Contrary to the way he’s portrayed by Hollywood, Satan appears as an angel of light.[1] His minion, the Antichrist, will do the same. He won’t be easy to spot; most of us will see the greatest politician and/or military leader the world has known in generations.
That’s part of the deception; from the Enemy’s perspective, there’s nothing to gain by literally scaring the hell out of people. Jesus warned that in the last days “false christs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect.”[2] So, Christians have no excuse—we’ve been warned, and we should be especially wary of anyone who claims to be the Messiah. Getting it wrong means literally siding with the devil.
It won’t be easy. The Fallen are far older and more intelligent than you and me. Sending out an Antichrist who’s easy to identify would be stupid, and they aren’t stupid. When this character appears, it will take industrial-strength discernment to see him for what he is.
Consider the following possible scenario: War erupts between Israel and its nearby Muslim neighbors. Given recent history in the Middle East, this wouldn’t be a surprise. Daniel was told about this twenty-five hundred years ago:
And the king shall do as he wills. He shall exalt himself and magnify himself above every god, and shall speak astonishing things against the God of gods. He shall prosper till the indignation is accomplished; for what is decreed shall be done. He shall pay no attention to the gods of his fathers, or to the one beloved by women. He shall not pay attention to any other god, for he shall magnify himself above all. He shall honor the god of fortresses instead of these. A god whom his fathers did not know he shall honor with gold and silver, with precious stones and costly gifts. He shall deal with the strongest fortresses with the help of a foreign god. Those who acknowledge him he shall load with honor. He shall make them rulers over many and shall divide the land for a price.
Daniel 11:36–39 (ESV)
It’s generally accepted that this section of Daniel is a prophecy of the character Christians call the Antichrist. Verse 36 in this chapter begins a new section of prophecies yet to be fulfilled, as verse 35 marks a break from fulfilled prophecies of the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Ephiphanes (reigned 175 BC–164 BC), who set up the infamous “abomination that causes desolation” in the Temple.
Much has been written about Daniel 11:36–39, but after 2,500 years of trying to figure it out, we must be honest—we can only guess at which gods the angelic messenger meant.
Although this end-times figure wasn’t called “Antichrist” by the prophets (the title only appears in four verses in 1 John and 2 John), he’s described in several places in the Old Testament. Besides Daniel 11, there are clear references in Daniel 9:26–27 (“the prince who is to come”), Daniel 7 (the little horn of the fourth beast), and, most obviously, Ezekiel’s Gog of Magog, Israel’s enemy at the end of the age.
Jewish religious scholars believe the Gog-Magog war is the final conflict before Messiah’s arrival. They are correct. The war reaches its climax “on that day,” the Day of the Lord, which is when God Himself arrives on the battlefield to put an end to the rebellion. Besides being a commonly used reference by Hebrew prophets for Judgment Day, God told Ezekiel that everyone on earth “shall quake at My presence,”[3] and that “the nations shall know that I am the Lord, the Holy One in Israel.”[4]
Did you catch that? God said, in Israel, not of Israel. This is the only place in the Bible where that phrase is used. God will be on the battlefield for this showdown, which is better known to us Christians as Armageddon.
How do we connect Ezekiel to Revelation? In Ezekiel 39:17–19, God tells the prophet to invite the birds and beasts to a gruesome sacrificial feast on the mountains of Israel—the flesh of the mighty, and the blood of the princes of the earth.[5] This same feast is described by John in Revelation 19:17–21. The imagery in Ezekiel and Revelation is so similar that commentators have noticed the parallel for hundreds of years.[6] The two prophets described the same event, when the followers of those foul spirits who have for millennia demanded sacrifice from humans, including human sacrifice, will themselves become a sacrifice for all of creation.
The war of Gog and Magog ends with Armageddon. It’s not a precursor to Armageddon, and the Antichrist doesn’t appear after Gog is defeated. Gog is the Antichrist, and his war includes Armageddon.
One of the points we often overlook when trying to identify the human actors in this end-times drama is that the prophets described a superhuman enemy. We can get caught up in debating whether Gog is Putin, Erdogan, or Assad, and forget that the real enemy is behind the scenes. Because the home base of Gog’s army, yarkete tsaphon, is usually translated into English as “far north,” “distant north,” or “uttermost parts of the north,” we draw a line on a map northward from Jerusalem, passing through Turkey, Ukraine, and Russia on the way, and assume it’s somewhere on that line. And ever since Cyrus I. Scofield published his study Bible a hundred years ago, prophecy students have identified Russia as the land of Magog.
It makes sense, right? There’s nothing on the map more “uttermost north” than Russia. Scofield’s theory was popular after the Bolshevik uprising in 1917, and it only became more popular during the Cold War. Since the 1970s, the idea that Russia is Magog has become so ingrained in our study of end-times prophecy that it’s taken as a given.
