As baptized Christians, we can actually acknowledge that there are real gaps and we can argue how to close them because we do so remembering what we saw typified this morning. Our one baptism binds us together in a familial way such that we can disagree even vehemently as family. When we acknowledge that we are family and that family drives you crazier than anyone else, then we can have fellowship with one another that isn't afraid to disagree. That's one of the reasons that here we allow every family member to partake of the family meal because they're family. Whether you were baptized Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Lutheran, Disciples of Christ, Baptist, or any other Trinitarian baptism at RCC, because you are Christ's, it's not our place to keep you from him or his table. Now, this analogy breaks down if you press it too far. But if you can think of our Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches as being our crazy old grandpas with dementia, who you are pretty sure were legit back in their day. our Lutheran Reformed Confessional Churches as our gray-haired fathers, and our Baptistic Charismatic Brothers as teenagers. It will help you remember that we are all family, albeit a messy one. Now I lead with all of that because our text today in Ezekiel 38 and 39 is one of the most argued about texts in our day. And I want to emphasize in our day because we're in a day where our younger brother has forsaken the teaching of our fathers. Now our little brother is still our little brother. And I have little doubt that he's going to eventually grow up and start listening to father again. But right now, he's a little wonky, as teenagers I've heard can be. Now, if you've read Ezekiel 38 and 39 and the infamous battle of Gog and Magog, you've perhaps been exposed to the insanity of electromagnetic weapons. radioactive bones, and helicopters fitted with lasers. If you have no idea what any of that means, lucky you. In about 30 minutes, regardless, I hope that as a family, after spending some time in Ezekiel, we can draw near to the throne of grace, either in a newer and deeper way, because we're going to see that in Ezekiel 38 and 39, God is actually promising to do something in history that he did in history. Okay, so Saints of Reformation Covenant Church, if you're willing and able, please stand to honor the reading of God's word. We'll be in Revelation 30, or Ezekiel 39 and Revelation 20. Gog and Magog, a prototypical battle. Hear God's word. And you, son of man, prophesy against Gog and say, thus says the Lord God. Behold, I am against you, O Gog, chief prince of Meshech and Tubal. And I will turn you about and drive you forward and bring you up from the uttermost parts of the north and lead you against the mountains of Israel. Then I will strike your bow from your left hand and will make your arrows drop out of your right. You shall fall on the mountains of Israel, you and all your hordes and the people who are with you. I will give you to birds of prey of every sort and to the beasts of the field to be devoured. You shall fall in the open field, for I have spoken, declares the Lord God. I will send fire on Magog and on those who dwell securely in the coastlands, and they shall know that I am the Lord. My holy name I will make known in the midst of my people Israel, and I will not let my holy name be profaned anymore, and the nations shall know that I am the Lord, the Holy One in Israel. Behold, it is coming, and it will be brought about, declares the Lord God. That is the day of which I have spoken. And now Revelation 20. When the thousand years are ended, Satan will be released from his prison and will come out to deceive the nations that are at the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them for battle. Their number is like the sand of the sea. And they marched up over the broad plain of the earth and surrounded the camp of the saints and the beloved city, but fire came down from heaven and consumed them. And the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever. This is the word of the Lord. Oh God, add your blessing to the reading and the hearing and the preaching of your word and grant us all the grace to trust and obey you. And the church said, amen. Please be seated. Now, we normally don't have handouts for you, but because of how easy it can be to get motion sickness when trying to untangle some texts that have been abused for so long, we included some sections from Esther 3 and 9 for you to reference later, and a diagram and a timeline on the back. It should have been, it was a single piece of paper, it's not in your worship order, it looks like Mr. Two's is hanging them out now. Yeah, do people have those? Okay, cool, good. All right, now, I don't know that this is the case for sure, because it seems too simple. But part of me wonders if why so many people get Daniel and Ezekiel wrong, is because they're not even aware they're talking about the things that take place in Esther and Ezra and Nehemiah. Now I'm sure at some point, people were taught their Bible timelines, particularly if they went to seminary or were equipped in some form or fashion to read and interpret their Bibles. But I wonder if how we order our English Bibles doesn't at least contribute to the problem. Most of your English Bibles follow