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by Alexander L. Lacson

The Last Battle (20:7-10)

by David Chilton
from "Days of Vengeance"
commentary on Revelation

7. And when the thousand years are completed, Satan will be released from his prison,

8. and will come out to deceive the nations which are in the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together for the War; the number of them is like the sand of the sea.

9. And they came up on the breadth of the earth and surrounded the camp of the saints and the beloved City, and fire came down from heaven and devoured them.

10. And the devil who deceived them was thrown into the Lake of fire and brimstone, where the Beast and the False Prophet are; there they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.

7-8 At last the thousand years are completed, and God’s timetable is ready for the final defeat of the Dragon. According to God’s sovereign purpose, the devil is released from his prison in order to deceive the nations. Biblical postmillennialism is not an absolute universalist; nor does it teach that at some future point in history absolutely everyone living will be converted. Ezekiel’s prophecy of the River of Life suggests that some outlying areas of the world – the “swamps” and “marshes” – will not be healed, but will be “given over to salt,” remaining unrenewed by the living waters (Ezek. 47:11). To change the image: Although the Christian “wheat” will be dominant in world culture, both the wheat and the tares will grow together until the harvest at the end of the world (Matt. 13:37-43). At that point, as the potential of both groups comes to maturity, as each side becomes fully self-conscious in its determination to obey or rebel, there will be a final conflict. The Dragon will be released for a short time, to deceive the nations in his last-ditch attempt to overthrow the Kingdom.

We noted at verse 3 that the specific purpose of Satan’s deception of the nations is to gather them together for the War. This had been at least one of Satan’s goals from the beginning: to provoke the final war between God and His rebellious creatures, in order to “spike” God’s work and prevent it from attaining fruition and maturity. That is why there was a sudden outbreak of demonic activity when Christ began His earthly sound. Tobolsk was founded in 1587 A.D. Some think Gomer [Ezek. 38:6] means Germany. It is true the words ‘Gomer’ and ‘Germany’ both begin with a ‘G.’ So does guesswork.”38

Woodrow goes on to give reasons why the war of “Gog and Magog” spoken of in Revelation cannot be identical to that prophesied in Ezekiel:

1. In Ezekiel, Gog is a prince. In Revelation, Gog is a nation. [But see Farrer’s alternative explanation, below.]

2. In Ezekiel, Gog is spoken of as coming against Israel with people from various countries around Israel; in Revelation, Gog and Magog are pictured as nations in the four quarters of the earth, in number as the sands of the sea.

3. In Ezekiel, Gog and his troops come against Israel, a people who have returned from captivity and are dwelling without walls; in Revelation, Gog and Magog go up on the breadth of the earth and compass the city of the saints.

4. In Ezekiel the enemy is Gog of the land of Magog; in Revelation Gog and Magog.

5. In Ezekiel, Gog’s troops are defeated in Israel and the people burn the remaining weapons for seven years; in Revelation, Gog and Magog are destroyed by fire from God out of heaven. . . . Wooden weapons would be destroyed then and there.

It is not uncommon for the imagery of Revelation to be based on Old Testament subjects or places. The “Jezebel” of Revelation is not the same woman as in Kings. The “Sodom” in Revelation is not the same Sodom as in Genesis. The “Babylon” in Revelation is not the Babylon of Daniel. The “New Jerusalem” in Revelation cannot mean the old Jerusalem. But, in each instance, the former serves as a type. The woman Jezebel had already died, the cities of Sodom and Babylon had already been overthrown, and (in our opinion) the battle of Ezekiel 38 and 39 (if a literal battle) had already met its fulfillment within an Old Testament setting.39

As Caird points out, in Jewish writings “Gog and Magog” was a frequent, standard expression for the rebellious nations of Psalm 2, which gather together “against the LORD and against His Anointed.”40 Austin Farrer comments: “St. John takes the story from Ezekiel and leaves the symbol undecoded. St. John says that the nations, or ‘gentiles’ beguiled by Satan are ‘in the four corners of the earth’ and perhaps he means this, i.e. that the unreconciled are tucked away in lands remote from the centre. The simple pairing of ‘Gog and Magog’ must not be taken as fixing on St. John the error of understanding both names either as tribes or as princes. In Ezekiel it is perfectly clear that Gog is the prince, Magog the people. St. John is innocent of the mistake; he says simply ‘the nations in the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog,’ i.e. the power so described by Ezekiel – as an English orator might have said ‘the forces of frustrated nationalism, Hitler and Germany.’ It is certainly curious that St. John equates without explanation the tribes in the four corners with a tribe in one corner; only he does exactly the same thing in the Armageddon vision. Euphrates is dried to let the kings of the East pass; the three demons beguile all the kings of the earth to come to Armageddon. The old biblical picture of invasion from the North East is in both cases given an ecumenical interpretation.”41

