We are still studying this subject that we started quite a while ago, I think 14 weeks ago, of the Israel, the Arabs, and Islam. And we have followed a chronology starting roughly 1950 BC, with Ishmael and Isaac's fight that caused the beginning of the Arab-Israeli conflict. And then we traced that through the Bible and we saw all the instances in the Bible where that conflict was developing. And then we got into the period outside the Bible, and we started charting it through until we got about 600 AD. And then we saw the origin of Islam, and Islam, which originated in Saudi Arabia, which is an Arab country, about as Arab as you get, when that religion started conquering by the sword, it had nothing to do with love or a savior, it's just you go out and beat these people down and kill them if they don't convert, that was just like throwing gas on the fire of that fight between Ishmael and Isaac. And then it spread way beyond the Arabs. I mean, it got into the Persians, and it got into Russia, and it's gone all over Southeastern Asia, Northern Africa, and so on. And Islam now is the enemy of Isaac, of Jacob, of Israel. And we finished up our last session looking at the Intifada. We finished the 73 war and we looked at the Intifada, which has been going on since that 73 war. And we saw that Ariel Sharon gave up the Gaza Strip and he gave up what they call now the West Bank, but really it's Judea and Samaria. And right after he did this, within days, as a prime minister, he suffered a massive stroke, and he still is in a vegetative state, and it's been five or six years now. This is God's holy land, and these are God's chosen holy people. And even though they're outside of fellowship with him, they are as far away from him as we could ever imagine, he still loves them. He still has a plan for them, and he's working that plan. Most Christian denominations have given up the Jews. They don't believe that the Jews have a future. They engage in what we say theologically is replacement theology, where the church has replaced Israel. And nothing could be further from the truth, because the scriptures make it quite clear that they're kind of in the penalty box right now. But they will be out. They will be out. And they're going to be running the earth under Jesus, along with us, when the Millennial Kingdom starts. But anyway, suffice it to say that we got the Intifada going on now over there, which is all these things you see in the news on a daily basis of the suicide bombings and the little picking apart of wherever the Islamists can try and kill the Israelis. And the Israeli defense forces are actively pursuing them. So it's a constant miniature war of little teeny proportions, but lots and lots of them. The next event that is beyond where we are now, and doesn't look like it's too far off, but we really can't tell, is the allied invasion of Israel as God has given us in Ezekiel 38 and 39. Now this prophecy that is given here is very specific. It's not, for example, like Psalm 83, we look at that and we say, boy, there's some great information there about a potential invasion of Israel. But that's not God speaking and saying this will happen. That's a psalmist making what we call an imprecatory prayer. Which is, please God, nuke these guys around me, you know? Help me. It's not, I'm going to do this, God speaking in the first person. This prophecy here is gonna happen. There's no doubt about it. There's no doubt about this happening. Let's pray and get started. Father, we love you and we thank you for our Lord and Savior Jesus the Messiah. Father, he brought us into this living kingdom. Lord, we are so thankful for you sending him. We are so thankful for you being willing to take the punishment to satisfy yourself. that all those that look to you, Lord, our Lord Jesus Christ, just tonight as we go through this prophecy you've given us, in Jesus' name we pray this, amen. There's a lot of unfulfilled prophecies in the Old Testament. Many, many, many. Most people don't look at them, they don't understand them. Frequently, the evangelical churches will look at the fulfilled prophecies to see how Jesus met the qualifications that were given for the Messiah in the Old Testament. But most of them are still unfulfilled. And one of these is the allied invasion of Israel by the Germans, the Muslim nations, all led by the Russians. The interesting aspect of this is each one of these is a Muslim nation or Muslim groups, and we're going to see that God uses this prophecy to punish the nations that have been severely persecuting the Jews for a long time. The Russians just burned zillions of them, so did Hitler, and so have the Muslims, as we've looked at over the last 14 weeks. The Jews are the apple of his eye and he will not allow this sort of behavior towards them to continue. He alone will provide the vengeance. that will be the divine restitution for all that they have done towards the Jews. And the Bible is not really explicit