Lining Up the Verses About the End

Every view of the end uses the same verses and puts them in a different order. This page does not start with a view. It starts with the verses, one row each, quoted whole, with what comes before and after each one in its own book and the words it uses about time. The rows that the modern arrangement builds on are here too, with a note on how it uses them, so that nothing is left out that a reader might expect to find. Read down the tables first. The three ways the church has arranged the rows come after it, in the arrangers’ own words. Where this site lands is last, and held loosely.

Two rules for reading it. First, the words about time are the passage’s own: “in the latter days,” “immediately after,” “when the thousand years are expired,” “this generation.” Second, the columns for before and after are the plain order of each book, not a claim about history. A prophet can put two events side by side that are far apart in time, and often does; the table shows the order on the page so you can see where a view has to say so.

1. The verses, in the order of the books

2. The same scene in two or three books

Revelation does not invent its pictures. Almost every scene in it is a prophet’s scene quoted back, and the Gospels and letters stand between them. This table puts the same scene side by side so you can see it without being told.

3. The four kingdoms, four ways

Daniel saw the same four kingdoms three times, as a statue, as beasts from the sea, and as a ram and a goat, and he named the first three himself: Babylon (2:38), Media and Persia (8:20), Greece (8:21). John’s beast from the sea is built out of Daniel’s beasts. The church from the beginning read the fourth as Rome, and so does this site; the Daniel and Revelation page says how firmly. Here they are side by side. Note the one place a modern reading has to open a gap of two thousand years, between the legs of iron and the feet of iron and clay; the text runs straight through.

4. What the tables show before anyone explains them

One return, described the same way every time. Acts 1:11, 1 Thessalonians 4:16, 2 Thessalonians 1:7, Matthew 24:30, Revelation 1:7: He comes visibly, in the clouds, with a shout and a trumpet, and every eye sees Him. No passage describes a quiet coming and a loud one. The catching up in 1 Thessalonians 4 and the coming in flaming fire in 2 Thessalonians 1 are in letters to the same church, months apart, and both are “the day of the Lord.”

One resurrection hour for everyone, in the plainest verses. John 5:28-29 and Daniel 12:2 raise the good and the evil together, at one hour. 1 Corinthians 15:23-24 gives an order, Christ first, then His people at His coming, then “the end,” and puts nothing between the coming and the end except the handing over of the kingdom. Revelation 20:4-6 is the only passage that speaks of a “first resurrection” with a gap after it. Every view has to decide whether that one passage rules the plain ones or is read by them.

One last gathering of all nations, then one act of God, then the everlasting state. Joel 3, Zechariah 14, Isaiah 66, Revelation 16, Revelation 19 and Revelation 20 each end the same way: all nations gathered, God intervenes once, and what follows is for ever. The second table shows Revelation 19 using Ezekiel 39’s supper of the birds and Revelation 20 using Ezekiel 38’s names. No prophet describes two final wars. Whether Revelation 19 and 20 are one battle told twice, or two battles a thousand years apart, is the single biggest fork in the table, and it is decided by how you read the thousand years.

Ezekiel’s Gog comes against a people already at peace. Ezekiel 38:8, 11 and 14 say it three times: brought back from the sword, dwelling safely, without walls. Whatever the thousand years are, Gog comes at the end of a long peace, not at the start of a war. That is the one thing the text fixes about his timing.

The fulness of the Gentiles and the falling away name the same stretch. Romans 11:25 puts Israel’s blindness “until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in”; Luke 21:24 has Jerusalem trodden down “until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled”; 2 Thessalonians 2:3 has “a falling away first.” All three describe the last part of the church age. Where a view puts the return, it puts these three just before it.

“This generation.” Matthew 24:34 and Luke 21:20 tie the desolation of Jerusalem to the people Jesus was speaking to, and it came in the year 70. Gill: “it respects that present age, or generation of men then living in it; and the sense is, that all the men of that age should not die, but some should live till all these things were fulfilled.” Barnes: “The destruction of Jerusalem took place about forty years after this was spoken.” Then verse 36, “of that day and hour knoweth no man,” turns to a day nobody can date. Every view has to say where in Matthew 24 the year 70 stops and the end begins; the site’s answer is on the Olivet discourse.

5. The three ways the rows have been arranged

The thousand years are now. Christ reigns from His resurrection; Satan is bound in the sense that he can no longer keep the nations from the gospel (Revelation 20:3, Matthew 12:29); the “first resurrection” is the believer’s share in Christ’s life now; the return, the one resurrection and the one judgment come together at the end. On this arrangement Revelation 16, 19 and 20 are one battle seen three times, and Ezekiel’s Gog is the last assault on the people of God, the same event. This is Augustine’s reading and the historic reading of the Catholic, Orthodox and most Reformed churches. Matthew Henry states it in a sentence: “Those who suffer with Christ, shall reign with him in his spiritual and heavenly kingdom, in conformity to him in his wisdom, righteousness, and holiness: this is called the first resurrection.”

