Ezekiel 28-32
I normally try to write something here to engage you, dear reader, instead of boring you to tears right off the bat. Something witty or captivating. But as I was sitting here thinking about how I would tie something into five chapters in Ezekiel dealing with God’s judgement over nations and the shifting of world powers in the ancient Near East, all I kept seeing were maps. Maps that take ancient empires; Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Medo-Persian, Greek, Roman, and overlay them on top of modern borders. For me, it turns sterile history into tomorrow’s front page.
If you overlay those kingdoms through time, you get Egypt (still there) conquering most of Israel and Palestine, Lebanon, Cyprus. Then the Assyrians move in from the Fertile Crescent in Modern Iraq and conquer parts of Turkey, Syria and Jordan. Then come the Babylonians who spread even further into Saudi Arabia. Then the Medo-Persians roll in with Cyrus the Great from Iran al the way into Bulgaria, Armenia, and Turkmenistan. Alexander the Great conquers from Macedonia to Egypt to Afghanistan and clear into India. And if you’re not bored yet you get a gold star and peanut butter gram crackers and orange slices.
All these things in Ezekiel really happened. They happened to real people in real places in real time. People who breathed and laughed and got hangnails and thought about their wives when they travelled for work. It’s easy to just read and gloss over that because we’re so separated from it by time and distance and culture. But as I typed those country names it sunk in that those places are in the news today. My country (not mentioned in the Bible) is sending a whole lot of very powerful ships and planes to the place where Cyrus the Great was born. It’s astonishing. It’s all very real.
I read about God overthrowing the king of Tyre because, “you have made your heart like the heart of God” and God responds, “Will you still say, ‘I am a god’, in the presence of your slayer, though you are a man and not God?” and it saddens me and chills me because God takes this very, very seriously. Tyre had become arrogant, wealthy beyond imagination, prideful of her beauty, corrupted by prosperity, and the Lord would cast them to the ground in judgement and slay them for their blasphemy. “And you will cease to be forever” (28:29). Mercy. It’s heavy. God wants it to feel heavy.
Then Ezekiel spends 4 chapters on Egypt. He will use Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon to bring judgement on the place where He redeemed slaves with His mighty right hand and made them a nation. He calls Pharoah “the great monster that lies in the middle of the river and says, ‘The Nile is mine and I myself have made it’” Because of that, the Lord will bring a sword and break them. In a world power showdown bigger than the WWE, Pharoah Neco (mentioned in Jeremiah 46:2 because, again, all of this really happened), marched north with what remained of the Assyrian army to fight Nebuchadnezzar. The Lord says, “I will make the hordes of Egypt cease by the hand of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon.” In the early summer of 605 BC, the Babylonians defeated the Egyptians at Carchemish and ended nearly 2,000 years of power and dominance. God does what He says. And the Battle of Carchemish is one of the watershed moments in history.
The Lord tells Ezekiel twice that He will put “My sword in his hand”, “Then they will know that I am the Lord when I put My sword into the hand of the king of Babylon” (30:24,25). Whose sword? God’s sword. In whose hand? The king of Babylon. God uses human vessels to exact His judgment upon the earth. And these guys were not saints. The kings of Egypt, Tyre, Assyria, Babylon, they all thought they were God. Add in the Greeks and Romans and on and on it goes. Men do great things and think they are great and God brings them down. Why? “Pride goes before destruction and an arrogant spirit before a fall” says Solomon in Proverbs 16:18. God judges the arrogant hearts of men. And women. But all these are dudes, so, let’s let the ladies have some space.
What is incredible about Ezekiel is that the Lord has already told us, “For I have no pleasure in the death of anyone who dies, so repent and live” (18:32). God does not delight in wielding the sword against the breathtaking arrogance of these nations. Yet God will wield the sword. God will have His way. And no nation or administration or process or philosophy will ever keep Him from bringing about His will. He asks no permission, reads no polls, and does what is Good and Just and Right because He is the one who defines the terms. The only reprieve from judgement is Mercy. That is put-your-big-boy-pants on theology. It’s not fun. It doesn’t give be goose bumps, it gives me chills. The kind that creep up my spine and neck and shoulders and leave me wide eyed and breathless. The kind that come when I am afraid. I do not believe we should be afraid of God. But we should fear Him. We should experience breathless awestruck wonder at His power to wield the sword of judgement over the entire created order. And eventually, if we never fear Him, we will indeed one day be very afraid.
But God weaves something extraordinary into the fabric of these revelations. As the Lord moves the shuttle between the woof and warp of space and time He weaves the tapestry of history with indigo threads of lament. He commands Ezekiel to wail, for the day of doom is near. To cry in anguish as God razes Egypt to the foundations and leaves the glory of the Nile in ruin. Ezekiel writes a song of lament for a pagan king because God takes no pleasure in death and we shouldn’t either. Instead, He instructs the daughters of the nations to chant lamentations over the fallen multitudes of pagans who will go down to death lost in their sin. God commands Ezekiel again, “Wail for the masses of Egypt and bring it down, bring her and the daughters of powerful nations to the nether world.” He’s telling Ezekiel to grieve. To grieve the loss of life, the human calamity, the suffering, the sorrow brought about by God’s inescapable judgement of human sin.
I confess that I do not always view world events with sorrow in my heart. It’s easier to categorize nations into enemies and allies and rejoice when the enemies perish. But God doesn’t do that. If American forces attack Iranian forces, I should grieve, because humans will die, and humans matter to God. The Church, the incomprehensibly beautiful Body of Christ, is growing like wildfire in Iran. Humans are seeing visions and reading Bibles and hearing that Jesus died for their sins and the Spirit is regenerating those dead in their sins and making them alive in Christ. God is doing that because He is still working among the nations. Even the nations where the darkness seems insurmountable, where an evil regime can murder tens of thousands of its own people, in that place the Light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it.
And that should give you chills. The good kind. The kind that reminds us that not only does our Redeemer live, but He is working in the world as this very moment, weaving sunbright threads of hope through indigo lamentations. No matter how dark the day or how hopeless the news, God has not left us. The Gospel sines bright. He is weaving history every day. And no one can keep Him from finishing His work. If that doesn’t engage your heart, I’ve got some maps you should see.
