In the history of Christianity Ezekiel 38:2-3,6 has often been applied to current events. Eusebius (and others) identified Gog and Magog with the Romans, Bishop Ambrose (and others) identified them as the Goths; Procopius of Caesaria identified Gog and Magog with Attila and the Huns. Others associated them with the Saracens. and the Jewish Khazar kingdom. (1) At the time of the Crusades, Genghis Khan and the Golden Horde were viewed as “Gog and Magog.” Martin Luther thought that the Ottoman Empire was “Gog and Magog”. (2) Prominent English Puritan writers also viewed Gog and Magog as the Ottoman Empire or Gog as the Roman Catholic Church and Magog as the Ottoman Empire, Recently a North American President said “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East” and “we need to stop them”.
Such history has demonstrated how dangerous it is to make predictions regarding current events on the basis of our interpretation of biblical prophecy.
Misinterpreted prophecy and prophetic speculation about Messiah in the first and second centuries led to great bloodshed. Jesus gave strong warnings against such prophetic speculation (Matthew 24:36; Mark 13:32; Acts 1:7). In the centuries that followed many Christians, like their Jewish antecedents, continued to scan the event horizon for events to interpret as fulfillments of their prophetic expectations. When they saw something that might be significant, they often related it to end time prophecy, usually with disastrous results. (See How often in the history of the church have people mistakenly believed they were acting in fulfillment, or observing the fulfillment, of prophecy?)
(1)”Still later, Gog and Magog became identified with the Khazars, whose empire dominated Central Asia in the 9th and 10th centuries. In his 9th-century work Expositio in Matthaeum Evangelistam, the Benedictine monk Christian of Stavelot referred to them as descendants of Gog and Magog, and says they are “Circumcised and observing all [the laws of] Judaism”;[31] the 14th century Sunni scholar Ibn Kathir also identified Gog and Magog with the Khazars,[32][33] as did a Georgian tradition, which called them “wild men with hideous faces and the manners of wild beasts, eaters of blood”.[34] According to the famous Khazar Correspondence (c. 960), King Joseph of Khazaria claimed to be a descendant of Magog’s nephew Togarmah.”[35] (Wikipedia)
(2)Luther approached his primary vocation as a Bible scholar though a pastoral lens. These commitments merged with his identification of the Turk and Pope as antichristian threats to faithful people. During the imperial 1530 Diet of Augsburg, Luther was housed north of Nuernberg in the Coburg Castle so he might more easily be consulted by his colleagues, including Philip Melanchthon. Suleiman had commenced his siege of Vienna in September 1529, and, as the preface to the Augsburg Confession makes clear, organizing support for defensive efforts was the Diet’s main purpose. Luther’s purpose during his time in the “wilderness” was translating portions of the Bible into the German vernacular. His first finished product was a translation and short commentary on Ezekiel 39-40, in which Luther interpreted Ezekiel’s apocalyptic “Gog” and “Magog” to be the Ottoman Empire. His hope was that “all the faithful might…draw courage and comfort from this passage.”(p. 50, More Desired than our Owne Salvation, Robert O. Smith)
(3) “After the passion had taken place the disciples were able to see in the Old Testament prophecies things which they had never before understood. The experience on the Emmaus Road when Jesus began with Moses and all the prophets to interpret in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself was utterly novel to the disciples. They had never heard of such things. They had read the Scriptures, but they had not applied them to the Messiah. It is to us a revealing fact that in the whole range of Jewish apocryphal literature where there occur various concepts of the expected Messiah and kingdom, there never once appears a Messiah who, in fulfillment of Isaiah 53, was to die for the sins of his people.” (Bernard Ramm)
