them.
After many days you will be mustered; in the last years you will come into the land that is restored from the sword, whose inhabitants have been gathered from many peoples to the mountains of Israel which had been a continual waste; but its people were brought out from the peoples, and they are living securely, all of them.
And you will go up; you will come like a storm; you will be like a cloud covering the land, you and all your troops and many peoples with you.
(Ezekiel 38:7-9 LSB)
The Sovereign Taunt (v. 7)
We begin with God's direct address to the enemy.
"Be prepared, and prepare yourself, you and all your assembly that are assembled about you, and be a guard for them." (Ezekiel 38:7)
Take a moment to let the audacity of this sink in. This is Jehovah speaking to Gog, the prince of Magog, the archetypal enemy of God's people. And what does He say? Does He threaten him with immediate destruction? No. He tells him to get ready. "Be prepared." Sharpen your swords. Muster your armies. Gather your allies. Do not come at me half-cocked. Bring everything you have. This is divine irony, so thick you could cut it with a knife. It is the challenge of a grandmaster to a novice, a lion to a mouse. It is like telling the waves to prepare to crash against the cliff.
God is not merely predicting what Gog will do; He is commanding it. This establishes the foundational truth of the entire passage: God is in absolute control of this conflict from start to finish. The plans of the wicked, their malicious intent, their grand alliances, are all occurring within the boundaries of God's sovereign decree. As the psalmist says, "The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD and against his Anointed... He who sits in the heavens laughs" (Psalm 2:2, 4). This verse is the sound of God laughing. He is not worried. He is not threatened. He is so confident in the outcome that He commands His enemies to do their absolute worst.
This is the bedrock of a robust Christian worldview. We do not believe in a dualistic universe where God and Satan are locked in an epic struggle, with the outcome in doubt. We believe in a God who uses the very wrath of man to praise Him (Psalm 76:10). He used the murderous envy of Joseph's brothers to save a nation. He used the hard heart of Pharaoh to display His power. He used the might of Assyria, the "rod of His anger," to discipline His people. And He will use the final, furious rebellion of Gog to sanctify His great name. Our enemies do not have a leash; they are on a leash.
The Time, the People, and the Place (v. 8)
Next, the prophecy lays out the setting for this divinely-orchestrated conflict.
"After many days you will be mustered; in the last years you will come into the land that is restored from the sword, whose inhabitants have been gathered from many peoples to the mountains of Israel which had been a continual waste; but its people were brought out from the peoples, and they are living securely, all of them." (Ezekiel 38:8)
Here is where the newspaper exegetes go wildly astray. They see "in the last years" and "mountains of Israel" and immediately book a flight to Tel Aviv. But this is to read the New Testament back into the Old with wooden literalism, instead of reading the Old Testament forward into its fulfillment in Christ. The "last years," or "latter days," is standard prophetic language for the entire age of the Messiah, the era inaugurated by the first coming of Jesus Christ. The writer to the Hebrews tells us that God, "in these last days has spoken to us by His Son" (Hebrews 1:2). We have been living in the "last years" for two thousand years.
And who are the people, and what is this land? The text says they have been "gathered from many peoples." This is not a description of ethnic Jews returning to a strip of land in the Middle East. This is a perfect description of the Church of Jesus Christ. The New Covenant people of God are gathered from every tribe, tongue, and nation. We are the fulfillment of the promise to Abraham. Paul is explicit: "if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to promise" (Galatians 3:29). The true Israel is the Church.
This Church has been "restored from the sword" and brought out of a "continual waste." This is the language of redemption. We were under the sword of God's judgment, living in the desolate wasteland of sin and death. But Christ took the sword in our place, and through His resurrection, He has gathered us to Himself, to the "mountains of Israel," which is the heavenly Mount Zion, the city of the living God (Hebrews 12:22). This is our position in Him. And because of this, we are "living securely, all of them." This is not a political security, dependent on armies and borders. It is a covenantal security, dependent on the finished work of Christ and His reign at the right hand of the Father. The gates of Hell cannot prevail against this people.
The Overwhelming Storm (v. 9)
The prophecy concludes this section by describing the sheer scale of the assault.
"And you will go up; you will come like a storm; you will be like a cloud covering the land, you and all your troops and many peoples with you." (Ezekiel 38:9)
From a human perspective, the opposition will be terrifying. It is a storm, a cloud that blots out the sun. This is the world, in its full, mustered rebellion, coming against the camp of the saints. Gog and Magog here are a type, a symbol of the collected animosity of the fallen world against Christ and His kingdom. John uses the name in precisely this way in Revelation 20 to describe the final, global rebellion at the end of the millennial age. It is not one nation, but "many peoples." It is the seed of the serpent in its final, convulsive rage against the seed of the woman.
But we must read this verse in light of verse 7. This storm has been summoned. This cloud has been gathered by the Lord Himself. The purpose of its overwhelming size is not to terrify the saints, but to magnify the glory of God in its defeat. When God delivered Israel at the Red Sea, He did not have them face a small Egyptian patrol. He drew out Pharaoh's entire chariot army, the most fearsome military machine of its day, and drowned them in the sea. When He delivered Hezekiah, He allowed the 185,000-man army of Sennacherib to surround Jerusalem before wiping them out in a single night. God specializes in impossible odds.
The sheer scale of the world's rebellion is not a sign of the church's weakness, but rather the setup for a display of God's omnipotence. The darkness of the cloud is meant to make the lightning of His judgment all the more brilliant.
The Gospel According to Gog
So where is the good news in this? The gospel is this: the greatest Gog and Magog invasion in the history of the world has already occurred, and God used it to save us.
Think of it. At the cross of Jesus Christ, the ultimate storm gathered. All the powers of darkness, the prince of the air, the rulers of this age, the hypocrisy of the religious establishment, the cowardice of the disciples, the pragmatism of the Roman state, and the fickle hatred of the mob all assembled themselves against the Lord and His Anointed. They came like a cloud and covered the land with a supernatural darkness.
They mustered all their forces. They prepared themselves. And God let them. In fact, He orchestrated it. They did what His hand and His plan had predestined to take place (Acts 4:28). And when that storm unleashed its full fury on the Son of God, it broke itself upon Him. In His death, Christ disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame (Colossians 2:15). God used the greatest evil to accomplish the greatest good. He used the ultimate rebellion to purchase our ultimate redemption.
Because that great storm has been broken, we who are in Christ truly do live securely. The prophecies of Gog and Magog, therefore, are not a script for our future panic, but a pattern of our past salvation and a promise of our future vindication. The world will continue to rage. Storms will gather. But we are the people who know how the story ends. We belong to the Lord who laughs at the plans of His enemies, who musters them for their own destruction, and who has already won the decisive victory. Our task is not to hide, but to advance the crown rights of our King, knowing that every hostile force we encounter is on a leash, and our Father is holding it.