about when things happen. in the future. It gives us a relative chronology, but an ordering of events, rather than this is going to happen on such and such a day in such and such a year. But it does give us a real good chronology of what event is going to happen after another. And this is the next big event on the prophetic horizon, that there is going to be an invasion. He doesn't tell us when this is going to happen. We don't know the date. Matter of fact, Christ clearly made that statement in what he called the Olivet Discourse in Matthew 24, 36. We're not going to know it. And don't even try and understand or try and figure out the dates. And lots of people do that. There's been a guy out in California, Harold Camping, that's been doing this regularly, and he's constantly embarrassed. He loses his followers, he loses his supporters, he loses his financial support, and he still keeps doing it. I think the guy's crazy, but there's been a lot of people that have done this sort of thing. Scripture clearly says don't do it. You're not going to understand this. Christ gave us the Olivet Discourse to give us the relative time chronology of these events, and he gave us signs to look for. But he didn't tell us when it was going to happen. So, one of these prophecies that's in the Old Testament is this allied invasion of Israel. The world is setting the stage for this because we've looked at all these peace negotiations, we've looked at all the lies on the political horizon here about making peace with Israel. by the Muslim nations, and then they turn around and they claim it to be Hudna, like, you know, I cross my fingers behind my back, so anything I said doesn't really count, and I'll do whatever I want. This has been going on for a long time. But this, this invasion is coming from the North, and it's gonna end up with everybody in this invasion being destroyed by God. Whether it's nuclear arms, which it appears to be from the text that we'll look at in the next couple of weeks, or it's God putting fire and brimstone down on these people, they all are dead. None of the Jews die. It happens on the mountains of Israel, and it looks like, as I said, there's a preemptive attack here with nuclear weapons by the Jews. There's a seven-year cleanup period, and no one can go in to the land where the activity, the war, the battle took place for seven months, because they can't touch anything there. And they hire professionals to go in and do this. It sure looks like it's a nuclear war, because these things burn for seven years. It's an interesting passage here. When we get done with this, after a couple more weeks, we'll talk about the timing of this. But for now, I just want to go through first couple of portions of this prophecy tonight. And it starts off with Ezekiel 38 verses 1 to 6. And it says, and the word of Jehovah came unto me. That's Ezekiel when he was in captivity in Babylon sometime between 597 and 586 BC. saying, Son of Man, set thy face toward Gog of the land of Magog, the prince of Rosh, Meshach, and Tubal, and prophesy against him, and say, Thus saith the Lord Jehovah. Behold, I am against thee, O Gog, prince of Rosh, Meshach, and Tubal, and I will turn thee about, and put hooks in thy jaws, and I will bring thee forth, and all thine armies, horses, and horsemen, all of them clothed in full armor, a great company, with a buckler and shield, all of them handling swords, Persia, Cush, and Put with them, all of them with shield and helmet, Gomer and all his hordes, the house of Togarmah in the outermost parts of the north, and all his hordes, even many peoples with thee." So the beginning of this prophecy, it is Ezekiel saying, or God saying to Ezekiel, set your face against Gog in the land of Magog, and he's the chief prince of Rosh, Meshach, and Tubal. And as we've looked at in the past, the tribe or the individuals that were populating the earth after the flood all had names. Those names all meant something. Those people became tribes. Those tribes became nations and now they're countries. The Bible names never change. The names change to the countries, but the Bible names never change. So it's the same people throughout history identified in the Bible as they're back at the same time at the end of the flood. Gog is not a man's name. It's a title, pretty much like Kaiser or President or King or something. It's an unidentified person. We don't know who it is, but he is going to be Ezekiel's Gog at the time of the invasion. Now there have been books written, many books written about who this might be. Who is this going to be? And one of the prominent figures has been a guy in Russia named Vladimir Zhirinovsky. He's an ultra left-wing liberal within the Soviet sphere, which is not the same as our liberals and not the same as our left-wing. He's more like what we would call an ultra right-wing guy, like an Adolf Hitler or something. And this guy keeps getting elected to parliament over there. He's run