Instead of these erratic speculations that attempt to read our newspaper events into Holy Scripture, we have been called to do what the Bible plainly says. Instead of spending all of our time worrying ourselves silly about the end times, identifying nations, Antichrists, marks of the beast, and all of that, we have been called to faithful labor.

INTRODUCTION

Once every year or so, the tin-foil hat-wearing end times internet shamans and eschatology provocateurs will forget they own an actual Bible and will latch on to some new issue or story in culture, and then spray their poorly exegeted conclusions like a drunk man behind a machine gun. For instance, the current war between Russia and Ukraine is said to be a sign that Gog and Magog are on the move and the end is about to happen. Well, this is about the 10^th time a Russian offensive has been applied to Ezekiel 38 in the last decade, each time being proven false.

But, error in calculations is not a new thing for the “end-times movement,” which boasts a perfect zero percent accuracy rating. For instance, a couple of years ago, memes abounded calling the vaccine the mark of the beast. Before that, Bitcoin was going to be the one world currency of Antichrist’s empire. And if you go back in time, you will see books written to convince us that Anthony Fauci, Barack Obama, Bill Gates, George Soros, Sadam Hussein, Fidel Castro, Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, and even the Pope were all the actual Antichrist…

This of course is riddled with problems.

FIRST PROBLEM

The first and most obvious problem with these predictions is that none of them have come true! Think about it, after 2000 years of fringe Christian future-oriented prophecies, not a single one has had any merit. After tens of thousands of swings and misses, the “end times community” has yet to get a single one of them right, which means they have amassed even less trustworthiness than Michael Jackson as a babysitter. You would have better odds submitting a blank Powerball card at a gas station than thinking any of these predictions would ever come true. We simply must not continue going along with these silly fables when none of them have panned out yet.

SECOND PROBLEM

Second, since the punishment for false prophets is death by stoning, we ought to – at a minimum – think long and hard before running after the next sensationalist with a microphone. Better to follow serious biblical thinkers and scholars than a few wild-eyed firebrand rabble-rousers on YouTube.

THIRD PROBLEM

Third, this kind of newspaper exegesis appeals to our carnal sensations of fear by taking today’s headlines, which is truly frightening, and then giving those stories eschatological significance. We have been conditioned to think the world is always getting worse, Satan is always winning, and that we are just a few bad news cycles away from Armageddon. None of these things are true in Scripture, but this way of reading the Bible (eisegetically) appeals to our carnality.

FOURTH PROBLEM

Fourth, this kind of thinking – in general – reveals that we are not a biblically literate or thinking people anymore. For instance, a careful and faithful theologian today can barely sell books (no matter the topic), while the health and wealth charlatans, the heaven and hell tour guides, and the eschatology hucksters who peddle the latest end times fiction, all get fat and rich off their foolishness. In some ways, we must admit that the product being slung, says a lot about the consumer. American Christians – as a whole – have become enamored by the basest rubbish a publishing company can produce when the Bible speaks clearly and sufficiently on these issues.

WHAT’S MY PROBLEM?

Maybe you are wondering, geez Kendall, what has your knickers in such a knot? Well, I am sick and tired of eschatology agitators striking fear in the hearts of God’s people. While the blind goes on shooting flaming arrows in all directions, hoping to someday hit a bullseye, pastors in the trenches are quietly and patiently dealing with all the wounds these fools have created. We are the ones who have to clean up their mess, and carefully attempt to undo the fallacious thinking they have spread around like anthrax. And sadly, many believers will hold so tightly to their “Left Behind” / “Late Great Planet Earth” traditions, they will never see it for what it is, a lie and a dangerous fiction.

And perhaps you will retort, but Kendall, I saw a meme about it on Instagram… I watched a Tik Tok that was shot live from a corn farmer’s bomb shelter in Iowa, and he had charts to prove it… I watched a VHS tape or heard the mutterings of my closest friends saying that some pastor told them that Gog and Magog from the book of Ezekiel must be Russia and that Daniel 11 confirms the end is now!

And while I want to be very careful discounting meme theologians on Instagram, chart hockers on TikTok, your friends, or even farmer Joe in Iowa, as maybe not being true scholars of eschatology (snark included), I do want to affirm that I understand why you are afraid. I really do.

