Ezekiel 39:9

Burn them with fire seven years. This section of the prophecy will clearly not have a literal fulfillment in connection with the second coming of Christ and the millennium. According to the principle outlined in comments on ch. 38:1, history would have taken a vastly different course if Israel had permitted God to work out His designs with respect to them. In the natural course of events the restored and prosperous nation would become the target of attack from envious heathen nations that refused to accept Israel’s message of the true God. In such a war as here described, God would protect His people by giving them overwhelming victory. This prophetic description of the great conflict would doubtless have been as literally fulfilled as the promises of a national restoration and world mission for the returned exiles of Israel. The question may be asked, Why, then, will not these things come to pass now that there is once more a national state of Israel in Palestine in modern times? The answer is that in the meantime the Jews, upon their rejection of Jesus, were rejected of God as a nation, and the promises have for two thousand years belonged to the Christian church, to be fulfilled in a spiritual sense for spiritual Israel (see pp. 35, 36).