for president. He hasn't made it. But he's an absolute Jew-hater. Absolute Jew hater. He blames everything on them and he says they've got way too many resources when for years they haven't had anything other than they've now got natural gas and oil that they've been finding offshore. But this guy here is what they call an ultra-nationalist. He's looking for racial and ethnic purity. And he wrote a biography called Last Dash to the South, and he talks about attacking the Mediterranean and the Jews in Russia's great war. He claims that the Jews were responsible for World War I and II, and he says that they're the richest nation in the world and he just wants that money. He may not be Gog, he probably isn't Gog, but that type of attitude is what this Gog is going to have that God is going to lead down south and then up those mountains and over into Israel. So there's going to be this invasion headed by a guy named Gog, where God himself is going to lead this person to pull these nations together to come against the Jews. And the term, I'm going to put hooks in your jaws or your cheeks to bring me forth with all your army, meaning God is saying, I'm going to pull you in. I'm going to do this because I want you. You want to do it, and I'm just going to give you the guidance. I'm going to help you along. And we can see this in the book Isaiah where God has done this to the Assyrians too. He did it with Sennacherib. Sennacherib hated the Jews too and wanted to kill them and take over the country. So God just drops the idea And it doesn't take much for the guy that wants to do it to take the bait and run with it. So he did it. And that's the same thing that's going to happen here. It's helpful to understand who these people are, what countries they're associated with, in terms of the proximity to Israel. Magog, Rosh, Meshach, Tubal, Persia, Put, Gomer, and Togarmah. And when we look at The migration from the Ark in that first map there, it's an old map and some of you may have seen it before, the three sons of Noah were Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Japheth went to the north and to the west and he's in the pink surrounding the Middle East. Ham went to the south and to the west down in Africa. Shem stayed in the Middle East in Saudi Arabia. After the flood, this is the migratory pattern that they went in. Jafa's progeny went up into the Russian steppes, Turkey and the Russian steppes, which is the old Scythian Empire up in southern Russia today. Magog, Mishak, and Tubal were located between the Black and the Caspian Seas. And that was part of Turkey, ancient Persia, which is Iran today. And Mishak and Tubal, they became cities that are now, we call, Moscow and Tobolsk. And Tobolsk is a major city in Siberia. is the Hebrew word for head or top. And it's showing us way north, up in the top is northern Russia. So we've got all of these people that come out of the ark that then have sons and they move in these directions and that's who we're seeing here in the migratory patterns. God highlighted Turkey and southern Russia to just show where these invaders are going to come from. God comes from the north and it's all these nations that have persecuted the Jews in the past. Russia, German, and the Muslim nations primarily. Now I put a chart there that you may have seen me use in the past, the genealogy of Noah and Japheth, and all of those names are the names that get used in this particular prophecy. Japheth and the ones in blue, his sons and grandsons. You can see who they are. And then in the next chart, you may have seen me use that in the past, you can see where they are laid around, circling just about, Israel. And parts of Iran and Turkey are the closest there from the Japhethites. What God says here is they're gonna come from the uttermost parts of the earth. And he repeats it a couple of times. The uttermost, excuse me, parts of the north. And he repeats it a couple of times. And from Israel, the uttermost part of the north is Russia. Straight up from Jerusalem is Moscow. Due north. Straight up, Russia is the leader, clearly, of this Northern Confederacy. Now, there are some people today that say that these are all going to be Muslims, and that could very well be, because the Muslims hate the Jews more than anybody. Other cultures hate the Jews too, but the Muslims hate them more than anybody. And southern Russia is just hugely populated with Muslim nations. Azerbaijan and all the rest of those countries. The old Russian satellites. or the old, excuse me, the old Soviet satellites. There's one commentary that I've got here by a guy named Rabbi Moshe Eisenman, and he's not a Christian at all. The Jews, the Orthodox Jews, understand this prophecy. They don't need Christ to understand this prophecy, and they do pretty good at it. And what he is saying here is the Geonim, the Geonim, Geon and Geonim were mid-eastern, middle-aged Jewish schools, Jewish seminaries. And they taught Hebrew, they taught