(Above) Orthodox Christian icon of Pentecost, from Uncut Mountain Press. (Below) Evangelical Protestant/Christian Zionist Ted Cruz and Episcopalian Tucker Carlson spar over Dispensationalism. (Far below) C.I. Scofield whose Dispensationalism in the Scofield Reference Bible influenced many American Protestant Zionists.

“Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East,” U.S. President George W. Bush allegedly told a surprised French President Jacques Chirac in a phone call in 2003 justifying the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

A surprised Chirac apparently was less up on his Bible than American leadership, which however seemed confused in interpretation. The French leader reportedly had his staff consult with University of Lausanne Old Testament Professor Thomas Römer, who explained to them that this was a reference to names in the biblical books of Ezekiel and Revelation who are identified as arch-enemies of the biblical Israel in prophecy. Römer reportedly later told a journalist about this exchange, although the whole incident was disputed by a Bush aide.

The identification of Gog and Magog with literal enemies of the modern state of Israel is entangled with the Protestant American Christian Zionism of Dispensationalist views, most famously promoted in the 20th century by the American fundamentalist C.I. Scofield in his famous Scofield Reference Bible. Surprisingly published by Oxford University Press in the early twentieth century, that Bible (the first of modern “study Bibles”) became an influential force in Anglo-American popular opinion supporting Zionism and also other heretical doctrines such as Premillenialism (encouraging the heresy of Chiliasm condemned in the historical Church and in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed) and “the Rapture.”

All this is far afield from Orthodox Christian Tradition, which going back to Apostolic times and tracing continuity with the Old Testament Church or ekklesia, does not share those beliefs. It fact, it considers them to be heretical, and thus spiritually dangerous.

All this came up in our Church Bible Study on Ezekiel this past Sunday. That’s because we were discussing Ezekiel 37-39 in light of Orthodox Christian tradition, where Gog and Magog are mentioned, along with in Revelation 20.

The topic emerged a viral video exchange a few days before between the Episcopalian journalist Tucker Carlson and the Christian Zionist Evangelical U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz online. They were arguing whether Christians were required to support the modern secular-Jewish state of Israel in Middle Eastern conflicts, as the U.S. consistently has done at great cost across many decades.

At its base, theologically, the Carlson-Cruz debate is over whether the state of Israel created in 1948 is the biblical Israel, along with its expanding physical land and disputed boundaries and powerful military reach and influence since.

Those accepting that false identification also tend to identify the evil hordes of Gog and Magog (as President Bush allegedly did) with geopolitical enemies of the current state known as Israel, thus setting up conflict in the Middle East as apocalyptic and demanding Christian support of all kinds for the government of modern Israel.

By contrast, the Orthodox Christian Church, which emerged from the Old Testament and the Jews who formed the Apostolic Christian Church millennia ago, and has maintained a continuous if embattled presence in the Holy Land since, understands Israel to be the Church, as fulfilling the Old Testament prophecies, including those about Gog and Magog, which are understood in light of massive spiritual warfare targeting the Church’s remnant in the last days.

This link explains more of how the promise of God’s blessing to Abraham’s seed is to the faithful throughout ages who uphold and follow God’s law, today in the New Testament of our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ, Who is the culmination of Old Testament prophecies. The remnant assembly or ecclesia (in the Greek Seputagint Old Testament) unfolded to shelter the Incarnation of Jesus Christ in Bethlehem, his ministry during the Gospel era, and the early days of the New Testament Church. Hence the terms ecclesiastical and ecclesiology of the Church, which as the full realization of Israel encompassed believers of all nations, Jews and Gentiles.

The names Gog and Magog are interpreted in Church Tradition (as cited by Archimandrite Athanasios Mitilinaios and attributed to Arethas) as meaning “gathering” and “arrogant” respectively, thus signifying together the “arrogant mob,” in opposition to the ekklesia as the assembly of the faithful remnant. They are described in Ezekiel as coming in a horde (led by “Gog of Magog”) to devastate Israel, but suffer a hugely bloody defeat.

St. Gregory the Great noted the symbolism of the direction. He explained that coming from the south symbolized the Holy Spirit, while coming from the north indicated the devil, “because the former loosens with heat and the latter constrains with cold” (cited in Orthodox Study Bible, note on Ezekiel 38:1-39:29). Likewise, unlike the Protestant Dispensationalist Premilleniarists, the Orthodox Church has always taken the “last days” (Ezekiel 38:16) in which Gog and Magog are said to appear to mean the Church age, the time since Pentecost, the promised “thousand years” (a symbolic fullness of time) of Christ’s reign, before a final battle at the end in which Satan will be cast into the abyss forever (Rev. 20:10).

In our Lord’s Revelation to the Evangelist John at the end of the Bible, Gog and Magog are said to appear at that final battle. As Archimandrite Athanasios Mitilinaios notes in his extensive five-volume exegesis on Revelation,

St. John [in Rev. 20] now uses these terms [Gog and Magog] symbolically for the apostasized anti-Christian nations, which will strike one last time against the city of God, the Church [Israel]. Let us not confuse the gathering of these nations with the battle of Armageddon [in Rev. 16]. These nations will battle agains the Church, whereas the battle of Armageddon will be a civil war of annihilation between factions of the nations, the last action of human history. Their number (not of the nations but of their citizens) is like the sands of the sea, aiming to show that the faithful during those final days will be very few compared to the number of the apostates. The faithful will be but a small remnant, the remnant of Christ. Christ said, “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom” (Luke 12:32).