The thousand years come after the return. Revelation 19 is the return; 20:4-6 is a bodily resurrection of the saints; Christ reigns on earth a thousand years; then Satan is loosed and Gog and Magog is a second, last revolt; then the general resurrection and judgment. This is the view of Justin, Irenaeus and most of the second-century church, and of many careful modern readers. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown argue it from the word “souls”: “This term is made a plea for denying the literality of the first resurrection, as if the resurrection were the spiritual one of the souls of believers in this life… But ‘souls’ expresses their disembodied state (compare Rev 6:9) as John saw them at first.” On this arrangement, Ezekiel 38-39 is usually placed with Revelation 20, after the reign.

Two Gog wars, one of them soon. The modern dispensational arrangement adds a separate catching up before a seven-year tribulation, reads Daniel’s seventieth week as that tribulation, and reads Ezekiel 38-39 as a war before or during it, fought by named modern nations, with Revelation 20’s Gog a second war a thousand years later. This arrangement is less than two hundred years old. It needs Ezekiel’s “Rosh” to be Russia (Barnes: “Rosh, if a proper name, occurs in this connection only”), and it needs two final wars where the prophets describe one. The site’s pages on Armageddon, Antichrist and Dispensationalism take it up in full.

6. Gog and Magog, and the men who dated him

Who Gog is has been argued for two thousand years, and the honest thing is to show the argument. Matthew Henry would not join it: “The critical expositors have enough to do here to enquire out Gog and Magog. We cannot pretend either to add to their observations or to determine their controversies. Gog seems to be the king and Magog the kingdom; so that Gog and Magog are like Pharaoh and the Egyptians. Some think they find them afar off, in Scythia, Tartary, and Russia. Others think they find them nearer the land of Israel, in Syria, and Asia the Less.”

The Pulpit Commentary reads the name as a figure: “Gog was probably a title formed by Ezekiel himself from the word Magog, the syllable ma being treated as equivalent to ‘land.’ A similar freedom appears to have been exercised by the author of the Apocalypse, who out of Magog, here a territorial designation, makes a military power co-ordinate with Gog (Revelation 20:8).” Jamieson, Fausset and Brown read it twice, type and antitype: “in the latter years, that is, in the times just before the coming of Messiah, namely, under Antiochus, before His first coming; under Antichrist, before His second coming.”

And John Gill dated him. Writing in the 1750s, Gill read Gog as the Ottoman Turk, the great power of his day, coming against a Jewish people returned to their land:

Gill was a careful man, and this was the obvious reading in his day: the feared northern power, fitted to the prophecy. The Ottoman empire ended in 1922 and the prophecy did not. Ambrose had read Gog as the Goths. Others have read him as Russia. Each time the fit looked plain, and each time it passed. That is why this site quotes Gill whole and does not date Gog. On Revelation 20:8 Gill himself kept the two apart: John’s Gog and Magog are “not the same which are mentioned in Ezekiel 38:1 though there is an allusion to them, and from thence the names are taken, and some of the figures borrowed, and design the enemies of God’s people, who will be in the world at this time.” Barnes reads John’s Gog the same way, as a world-wide deception, not a nation: “It is implied here that the deception or apostasy referred to would not be confined to one spot or portion of the world, but would extend afar.”

7. Where this site lands

The Timeline draws the first arrangement and keeps the second beside it as a cousin that shares the one return. On that line, Revelation 20:7-9 is the last revolt of the church age, just before the return, in the same slot as the fulness of the Gentiles and the falling away; Ezekiel 38-39 is the prophets’ picture of the same last assault, on a people gathered from the nations and at peace under the covenant of Ezekiel 37:26, with the Spirit poured out (39:29) and the temple read as the church (40-48). Read that way, the table has one return, one resurrection hour, one last gathering, and one judgment, and every row keeps its own words about time.

Held loosely. The second arrangement is older than the first, and men we trust held it. What the site will not do is date Gog, name a modern nation as the beast, or build two final wars where Scripture describes one. Whatever the news is doing, the outcome is not in doubt: “the kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever” (Revelation 11:15).

Scripture in the King James Version, quoted whole in each row. Commentary from public-domain editions held in the site’s database: Gill, Matthew Henry, Barnes, Jamieson-Fausset-Brown, the Pulpit Commentary. Related: Timeline, Armageddon, The Seventy Weeks, The Olivet Discourse, Caught Up to Meet the Lord, The Man of Lawlessness, When John Saw It.