this abdugent ordering, which is law, history, wisdom, prophets. But as you can see on the handout, that's actually not the traditional order of the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew Bible was ordered in the Tanakh, or Torah, Nevi'im, and Ketuvim, or the instruction, the prophets, and the writings. And so for them, the order they read, the books that we've been studying the last year or so was Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and then Esther, followed by Daniel, and then Ezra and Nehemiah. So for people who only know the order of the English Bible, it seems like you have all the history of God's people, the wisdom from the kings, and then the prophets who are looking back and rebuking God's people and looking forward until Jesus returns. But that's not how things played out, not directly. The actual history of God's people is actually intertwined. Some of the prophets overlapped some of the kings, some of the prophets overlapped with one another, and then some of the prophets overlapped with Esther and Ezra and Nehemiah. So it's not like Ezekiel prophesied about these things, and then God's people have been waiting for 2,500 years to see what on earth he was talking about. No, Ezekiel's prophecies would have made sense, at least in shadow form, to his audience. And the fact that Jeremiah gave exact timelines as to when these things would be fulfilled meant that God's people who trusted him knew about when these things were going to take place. And so when Jeremiah prophesied around 608 BC that God's people would be taken into exile for 70 years, guess about when God's people thought their exile was going to come to an end. Kids, if your parents pay for your education, what is 608 minus 70? 608 minus seven is 601. What is 608 minus 70? Good job, homeschooler. Man, you guys that are paying money, man, y'all about to get people pulled out of that school. Yes, 538. Now we're gonna come back to this in Daniel 9, but it was the fact that Daniel was aware of and believed Jeremiah's prophecy that led him to pray God would keep his promise to bring his people back from exile, which he did, can you guess when? 538, yes, very good, okay. Should've included little pencils. Now, I know that might sound overly simplistic, but you would be amazed at some of the gymnastics people have to do with these texts and some of the conclusions that they make. And it's not backwoods snake handlers. Now, if you don't believe me, I'm reformed, so I'm comfortable gambling. I will bet you $50 that most If not all, well, okay, not all, I'm taking that back. Most megachurch and YouTube preachers teach that Ezekiel 38 and 39 is referencing modern day Russia. And the events that we see prophesied about here are proof that the rapture could literally happen tomorrow. If you wanna really bet me, just know I listened through tears to lots of them this week. I literally heard people say that if you take the S and P, the two letters S and P, off of the word spoil, in chapter 38, verse 13, you get the word oil. Which has anybody shocked that Putin is after people's oil? Again, these are our brothers, okay? But one of my brothers tried to convince an audience of thousands. that the bows and arrows are really lasers and electromagnetic guns, the chariots were really tanks, and that the bones of the slain would be untouchable because Putin has nuclear weapons. I want to propose to you this morning that, in fact, is not what Ezekiel is talking about. Now I know that seeing these things as fulfilled, when God said they were going to be fulfilled, might not be as exciting as thinking that we're on the cusp of having 2.2 billion people vanish from the earth to leave Putin behind. But hopefully, by the end of our time this morning, you'll see that God making and keeping his promise is even better than that. Now, it is easy to get lost in the minutia of things. And so I wanna try to keep us above the weeds if we can see how simple this actually is. So first, we're gonna look at a brief timeline. We touched on it a bit, but we're gonna see a brief timeline of where we're at and then where things were going in the history of God's people. And then we're gonna break down this Gog and Magog reference to see if we can unpack that. And then finally, we'll see that as he always does, God keeps his word and he does so through his people. So first and probably the shortest, let's revisit the timeline. If you look there on the left of that handout, it gives you some dates, most of which we've been covering for the last six months or so. We are in Ezekiel 38 and 39, which is the section of Ezekiel's prophecies that come after Jerusalem has been destroyed. Now that's important because before Jerusalem was destroyed, Ezekiel was prophesying that Jerusalem was going to be destroyed. And now that it's been destroyed, Ezekiel is prophesying about what's coming next. One of the fallacies of futurism is that phrases like you see in chapter 38 verse 8 and then in verse 16 as latter years or latter days are phrases that refer to the end times or what they call the tribulation period, but that's simply not what the phrase means. An introductory grammar of the Hebrew and English lexicon, Brown, Driver, Briggs, or BDB, some people call it, notes that this phrase is a prophetic phrase denoting