Marriage is hard. It is, at the same time, one of the great blessings and most difficult responsibilities to fulfil. But the thing that gives us strength to persevere and especially not give up hope is the knowledge that it is God who is supernaturally at work in the hearts of believers making them one. This is also why we must guard ourselves in our spirits so that we continually recommit ourselves to loving our wives (Malachi 2:15).

I was preaching at a wedding recently and was deeply challenged by my own sermon. Thankfully, by God’s grace, this happens on a regular basis! As I exhorted those who were husbands in the congregation to love their wives I realised that I didn’t do this anywhere near enough myself.
It’s not that I’d become violent or mean—although I do still need to grow in gentleness, self-control and patience—but I was convicted by God’s Spirit that I was not loving my wife as Christ does the church (Eph. 5:25). I was taking her for granted and I wasn’t really caring for her as I would my own body (Eph. 5:28).
I later realised after I made some initial steps of repentance, that this had been affecting my own fellowship with God. Prayer had become something of a “burden”, the LORD had felt distant, and I wasn’t experiencing the Spirit’s power in my life. The words of the apostle Peter were especially pertinent at this point:
Husbands, in the same way be considerate as you live with your wives, and treat them with respect as the weaker partner and as heirs with you of the gracious gift of life, so that nothing will hinder your prayers.“ 1 Peter 3:7
All of which is say, love for one’s wife is more important than any form of spiritual success or wider influence in Christian ministry. Because if I fail at this then, as a minister of the Gospel it really undermines everything else I do. As John MacArthur states:
The true spirituality of a church leader is not measured best by how well he leads a deacons’ or elders’ meeting, by the way he participates in Sunday school, or by the way he speaks from the pulpit—but by the way he treats his wife and children at home when no one else is around. Nowhere is our relationship to God better tested than in our relationship to our family. The man who plays the part of a spiritual shepherd in church but who lacks love and care in his home is guilty of spiritual fraud.[1]
In this regard, there are a couple of verses in Scripture which have ‘haunted’ me over the years. One of them is where the apostle Paul writes in 1 Timothy 5:8, “If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his immediate family, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” And the other is in 1 Corinthians 9:27, “…I beat my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize.” In other words, there is something about marriage that should be of first importance. Because if I fail to love my wife and children then I have not faithfully served Christ.
Is your wife a ministry “widow”?
The danger is that our wives and children can become ministry “widows” or “orphans”. We can sacrifice their spiritual well-being on the altar of our own spiritual service. And even worse, we can justify our selfish—nay, idolatrous—behaviour because of the Gospel. The words of the Lord Jesus Christ to the Pharisees are especially apt at this point where he rebuked them for their failure to honour their parents by being overzealous (yes, there is such a thing) in their ‘devotion’ to God.
“…why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition? For God said, ‘Honour your father and mother’ and anyone who curse his father or mother must be put to death.’ But you say that if a man says to his father or mother, ‘Whatever help you might otherwise have received from me is a gift devoted to God, he is not to ‘honour his father with it. Thus you nullify the word of God for the sake of your tradition. You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you:
“These people honour me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; Their teachings are but rules taught by men.” Matthew 15:3-9
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Most people who show up to an AA meeting don’t need to be convinced they have a sin problem. Christians should show up to church the same way, but with an even deeper hope. We don’t need to expect perfection or even social grace from all of our brothers and sisters all of the time. Humility says for every time we suffer “church hurt,” we may just as easily have inflicted it ourselves.

On a recent episode of actor Dax Shepard’s Armchair Anonymous podcast, he solicited calls about the craziest things folks had seen at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. A recovering addict himself, Shepard said these meetings are always good for drama. One woman told a story of a man taking up a collection for some kind of kickball league. After gathering the cash, he proceeded, in full view, to stuff it into his backpack. The group kicked him out.
Rather than sounding scandalized (“Look how toxic these meetings get!”), the woman telling this story seemed almost amused, like a mom shaking her head at her kids’ harmless mischief. These addicts and their hijinks, am I right?
My mind wandered. What if that had happened at church?