WHY WE ARE AFRAID

We live in a world filled with sin and sinful people. That is terrifying enough. Then when you add menacing autocrats like Vladimir Putin, who sit on top of the world’s largest supply of nuclear weapons, I would consider you to be a very reasonable person for expressing genuine concern. But just because it is reasonable to be concerned about a twenty-first-century event in Western Europe, does not mean we have to turn to unreasonable explanations to help us understand it. Furthermore, just because something is important in our day, does not mean it must have a corresponding biblical prophetic event, that we have to decode to understand the signs of the times. God did not write the Bible like the back of a cereal box and give us current events as our decoder rings. He wrote it to be understood!

With that, I would like to address the current Russian invasion of Ukraine and show that this is not an end-time event. I won’t be focusing on the play-by-play gory details that are going on in-country. As you have already discovered, getting accurate news right now is almost impossible and I do not want to be given over to speculation. My goal in addressing this topic is to help Christians decouple events like this from end-times madness and fear and view it as it is.

Then, in conclusion, I want us all to remember a few good old biblical truths that will calm our hearts, dispel our fears, and will remind us what we have been called to spend our time and energy on. And spoiler alert, it is not trying to figure out the identity of Gog and Magog.

EZEKIEL 38 IS NOT MODERN-DAY RUSSIA

My goal in this section is not to exhaustively deal with these passages. We could spend weeks going through them and still not be settled on the exact identity of Magog, that Ezekiel is referencing. That pursuit would almost surely take us outside of our aim for this post. My goal, however, is to show that this passage, as many are currently claiming, is not about modern Russia. In fact, as we will see, it can only be speaking about an ancient nation.

With that, let’s dive in.

The context for Ezekiel 38, is Ezekiel 37, which is a prophecy of the Messiah’s first coming. When Jesus comes, His purpose will be to bring spiritual life to His elect people who are described as a valley of dry bones (Ez. 37:1-10). The text says the graves will be opened (v. 12), which was fulfilled at the crucifixion of Jesus (Mt. 27:52), and gives us a time frame for this prophecy.

The text also prophecies that the Son of Man will put His Spirit into His people (v. 14), which we know occurred at Pentecost (Acts 2), further limiting the fulfillment of this passage to the first century. Further, the text predicts that Judah and Israel would be reunited under one messianic King, which seems complicated until you remember the early church was a mix of Jews from Judah, Gentiles that Paul claimed were grafted into the Israel of God (Gal. 6:16), all being led by one King from the line of David, whose name is Jesus. This King will bring His people together into one nation and will keep them in Yahweh’s presence forever (v. 28), which is certainly what Christ has done for us as a Church. In Christ, we are one people, gathering as one nation, with one citizenship, with one purpose, which is to commune with the triune God in our gathering (Mt. 18:20) When you understand this biblically, you will see that all of Ezekiel 37 is a prophecy about the first coming of Christ where He elected for Himself a nation, an army, and a bride that will be known as His Church.

When we come to the very next chapter of Ezekiel, it would be reasonable to assume that it flows naturally from Ezekiel 37 unless we have clear biblical evidence to say otherwise. What would be entirely unnatural, on the level of a tree frog mating with a great white ape, would be to insert a 2500-year gap in this text, with no biblical warrant for doing so. And yet, this is exactly what the end-time prognosticators have done.

David Jeremiah, who typifies this exceptionally bad scholarship says this entirely ludicrous statement:

“Approximately 2,500 years ago Ezekiel predicted specific events that will occur in Russia’s future. He begins Ezekiel 38 with a long list of nations that will attack Israel. None of these nations are called Russia; that name is not found anywhere in the Bible. However, the reference to Rosh in verse 2 is a shortened version of the word Russia. This can be determined linguistically and geographically. The Bible describes Rosh as being far to the north of Israel, which was the reference point for Ezekiel’s original audience.”

Dr. Jeremiah advances the claim that Ezekiel, with no logical or textual warrant for doing so, ignored his previous train of thought and bull-rushed into the modern world, narrowing his focus upon twenty-first-century Russia. To support such an outlandish claim, he misinterprets the word “Rosh” in verse 2, which normally means “prince” in Hebrew, to be some ancient form of the word Russia. Apparently, because it looks like the English word, it must actually be that same English word! Such logic gets us into some fairly odd situations when we take other Hebrew words like “Niagara” and assume they also allude to modern-day locations (like a waterfall in Canada) when the real word means toilet roll dispenser. That kind of logic clearly stinks, no pun intended.

