Three weeks ago we met the young Ezekiel who is called to be a whistleblower and to expose the corruption and degradation of the priests and leaders of those who have been left behind in Jerusalem. Instead of deliverance from Nebuchadnezzar they are going to be overwhelmed by his armies. God has left the Temple and Jerusalem. All that will remain in Jerusalem is what will remain in this world when the Church departs – a world without pity, mercy, justice, hope or pleasure. Only complete delusion. Evil that has been boiling below and ever present in the world will be revealed. What has been hidden will be obvious. In Chapter 16 we looked at the founding story of Israel according to the people and then Ezekiel’s exposure of who they really are and where they came from. Their founders were nothing but white trash and had it not been for God’s compassion they would have died as a tossed out and despised baby in the wilderness. But, this is a story of a God who patiently raises an unwanted infant and is caught up in undying love for that child. It is the story of a discarded baby becoming a woman and then married to the one who rescued her. But, it is also the story of a wife who became a prostitute who will be ridiculed by the very people she ran after. “Then I will deliver you into the hands of your lovers..They will strip you of your clothes and take your fine jewelry and leave you stark naked. They will bring a mob against you who will stone you and hack you to pieces with their swords.”

And then we closed with this from Christopher Wright’s comment on Ezekiel 16 and my personal concern for the evangelical Church in America:

When the people of God woo the world and sell their soul for political power, financial profit, social influence or other temporal gains, the end result historically has always been that, at best, they become pathetic, scorned and treated with contempt, and at worst, the world turns with ferocious destructive power on the church itself. Sometimes such judgment may be purging; at other times, as Jesus warned the churches of Asia Minor, it may be terminal. As far as Old Testament Israel is concerned, we do well to remember Paul’s sobering reminder ‘Now these things occurred as examples to keep us from setting our hearts on evil things as they did… and were written down as warnings for us, on whom the fulfilment of the ages has come. So, if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don’t fall!’ The church, with its long history of unholy alliances with the world in all its forms, has little cause for any sense of superiority over Old Testament Israel.”

This is my concern for the evangelical church today. Have we traded our beauty, splendor and fame for being a prostitute who has gone whoring after power and traded our legacy for an insatiable desire? Have we worshipped the worthless idols of those around us? Will we one day be humiliated by those same lovers we paid and torn to pieces by the mob we helped create?

This morning we are going to look at three chapters that focus on one of the nations other than Israel. Six years after Ezekiel’s first vision the Lord speaks to him again and announces prophecies against Ammon, Moab, Edom, Philistia, Sidon, and Egypt. But it is the Lord’s words against Tyre that I want to turn to this morning in chapters 26-28.

Tyre at the time was one of the most prosperous and powerful cities along the Mediterranean coast. It’s prosperity was not built on military might but on its role as the premier trading nation. Much of its revenue was derived from the purple dye it produced from shellfish. It took an incredible amount of these shellfish to produce a single gram of dye. For example, as many as 12,000 shellfish were used to produce the dye for a single garment. For this reason, owning garments dyed purple was prohibitively expensive for most people. In time. purple came to be a color associated with royalty and just as great cities have “brands” like New York is a center for finance, Los Angeles for entertainment, and Boston for education so Tyre’s brand became the purple dye only they could produce. In fact, the brand was so powerful that only royalty could wear purple and any non-royal caught wearing it was imprisoned or put to death. That’s a brand to die for – so to speak.

It’s a three fold prophecy – against the nation that Tyre represents, against the prince of Tyre and then against the King of Tyre. Let’s look at all three.

What is the sin of the nation of Tyre? First, she has taken advantage of the fall of Jerusalem. In the past, while Tyre and Jerusalem were competitors they were also trading partners. You probably remember that it was King Hiram who sent the cedars of Lebanon for the building of the Temple and their king, Hiram, had been a friend of Solomon’s father, David. But here, many years later, Tyre celebrates the fall of Israel and sees it as an opportunity. I’ve been reading “Titan” by Ron Chernow. It is the biography of John Rockefeller and there never was a better example of an opportunist. In the early days of the oil boom there was virtually no regulation and hundreds of small refineries sprang up. It was chaos and Rockefeller did not like chaos. He recognized that an industry could not grow in chaos. So, he began to buy up refineries to stabilize the markets. Some say he was a typical robber baron taking advantage of competitors but he always claimed that his intentions were only honorable.  He saw the creation of a monopoly – or what he called a cooperative – as a way to save the weak. “The Standard was an angel of mercy, reaching down from the sky, and saying, ‘Get into the ark. Put in your old junk. We’ll take all the risks! It was not a process of destruction and waste; it was a process of upbuilding and conservation of all interests..in our efforts most heroic, well meant – and I would almost say, reverently, Godlike – to pull this broken down industry out of the Slough of Despond. Standard rendered a missionary service to the whole world and it was the salvation of the oil business instead of a disgraceful, gambling, mining scheme.”

Maybe Tyre felt the same way about the void in the trading industry left by the fall of Israel. Maybe they saw themselves as bringing order to chaos and stepping in to save whatever could be salvaged. Maybe so..but apparently God did not. He saw it as their scheming to benefit from the failure of Israel. Instead of acting like a friend as Hiram would have done with David, they became even wealthier at Israel’s expense.

What does God say about that? “I am against you, O Tyre, and I will bring many nations against you, like the sea casting up its waves. They will destroy the walls of Tyre and pull down her towers; I will scrape away the rubble and make her a bare rock. Out in the sea she will become a place to spread fish nets.”