the Jews, they taught the scriptures to Jews that would go out and teach them again. Now, the Geonim had a tradition that these controls In other words, who's going to do this? Who's in charge? We're located in Russia. One tradition passed down from the Villa Gaon states, when the Russian Navy passes through the Bospors, on the way to the Dardanelles, it'll be time to put on Sabbath clothes in anticipation of the coming of the Messiah. Because they look at this prophecy and say, well, Messiah's coming when this happens. In the Gog and Magog war, Messiah the son of Joseph will be killed, which will then bring the coming of the Messiah, the son of David. Now I brought that out a couple weeks ago in Genesis. that the Jews look at these events in terms of the Messiah not having been here yet, so this, they say, will precipitate the coming of the Messiah. Russia's not the only country, though. It's easy for Russia to get all of these nations together, one of which is Iran. Used to be called Persia, used to be very sympathetic. to the United States, the West, and the Israelis. But after the Khomeini revolution, they became terrible towards the West. We all remember the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s. We remember how the people at the American embassy in Iran were captured and held hostage for some huge number of days in the late 70s. It's one of Jimmy Carter's huge black eyes. He couldn't get them out, or wouldn't get them out. The United States today, and we see this every day in the news, considers Iran our most threatening enemy. Another nation in this prophecy is called Cush, and there's two places in the Bible called Cush. One in Mesopotamia, and the other is Ethiopia. This one is, we believe, Ethiopia. And it's important, I put the note in there, never use current events to try and interpret biblical prophecy. Go the other way around. Biblical prophecy can help us understand current events, but current events does not describe prophecy. It does not tell us what the Bible says. Matter of fact, one of my profs called that newspaper exegesis. You do not engage in newspaper exegesis. Don't let that tell you what the Bible says. Put is mentioned, and it's used for Somaliland or Somalia, and that borders Ethiopia, followed by Gomer, which is present-day Germany. The Midrash that we've been referring to on Sunday morning calls it Germania, and we know that to be Germany. Togarmah is present-day Armenia, and the phrase, and many peoples with you, is just talking about the numbers, the huge volume of people and nations, I already mentioned, that are going to be coming against these countries, or is going to come against the Jews, at these countries, Iran, Ethiopia, Somalia, Germany, and Armenia. They're located geographically north and south of Israel, but the control here is this guy Gog up in Russia. I said earlier, the names of the nations have changed over time, but it's still the same people groups. God has this tendency to use the people's individual names throughout the scripture to refer to these tribes and countries. And we're going to see this in Genesis. Last week we saw where Israel is now being called a nation. When Dina was raped, they said that this thing ought not to be done in Israel. So you're starting to get this national flavor to that tribe. It's growing, and it's becoming a nation. Same thing with these others. Now, this same Jewish commentary that I have been referring to here makes this observation, Yerushalayim Megillah renders Magog as Gutia, which are the Goths, it's a group of nomadic tribes that destroyed the Scythians and made their home in Scythian territory. Considering that the Goths were a Germanic people, the identification of Magog's descendants as the Goths, in accord with Targum Yosanum to Genesis 10.2, which renders Magog as Germania, And the Bereshit Rabat that I quote frequently on Sunday morning is called there also as Germania. And it's interesting, you know, the Russians have persecuted the Jews severely. And the Russians are still a country. Germany, Nazi Germany, was completely devastated at the end of World War II. That persecution stopped. The Russian persecution has not stopped. And God is just about fed up with them. This persecution that they have had going on is going to end with this invasion. It is God who is going to bring this about and all he's going to do is just incite or encourage Gog, G-O-G, to do this because he, God wants to do this. You can see the sovereignty of God controlling his creation and moving these events along on the world stage to bring to fruition those things that he wants to accomplish. Now, moving on in the text of Ezekiel 38, verses 7 to 9 said, Be thou prepared, yea, prepare thyself thou and all thy companies that are assembled with thee, and be thou a garden to them. After many days thou shalt be visited in the latter years. Thou shalt come into the land that is brought back from the sword, that is gathered