Dr. Jeremiah continues this confusing line of thinking, saying:

“Persia is (also) mentioned in Ezekiel 38:5 and about 35 more times in Scripture. In 1935, Persia changed its name to Iran. Then in 1979, it became the Islamic Republic of Iran. Today, Russia is Iran’s strongest ally and Israel’s strongest enemy. This alliance will continue in the latter days.”

So, just so we are tracking… An easily avoided mistranslation of “Rosh” proves that the end times must go through modern-day Russia? Then, a real ancient empire called Persia, can’t mean what it actually means, but instead, it must mean the modern-day state of Iran?? And this proves that a Russia-Iranian coalition will storm into Jerusalem, beginning the great tribulation??? Forgive me while my head spins, but how has any of this been proven?

To bolster what some might call a point, David Jeremiah goes through the other names listed in Ezekiel 8 (Meshech and Tubal), showing how they too must have modern-day equivalents that Ezekiel and his audience would have known about, and that these nations will also join in a future Russian led federation against modern-day Israel that will more than likely, both probably and most definitely, will almost certainly have a good possibility of, beginning when modern Russia invades Ukraine… Right?

This very astounding way of establishing a point has no biblical warrant whatsoever to support it and would be as relevant to Ezekiel’s audience as a Model S Tesla. But, David Jeremiah, eschatology expert said it, so it must be accurate, right? Hardly.

DISPROVING THE FICTION

To disprove this line of thinking, one need only look at the biblical description. A novel concept, in such an age of speculation, I know. When we do that, when we honestly look at Ezekiel 38, whoever this army is, we see that it cannot be modern-day Russia… Or any other modern army for that matter.

I will demonstrate this with five simple observations from Ezekiel 38.

1 THE RESULT OF THE WARFARE

In Ezekiel 38, an army named Magog rises up against the people of God, and God Himself says that He will punish them. For fighting against His people, the Lord says that He will have hooks put in this Magog army’s jaws as a form of divine punishment (v. 4). This kind of torture was fairly common in the time of ancient Assyria and Persia, who prided themselves in dragging victims behind chariots and horses for public sport. That God would adopt such a specific kind of punishment would seem like perfect retribution on the enemies of God, who invented the punishment, it would seem encouraging to the people of God, and would have immediate relevance for Ezekiel and his audience.

If this were to apply to Russia, As Jeremiah has said, then the current invasion of Ukraine (that they aren’t doing too well at) would need to be the first among many successful invasions to establish the old Soviet Union. Supposing Russia had the funds and military might to accomplish this, they would also need to defeat all of NATO powers, who would be forced to respond (via article 5) when Poland, Belarus, or the Baltic states were invaded. This means Russia would need to defeat the United States along with 29 other nations, all before assembling the Soviet Union.

At some point, after they successfully run the gauntlet with the world’s most powerful nations, arising the victor of what must be World War Three, they would then need to march to Israel with Iran (as our end times scholar has mused), all to be defeated in Israel.  Once that defeat was complete, Israel would need to adopt a 2500-year-old torture method that was common in Ezekiel’s day, inserting rather large lip rings into the Russian army’s jaws, and dragging them about publicly for sport. You could imagine whatever media was left, all getting coverage of the poor Russian armies being dragged about like puppets for the remaining world to see.
Since we know this kind of torture was common in the ancient world, relevant to Ezekiel’s day, and relevant to his prophetic situation, I find no reason to dream up a Russian myth just to make this modern.

2 THE MODE OF WARFARE

After the hooks, God will bring out the entire Magog army, both it’s horses and riders, who are splendidly attired with small metal shields and swords (v. 4). We know from history that ancient peoples in Ezekiel’s day, and the Persians after his day, fought on horseback with these kinds of buckler shields and swords. It should go without saying that none of the Russians rode into Ukraine on horses. And, it should also go without saying that these “horses” are not metaphors for tanks. If we reduce human language to that kind of whimsical farce, we may as well go ahead and buy our dream home in Wonderland right beside the white rabbit, because we would have lost all sense of reality.

3 LOCATION OF THE WARFARE

This battle apparently happens inside the nation of Israel, who is described formerly as “a continual waste” with its people being scattered throughout the nations (v. 8), but who would be drawn back to the land before this war. This just simply cannot apply to modern Russia or Israel. For starters, the current war that dominates our news cycles is not in Israel or even about Israel. But even if it were, modern-day Israel is not the kind of unoccupied wasteland Ezekiel is describing, but a thriving metropolitan nation, with a bustling economy, and paradise-like topography. Nothing at all about the current nation of Israel resembles Ezekiel’s vision. That description, of wastelands, and scattered peoples, returning to their homeland to rebuild a temple already happened! An event that occurred after Jerusalem was sacked by Babylon and the land lay empty for 70 years before the people returned and built the temple under Ezra. This return happened in 3 stages, which is also consistent with Ezekiel 38 and looks nothing like the reconstitution of the secular Jewish state today.

