We Are in the Middle of Armageddon

As I write these words, war has broken out, yet again, in the Middle East. This time, it is an open confrontation between the nations of Iran and Israel. In my short lifetime of under 50 years, there have been perhaps two dozen wars in the Middle East, though it can be difficult to make a precise count because of the way that some of the wars go on for decades or more and blend into each other.

Whenever war breaks out in the Middle East, a subculture of evangelical Christians tends to get excited. Let me say clearly that I personally know and love a number of people who are within this subculture, and I mean no insult to them. Generally speaking, we could call this subculture the “dispensational school” of prophetic interpretation. Their doctrinal system has been around for a bit more than a century, with a dominance in England (initially) and America, especially in the Baptist churches and among the cohort of evangelicals who were born before 1970. Their authentic conviction is that the Bible contains specific prophecies about the modern-day Middle East.

I belong to a very different “school”, the world of Reformed theology, which reads the Bible quite differently. We would trace our theological heritage through the mainline Protestant reformers (e.g. Luther, Calvin, Cranmer, Knox) and ultimately back to Saint Augustine. When people in my school see people in the other school getting excited about the latest Middle Eastern war, we tend to react (sometimes meanly) with eye-rolling, chuckling, cringing, or some combination of these three things.

I think it would be fair to say that quite a few people in the Reformed school have some degree of familiarity with dispensational theology (either from the outside, or in some cases from the inside, having “switched teams” in the past), and therefore at least some basic understanding of why they view the contemporary Middle East the way they do. Though certainly, many people in “mainline” Reformed traditions would look at dispensationalism with utter bewilderment and confusion, having absolutely no comprehension of how they read the Bible and its prophetic texts. It would be like trying to decipher a book in a foreign language—I have had a number of conversations with such folk over the years, even some pastors, who have expressed their inability to even begin to get their heads around dispensational readings of the Bible.

Something that has dawned on me in the last month, a bit like a penny drop, is that this works the same in the other direction! I have realised that probably most dispensationalists look at our way of reading the Bible with utter confusion, like trying to decipher a foreign language. What seems self-evident to one camp is barely comprehensible to the other.

With this realisation, I am writing this for people who would think to themselves, “How on earth can some Christians look at the Middle East and not see biblical prophecy playing out before our very eyes?” My goal is not to persuade them to change their minds and see it “our way”, but more modestly, to give a window into why we see things so differently than them, and to help reduce that sense of bewilderment.

Some notes on my personal background

For transparency: my theological formation happened within Reformed theological circles. The biggest influences on how I read the Bible as a whole, and particularly the Old Testament, would be two Australian men (who are both pastors and theologians)—Graeme Goldsworthy and Andrew Reid. While I accessed Goldsworthy through his books, I had the privilege of sitting under Andrew’s personal teaching when I was at Bible college. Andrew taught me two units of the Old Testament and one unit of hermeneutics.

I also had Peter Adam as a pastor as a young adult, and his Bible teaching was a significant influence on me during my formative years. Lastly, I did a semester unit on Isaiah at Bible College, meaning that this is the one book of the Old Testament where I have truly done a “deep dive” into the commentaries and other scholarship. I want to stress that what I gained from the men I have named here has been primarily a general approach to understanding Scripture. The specifics of what I write do not necessarily come directly from them.

Also for transparency, most of my theological formation happened around people who would fall into the “amillennial” camp of eschatology. If forced to select a position, I would probably pick amillennialism too, though I am fairly agnostic about these precise definitions and avoid pinning myself down to a particular system.

The great prophetic battle

If there is a Middle Eastern Armageddon, a “war to end all wars”, then this would be how it runs:

Jerusalem is surrounded on all sides by the innumerable hosts of foreign nations, who have allied themselves together with the express intention of causing its destruction. It is a dire situation, a hopeless situation for the city of God, as the armies prepare to advance. There is no escape route for the vastly outnumbered defenders, no reinforcements on the way, no ally who can be called for assistance … But at the last moment, the Lord himself descends from heaven and intervenes, routing the assembled nations, and granting deliverance to the besieged city and its inhabitants. Certain defeat, transformed into glorious victory!

There can scarcely be a more epic scene described anywhere in the Bible. 