Archimandrite Athanasios then notes that a great temptation to the faithful in that struggle will be envy, of envy for the worldly success of the forces arrayed against the Church, and a desire to join them in enjoying their worldly ways. In this, he indicates that this final battle will largely be a spiritual battle of worldly forces against the Church. The prophecy of Gog of Magog in Ezekiel may have reflected, as Archimandrite Athanasios also mentioned, echoes of the recent Scythian depredations on the Middle East in Ezekiel’s time, and perhaps pointed historically to the coming of Alexander the Great and the later Hellenist regimes, in conflict with the remnant people of Israel, as chronicled in the books of Maccabees in the Orthodox Christian Bible. However, Church Fathers understood the deeper symbolic meaning of the Old Testament prophecy to be in sync with the New Testament Revelation of Gog and Magog as representing a final struggle to overturn the remnant of the Church, against which our Lord promised “the gates of hell shall not prevail.” Archmimandrite Athanasios also notes in his extensive study that the prophecies in Resurrection should not be seen in a simple worldly sequential way; applying that to the issue at hand, while the struggle against the Church by Gog and Magog (Rev. 20) is different from Armageddon (Rev. 16), the spiritual mystery of the latter as revealed in the prophecy should not be read as necessarily simply later in time.

St. Andrew of Caesarea, as cited in Archbishop Averky Taushev’s commentary on the Apocalypse, as translated by Hieromonk Seraphim Rose, both of blessed memory, wrote of this:

Some people think that Gog and Magog are the northern and most remote Scythian peoples or, as we call them, Huns, the most militant and numerous peoples of the earth. They are restrained from taking possession of the whole world only by the Divine right hand, until the liberation of the devil. Others, translating from the Hebrew, say that God signifies “one who gathers” or “a gathering” and that Magog signifies “one who is exalted” or “exaltation.” And so these names signify either a gathering of peoples or their exaltation.

Archbishop Averky then notes, “One must suppose these names are used in a metaphorical sense to denote those fierce hordes who, at the end of the world, will arm themselves under the leadership of the antichrist against the Church of Christ.”

All this is a far cry from President Bush’s alleged identification of various military powers with Gog and Magog in urging military action by the U.S. in the Middle East, ultimately from a Dispensationalist view to protect the modern secular Jewish state of Israel. Many of the latter’s most extreme religious elements, by the way, are in their theology extremely anti-Christian, which is the basis of opposition to Jesus as the Christ, and of extreme anti-Christian statements historically in Talmudic tradition. Just on a practical secular level, American Protestant Christian Zionism has encouraged U.S. intervention in the Middle East that has since the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948 led to great displacements, persecutions, and exiles of ancient Christian communities in the region, of which Orthodox Christians are first. In Iraq, for example, the Christian population went from about 10 percent at the time of the U.S. invasion in 2003 to an estimated 1 percent today. Likewise in Syria, the Assad regime largely protected the Christian minority, while enemies of the regime (some supported by the state of Israel) have been seen as hostile by Christians.

Historically, the pre-Communist Russian Empire in the nineteenth century served as a protector of sorts for Christian minorities in the Holy Land, which was a designation for many pilgrims from Russia. This is why, for example, the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia after the Communist takeover of Russia maintained significant holy sites, Churches, and a monastic presence in the Holy Land. The State of Israel sided with the Soviet Union in its effort to take over those sites after 1948, although subsequently as geopolitical arrangements shifted, some were returned to the exile anti-communist Russian Church.

Given the role of Russia traditionally in protecting the Church in the Holy Land (also seen in more recent times as echoed in Russia’s support for the Assad regime in Syria), it is a paradox of the false Dispensationalist view that it often simply identifies Gog and Magog with the modern state of Russia.
Traditional Christianity has seen a huge renewal in post-Communist Russia, whatever controversies may involve the Russian government, and this has included the renewed highlighting of Russian Orthodox Christian traditions around the world (spread in the anti-communist exile diaspora), as descended from the ancient Christianity of Byzantium and the Holy Land. Thus the Left Behind franchise and Dispensationalist views of the world end up in a twisted way identifying forces of evil with the only major world power with a growing traditional Christian public culture (Russia), while supporting foreign policy that has been detrimental to ancient Christian cultures in the Holy Land, and a secular Jewish state (Israel) that includes influential religious communities hostile to Jesus Christ and historical Christianity. Lord have mercy!

Finally, it should be noted that, as Blessed Theophylact observed in his commentary on the Acts of the Apostles from the 11th century, based in earlier Orthodox Church Tradition, the full realization of the Church as Israel involved recognizing that land was not the basis of salvation. Our sense of place as Christians inheriting the blessing of Israel depends on our faith, and the Church, not any physical land, is the New Testament Bride of the Lamb, Israel (which in the Old Testament was described typologically in terms of “the land of Israel” as the Bride of God, symbolizing again the Church as portal to the land of Paradise and Heaven). Blessed Theophylact points to the earliest recorded Christian sermons in the biblical Acts of the Apostles (compiled by the Evangelist Luke) as indicating how Abraham (who received God’s blessing for his seed) had left his home, and how subsequently the faithful wandered into Egypt, and later from their new promised land into exile, but all the time the “land of Israel” symbolized “another land,” that of Paradise and Heaven. This is fulfilled in the Church, not the modern state of Israel. In Acts, early followers of the Church sold their land and gave the proceeds to support the needy and the mission of the Church. Ananias and Sapphira sold their land but withheld some of the profit for themselves, lying to the Church, and were struck dead as a powerful example for subsequent history of how this ran counter to the Holy Spirit’s operation in the Church. Contrary to being a blessing, in Orthodox Christian Tradition holding on to a false sense of objectifying Israel as one land or one ethnicity or one government runs counter to the full realization of Israel as the Church including the faithful of all nations, Gentile and Jew.

May the Lord give us wisdom!