There are many similarities between church and AA, even beyond the not-so-subtle “Higher Power” stuff that only really makes sense in reference to the God of the Bible (although AA effectively “secularized” a few decades after its thoroughly Christian founding.) Like church, AA is also supposed to welcome everyone. People are supposed to share deep, uncomfortably intimate and unflattering details of their lives with a group of people they may have absolutely nothing in common with outside of their addiction.
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Time and again Israel had been pillaged and plundered by her human enemies; the Last Battle will be their last attempt, when fallen man (6) will do his very worst. But here, says God, is where it ends, and where the tables are forever turned. For here eschatological Israel will pillage and plunder all her foes, and for all time; her victory will be complete (7).  The NT unveils the fulfillment of our text. By God’s decree the saints will have a share in the Judgment. “Do you not realize,” asked the incredulous Paul, “that the saints will judge the world” (Rom. 16:20; 1 Cor. 6:2; Rev. 20:4)? In that Day, the glorified Church will pillage her enemies and plunder their illicitly held possessions. When the fires of judgment have performed their work, a world formerly gone over to Satan and his seed will forever belong to the saints of the Most High. The humble will inherit the earth (Gen. 3:15; Dan. 7:18; Matt. 5:5, Luke 4:5-7; 2 Pet. 3:10-13). 

For many years I have labored in the Word of God, hoping to establish the Lord’s Church in a soundly biblical eschatology. Current events playing out here in the Fall of 2023 confirm the importance our attaining that worthy goal. Otherwise (to paraphrase the apostle) we may be alarmed or suddenly shaken from our presence of mind, whether by a sermon, a blog, or a video, claiming that recent developments in the Middle East signal a Pre-tribualtion Rapture, or that the Day of the Lord is at hand (2 Thess. 2:1).
Demonstrating the extent to which the evangelical Church remains under the spell of dispensational premillennialism, the present war between Israel and Hamas has triggered a number of sermons on the eschatological significance of “Israel’s Last Battle”, prophetically described in Ezekiel 38-39. The goal is to connect this biblical text with supposed fulfillments in the present conflict (see here).
In the essay below I argue that all such efforts are fundamentally misguided; that they are based upon a literalist hermeneutic that does not abide under the discipline of New Testament (Covenant) theology; that the Spirit’s focus in this text is not (primarily) on ethnic Israel, but on spiritual Israel, the Church; and that the Last Battle here in view has little or nothing to do with “wars and rumors of wars” in the Middle East, but exclusively with the world-system’s final global assault upon the Church of God, an assault that will swiftly usher in the Second Coming of Christ, the Resurrection of the Dead, the Judgment, and the advent of the World to Come.
Am I therefore saying that the present war in Israel is without eschatological significance? Not at all. For again, it is definitely one of the many wars and rumors of war that herald the coming of the End, though not the imminence of the End (Matt. 24:6-8).
Also, it is not impossible that the current global attack on God’s OT people is, in fact, the last of the many that have bedeviled them down through the centuries; that in the Providence of God this is the one that will lead (multitudes of) them to repentance and faith in Christ, as Scripture predicts; and if so, that the return of the Lord is indeed at the door, soon to bring with it “life from the dead” for the entire Israel of God and the whole creation (Genesis 45-46; Romans 8, 11; Galatians 6:16).
Here, then, is the essay, and my best shot at opening up its deep meaning for God’s latter-day Church. May it help you and all of God’s eschatological Israel never to give way to fear or be shaken in mind or spirit, but instead to steadfastly occupy until He comes.1

These mysterious chapters give us Ezekiel’s famous prophecy of the Deception, Destruction, and Disposal of Israel’s great eschatological enemy: Gog and his confederation of evil armies. In the latter days, by divine decree, they all will go up against a people fully restored to the LORD and his covenant blessings, thinking to annihilate them and seize their homeland. But it is Gog and his armies who will be annihilated. Under furious strokes of divine judgment they will suffer complete and everlasting destruction upon the mountains of Israel.
How shall we understand this prophecy?