That is exactly what happened 250 years later. Nebuchadnezzar laid siege to the island city for 13 years with no success but in 332 BC Alexander the Great built a causeway from the mainland to the city and destroyed it completely. It was never rebuilt.

“I will make you a bare rock and you will become a place to spread fishnets. You will never be rebuilt, for I the Lord have spoken, declares the Sovereign Lord.”

They never saw it coming.They, like other great civilizations and nations, thought they were too big to fall.

Then, in Chapter 27, we can look in detail about the sins of Tyre.  It was more than simply taking advantage of the misery of Jerusalem. It went much deeper than that.

They had become proud of their wealth and prosperity. Ezekiel compares them to a beautiful ship built by fine craftsmen with expensive materials. Nothing was too good for them. The whole world traded with them and they had no serious competitors. Their ships were everywhere and they built colonies across the Mediterranean.

“When your merchants went out on the seas, you satisfied many nations; with your great wealth and your wares you enriched the kings of the earth.”

But all of that will crumble and they will be, like Israel, humiliated by those they once ruled. “The merchants among the nations hiss at you; you have come to a horrible end and will be no more.”

Then, in Chapter 28, we read even more about the deepest sins of Tyre. These are the sins that corrupt a nation eventually and destroy it from the inside. These are God’s words to the prince of Tyre.

“In the pride of your heart you say, “I am a god; I sit on the throne of a god in the heart of the seas.”

And God says, “By your wisdom and understanding you have gained wealth for yourself and amassed gold and silver in your treasuries. By your great skill in trading you have increased your wealth, and because of your wealth your heart has grown proud.”

It’s a cycle, isn’t it? Many years ago Cotton Mather, one of the Puritan divines, said, “Religion brought forth Prosperity, and the daughter destroyed the mother.“ Others have said much the same. John Wesley preached that “wherever riches have increased, the essence of religion has decreased in the same proportion” and while the disciplines of Methodism had made many rich it had also made them proud and uncaring. “You are not so teachable as you were…you have a much better opinion of your own judgment and are more attached to your own will.” As well, they had lost their concern for the poor: “You once pushed on through – cold or rain, or whatever cross lay in your way, to see the poor, the sick, the distressed. Now, however, do you fear spoiling your silken coat? Are you afraid of catching vermin?

God said to the Israelites when they first came into Canaan: “Be careful that you do not forget the Lord your God, failing to observe his commands, his laws and his decrees that I am giving you this day. Otherwise, when you eat and are satisfied, when you build fine houses and settle down, and when your herds and flocks grow large and your silver and gold increase and all you have is multiplied, then your heart will become proud and you will forget the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You may say to yourself, “My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.” But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth, and so confirms his covenant, which he swore to your ancestors, as it is today.”

But then in verse 11 there is a transition and I would have missed it had it not been for others pointing it out. The preceding 10 verses are directed to the prince or the ruler of Tyre but the following 12 verses are directed to the King or the one who stands behind the prince. This is the true power behind the throne. We know him as the Fallen Angel or Satan, the Son of the Morning, the Deceiver, the Father of Lies. But in this passage we see the Fall not just of a King but of the former model of perfection – the one who was once full of wisdom and perfect in beauty.

You were in Eden,

    the garden of God;

You were anointed as a guardian cherub,

    for so I ordained you.

You were on the holy mount of God;

    you walked among the fiery stones.

You were blameless in your ways

    from the day you were created

    till wickedness was found in you.

Through your widespread trade

    you were filled with violence,

    and you sinned.

So I drove you in disgrace from the mount of God,

    and I expelled you, guardian cherub,

    from among the fiery stones.

Your heart became proud

    on account of your beauty,

and you corrupted your wisdom

    because of your splendor.

So I threw you to the earth;

    I made a spectacle of you before kings.

By your many sins and dishonest trade

    you have desecrated your sanctuaries.

So I made a fire come out from you,

    and it consumed you,

and I reduced you to ashes on the ground

    in the sight of all who were watching.

All the nations who knew you

    are appalled at you;

you have come to a horrible end

    and will be no more.’”

There will be a final destruction of the power lurking behind the thrones of all nations. And the destruction will come from the center of that demonic power. That power contains the seeds of its own destruction but it is fooled by its own power to deceive.  Like Tyre, it will never see it coming.

If you go back to the beginning of creation – the perfect state of the Garden – it says that God was in the midst of them. He was the very center of their lives. If we flip to Luke 17:21 and the answer of Jesus to their question about the nature of the Kingdom he says, “The coming of the kingdom of God is not something that can be observed, nor will people say, ‘Here it is,’ or ‘There it is,’ because the kingdom of God is in your midst.” It’s the same word. The Kingdom of Christ is the very center of your lives. Now, look at the source of the final destruction of those who, like Satan, have turned beauty into horror, perfection into destruction, truth into lies, relationships into violence, integrity into wickedness and wisdom into idolatry. The destroying fire will come from the center.

A fire will come out from you. It’s the same word used for God’s being in the midst of the Garden and the Kingdom being in the midst of the believers. It is a description of whatever is the center of your life. It will be a source of health and strength or death and humiliation. The fire will come out from the center of the heart of Satan – and the center is what Paul says in Romans 1. “For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened…They exchanged the truth of God for a lie..”  They made something other than God the center of their lives.

The most important question we can answer for 2022 is “Where is my center?’ Is it Christ and his glory? Is it the only source of life and health or will it be, eventually, the fire that consumes me? Will it be the truth of God or the great lie? It’s a choice we make every day.