the period of history so far as the speaker's perspective reaches. And so the phrase they say is best translated as in the days to come or in the days coming after these days that we're in right now. For Ezekiel's audience then, when Ezekiel says that these things are going to take place in the latter years or the latter days, He's simply saying to his hearers that what I'm telling you will happen in the days that we've been talking about is in the days that are coming after these days. That's it. For them, this is the time that they're looking forward to, which is the restoration. Remember, the immediate concerns of these people during the times of the major prophets was that doom was coming for Jerusalem soon. And so now that those prophecies have come true, they're asking, what's going to happen next? Not what's gonna happen 2,500 years from now in some part of the world none of us has ever heard of between the years of 1948 and 2028. The word of the Lord comes to Ezekiel after the fall of Jerusalem and gives him a message to deliver to his people about what was going to happen in a time period relevant to them. For the people alive during the time of the prophets, the exile, was the most significant event that was coming and that had come. And the question that they're begging is, what will it be like when exile is over? That's why the prophets are usually referred to as either pre-exilic prophets or post-exilic prophets. Now I know this is gonna be a stretch for some of us, but pre-exilic prophets were prophesying before the exile, okay, and post-exilic prophets were after the exile, right? And so you've got Ezekiel serving as sort of this gap prophet of sorts. And if you can imagine, Daniel isn't actually included in the prophets. In the Hebrew Bible, Daniel is actually grouped with the post-exilic writings, not the prophets, as you can see there in your chart. So if who the prophet is, who they're prophesying to, and when they're prophesying isn't the driving factor behind how you're trying to understand them, you're going to get them wrong. These words in Ezekiel 38 and 39 were being spoken in or around 585 BC after the fall of Jerusalem and before the people returned from exile. Just like Ezekiel 34, 35, 36, and 37, Ezekiel 38 and 39 should be understood as the things God was going to do for his people in their future. Namely, bring them back from exile, which he did, just like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and all the other pre-exilic prophets said he was going to do in about 538 or 537 BC. Now, that timeline is important because it is after they return from exile that these latter day events that we're seeing here in Ezekiel 38 and 39 are going to happen. So that's our timeline, Jerusalem going to fall, Jerusalem fallen, and now God preparing to bring them home. So what of this Gog and Magog, ominous characters? Now, if you'll listen to some of our brothers, they'll tell you that there is no recorded history of the things in Ezekiel 38 and 39 ever taking place anywhere ever. Now, maybe if Ezekiel 38 and 39 was written after Esther and Ezra Nehemiah, Maybe then you could say nothing like this has taken place since Esther and Ezra, Nehemiah. But I want to propose to you that these events in 38 and 39 were precisely about the events that took place with Esther. Starting July 17th, Devin is going to be walking through Esther and Ezra and Nehemiah narratives because we're going to be actually in Daniel 9 through 12 in our chronology. But for now, we're just going to do a flyby. If you did the homework I posted on Realm and Facebook, this might make more sense to you, and you might remember it. But if not, just take some notes and then go back and read the text later, because we're not going to read all of them this morning. Now, originally, I had 12 points. But I swore after Gene's installation service, I would never do such a thing to you. And so I stole from our own Chris Wilson's fabulous summary of these things in our Sunday school curriculum, which I'm going to now make a shameless plug for. One of the many reasons we chose to move to RCC three years ago was because of the beast mode Sunday school curriculum that Doug and Chris put together back in the day. Now most of you, or most of what you'll find out there, especially for kids, is sort of goofy, frosted flakes breakfasts. But these guys prepared steak and eggs. Even if you only get your kids here for 40 weeks a year, they're going to be digesting 30 hours of the oracles of God. And if you halfway pay attention to what's going on in there, you might learn a thing or two as well to be able to recognize silliness when you hear it, because you're not going to find it in those books. Okay, Sunday school plug over. Look, now we're going to look at this Gog character and see how God keeps his promises. First, Gog, the prince of Magog and chief prince over Meshech and Tubal is what he's called, is referenced seven times in Ezekiel 38 and 39. This chief prince, Gog, is said to rule over Meshach and Tubal. And he's going to attempt to bring Persia and Cush and Put and Homer and his hordes, Beth Togomar and his hordes, Sheba, Dedan, the merchants of Tarshish, everyone against what felt like all the nations of the earth against God's people after God brings them back from exile. Ezekiel