What is interesting is that the prophetic books contain multiple instances of this scene. We see it described most notably in Joel chapter 3, in Zechariah chapters 12-14, and in Ezekiel chapters 38 and 39. There are minor differences among the alternate versions, as well as plenty of similarities. In Joel, the nations are gathered in the “Valley of Jehoshaphat”, possibly identified with the Kidron Valley between the Temple Mount and the Mount of Olives. There God executes wrath on the armies, accompanied by signs in the heavens.

In Zechariah, vivid details are given about the Lord striking the enemy with confusion and plague (Zech 12:4; 14:12-15), as well as inducing great geological and cosmic changes (14:4-10). Ezekiel’s account is the longest; in it, several invading nations are named (Meshech, Tubal, Gomer, Beth-Togarmah, Persia, Cush, Put) under the leadership of King Gog, “of the land of Magog”. [1] Similar to Zechariah, there will be geological and meteorological disturbances, and the armies will be struck with confusion such that they turn on each other (Eze 38:19-22). After God finishes massacring them, he calls on the birds and the beasts to come and feast on the corpses of the slain. (Morbid!)

Common to all the accounts is the fact that it is God who summons and gathers the hostile nations to do battle. “I will gather all the nations and bring them down”, “For I will gather all the nations against Jerusalem to battle”, “I will turn you about and drive you forward, and bring you up … and lead you against the mountains of Israel”. The nations do not act autonomously, of their own free will; they are doing God’s bidding. Ezekiel even says that God will forcibly pull them along with hooks through their jaws (38:4). God determines the location for the battle, God brings the combatants in, and God triumphs over them. It is a work of God from start to finish.

What are we to make of the fact that there are three similar, yet non-identical accounts of a climactic battle of the nations? Are these three separate events or three versions of the same event? And more importantly, the real burning question, when is it going to happen?

The fact that three different biblical prophets seem to describe almost the same story, with minor differences, tells us that what we are, in fact, looking at here is a biblical motif. In other words, it is a theme that had become so powerful in the minds of the ancient Hebrews that they came back to it again and again in their writings. A biblical motif that is well known to us is that of God as shepherd; it recurs over and over in the Bible, in both the Old and New Testaments.

Certain biblical motifs originated with a specific event in history. The divine parting of the waters of the Red Sea is one such motif. It actually happened in Exodus chapter 14, but the experience was so powerful that the prophets and psalmists keep going back to it over and over again (eg. Psalm 77:19-20; Isaiah 51:10; 2 Samuel 22:16). In Isaiah 11:15-16, Isaiah says that God will dry up the Euphrates River so that his people can walk back across on dry ground from their captivity in Assyria. Now, there is no record of this literally happening; this is in fact Isaiah repurposing the powerful imagery of the Red Sea crossing to say that the return of exiles from Assyria will be as miraculous and divinely ordained as the exodus from Egypt.

Like the Red Sea parting, the motif of the “battle of Armageddon”, the gathering of nations and their armies to do final battle with God at Jerusalem, actually derives from a historical event. This event is described in the book of Isaiah, chapters 36-37. [2] The army of King Sennacherib of Assyria had come to lay siege to Jerusalem during the reign of King Hezekiah of Judah. Assyria was the world’s superpower of the day (8^th century BC) and fielded a superpower army that Hezekiah could not have possibly defeated; under ordinary circumstances, Jerusalem should have easily fallen.

Isaiah 36 tells the events of the siege in suspenseful detail, right up to where the Assyrian military commander taunted Jerusalem’s soldiers in Hebrew, telling them that their fate would be “to eat their own dung and drink their own urine”.

Sennacherib himself wrote an account of the event, which has survived to the present day. [3] He said:

“As for the king of Judah, Hezekiah, who had not submitted to my authority, I besieged and captured forty-six of his fortified cities, along with many smaller towns … As for Hezekiah, I shut him up like a caged bird in his royal city of Jerusalem. I then constructed a series of fortresses around him, and I did not allow anyone to come out of the city gates.”