This is reinforced by St. John’s observation that the number of them is like the sand of the sea – the same hyperbolic image used for the Canaanite nations conquered by Joshua (Josh. 11:4) and the Midianites overthrown by Gideon (Jud. 7:12) – two of the greatest triumphs in the history of the Covenant people. Rather than being a reason for panic and flight, the surrounding of the saints by a rebellious horde “like the sand of the sea” is a signal that God’s people are about to be victorious, completely and magnificently. God’s reason for bringing a vast multitude to fight against the Church is not in order to destroy the Church, but in order to bring the Church a speedier victory. Instead of God’s people having to seek out her enemies and engage them in combat one by one, God allows Satan to incite them into concerted opposition, so that they may be finished off quickly, in one fell swoop.

9-10 And they came up on the breadth of the earth: This is reminiscent of Isaiah’s prophecy of a coming Assyrian invasion, which “will fill the breadth of your land” (Isa. 8:8); yet, as Isaiah goes onto say, the land belongs to Immanuel. If the people trust in Him, all the power of the enemy will be shattered. Faithful Israel can taunt her attackers:

Be broken, O peoples, and be shattered;
And give ear, all remote places of the earth.
Gird yourselves, yet be shattered;
Gird yourselves, yet be shattered.
Devise a plan, but it will be thwarted;
State a proposal, but it will not stand,
For God is with us! (Isa. 8:9-10)

Yet St. John’s allusion to Isaiah’s prophecy is also a reminder that old Israel is now apostate. For her there is no longer an Immanuel. She has definitively rejected her Maker and Husband, and He has abandoned her. Instead, God is now with the Church, and it is the Church’s opponents who will be shattered, though they be as many in number as the sands of the sea (Gen. 32:12)! Jesus Christ is the Seed of Abraham, and He will possess the gate of His enemies, for the sake of His Church (Gal. 3:16, 29; Gen. 22:17).

St. John’s image for the gathered people of God combines Moses’ camp of the saints with David and Solomon’s beloved City. This City is the New Jerusalem, described in detail in 21:9-22:5. The significance of this should not be missed: The City exists during the Millennium (i.e. the period between the First and Second Advents of Christ), which means that the “new heaven and new earth” (21:1) are a present as well as future reality. The New Creation will exist in consummate form after the Final Judgment, but it exists, definitively and progressively, in the present age (2 Cor. 5:17).

The apostates rebel, and Satan’s forces briefly surround the Church; but there is not a moment of doubt about the outcome of the conflict. In fact, there is no real conflict at all, for the rebellion is immediately crushed: Fire came down from heaven and devoured them, as it had the wicked citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen. 19:24-25), and the soldiers of Ahaziah who came against Elijah (2 Kings 1:10, 12). Is this to be a literal fire at the end of the world? That seems probable, although we must remember that St. John is now showing us “a world of symbols too shadowy and distant even to be disputed.”42 Acknowledging that this firefall may refer to “that blow wherewith Christ in His coming is to strike those persecutors of the Church whom He shall then find alive upon earth,” St. Augustine proposed another explanation: “In this place ‘fire out of heaven’ is well understood of the firmness of the saints [cf. 11:5], wherewith they refuse to yield obedience to those who rage against them. For the firmament is ‘heaven,’ by whose firmness these assailants shall be pained with blazing zeal, for they shall be impotent to draw away the saints to the party of Antichrist. This is the fire which shall devour them, and this is ‘from God’; for it is by God’s grace the saints become unconquerable, and so torment their enemies.”43

In any case, the basic point of the text is that, in contrast to the armies of the Beast who were “killed” (i.e., converted) by the sword from the mouth of the Word of God (19:15, 21), these self-conscious rebels of the end are utterly destroyed. All opposition to the Kingdom of God is completely eliminated. The Dragon never really had a chance – his release from the Abyss had been a trap from the very beginning, intended merely to draw his forces out into the open, to make them visible in order to destroy them. Terry comments: “It is a great symbolic picture, and its one great teaching is clear beyond the possibility of doubt or misunderstanding, namely, that Satan and his forces must all ultimately perish. This is written for the comfort and confidence of the saints. But that final victory is in the far future, at the close of the Messianic age, and it is here simply outlined in apocalyptic symbols. Any presumption, therefore, of determining specific events of the future from this grand symbolism must be regarded as in the nature of the case a species of worthless and misleading speculation.”44