says that Gog will attempt to plunder God's people while their walls are still down. But Gog and his armies Magog will ultimately be defeated. God says he's going to grab Gog by putting hooks in his jaws. Gog is going to fall dead in an open field and the dead Gogite will be buried in a valley called Chimon Gog and Chimonah. As a result of this grand large scale defeat of Gog, God says that then the nations will know that I am the Lord. So that's the essence of Ezekiel 38 and 39. So how does that pair with the events in Esther? Well, in Esther 1, we're introduced to a Medo-Persian king, and man, I've been practicing this guy's name for like three days, and I cannot say it. I listened to it on the ESV Bible, so I'm gonna try, I'm only gonna say it once, and then I'm gonna refer to him as the king, okay? So we're introduced to the Medo-Persian king, King Ahasuerus, man, who is ruling, he's ruling over 120 provinces, from India all the way to Ethiopia. Now we see these same numbers of provinces confirmed in Daniel 6 with the king of Persia setting up 120 satraps or princes to rule over his kingdom. We are told in Esther 3 that the king promoted a man named Haman the Agagite to be his chief prince. Now in English, Haman is called the agogite, but in Hebrew, there are no vowel pointings. And so agogite and gogite, gog, agog are all interchangeable in a sense. This isn't the same approach as using the Hebrew word Rosh to represent the English word Russia, the Hebrew word Mishak to be the English word Moscow, and the Hebrew word Tubal to be Tobolsk. Yes, some people try to do that. To compare ancient Hebrew to modern English is not the same thing as comparing ancient Hebrew to ancient Hebrew. Gog, Agag, Gogite, Ogogite. Very similar, even though they may be pointed differently. But even if they're pointed differently, sometimes different vowels don't even change the meaning. It's like spelling worshipping, how many Ps in worshipping? Hold up your fingers. I see, one, two, we got a four back there, not sure. Theater, R-E, or theater, E-R. Same words, right? Just different variations of them. And so in fact, Gog, Agag, a Gogite, in one cursive manuscript, Hebrews wrote in cursive, yes, calls Haman a Gogite. And in Numbers 24, the Septuagint has Gog instead of Agag when referring to the king of the Amalekites. And so if you've been hearing for 75 years that a Gogite was going to bring Persian forces against you after God brought you back into your land, but while your walls were still in ruins, and that God would defeat this Gogite and bury him in a place called Hamona. And then this dude rises to power named Haman, the Gogite, who ruled as a chief priest on behalf of the Persians and was planning to attack you while your walls were down. Do you know what you would have expected? You'd expect that in 2,500 years, a man named Vladimir would attack your city while riding a radioactive shark with laser beams for eyes right before the heretic Christians all disappear from the face of the planet. No, probably wasn't really on their minds. You would think the guy named Haman the Agagite who was ruling as chief priest over Persian armies and coming against your unwalled city just after you got home from exile was probably the same guy God must have been talking about when he said a Gogite from Hamona chief priest over Persian armies was going to come against your unwalled city after you came back from exile. And what's more, because you believed God, when he said, through Ezekiel, all those years ago, that this Gogite was gonna be defeated, grabbed by the jaws, and buried in the valley of Hamon Gog, you weren't surprised when Haman, the Agagite, was grabbed by the jaws, hung, and buried in a field called Hamonah. Just like when God's faithful weren't shocked when a guy named Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, conquered Jerusalem. Because years beforehand, Jeremiah said, a guy named Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, was going to conquer Jerusalem. These guys weren't shocked. Just like God's faithful weren't shocked when a man named Cyrus led them like a shepherd back into their land because years beforehand, Isaiah said a man named Cyrus would be God's shepherd to lead them back into the land. These people weren't shocked. We are not dealing with modern day supposed prophets that are just nebulous enough they can dupe the unwitting. We are dealing with men who received divine revelation directly from God, and their prophecies were specific, and they came true to a T. And if they didn't, if they gave a prophecy update that didn't come true, they could be stoned. They're not playing around with prophecy. And so when a man named Haman, the Agagite came against them while their walls were down, but was ultimately defeated. God's people weren't shocked because Ezekiel said on God's behalf, years beforehand, that Agagite would come against them while their walls were down, but he would defeat him. So these chapters in Ezekiel 38 and 39 were about God making and keeping promises. Contrary to popular belief, God making and keeping promises in history is more exciting than vid-angel sci-fi Christianity. Now, Just because we reject the immediacy of these prophecies being fulfilled in the here and now doesn't mean that what happened in Ezekiel and