out of many peoples upon the mountains of Israel, which have been a continual waste. But it is brought forth out of the peoples, and they shall dwell securely, all of them. And thou shalt ascend, thou shalt come like a storm, thou shalt be like a cloud to cover the land, thou and all thy hordes and many peoples with thee. So the invasion comes from the north, Gog is the leader of the confederacy, they go to the land of Israel, the mountains of Israel are sighted, and then it talks about the massiveness of the invasion, where the people that are invading look like a storm cloud covering the land. The Jewish state has been formed since May the 15th, 1948, and it's making that assumption that this land, they are back in the land. Israel has been gathered there in unbelief. They don't believe that Jesus is the Messiah. And, you know, I'll give you a couple examples of what happens when people are trying to evangelize over there. One of my professors got thrown out of the country. He was very successful. Arnold Fruchtenbaum. He got thrown out of the country because he was so successful. He's a Jewish guy. He was an Orthodox Jew before he converted, and he had a very successful ministry over there. They kicked him out. And the guy that teaches me Hebrew now, he's always been a Christian, but they wouldn't renew his visa after he was there 11 years. He wanted to stay, and they just don't want people that are, you know, rock-solid, genuine, born-again Christians, because they don't want you converting them. So they don't like the idea. They tolerate you, they let you in if you wanna visit, if you wanna study, if you wanna spend time there, but you're not gonna set up permanent residence. They don't want that to happen. It's interesting, though, they don't care about the Muslims. But they just don't like the Christians. It's threatening to the people in Israel that are Orthodox Jews. This invasion occurs describes some of the characteristics are first it describes this Jewish state as being brought back from the sword and look at the persecutions and look what they had to do that we've looked at to bring that place into a nation and it's gathered out of many peoples and it's a land with mountains that were a continual waste but no more And it's a land that was brought forth out of the peoples. You know, Ezekiel is not describing any country or place that was here in ancient times. He's talking about now, Israel of today. They started coming back at the end of the 19th century, end of the Zionist movements, and more and more and more are making what they call Aliyah. And that Aliyah is a Jew going back home from whatever country he's been in. So you've been born in the United States, and you are Jewish, and you've never been in Israel, and you want to go over there and live, they call that making aliyah, and you are coming home. And they welcome you with open arms, and there's all kinds of social services and gifts, and I mean, they just make it really good for you to go there, because they want people there. The waste places have been built up on a massive scale. They immediately started engaging, after 1948, they started engaging in irrigation and crop production, and they produce an enormous number of vegetables and fruit for the entire Middle East. But the latter years that's used in this prophecy strictly refers to the last days or the end times. And I want to kind of talk about that for the rest of the time that we have here. The last days are something that most churches don't even talk about because they say it's just a nebulous time period about some end time thing that nobody can understand. Well, we can understand it because Christ gave us the information and by having the original languages to really chew on here, you can see what he's talking about. He said, that nation shall rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom and there should be famines and pestilences and earthquakes in diverse places. All these are the beginning of sorrows. All three gospel writers, the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, talk about the sign of the end of the age. Nation rising against nation and kingdom against kingdom. It's coupled with famines and earthquakes in various places. And what Jesus said This is the beginning of sorrows. The word there, the real word there should be travail, because that's what the Greek word means. It means travail, birth pang. It means birth pang, and it refers to the same concept that a woman undergoes when she's giving birth to a baby. She goes through a series of birth pangs, and then there's a delivery. Well, this is referencing a series of birth pangs, if you will, They're events on God's prophetic scale that give birth to the messianic age when Christ is here as Messiah reigning in Jerusalem. The first birth pang that he's talking about right here is nation rising against nation and kingdom against kingdom. And there's at least two places in the Bible where this