Without descending into “misleading speculation,” it is valid to ask: Why will the nations rebel after living in a Christianized world-order? In his thought-provoking study of “Common Grace, Eschatology, and Biblical Law: Gary North explains that both the regenerate culture and the unregenerate culture, as “wheat” and “tares,” develop historically toward greater consistency to their presuppositions – in Cornelius Van Til’s phrase, “epistemological self-consciousness.” Over time, as Christians conform themselves more fully to God’s commands and thereby receive His blessings, they become more powerful and attain increasing dominion. But what will happen to the unbelievers, as they become more self-conscious? North writes: “In the last days of this final era in human history [i.e., at the end of the Millennium], the satanists will still have the trappings of Christian order about them. Satan has to sit on God’s lap, so to speak, in order to slap His face – or try to. Satan cannot be consistent to his own philosophy of autonomous order and still be a threat to God. An autonomous order leads to chaos and impotence. He knows that there is no neutral ground in philosophy. He knew Adam and Eve would die spiritually on the day that they ate the fruit. He is a good enough theologian to know that there is one God, and he and his host tremble at the thought (James 2:19). When demonic men take seriously his lies about the nature of reality, they become impotent, sliding off (or nearly off) God’s lap. It is when satanists realize that Satan’s official philosophy of chaos and antinomian lawlessness is a lie that they become dangerous . . . . They learn more of the truth, but they pervert it and try to use it against God’s people.

“Thus, the biblical meaning of epistemological self-consciousness is not that the satanist becomes consistent with Satan’s official philosophy (chaos), but rather that Satan’s host becomes consistent with what Satan really believes: that order, law, power are the product of God’s hated order. They learn to use law and order to build an army of conquest. In short, they use common grace – knowledge of the truth – to pervert the truth and to attack God’s people. They turn from a false knowledge offered to them by Satan, and they adopt a perverted form of truth to use in their rebellious plans. They mature, in other words. Or, as C. S. Lewis has put into the mouth of his fictitious character, the senior devil Screwtape, when materialists finally believe in Satan but not in God, then the war is over. Not quite; when they believe in God, know He is going to win, and nevertheless strike out in fury – not blind fury, but fully self-conscious fury – at the works of God, then the war is over.”45

North concludes: “Does the postmillennialist believe that there will be faith in general on the earth when Christ appears? Not if he understands the implications of the doctrine of common grace. Does he expect the whole earth to be destroyed by the unbelieving rebels before Christ strikes them dead – doubly dead? No. The judgment comes before they can do their work. Common grace is extended to allow unbelievers to fill up their cup of wrath. They are vessels of wrath. Therefore, the fulfilling of the terms of the dominion covenant through common grace is the final step in the process of filling up these vessels of wrath. The vessels of grace, believers, will also be filled. Everything is full. Will God destroy His preliminary down payment on the New Heavens and the New Earth? Will God erase the sign that His word has been obeyed, that the dominion covenant has been fulfilled? Will Satan, that great destroyer, have the joy of seeing God’s word thwarted, His handiwork torn down by Satan’s very hordes? The amillennialist answers yes. The postmillennialist must deny it with all his strength.

“There is continuity in life, despite discontinuities. The wealth of the sinner is laid up for the just. Satan would like to burn up God’s field, but he knows he cannot. The tares and wheat grow to maturity, and then the reapers go out to harvest the wheat, cutting away the chaff and tossing chaff into the fire. . . . When [Satan] uses his gifts to become finally, totally destructive, he is cut down from above. This final culmination of common grace is Satan’s crack of doom.

“And the meek – meek before God, active toward His creation – shall at last inherit the earth. A renewed earth and renewed heaven is the final payment by God the Father to His Son and to those He has given to His Son. This is the postmillennial hope.”46

So the devil who deceived them was thrown into the Lake of fire and brimstone, where the Beast and the False Prophet are; there they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.