4 THE GOAL OF THE WARFARE

After the battle, the nation of Gog was accused, by God, of wanting to plunder Israel for her cattle (v. 12). This would make good sense in an ancient setting since cattle would have been an excellent commodity for any people to acquire as the spoils of war, and Israel was certainly known for her livestock, making her a fit target. Yet, Israel – by no stretch of the imagination – is known for its surplus herds of cattle today, and, modern Russia has not, nor ever would, enter into a war based on how many cows she would bring back to the fatherland. Can you imagine the Russian oligarchs, after defeating the majority of the world’s nations, sitting around a table saying we need more cows?

Can we just admit that the scene most clearly fits in the ancient world?

5 ORIGINATION OF THE WARFARE

This army of Magog is said to have come from the north, which must mean modern-day Russia, because surely there has never been a single nation of people, who lived north of Israel, at any time in Israel’s history. That is, until the present day? Again, the logic is abysmal.

So much more could be said, and even has been said by others, but the basic point has more than been proven. This passage has nothing at all to do with modern Russia or any modern country for that matter. It involves a prophecy that is future to Ezekiel, but past tense to us. To go on saying otherwise is to expose yourself as a fraud not worth listening to.

THE REAL POINT OF ESCHATOLOGY

Instead of these erratic speculations that attempt to read our newspaper events into Holy Scripture, we have been called to do what the Bible plainly says. Instead of spending all of our time worrying ourselves silly about the end times, identifying nations, Antichrists, marks of the beast, and all of that, we have been called to faithful labor.

Remember the parable of the talents? It wasn’t the one who worried about the terrible return of the Lord who was called faithful. It was the one who got to work, doubling the master’s investment, who was called faithful by His Lord. The one who was too busy worrying about all the various details of his master’s return, so terrified that he could not even bring himself to work, was the one who had his talent taken away. Our goal is not to live in fear about an uncertain future, but to get to work in the Kingdom of God.

Remember the parable of the ten virgins? The five foolish virgins believed the coming of their Lord to be of such imminent nature, they had no time to even bring their normal supplies. But, when their Lord tarried, they were exposed and left groping about in darkness while the wise virgins went in. The point is simple, we do not stop living, and stop making preparations, dropping everything for the coming of the Lord. That kind of urgency is foolish. May the Lord find us prepared, working, and faithful when He returns.

Do you remember the men of Galilee? When Jesus ascended into heaven, the poor disciples in Jerusalem – having never seen an event like that before – stood frozen and staring into heaven, straining their eyes to see when the Christ would come again. And do you remember what the Angels said to them? They said: “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into the sky? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in just the same way as you have watched Him go into heaven.”

The angels were teaching the disciples and all of us a valuable principle. Do not spend your life staring up into the heavens. You will be there soon enough if you are in Christ. And do not waste your life terrified and perplexed about the news of our day, straining your eyes for secret fulfillments of prophecy, afraid that someone will persecute you, worried that you will be left behind. Spend your days serving Christ. Use your talents well. Don’t bury them in the sands of eschatological fear and speculation. Run the race that Jesus has given you to run, and stop letting internet charlatans whip you up into an end-times frenzy.

Whether He comes today or in ten thousand years matters less to us than serving Him faithfully while we remain. Again, I am not saying that a godly passion to see the Lord return is wrong. I am saying that we must not be consumed with His coming to the point that it renders us immobile! When He comes, the only thing that matters is that He finds us working! Working in faith! Working to build His Kingdom! Working to advance His Bride, the Church, to the ends of the earth! Working to see the Gospel preached in all the nations! Working to see men and women saved, baptized, and discipled! Working to see His Kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven. Working and doing the good works that He prepared before the foundations of the earth for us to do!

Instead of being gripped with fears and bound in worries, let Him find us working. Let Him find us being good and faithful slaves. We must stop being afraid and get about the task of living!

Kendall Lankford is pastor of The Shepherd’s Church in Chelmsford, MA. This article is used with permission.