Biblion Bible Commentary
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Gog and Magog
Revelation 20:7-10
7 And after the thousand years, Satan will be released from his prison · WEB
Released to a resurrected world, the deceiver deceives again at full scale, the siege dies around the city, and the dragon follows his agents into the lake.
And after the thousand years, Satan will be released from his prison and he will come out to deceive the nations which are in the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to the war, whose number is as the sand of the sea.
The release the sentence promised Revelation 20:3 arrives, and its mechanics are the second resurrection's: the rest of the dead live again at the years' end Revelation 20:5 — and the moment there are nations to deceive, the deceiver resumes his one trade, unreformed by a millennium's confinement: he will come out to deceive. The verse is Scripture's final word on the impenitence of evil: a thousand years of enforced reflection produce not repentance but recruitment.
The names are Ezekiel's — Gog, of the land of Magog, the great northern confederacy that marches against a peaceful, restored people and dies on the mountains by fire from heaven Ezekiel 38:2 Ezekiel 38:22 Ezekiel 39:6 — the prophets' archetype of the world's last assault on God's dwelling, here given its final referent: the resurrected rebellious of all ages, as the sand of the sea, every generation's unrepentant marshaled in one host under the original deceiver. The army's size is the book's grimmest statistic, and its honesty: given one more chance and one more lie, the vast dead rise and march.
They went up over the width of the earth and surrounded the camp of the saints and the beloved city Revelation 20:9.
The city is on earth now — the beloved city, the New Jerusalem descended Revelation 21:2 with the saints and the throne inside it — and the resurrected host surrounds it: the last siege, every free will's final address taken, the whole moral universe gathered around one wall in two companies. Nothing remains undecided and no one is missing; it is the one scene in Scripture at which every human being who ever lived is present.
Fire came down out of heaven from God and devoured them.
Ezekiel's fire Ezekiel 38:22, Elijah's answer 1 Kings 18:38 at final scale: no battle — the book's last war, like its previous one Revelation 19:20–21, is over in a sentence. The fire that devoured is the lake of fire in the act — the second death executing Revelation 20:14–15 Malachi 4:1.
The devil who deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet are also. They will be tormented day and night forever and ever Revelation 20:10.
The dragon follows his instruments at last — the whole counterfeit trinity in the lake — and the forever and ever is the idiom Scripture's own usage has already fixed: Edom's smoke, Sodom's eternal fire Isaiah 34:10 Jude 1:7 — destruction final and irreversible, the deceiver ended beyond return. The serpent of the first garden dies outside the last city — and the next verses hold the judgment that grounds it all.
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