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Gary discusses his recent debate with Joel Richardson about Ezekiel 38-39, the famous Gog and Magog chapters.

Nearly every book being published today points to the Gog and Magog alliance as evidence that we are living in the last days and the world is on the eve of destruction. Ezekiel 38 and 39 are being used by today’s prophecy writers as a modern-day prophetic blueprint for our time. As we’ll see, these same prophecy writers almost never tell their readers that there has been a long history of failed predictions based on these two chapters and other prophetic texts. While the world is a dangerous place, this does not mean that Ezekiel was predicting prophetic events 2600 years removed from his time. As I hope to show, Ezekiel’s prophecy had a more immediate fulfillment. The accomplishment of this prophecy was to demonstrate to “the nations” at the time that “the house of Israel went into exile for their iniquity because they acted treacherously against” God (Ezek. 39:23; cp. 38:23). These witnessing nations are described by Ezekiel as Israel’s “adversaries” (39:23). Applying the prophecy of Ezekiel 38 and 39 to modern-day nations is contrary to the historical context. No nation today had any part in Israel’s exile 2600 years ago.

The prophecy begins with instructions given to Ezekiel to set his “face toward Gog of the land of Magog” (38:2). Who is Gog and what is the land of Magog? The most popular interpretation is that Gog is modern-day Russia. Magog, a people group that first appears in Genesis 10:2, is thought to be an alliance of nations that join Russia in a failed end-time invasion of Israel. Added to the mix, a leader of this confederation is said to be the “prince of Rosh,” the leader of Russia. In 1972, Carl Johnson wrote Prophecy Made Plain for Times Like These, in which he 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.” The passage of more than half of a century hardly seems like “at any moment.”

The Gog and Magog End-Time Alliance

My library is filled with books that attempt to make the case that the events predicted in Ezekiel 38 and 39 are on our prophetic horizon, and it seems that each month new books and articles appear insisting that “given the current world situation, nuclear war is inevitable” based on what we read in Ezekiel’s prophecy. What if we read Ezekiel 38 and 39 literally? Is it possible that the Gog and Magog alliance that was designed “to destroy, to kill and to annihilate all the Jews, both young and old, women and children” has already taken place? That’s exactly what The Gog and Magog End-Time Alliance attempts to show.

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Gary discusses his recent debate with Joel Richardson about Ezekiel 38-39, the famous Gog and Magog chapters. Joel believes these events are still future; Gary believes they were fulfilled in the events described in the book of Esther.

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