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Ezekiel 39 — The battle ends, the bones get buried, and God promises he's done hiding
10 min read
fresh.bible editorialChapter 38 opened with a terrifying vision — a massive coalition of nations, led by a figure called , sweeping down from the northto overwhelm . It looked like the end of everything. But God made it clear: he was the one drawing them in. This was never an accident. It was a setup.
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Now gets the rest of the picture. And it's staggering. Not just the defeat of an army, but the aftermath — years of cleanup, a that flips the imagery of on its head, and a so tender it almost doesn't seem like the same God speaking. But it is. That's the whole point.
God told to prophesy directly against — again. Not as a warning this time. As a verdict. The tone here is absolute. There's no negotiation, no "if you ." This is already decided:
"This is what the Lord God says: I am against you, Gog, chief prince of Meshech and Tubal. I will turn you around, drive you forward, and bring you up from the farthest reaches of the north against the mountains of Israel. Then I will knock the bow from your left hand and make the arrows fall from your right.
You will fall on the mountains of Israel — you, all your armies, and every nation that came with you. I will give you to the birds of prey and the wild animals to be devoured. You will fall in the open field. I have spoken, declares the Lord God.
I will send fire on Magog and on those who live safely along the coastlands. And they will know that I am the Lord.
I will make my holy name known among my people Israel. I will not let my holy name be dishonored anymore. The nations will know that I am the Lord, the Holy One in Israel. It is coming. It will happen. That is the day I have spoken about."
The detail about the bow being knocked from his hand and the arrows falling — that's not just military language. It's humiliation. This coalition came with the full force of human power, and God disarmed them the way you'd take a toy from a child. The weapons didn't just fail — they were removed. There's a difference between losing a battle and having your ability to fight taken away entirely. That's what happened here.
And then that declaration: "I will not let my holy name be dishonored anymore." God's reputation had been dragged through the mud by , by the nations thinking God was too weak to protect them. This moment was God setting the record straight — for everyone.
The aftermath paints a picture that's hard to get your head around. The scale of the defeated army was so massive that the debris alone would reshape daily life:
"Then those living in Israel's cities will go out and build fires with the weapons — shields, armor, bows, arrows, clubs, spears. They will burn them for fuel for seven years. They won't need to gather wood from the fields or cut trees from the forests because the weapons will be their fuel.
They will take the plunder of those who plundered them. They will strip the spoil from those who stripped them, declares the Lord God."
Seven years. That number is meant to stop you. The amount of weaponry left behind was so enormous that it supplied an entire nation's fuel needs for the better part of a decade. Think about what that says about the size of the force that came against — and how completely it was destroyed. The tools built to annihilate God's people ended up warming their homes. There's a quiet irony in that.
But it wasn't just weapons left behind. There were bodies. And here the vision gets deeply sobering. God doesn't skip over the cost. He walks through the cleanup:
"On that day I will give Gog a burial place in Israel — the Valley of the Travelers, east of the sea. The mass of the dead will block the road. Gog and all his hordes will be buried there, and it will be called the Valley of Hamon-gog.
For seven months the house of Israel will be burying them, to cleanse the land. All the people of the land will participate in the burial, and it will bring them honor on the day I reveal my glory, declares the Lord God.
They will appoint teams to travel through the land continuously, burying any remains left on the surface to purify it. After seven months, they will do a final search. Whenever anyone traveling through the land spots a human bone, they will set up a marker beside it until the burial teams come and inter it in the Valley of Hamon-gog. (There will even be a city there called Hamonah.) That is how they will cleanse the land."
Seven months of burying the dead. Professional teams assigned to sweep the countryside. Marker systems for stray bones. This level of detail isn't accidental. In Israelite thought, contact with the dead made the land — ritually impure. The thoroughness of this process shows how seriously God takes . The victory wasn't complete at the battle. It was complete when the land was pure again.
There's something in this for us too. Winning isn't always the dramatic moment. Sometimes it's the slow, unglamorous work of cleaning up the mess that the battle left behind. That work matters just as much.
This next section is one of the most intense images in all of . And it's supposed to be. God told to issue an invitation — but the guests weren't human:
"Son of man, this is what the Lord God says: Call out to every kind of bird and every wild animal — 'Gather together. Come from every direction to the great sacrificial feast I am preparing for you on the mountains of Israel. You will eat flesh and drink blood.
You will eat the flesh of warriors and drink the blood of the princes of the earth — as if they were rams, lambs, goats, and bulls, all of them fattened livestock from Bashan.
You will gorge on fat and drink blood until you are full and drunk at the sacrificial feast I am preparing. At my table you will be filled with horses, charioteers, mighty soldiers, and warriors of every kind,' declares the Lord God."
This is disturbing. It's meant to be. God took the language of — the sacred imagery of the — and applied it to the slaughter of his enemies. The mighty warriors who thought they were coming to on became the feast themselves. The princes of the earth, reduced to carrion.
It's a complete inversion of power. The armies that seemed unstoppable are now food for birds. Everything they trusted — their horses, their chariots, their military might — was laid out on God's table. If that image makes you uncomfortable, it should. isn't comfortable. But for people who had been crushed, conquered, and exiled by exactly these kinds of powers? This was vindication.
Now the tone shifts. God pulled back to explain the bigger story — and this part is more painful than the battle itself:
"I will display my glory among the nations. Every nation will see the judgment I have carried out and the power I have brought to bear.
From that day forward, the house of Israel will know that I am the Lord their God.
And the nations will understand something too — that Israel went into captivity because of their own sin. They were so unfaithful to me that I hid my face from them. I handed them over to their enemies, and they fell by the sword. I dealt with them according to their uncleanness and their rebellion, and I turned away."
Let that sit for a moment. The — the worst thing that had ever happened to God's people — wasn't because God was weak. It wasn't because the were stronger. It was because had been so persistently unfaithful that God stepped back and let the consequences come.
And the nations had been watching the whole time, drawing their own conclusions. "Their God couldn't protect them." "Their God must not be real." This moment — the defeat of , the display of power — was God correcting every wrong conclusion. Both and the nations needed to understand the full story: the exile was , not abandonment.
And then — after all the devastation, all the imagery of and and carrion — God's voice changed completely. The same God who just described a battlefield now spoke with the tenderness of a bringing his children home:
"Therefore this is what the Lord God says: Now I will restore the fortunes of Jacob and have mercy on the whole house of Israel. I will be fiercely protective of my holy name.
They will forget their shame and all the ways they betrayed me — when they are living safely in their own land with no one to threaten them. When I have gathered them back from enemy nations and proved my holiness through them for all the world to see.
Then they will know that I am the Lord their God — because I was the one who sent them into exile among the nations, and I was the one who brought them home. I will not leave a single one of them scattered anymore.
And I will never hide my face from them again — because I will pour out my Spirit on the house of Israel," declares the Lord God.
Read those last two lines again. After an entire chapter of armies and fire and bones — this is where it lands. God pouring out his . Not hiding anymore.
The whole arc of has been building to this. God's people broke the . God disciplined them through . The nations misread it. came to exploit what looked like weakness. And God used all of it — every devastating chapter — to get to this moment: full , permanent presence, his Spirit poured out on his people.
That phrase — "I will never hide my face from them again" — is maybe the most hopeful sentence in the entire book. Because God hiding his face is what made the exile so devastating. Not the loss of land or or political power. The loss of his presence. And here, at the end of the Gog oracle, God promised that chapter is over. Permanently. Whatever you've walked through — whatever silence, whatever distance — this is the promise: he's not hiding anymore.