Satan’s cause will be finally and thoroughly overthrown. To picture this St. John again uses imagery based on the holocaust of Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen. 19:24-25, 28) and the destruction of the rebels in the wilderness of Kadesh (Num. 16:31-33), based on Isaiah’s similar usage to describe the utter ruin of Edom (Isa. 34:9-10). He has already represented the eternal destruction of the Beast and the False Prophet and their followers by such imagery (see 14:10-11; 19:20); now he shows that the prime instigator of the cosmic conspiracy is inevitably doomed to suffer the same fate.

Footnotes

33. This should be obvious by now; cf. Chilton, Paradise Restored, pp. 77-102.

34. It is certainly true that the Soviet Union’s aggressive imperialism and its worldwide sponsorship of terrorism pose a grave danger to the Western nations; see Jean-Frangois Revel, How Democracies Perish (Garden City: Doubleday and Co., 1984). This, however, has nothing to do with fulfilled prophecy, and everything to do with the fact that the West has simultaneously engaged in an increasing renunciation of Christian ethics and a progressive military and technological outfitting of her enemies; on the latter, see Antony Sutton, Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development, 1917-67, three vols. (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1968-73); idem, National Suicide (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1973); cf. Richard Pipes, Survival Is Not Enough: Soviet Realities and America’s Future (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984). Those who are shocked that the possible future conquest of the United States by the Soviets might not be included in Bible prophecy would do well to consider the large number of important conflicts throughout the last thousand years of Western history that have also been omitted – such as the Norman Conquest, the Wars of the Roses, the Thirty Years’ War, the English Civil War, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic War, the Seminole War, the Revolutions of 1848, the Crimean War, the War between the States, the Sioux Indian War, the Boer War, the Spanish-American War, the Mexican Revolution, the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, the Italo-Ethiopian War, the Second World War, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, to name a few; many of which were viewed by contemporary apocalyptists as notable fulfillments of Biblical prophecy.

35. The obvious example, of course, is Hal Lindsey, whose Late Great Planet Earth (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1970) spends about thirty pages (pp. 59-71, 154-68) detailing how the Soviet Union will soon fulfill the prophecy of “Gog and Magog” in the Battle of Armageddon, and takes only two or three sentences to deal with Rev. 20:8 – not once even mentioning that the only reference to Gog and Magog in the entire Book of Revelation is in that verse. Cf. idem, There’s a New World Coming: A Prophetic Odyssey (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 1973), pp. 222-25, 278. Another example is the usually more circumspect Henry M. Morris, whose Revelation Record: A Scientific and Devotional Commentary on the Book of Revelation (Wheaton: Tyndale House Publishers, 1983) discusses Gog and Magog under Rev. 6:1 (pp. 108-110) and 16:12 (p. 310), but strives mightily to dismiss the significance of the reference in 20:8 (pp. 422f.).

36. Here is a complete list of its uses in Ezekiel alone: 1:22,25, 26; 5:1; 6:13; 7:18; 8:3; 9:10; 10:1, 11; 11:21; 13:18; 16:12, 25, 31, 43; 17:4, 19, 22; 21:19, 21; 22:31; 23:15, 42; 24:23; 27:22, 30; 29:18; 32:27; 33:4; 38:2-3, 39:1; 40:1; 42:12; 43:12; 44:18, 20.

37. Ralph Woodrow, His Truth Is Marching On: Advanced Studies on Prophecy in the Light of History (Riverside, CA: Ralph Woodrow Evangelistic Association, 1977), pp. 32-46.

38. Ibid., p. 41.

39. Ibid., p. 42; cf. T. Boersma, Is the Bible a Jigsaw Puzzle? An Evaluation of Hal Lindsey’s Writings (St. Catherine, Ont.: Paideia Press, 1978), pp. 106-25; see also Cornelis Vanderwaal’s discussion of “Goggology” in Hal Lindsey and Biblical Prophecy (St. Catherine, Ont.: Paideia Press, 1978), pp. 78-80.

40. G. B. Caird, A Commentary on the Revelation of St. John the Divine (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1966), p. 256. Caird cites the following references in the Talmud: Ber. 7b, 10a, 13a; Shab. 118a; Pes. 118a; Meg. 11a; San. 17a, 94a, 97b; ‘Abodah Z. 3b; ‘Ed. II 10.

41. Austin Farrer, The Revelation of St. John the Divine (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1964), pp. 207f.

42. Farrer, p. 208.

43. St. Augustine, The City of God, XX.12.

44. Terry, Biblical Apocalyptic, p. 455.

45. Gary North, “Common Grace, Eschatology, and Biblical Law: Appendix C, below, pp. 657f.

46. Ibid., pp. 663f.