The answer from our premillennarian brethren is predictable and disappointing. Embracing prophetic literalism, they argue that Ezekiel is predicting a military war against latter day Jews who are spiritually renewed and happily resettled in their ancestral homeland of Palestine. But once again there are telling disagreements among them. Some, following the lead of Revelation 20:7-9, place this battle at the end of the Millennium. Others say it will take place just prior to Christ’s Second Coming and the onset the Millennium. This, however, forces the latter group to explain why Ezekiel has the Messiah living in the land before the Last Battle, rather than coming to it afterwards (Ezek. 37:24-25).
There are other problems as well, and of the same kind that appear in all Old Testament Kingdom Prophecy (OTKP). For example, the conspicuous use of figurative language warns against prophetic literalism. But if, in the case before us, the warning is ignored, our text is immediately seen to conflict with other OT prophecies of the Last Battle, entangle us in numerous historical anachronisms, and plunge us into incredulity.
For consider: Would (or could) modern armies bring wooden weapons to the field of battle? Would there be enough such weapons for a nation of millions to use them as fuel for seven years (Ezek. 39:9)? If all the people of the land worked daily for seven months to bury the bodies of their defeated foes, how many millions of corpses would there have to be (Ezek. 39:13)? How could the Israelites bear the stench or avoid the spread of disease?
But if prophetic literalism is not the key, what is? The New Testament (NT) points the way. As we have seen, according to the NT the Kingdom enters history in two stages: a temporary spiritual Kingdom of the Son, followed by an eternal spiritual and physical Kingdom of the Father (Matt. 13:24-30, 36-43; Col. 1:13). Sandwiched between the two stages of the one Kingdom is the Last Battle: a final global clash between the Kingdom of Christ and the Kingdom of Satan, during which, for a brief moment, it will appear to all the world that the Lord’s Church has been destroyed  However, nothing could be farther from the truth, for in fact the Last Battle is the sign and trigger of the Consummation of all things: No sooner has it begun, than Christ himself comes again to rescue his Bride, destroy his enemies, and usher in the eternal Kingdom of the Father (and the Son). (Matt. 24:9-28; 2 Thess. 2:3-12; Rev. 11:7-10, 19:17-21, 20:7-10).
These NT mysteries richly illumine large portions of the book of Ezekiel, including our text. In chapters 33-37 Ezekiel prophesies about the Days of the Messiah, and about the great spiritual renewal that he will accomplish among God’s people. In these chapters the prophet is using covenantally conditioned language to speak of the Era of Gospel Proclamation, during which the Father will bring “the Israel of God” into the spiritual Kingdom of his Son (Gal. 6:16).
Later, in chapters 40-48, Ezekiel encourages the saints with visions of the Everlasting Temple (40-42), the Everlasting Glory (43), the Everlasting Worship (43-46), the Everlasting Wholeness (47), the Everlasting Homeland (47-48:29), and the Everlasting City (48:30-35). In these chapters he is using covenantally conditioned language to picture the glorified Church in the eternal World to Come.
And what is sandwiched between these two great blocs of prophecy? You have guessed correctly: A covenantally conditioned picture of the Last Battle, cast as the Deception, Destruction, and Disposal of Israel’s most fearsome enemy: the armies of Gog.
Keeping these introductory thoughts in mind, let us now begin our journey through Ezekiel 38-39.
The Deception of Gog (38:1–17)
In verses 1-6 God commands Ezekiel to prophesy against Gog—who is consistently represented as a person—and the seven nations that will join him in the eschatological assault against Israel: Meschech, Tubal, Persia, Ethiopia, Libya, Gomer, and Togarmah. The number is symbolic, indicating that these nations typify the entire world. So too does the fact that they are situated to the north, east, and south of Israel. Rev. 20:7-10 further opens up the meaning, declaring that Gog and Magog will be gathered from “the four corners of the earth.” The message, then, is that Gog—unveiled in the NT as a personal antichrist controlled by Satan himself—will gather together the entire world-system for a final attack against the NT people of God: the Church. Her enemies will mean it for evil, but the all-sovereign God of providence, intent on a final majestic display of his glory, will mean it for good (Gen. 50:20; Rom. 8:28, 9:14-18, 11:36; 2 Thess. 2:1ff).
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