is used. first one is in Isaiah 19 verses 1 to 4. I'm not going to read the passage, but I'm going to describe what it is that's being said. The land of Egypt is in view, and the idiom points to a conflict over the entire property under discussion in the passage. So in this Isaiah passage, the discussion is about Egypt, and it's about a conflict within the geography under discussion. The second passage where this is used that I'll cite is from 2 Chronicles 15. I'm not going to read that one either, but I'm going to say that that one references the geography of the Middle East in general. And it points to a conflict within the entire area of that geography. The Olivet Discourse talks about the entire world. A conflict in the entire world. And that is the signatory event when the last times began with the very first birth pang that Christ talked about. And he talked about local wars, but there's been tons of local wars. But the only time that there has been a total conflict in the entire world was when World War I and World War II happened. That's quite in keeping also with the Jewish resources, and there's a couple on my site here. The Zohar Kadesh and the Bereshit Rabbah that I frequently refer to. The Zohar is a little bit of, you know, way far out. Those are like the ultra-hyper-prophecy types that I don't generally rely on because they're too fanciful, but every once in a while they say something that's got relevance that ties into our scripture and their scripture as well if they pay attention to it. Because the Zohar Kadesh says, at that time war shall be stirred up in the world. Nation shall be against nation and city against city. Much distress shall be renewed against the enemies of the Israelites. And the Bereshit Rabbah says, if you shall see the kingdoms rising against each other in turn, then give heed and note the footsteps of the Messiah. So the rabbis taught that there was going to be a worldwide conflict that was going to signal the coming of the Messiah. Jesus changed this slightly. What he said was, it's going to signal the beginning of the first birth pang leading up to the coming of the Messiah. And the Messiah is going to come when the last birth pang happens. Now, World War I was a fulfillment of this, and all the historians agree that World War II was just a continuation of World War I. It was all the same folks fighting. And World War I gave impetus to the Zionist movement. The Zionists have been coming back, and you get World War I, and all of a sudden, lots more of them come. General Allenby takes control. He's the British general. He takes control of Jerusalem, and he declares it for the Jews, Palestine, and there's been a lot of activities in Great Britain that, what they had called a British mandate that was given by the League of Nations that said, here, you guys run Israel, and they started bringing more Jews back, and then we all know what happened in the Second World War. Adolf Hitler murdered six million plus of them, and the world's sympathy allowed for the nation Israel to be created, and now lots of them start coming back. So those two major events saw a flood of Jews coming back to Israel. But, you know, we don't know how long the last days are. We just know that the last days are an extended period of time. Someday, There will be the church, which will be taken out of here, and then sometime after that, there will be a great tribulation, and there'll be an enormous war. An enormous war that runs for seven years, worse than this world's ever seen. But what Jesus is talking about here is these calamities that are gonna come on this world. The beginning of sorrows, the beginning of travail, the very first birth pain is this event that's going to happen. This Ezekiel 38 and 39 is one of those events. The very first one was World War I and World War II. This is one of those events. This is Ezekiel 38 and 39. And what Jesus is saying is, just like birth pangs, each one of the events is going to have a greater intensity with a greater frequency and less time between them until the Great Tribulation is the last one, giving birth to the Messianic Kingdom. All that's in front of us. At the end of the Great Tribulation, there's going to be a judging of the nations that have persecuted the Jews. And that'll be the last part of what we go through here after we're finished with this prophecy. Then I'll talk about what the Bible says, primarily from Jeremiah and Isaiah, what the Bible says about how those nations are going to get judged. And they will. They will. God gets His way all the time. All the time. You know, if there isn't any other reason for you to obey God and do what He says, man, you can see what He's doing here. You can see how He controls world events and gets things done. If you're living outside His will in any area of your life, man, pull it in. Pull it in. Stop doing whatever you're doing that's not right. Because He will judge us too. He will judge us too. Amen?