Lesson 10: Turkey and Russia – Gog and Magog
Lesson 10 Overview
Ezekiel 38: A Study of Gog and Magog with Dr. Andy Woods
This lesson continues the nation-by-nation walkthrough of the “how” question, focusing on Turkey and Russia, and then begins looking at the alliances forming between these nations. Use this overview to review the key points after watching the full video.
Review: Iran, Sudan, and Libya
Dr. Woods briefly reviews the previous lesson. Persia (Iran) shifted decisively in 1979 when the Shah was replaced by the Ayatollah. Cush (Sudan) has a record that includes the Darfur genocide. Put (Libya) surfaced under Gaddafi and again with the 2012 Benghazi attack. He is careful to say his criticism is aimed at these governments and ideologies, not at the people of those nations.
Turkey: Meshech, Tubal, Gomer, and Togarmah
Four of the names on Ezekiel’s list point to modern Turkey. Dr. Woods argues Turkey is following the same trajectory as Iran, moving from a secular state with a Muslim population toward a radical Islamic government. He quotes Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy, who described Turkey as transitioning from a secular democracy into a state governed by a radical Islamic ideology hostile to Western values.
He emphasizes how recent this shift is. Turkey was for many years an ally of both Israel and the United States and a member of NATO, and Israelis once vacationed there. A generation ago the idea of Turkey attacking Israel would have seemed absurd.
He points to several developments as stage-setting: Turkey being denied admission to the European Union (which he says fits the prophecy, since Turkey belongs with the invaders rather than with the Western nations that only lodge a protest), the 2010 flotilla incident in which a Turkish ship tried to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza, the 2016 coup attempt that Erdogan used to consolidate power (which Dr. Woods believes many suspect Erdogan himself engineered, comparing it to the Reichstag fire), and a 2015 statement attributed to a Turkish leader about gathering the Muslim world and marching on Jerusalem.
Russia: Rosh
Dr. Woods returns to Rosh, which he identifies as Russia, recalling the scholar Gesenius, who made that identification in 1842, long before the 1917 communist revolution or Russia’s rise as a nuclear power.
He notes that Russia was once an Orthodox Christian nation, not hostile to the West or to Israel, and that everything changed with the 1917 revolution. He recalls being ridiculed as a college student during the era of glasnost, perestroika, and Gorbachev for doubting that Russia had truly abandoned its ambitions. He argues later events vindicated that skepticism, pointing to Russia’s 2008 move into Georgia, its 2014 actions in Crimea, and Putin’s assertiveness on the world stage.
He also raises a possibility from Ronald Showers: that Russia itself could eventually become Islamicized, since every other nation on Ezekiel’s list already is. He cites figures indicating a dramatic growth in the number of mosques in Russia between 1991 and 2015, and attributes this growth largely to higher birth rates. Students should note that these demographic and political claims are Dr. Woods’s own contested assertions rather than settled fact.
Why the Current Events Come Last
Dr. Woods again defends the structure of the series. He deliberately avoided current events for the first several lessons and did pure exegesis first, so no one could accuse him of reading the headlines back into the Bible. Only now, with the foundation laid, does he compare the text to world events, and he finds the correspondence striking.
The Alliances Forming
Dr. Woods then raises a natural question. If all these nations will invade Israel simultaneously, we should expect to see alliances forming among them, and that is exactly what he sees.
His first example is Russia and Iran. After the Iran-Iraq war, Iran needed weapons and had cash. After the collapse of communism, Russia had weapons but needed cash. That mutual need, he argues, created a natural partnership. He stresses that such an alliance would have been impossible before 1979, when Iran was still an ally of Israel and the United States.