Sennacherib failed to conquer Jerusalem; his own account does not say why. In Scripture, we find out that after Isaiah pleaded to God on behalf of Judah, God went out and annihilated the 185,000-strong Assyrian army. Ancient Greek historians inform us that the army was stricken with a plague. And thus, by miraculous divine intervention, Jerusalem went from the verge of defeat to witnessing the glory (and mercy) of God’s deliverance.

Everybody who lived through this event had it seared into their minds. They told the marvellous story to their children, and their children told it to their own children. Like other great events in Israel’s history, such as the exodus from Egypt and David’s victories over the Philistines, it became embedded in the collective psyche of the people.

And thus, a narrative of the world’s most powerful armies assembled at Jerusalem, only to be personally defeated by God, came to be a biblical motif that would find its way into the writings of the Hebrew prophets. It is important to note that Assyria was in fact brought to the battle by God himself—we are told this in Isaiah chapters 7-8. Their ultimate downfall was also prophesied in Isaiah 10. The key elements of the historical episode were picked up by the prophets, [4] who used them to portray the climactic confrontation between God and his enemies. In doing this, they embellished the motif with apocalyptic imagery involving cosmic events and great geologic upheavals, which give way to cosmic renewal.

What the prophets Joel, Zechariah, and Ezekiel are saying is this: a great day of judgment and salvation is coming. This day of God will harken back to the story of Hezekiah that we all know well: God will assemble all his enemies in one place, do battle with them before the eyes of his people, triumph over them in a way that turns the universe upside down, and then usher in a new world. The experience of Hezekiah occurred in history, but this event will occur beyond history, at the end of days. To use theological jargon, the prophets used the familiar motif to describe the eschaton.

The Israelite readers of these prophets would have known exactly what they meant; there would have been no mystery. They knew the story of Hezekiah’s miraculous deliverance, and the destruction of Sennacherib’s army, because their parents had told it to them. When they read the scroll of Ezekiel, or of Zechariah, or Joel, they would have instantly recognised the echoes of the familiar story.

Enter Jesus Christ

The only outstanding question is, when and how does the eschaton occur?

Foundational to the Christian reading of Scripture (as we Reformed see it) is the presupposition that the Bible is a unity. It is not two books (one with 39 chapters and another with 27 chapters) written to two groups of people, but one single book with 66 chapters written to one single group of people. From this presupposition about the Bible’s unity, it necessarily follows that no part of the Old Testament can be properly interpreted without the direction of the inspired writings of the apostles, found in the New Testament.

The apostles teach us that Christ is the fulfilment of the law and the prophets (Matt 5:17), Christ is the one to whom the whole of (Old Testament) Scripture points forward (Luke 24:27), and Christ is the end point of prophecy (1 Peter 1:10-12). He is the mystery “hidden” in the pages of the Old Testament (Eph 3:4-9), the target of the Abrahamic promises and the Abrahamic covenant (Gal 3:15-16).

Relevantly to this topic, Jesus Christ is identified by the apostles as “the cornerstone in Zion”, that is, the Holy City of Jerusalem and its Temple Mount (1 Pet 2:4-6; Acts 4:11). They got this idea from Christ, who identified himself this way during his ministry (see John 2:19-22 and John 4:21-23).

So the New Testament teaches us that Jesus personally embodies Zion, and the uniform testimony of the apostles is that in his person, and in his death and resurrection from the dead, Jesus brought the eschaton to our world. Accordingly, when Christ had ascended his throne, the apostles proclaimed that the “last days” (Acts 2:17; Heb 1:2; James 5:3) and the “end of the ages” (1 Cor 10:11; Heb 9:26) had arrived. If we believe the words of the apostles, then the eschaton is not future; it began 2000 years ago.

What this means is that it is an error to look for a fulfilment of eschatological prophecies around the year AD 2000, or even further in the future. This includes the eschatological prophecies of Joel, Ezekiel and Zechariah about Zion (Jerusalem) and the climactic battle that occurs there. The right place to look is to Christ and his actions 2000 years ago. [5]

When we look in the right place, what we find is that the nations of the world did in fact gather together to do battle against God at Jerusalem in the first century AD:

“Why did the nations rage, and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers were gathered together, against the Lord and against his Christ. For truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the nations…”

Acts 4:25-27

When Jesus was on the cross, he was confronted by all the nations of the world, the assembled enemies of God. Even more than that, he was confronted by more sinister enemies, Satan himself with his legions of demons (Luke 22:53; John 13:27, 14:30). This was the great clash of armies, the ultimate pitched battle, cosmic in scope and scale. This was true Armageddon.

