In the Word

Pastor Mike Warren: Chapter 26 of Ezekiel is where we will pick up tonight. We are in an interesting section. I am hoping to get to two chapters tonight. We will see how it goes because some of it is going to be repetitive. Just make note of the fact that as we are going through Chapter 26, as God is dealing with Tyre or Tyrus as it is mentioned in the Old Testament, it is the city 12 miles above the Israeli border up into Lebanon.

It was an interesting city because part of it was on the mainland and the rest of that city was actually situated a half mile off of the mainland out into the sea, about 21,000 acres, a mile and a half square. It was considered to be impenetrable. We are going to see tonight that many nations tried and only a few succeeded. If you get your pen out before we pray, Tyre is a type of Babylon the Great, the spiritual wickedness of the last days and the material wickedness of the last days that God is going to judge. I think it also reflects what is happening in America right now.

These things are applicable to us as we look through them. God's word is eternal and it always has application. Let's pray and we will dive in. Father, we thank you tonight for your word. We are living in some interesting times and as we study the prophets, especially Ezekiel and Jeremiah, Isaiah 100 years earlier, and Daniel, we understand that a nation that once knew you, once was born of you, that were called your special people turned their backs on you and you had to discipline them.

When I am reading through these things I cannot help but think that this great nation that was founded on godly principles has turned its back on you. As you are correcting your people as we saw last week, you judge those who mock that correction, the wicked. We are going to get a good dose of that again tonight. Give us ears to hear. We are here studying your word. We have all had a long day and we just need for your anointing to be upon our minds that we could hear not just with our physical ears but with our spiritual ears. Lord, those things that you minister to us tonight through your word, give permanency to those things. We pray these things in Jesus' name.

Now as we have told you before, when we came to Chapter 25, we are in a different section. From Chapter 12 to Chapter 24, it is God giving reasons to his people as to why it is necessary for him to correct them. God always corrects his people; he does not punish his people. If you are being corrected right now because you have allowed something into your life that should not be there or you are being disobedient in some other area of your life that God's trying to direct you in, you and I can expect that he is going to correct us because we are his children and he loves us.

How many have had a little correction along the way? How many have felt like a pinball that once you were launched out in your salvation, you have those flappers that are slapping you and you are going from this side to that side? One of these days you are going to get to the place that God wants you to be. God corrects his people as we saw last week, but here is the thing that is so important to understand: while he is correcting us, if the enemy takes advantage of that in any way to get an advantage over us, God says, "I will destroy you."

Isn't that comforting? Even when we are being disciplined, God protects us. He even protects us from the wicked one, he protects us from our enemies, he protects us from accusations, he protects us from all of that stuff because we are his special people. Even in a time of correction, we are his special people because the gifts and callings of God are irrevocable. We saw that as we came out of Chapter 24 into Chapter 25 last week.

As we are coming through these chapters now, there are seven nations that God says he is going to judge because every one of these nations have taken advantage of God's people and have abused God's people during a time when God was seeking to correct his people. He was not trying to destroy them or punish them, but to correct them. They saw them in their broken and weakened state and saw an opportunity to take advantage of Israel and of Judah. God says because of that, "I am going to destroy you."

Let me give you the background so you understand the time of where we are at. In 605 BC, when Nebuchadnezzar, who God says is his servant, sets siege to Jerusalem. The Lord calls him a king of kings. He says he is my sword, he is my instrument that I am going to use to correct my people. When he was coming back from the battle of Pharaoh Necho there in Carchemish where he defeated Pharaoh, he set siege to Jerusalem. Isaiah warned them that God was going to correct them. Jeremiah was there warning, Ezekiel was there warning, and Daniel was there. Because they would not listen, the city was given over to Nebuchadnezzar and he set up a vassal king.

He gets word back in Babylon that his father Nabopolassar is sick, so he hurries back and while he is there they rebel again against the hand of the Lord through Nebuchadnezzar on Jerusalem. He comes back again in 597 and this time he literally takes all of the priests, he takes away the lineage of the kings, he takes away all of the instruments of worship that are up in the temple and he hauls them all back. Ezekiel goes in this. Daniel goes in the first exile, Ezekiel goes in the second and they still rebel and they are not submitting to God's correction.

