You knew it was going to happen. Like clockwork, the prophecy pundits are finding Bible prophecy being fulfilled “right before our eyes.” I expect the usual suspects like John Hagee, Joel Richardson, Joel Rosenberg, and many more who are going to rev up the prophecy market. This is from John “Blood Moon” Hagee in 2024:
Prophetically we are on the verge of the Gog-Magog War that Ezekiel described in chapters 38 and 39.
Ray Comfort has gotten in on the action with a new slick video titled “Has WW3 Just Begun? The Bible Warned This Would Happen.” He said the following in 2024 based on some dustup in the Middle East:
I’m going to show you how Iran is hidden in Bible prophecy. The nation of Iran has finally come out of the closet. Never before has it openly attacked Israel. Like a camouflaged predator, it has remained snarling in the shadows, but it’s never attacked.
It’s so hidden that you won’t find Iran mentioned in the Bible. Comfort published the book Russia Will Attack Israel in February 1991. That was 34 years ago! He quotes from the May 1982 Reader’s Digest article “Countdown in the Middle East”: “The Soviets are entrenched all around the rim of the Middle East heartland—In Afghanistan, South Yemen, Ethiopia, and Libya.” The “Soviets” pulled out of Afghanistan, and there was no mention of Ukraine or the fact that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) would soon be dissolved as it was on December 26, 1991. So much for prophetic prognostication!
Comfort’s 1991 Russia Will Attack Israel includes a list of “PROPHETIC FACTS” (pages 17-35). The problem with these “facts” is that they describe what was to take place before that Apostolic generation passed away (Matt. 24:34) and therefore don’t have anything to do with current geopolitics. I deal with Comfort’s prophetic prognostications in my book Prophecy Wars.
Prophecy Wars: The Biblical Battle Over the End Times
If you’re willing to take the Bible at its word, the study of prophecy can strengthen your faith, but if your trust is in man’s speculations, you will be disappointed every time. And that is why Bible prophecy is such a crucial area for apologetics. Skeptics of all stripes have condemned the Bible as inaccurate merely because various well-meaning Christians have been in error about the End Times.
Buy NowYou might remember that when Russia invaded Ukraine, we were warned that the Gog and Magog war was near. What that attack had to do with Russia and Israel is beyond my ability to understand since the Bible does not mention Ukraine. The Bible also does not mention a nation like the United States sending billions of dollars to Ukraine to help with the war effort. It seems the Bible is only so prophetic.
Claims that Russia is the end-time bad guy is not new, and neither are numerous examples of prophecy pundits linking Gog and Magog with historical candidates going back more than two millennia. Who said this, and when was it said?
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 Communistic and atheistic, now that Russia has set itself against God. Now it fits the description of Gog perfectly.[1]
This was from an address that Ronald Reagan gave at a dinner with California [2] legislators in 1971, one year after The Late Great Planet Earth was published. He also said the following in 1971 after a leftist coup in Libya:
That’s a sign that the day of Armageddon isn’t far off…. Everything is falling into place. It can’t be long now. Ezekiel says that fire and brimstone will be rained down upon the enemies of God’s people. That must mean that they’ll be destroyed by nuclear weapons.
In 1984, to show Reagan’s religious beliefs and what they might mean if he got re-elected in 1984, “a 90-minute documentary entitled ‘Ronald Reagan and the Prophecy of Armageddon’ was broadcast at various times … on about 175 public radio stations.”[3] Bart Ehrman mentioned this aspect of the impact that misplaced prophetic had on politics in the 1970s and 1980s in his 2023 book Armageddon: What the Bible Says About the End.
Following the October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, Glenn Beck sat down with popular Christian author Max Lucado to discuss the “End Times Prophecies Unfolding Around Us.”[4] The argument was that while World War II carried with it the “possibility of Christ returning,” Beck and Lucado reasoned that there wasn’t “enough” Biblical prophecy in play to seal the end-time deal. This time around, however, the missing ingredient has finally been added to the mix. “We’ve got Gog and Magog,” said Beck, “for the very first time.” Lucado responded with a smile and nodded in agreement. This is the great irony of Beck’s and Lucado’s statement. Far from the first time, “we’ve got Gog and Magog” for the hundredth time going back centuries.
Nearly all attempts to interpret Ezekiel 38 and 39 use extra-biblical sources instead of using the Bible itself by comparing Scripture with Scripture. One of the earliest attempts at finding the fulfillment during the 400 years of revelational silence between Malachi and the gospels, in particular, the events surrounding the atrocities committed by Antiochus IV Epiphanes (c. 215 BC-164 BC).[5]
The known invasion of Jerusalem by Antiochus IV (Epiphanes) in 167 BC follows many elements that are detailed in Daniel 11. Antiochus attacked from the north (he was from the northern, Seleucid Empire in Asia Minor). He committed the abominable act of profaning the temple by sacrificing a pig on the altar (cf. Dan 9:24-27) and made Jewish customs such as circumcision punishable by death.