The result of the battle? As foretold by the prophets, God intervened and overthrew all the forces, human and non-human, that were arrayed against his King. Christ struck every single one of his enemies down and trampled on their heads. He emerged from the grave on Sunday a victorious Warrior-King, his vanquished enemies humiliated beneath him.

“And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by cancelling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him.”

Colossians 2:13-15

The language that Paul uses here is military; at the battle on the cross, Christ broke the armies, broke their weapons, and triumphed. “Putting to open shame” references the ancient military practice of a victorious king forcing his defeated foes to kneel or lie prostrate before him, stripped of their weapons, armour and dignity. And again:

“When he ascended on high, he led a host of captives.”

Ephesians 4:8

Paul makes another military reference here, that of a victorious general leading prisoners of war on a march of humiliation. In Christ’s case, this is said to have happened at his ascension into heaven, and the POWs were the minions of the devil whom he had crushed.

This is good news! The great battle of Armageddon has happened, and we know the result—Christ has won.

We should bear in mind that when we look for Armageddon somewhere else, we will inevitably diminish the magnitude of the battle that Christ fought and won. His battle is second to none. It was larger than the battle between Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington, larger than the battle between Hitler and Stalin, larger than the battle between Israel and Iran, larger than a full-scale nuclear exchange between the USA and USSR. Next to the battle that Christ fought for us, even nuclear war is like two children going at it with Nerf guns. How dare we think to ourselves that we have spotted a war somewhere in the world that is more needful of our attention and study than the one that Christ already engaged in!

Christ for us and in us

I cannot stress enough that Armageddon, the great battle of God, is a past event; it is essentially over. But several of my favourite Bible teachers over the years have a saying that I am fond of: “We are in the mopping up phase”. In most wars, even after the decisive battle is concluded, there are still groups of enemy troops here and there. Some of these leftover elements put up a fierce fight, perhaps because they now have nothing to lose, or they know that nothing good awaits them once they are captured. They may be prepared to fight savagely to the death.

Hence, a “mopping up phase” where the victorious army has to go round quashing these last pockets of resistance. For us, it has been a very long phase (in human terms), two millennia and counting. The New Testament informs us that this closing phase of the war has two main spheres of operations:

• Spreading the gospel among the nations, by which we steadily increase the territorial gains of Christ’s kingdom
• Fighting sin and false teaching in the church and in our own personal lives (eg. Eph 6:10-18; 2 Cor 10:3-6), by which we suppress the enemy’s activity inside already conquered territory.

These are serious tasks that carry ongoing risks of injury and casualties. I think that Ephesians 6:10-18 should heighten our sense of how difficult and risky this really is—even though Armageddon is past, the tail end of it continues, and is fraught with danger. We dare not take off our Kevlar because bullets still zip through the air.

Nevertheless, because the overall outcome of the war is known, the church goes about its duty in a spirit of triumph:

“But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere. For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life.”

2 Corinthians 2:14-16

Paul goes to another military allusion, this time, to the victory parade of a triumphant army. As we do the work of advancing Christ’s victory, even as we continue fighting the remnants of the enemy, we have the privilege of marching in Christ’s victory parade.

Okay, what about Revelation?

I am confident that I have presented an understanding of biblical prophecy, and the great eschatological battle scenes in particular, which dominated the Christian church between at least the time of Saint Augustine and the early modern period. There have always been a minority of interpreters who held to alternative views (for example, that Zechariah 14 refers to historical events before the birth of Christ), but most Christians throughout history have sought to apply the prophecies Christologically, and to the daily experience of the church, as I’ve outlined above.

People will still ask, “What about the book of Revelation, and the wars that it describes?” It is true that Christian interpretation of Revelation has been much more varied. For myself, I do not find that anything in Revelation differs substantially from the framework that I’ve described here, and indeed, it would raise alarm bells if one book of the Bible presented a teaching that was wildly divergent from the other 65 books.