Esther's day wasn't written down for you. For example, Paul wrote to the Corinthian church using a story from the Exodus saying that the men and women and children were baptized. They drank water from the rock, which was Christ, and they ate the bread from heaven, and yet with most of them, God wasn't pleased. In using this story, Paul didn't say to the Corinthians, Moses wrote these things to you. He said, now these things happened to them as an example, but they were written down for our instruction. This is how we understand the things that we read in the Bible. These things were spoken and happened to our forefathers, but they were written down for us so that we could learn from them. So what should we learn from this text in Ezekiel 38 and 39 and its subsequent fulfillment in Esther and Ezra and Nehemiah? Well, we could list many things, but for now, when God promises his people land, it never comes without a fight. Now, it's a fight that God promises to win, but he uses his people to win it. Sometimes the battles are defensive, and other times we're called to take the battle to them, but there is always a fight to be had with a land promise. Think about it. Just after God promises to make Abram a mighty nation, to bless those who bless him and curse those who curse him in Genesis 12, Abram has to fight. Just two chapters later in Genesis 14, Abram, with just 318 fighting men, defeats King Jerolomer and three other kings who appeared to be taking over the entire world at the time. In Joshua, just after God promised the wilderness generation that he would give them the land of Canaan, They had to go into Jericho to take down King Shabbok. And then Samuel, just before David ascended to the throne, he ran roughshod through the enemies of God and his people. Every time God gave them victory, but every time they had to go fight. It was the unfaithful that stood by. The unfaithful were afraid that the sky would fall and God wouldn't keep his promises. Lot didn't fight. The wilderness generation, terrified. Saul sent a young boy out to fight a giant. If you don't fight, you don't inherit. Now, These are prototypical battles. We don't fight in the same way God's people fought back then, at least not when it comes to traditional warfare. Those things happened to them, but were written down for our instruction. Battles where God promises land, promises victory over the enemy, but they're battles he calls his people to fight, not by slaughtering your enemies, but by making disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and by teaching them to obey all that the Lord Jesus commands. Take the land, disciple the nations by making babies, raising them up to take over the world, Take the land by starting businesses that you can pass down to your kids and their kids. Take the land by getting equipped to defend the faith and giving a reason for the hope that is within you. Plant a tree, plant a forest. Take the land. Get into politics. Take Oregon back, not from the Democrats and for the Republicans, but from Gog and Magog and for your children and your children's children for a thousand generations. Beloved, God has not just promised his people some 48 square mile tract of land in the Middle East. He has promised you the world. So go and take it because it's yours. Contrary to what the chicken littles will tell you, the battle isn't close to being over. You're not about to get zapped out of this world and Satan sure as heck doesn't reign over any of it. Now some folks wonder, well, why are you so hard on our little brother for his eschatology? It's just eschatology. Yeah, it's just eschatology. But it's eschatology that creates lots and retreatist cowards and souls. It's an eschatology that doesn't look at these battles and their fulfillment as an encouragement to press on with the fight, but it sees them as mysterious foreshadows of a day when Satan finally wins the battle over the church, so God has to snap you out of it so you don't have to go through all of that. It's an eschatology that created three generations of people content letting Satan reign because they think this is all his. But beloved, this world does not belong to the Prince of Gog. This world belongs to King Jesus. The West was won under the cry, Jesus is Lord. It's being temporarily given back by generic individualistic deism. I don't know what every Christian who has the defeatist eschatology thinks that their king is doing, but your king reigns. He's already defeated the greatest enemies you will ever face. For you, Satan, sin, and death. What's there to fear? Not Vladimir Putin. Not the trans blip that we're in in history. not your boss making you get a shot. Gog and Magog and all their types are and will be defeated and the world will know that Jesus is Lord through you. So go and fight and win for the glory of God and the life of the world, amen. Let's pray. Our Father, we have heard wonderful things out of your word. We praise you for revealing Christ by promise and shadow in the Old Testament and for revealing him as the fulfillment of all these things in the new. Give us your spirit that we might understand these words and the fullness of your truth as you have revealed him to us in the person and work of Jesus, who with you and the Holy Spirit be all honor and glory now and forever. Amen.