There is a long-standing consensus by scholars (such as Porphyry, Jerome, Adam Clarke, Matthew Henry, Jamieson-Fausset-Brown and Matthew Poole) that identifies GOG as Antiochus (Epiphanes) IV and that Ezekiel 38-39 prophesies his invasion of Israel and the destruction of his coalition army.”[6]
There are more:
• “In the first century A.D., the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus identified Gog with ‘the Scythians,’ by then a generic term for various feared peoples of the north.”[7]
• “In early Christian terms, Gog and Magog were often identified with the Romans and their emperor. Eusebius [of Caesarea] seems to have been the first church father to suggest this identification. In his view, Gog … stands for the Roman Imperium.”[8]
• John Trapp wrote that Meshech represented the Muslims and Tubal the Roman Catholics. “These two are thus conjoined to show, as some think, that Turks and Popelings shall at length join their forces to root out the true religion, and that, while they are tumultuating and endeavouring the Church’s downfall, Christ shall come upon them and confound them.”
Frank Gumerlock’s book The Day and the Hour lists various Gog and Magog candidates through the centuries.[9]
The Day and the Hour
In The Day and The Hour, Gumerlock spans two thousand years of conjecture on the last days, disclosing the dreams and delusions of those who believed that their sect was the 144,000 of Revelation 7; that the 1290 days of Daniel 12 had expired in their generation; that the "Man of Sin" of II Thessalonians 2 was reigning in their time; that a Rapture of the saints, a Great Tribulation, a Battle of Armageddon were just around the corner; or that a Millennial Kingdom was about to dawn.
Buy NowWe already had Gog and Magog back in February of 2022, according to the late Pat Robertson. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Roberston enthusiastically announced, “God is getting ready to do something amazing that will be fulfilled!”[10] He was almost giddy as he repeatedly quoted from Ezekiel 38 and 39, the Gog and Magog prophecy, and said, “You can look at your maps. You can read your newspapers. You can listen to your news. And know for a fact that God is bringing to pass what he prophesied years ago through his servant Ezekiel.”[11]
Every modern-day battle is fought with modern-day weapons. The weapons described in Ezekiel are ancient weapons: horses, bows and arrows, chariots, clubs, and shields. What Ezkiel prophesied was fulfilled in the events described in the book of Esther. Haman attempted to kill all the Jews, and he was soundly defeated. Haman, “the Agagite, the Jews’ enemy.” (Esther 3:10). “Haman, who was of the seed of Agog,[12] the Amalekite, conspired to destroy the Jewish population in Persia and Media.”[13] Haman is “Hamon-Gog” in Ezekiel 39:15.
There’s much more to the story. I’ve outlined all of it in my book The Gog and Magog End-Time Alliance.
The Gog and Magog End-Time Alliance
Jet planes … missiles … and atomic weapons. You will search in vain in Ezekiel 38 and 39, and you will not find them. You will, however, find horses, bows and arrows, shields, clubs, and chariots. If the Gog and Magog prophecy was written for a time more than 2500 years in the future from Ezekiel’s day, why didn’t God describe the battle in terms that we could relate to and understand? Why confuse Ezekiel’s first readers and us?
Buy NowDispensationalists argue that there are no signs before the so-called rapture. This means that what’s going on now doesn’t have anything to do with Bible prophecy, including Israel becoming a nation again in 1948. Most dispensationalists don’t usually know this. I cover this in my book Ten Popular Prophecy Myths Exposed and Answered.
Ten Popular Prophecy Myths Exposed and Answered
Millions of books have been sold proclaiming countless false prophecies. Many Christians are beginning to take a second look at the biblical prophetic record. A seismic shift in biblical eschatology is taking place around the world because Christians, some for the first time, are willing to challenge what they have been taught based on what the Bible actually says. Gary DeMar has taken on the task of exposing some of the popular myths foisted upon the public by prophetic speculators.
Buy NowMid-trib, pre-wrath, and post-trib advocates can’t do anything about what takes place during the tribulation period because those events, according to their rapture positions, are a prophetic inevitability. Buy storage food, hunker down in a bomb shelter, and wait to be raptured. One final nail in the coffin of the Gog and Magog mythology is that the United States, the global major player, is not mentioned. The prophecy speculators will claim that this must mean that the United States will no longer exist. A war fought with bows and arrows somehow becomes a war fought with missiles and missile launchers. And all of these claims come from people who claim to interpret the Bible literally.
[1] 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: https://www.nytimes.com/1984/10/21/us/religious-leaders-tell-of-worry-on-armageddon-view-ascribed-to-reagan.html
[2] Quoted in Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More, 142.
[3] John Herbers, “Religious Leaders Tell of Worry on Armageddon View Ascribed to Reagan,” The New York Times (October 21, 1994), Sec. 1, page. 32.
[5] https://scienceandbibleresearch.com/gog-magog-maccabean-revolt.html
[6] https://www.sermoncentral.com/sermons/gog-and-magog-scott-coltrain-sermon-on-ot-prophets-41610
[7] Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More, 153.
[8] J. Lust, “Gog,” Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, eds. Karel Van Der Toorn, Bob Becking, and Pieter W. Van Der Horst, 2ndrev. ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), 375.
[9] See 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).
[12] Agag, the enemy of Israel and king of the Amalekites.
[13] Immanual Velikovsky, Ages in Chaos: A Reconstruction of Ancient History from the Exodus to King Akhnaton (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1952), 96. “as a “descendant” of Agag, the enemy of Israel and king of the Amalekites.