The pivotal chapter of Revelation, which concerns warfare, is chapter 12. Here, we find a narrative that is fully consistent with what I’ve just described. The great and decisive battle between God and his enemies happens on the cross:

“For the accuser of our brothers has been hurled down, who accuses them day and night before our God. And they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death.”

Revelation 12:10-11

At the conclusion of the main battle, waged by the blood of Jesus (his death on the cross for our sin) and the word of testimony (the proclamation of the gospel), a defeated Satan is deprived of his former status (cf. John 12:31; Luke 11:22). [6] Knowing that certain doom awaits, he engages in last-ditch warfare against the church (Rev 12:13-17), the same “mopping up” (from our point of view) warfare described by Paul in Ephesians 6 and other places. Subsequent chapters reveal that this warfare is fierce, but cannot alter the final outcome.

Christ’s battle against the nations is once again described in chapters 19 and 20. Of particular interest is the fact that these chapters deliberately allude to Ezekiel 38-39, with the call to the birds to feast on the corpses of the slain enemy army (Rev 19:17-18) and a reference to “Gog and Magog” at the head of the assembled nations (Rev 20:8).

Once more, in Revelation 20:7-10, we see that familiar motif inspired by the showdown between the Lord and Sennacherib: an innumerable host surrounding God’s city and poised to take it. And then, out of what would ordinarily be an unwinnable situation, victory ensues as God strikes down the entire horde in an instant.

I would say that chapters 19 and 20 give us a unified portrayal of Christ’s battle with and victory over all his enemies (human and non-human), at the cross and at his second coming. We can debate the fine details of where exactly the millennium fits into this picture, but my opinion is that the battle in Revelation 19 cannot be untangled from the battle in Revelation 20—they are one and the same, especially given that John very clearly unifies them using the allusions to Ezekiel 38-39.

And that’s a wrap. Having looked at the descriptions of Armageddon in the Bible and seen the Christological readings given to us by the apostles, I can honestly say that I am not left with any sense of being sold an inferior product or that there is a missing piece of the puzzle. For me, and others in my interpretative “school”, we feel that we have a complete picture in front of us, in every detail. I never find myself reading the Old Testament prophecies about Armageddon and wondering, “So when is this going to happen?” or feeling an urge that I must link them up with something specific that I’ve seen on the news, whether in the Middle East or anywhere else in the world. I feel entirely satisfied that I already know what the prophecies are about, and what (or rather, who) they point to.

If you are somebody who comes from the other “school” of interpretation, I hope that reading this has helped to “demystify” people like me. I hope that it is now a bit easier for you to understand how I, and Christians like me, can watch a news report about air raids in the middle-east and then flick right on to the cricket scores, without any great need to immediately pick up my Bible and cross-reference it against an Old Testament prophecy.

References

1. These nations correspond mostly to those which descended from Japheth (located to the north of Israel, see Genesis 10:2-5), plus two African nations descended from Ham (Cush and Put), and Persia. The coalition of nations can therefore be said to converge from the north, south and east—all three directions—in other words, the whole world.

2. These chapters are in fact the “lynchpin” in Isaiah, recognised by commentators as holding the first and second halves of the book together.

3. It is written on the “Taylor Prism”. I photographed it at the British Museum when I visited.

4. The picture of confusion and the enemy armies turning on each other in Zechariah 14 and Ezekiel 38 probably derives from a very similar event, described in 2 Chronicles 20, when Jerusalem was surrounded by another coalition of nations who ended up killing each other after divine intervention. Because the two events were so similar, it is not surprising that the details would become merged together in the prophetic motif.

5. It is notable how the New Testament authors explicitly link the vision of Zechariah 12-14 (it is a single vision) with the events surrounding the crucifixion of Jesus: see John 19:37 and Mark 14:27. This gives us a clear indication as to how we ought to properly understand the prophecy, namely Christologically.

6. These verses, like Colossians 2:13-15, reveal to us exactly how Christ was able to overcome Satan in battle. Satan’s most effective weapon was his ability to accuse us with the “record of debt that stood against us”. By cancelling our sin on the cross, Christ disarmed Satan of that terrible, hell-inflicting weapon.