With all due respect to generations of learned prophecy teachers, this assumption misses Ezekiel’s point.
We don’t want to drift too far from Daniel into Ezekiel, so we’ll summarize: First, all of the nations from the north in Gog’s coalition—Magog, Meshech, Tubal, Gomer, and Beth-Togarmah—were south of the Black Sea, in Anatolia (modern Turkey), in Ezekiel’s day.[7] Second, the “Rosh” cited by some as a reference to Russia is simply the Hebrew word for “chief” or “head,” as in Rosh Hashanah—literally, “head (of) the year,” the Jewish New Year. There isn’t a single valid reason to connect rosh with Russia.[8]
Third, the other members of the Magog coalition shouldn’t be read literally. While Persia (Iran) is a safe bet as an end-times enemy of Israel, it’s unlikely that Ethiopia (Cush) or Libya (Put) will ever pose an existential threat to the Holy Land. Why, then, did Ezekiel include them as last-days enemies of Israel? The answer is as simple as looking at a map. For most Jews in Ezekiel’s day, Persia, Cush, and Put were the farthest nations they’d heard of to the east, south, and west. When you add the northern nations to the mix, you realize that Ezekiel was saying that the army of Gog would come from the four corners of the earth—the entire world will be against Israel in that final battle.
Not only is this consistent with John’s description of Armageddon, it tracks with the apocalyptic prophecies of Joel 3 and Zechariah 14, which describe a conflict that brings “all the nations” to fight against God at Jerusalem.
Finally, and most important, yarkete tsaphon refers to a specific mountain, Mount Zaphon, famous in the ancient world for being sacred to the storm-god, Baal. As we noted earlier, Jesus specifically identified the storm-god as Satan.[9] Isaiah 14 names Zaphon as the mount of assembly of the rebel from Eden, which pins that rebellion on Satan and connects him to the war of Gog and Magog.
So, Gog/Antichrist is Satan’s military commander, a cheap copy of the role filled by Jesus Christ in the Trinity, and Mount Zaphon, the mountain in southern Turkey now called Jebel al-Aqra, is where his army will assemble.
Since Jebel al-Aqra rises out of the Mediterranean Sea on the Turkish coast, we believe that’s precisely where the Beast (the Antichrist) will emerge.
That ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world—he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him…
Then the dragon became furious with the woman and went off to make war on the rest of her offspring, on those who keep the commandments of God and hold to the testimony of Jesus. And he stood on the sand of the sea.
And I saw a beast rising out of the sea, with ten horns and seven heads, with ten diadems on its horns and blasphemous names on its heads. And the beast that I saw was like a leopard; its feet were like a bear’s, and its mouth was like a lion’s mouth. And to it the dragon gave his power and his throne and great authority.
Revelation 12:9, 17; 13:1–2 (ESV)
The Beast of Revelation 13 is the ten-horned beast of Daniel 7. Since we have a scriptural basis for identifying Satan as Baal, and we know that the mountain considered sacred to Baal is on the Mediterranean coast in southern Turkey, it’s reasonable to assume that the scene described by John in Revelation 13 takes place at Jebel al-Aqra. Again, this is where Gog, the Antichrist, assembles his army[10] for the final assault on Zion, the Battle of Armageddon.
Interestingly, and perhaps not coincidentally, the mountain is very close to Antakya, ancient Antioch, where “the disciples were first called Christians,”[11] and the al-A’maq Valley, one of the places where Muhammad reportedly prophesied the final confrontation between the armies of Islam and Christendom.[12]
[1] 2 Corinthians 11:14.
[2] Matthew 24:24, Mark 13:22.
[3] Ezekiel 38:20.
[4] Ezekiel 39:7.
[5] Ezekiel 39:18.
[6] For example, Benson’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1857), Matthew Poole’s Commentary(1685), Heinrich August Wilhelm Mayer’s New Testament Commentary (1880), Jamieson Fausset and Brown Commentary (1871), and The Expositor’s Greek Testament (1891).
[7] Daniel I. Block, The Book of Ezekiel: Chapters 25–48 (Grand Rapids, Mi.; Cambridge: Eerdmans, 1998), 440.
[8] Ibid., 434.
[9] Matthew 12:24–26; Revelation 2:13.
[10] Ezekiel 38:6, 15; 39:2.
[11] Acts 11:26.
[12] The other being the village of Dabiq, Syria, about twenty-five miles northeast of Aleppo. Sahih Muslim Book 041, Hadith Number 6924.
Thanks for the clear teaching. I looked up Antakya and found that last year an earthquake pretty much destroyed the city.
“The site of ancient Antioch — a crossroads of civilizations and a modern tourist and religious pilgrimage destination in southern Turkey — is one of the cities left most devastated by the Feb. 6 earthquake that killed tens of thousands in Turkey and Syria.” Earthquakes in divers places……