How confident are you about your rapture beliefs?

[eclipsenow]

They have walls now, literal and by their many defenses. The people Gog will attack will have none of those things, they will trust in the Lord for their protection and He will deliver it by wiping out Gog and his army.

As I have said before, the first thing to note is that this imagery comes from Ezekiel 38 and 39, which itself was highly symbolic and not literal. Gog is a personification of enemy nations, much like Ezekiel does with other names like Oholah/Oholibah in Chapter 23. Gog is an ancient name from Genesis invoking powerful nations from the distant past. Gog symbolises all God's powerful human enemies. Now the judgement imagery is thorough and awful destruction - but not literal - because it's inconsistent and contradictory. Then the mopping up exercise with the highly symbolic seven months to bury the dead and 7 years to burn all the weapons (as fuel for Israel) is also inconsistent, because it takes 7 months to bury the dead but the dead are all going to be eaten by the birds of prey, etc. Also, seven means perfection: Israel is given the perfect amount of time to heal from her enemies.
Watch the Bible Project on this second half of Ezekiel for more context. 7 minutes (Nearly 1.3 million views.)

I think the Bible Project was under pressure to include the first 'literal' interpretation of this temple because of the huge rise of the various Millennialisms in the United States after the popularisation of the Scofield study bible. No other force (except maybe for Hollywood and the rise of The Omen movies etc) has shaped American eschatology as profoundly. But the Bible Project hints at the fact that they side with the symbolic reading of the temple - given that everything else in Ezekiel is symbolic.

Now, what does all this mean for a literal futurist reading of Revelation? Basically it adds no credibility whatsoever to a literalist future timetable for a war involving Gog. Ezekiel's Gog is as symbolic and metaphorical as it is in Revelation. Futurist literalistic assumptions - so desperate to plead the case for their 'literal timetable' - have run roughshod over the evidence we have from Ezekiel and Revelation that both books tell us REAL theological truths in profoundly symbolic language. The Bible Project (nearly 2.1 million views) shows how John includes Gog in a vast collection of all the symbolic metaphors of the enemies of God. Futurists read Gog as some sort of literal prediction to decipher. But seen in context, both Ezekiel and Revelation are clear that it is a symbolic genre of literature using powerful metaphors to preach theological truths to encourage all Christians, for the last 2000 years and beyond.

Reducing it to some sort of future timetable for the last 7 years is not sensible, robs it of meaning for the Christians of the last 2000 years, and will have Christians fighting over their literalistic timetables for all time to come. It even risks the paranoia associated with death-cults like Jonestown and the Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas. It's got to stop! John was writing a symbolic sermon to his generation for ALL Christians to be encouraged, for all time to come.