Now in 588 BC, which is the timeframe we are in right now, Nebuchadnezzar goes and he has besieged the city. What we are reading right now was probably written about that time. I find it very interesting as we go through this section, it is written with tenses as though it has already happened. He is going to walk us through hundreds of years of history as we look at him judging these nations and he writes in terms that it has already happened.

Scholarship has struggled with this and some have even suggested that maybe Ezekiel was written at a different time, just like they did Daniel. They said there is no way Daniel could have been written at the time that the Bible purports that it was written because the accuracy of the prophecies is just too incredible. It must have been written at a later date. What we need to understand as students of the word is that God lives outside of time; he is transcendent. He is eternal. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. He is the "I am," which means he lives outside of time in the eternal. He can call those things that are not, the Bible says, as though they already were.

When we walk through this section he is going to talk about it like this has already happened and it is yet future. This is happening about 588. In 586 Nebuchadnezzar will break through the walls and this time he will burn Jerusalem to the ground. We have a witness of that. If you go to the old city of Jerusalem today, you will see there when they are excavating that there are two charred black lines. The first was when Nebuchadnezzar burned it to the ground and the second is when Titus Vespasian rode in and scattered God's people to the wind for 2,000 years and again sacked the temple and it was burned to the ground.

We have testimony as to God's correction of his people. A few of us got a few black lines in our timeframe too where God had to smoke us and burn us to the ground to get our attention and then rebuild us because he is a God of restoration. As we come to this, make note of the fact that he has already dealt with the Ammonites in Chapter 25. He has dealt with the Moabites, the Edomites, the Philistines.

Now as we come to Tyre, we are going to be there for a while for a number of chapters as he deals with this city. It is the capital city of the Phoenicians. What you need to know about the Phoenicians is that they were a seafaring people. They dominated the seas at this time. There was no greater navy in the world at this time than the Phoenicians. Later on even Alexander the Great feared the Phoenicians. That is why he laid siege to this city to destroy it because his fear was as he is conquering by land, the Phoenicians could bring in their warriors through the sea and countermand what he was doing.

The Phoenicians were feared as a seafaring people and they were the people that had the greatest trade of any people in the world at this time. They were the hub of commerce. Babylon the Great will be the hub of material commerce at the end times, but it will also be the dispenser of every wicked and foul thing. I would suggest to you tonight that America has been the hub of commerce. The economy of the world is based on the dollar.

The reason why the World Trade Centers in New York were called the World Trade Centers is because all trade flows through it. As we get into Chapter 27, we are going to see as that nation of Tyre became opulent, as Babylon becomes opulent and rebellious and prideful just like America, God says he is going to judge it. I personally believe God is judging this nation. He is not judging his people in this nation. When God sought to judge Egypt, which is a type of the world, and Pharaoh, which was a type of Satan, he protected his people. When those 10 plagues came through Moses, who was a type of Christ, upon Egypt, none of those plagues reached over into the land of Goshen.

It tells us there as God is judging, when the disease came to the cattle and they were dying in Egypt, the cattle in the land of Goshen were multiplying. None of the blood in the fountains and the pots and in the rivers flowed over into the land of Goshen. When darkness was so dark that they gnawed at their tongues because of the darkness, none of that was in the land of Goshen.

When I am telling you God is judging America, how can he not for the millions of babies that are being aborted? How can he not judge the absolute debauchery from the top to the bottom that is going on in this nation? The homosexual agenda, the attack on the nuclear family and marriage, every foul and wicked thing. In the midst of this, God says of us, "If my people called by my name would humble themselves and pray."

I have had people ask me why we are not seeing more miracles. Are you humble? Are you praying? Are you seeking his face and not just his hand? Are you as God's people turning from your wicked ways? God puts a criteria on him hearing from his people. As we read in 1 Peter Chapter 4, judgment must first begin at the house of God. If it begins there where God is correcting his people, what will the end of it be? I think God is correcting the church in these last days. I think he is bringing us to our senses. He is looking for a people who will stand in the hedge and make up the gap.

Remember back in Isaiah, when Isaiah saw the Lord high and lifted up and he saw his glory fill the temple? He looked at himself and he realized he was undone. Then he hears a conversation between God the Father and God the Son: "Who will go for us and whom can we send?" Isaiah says, "Send me." When he said that, God allowed an angel to take a coal from the altar and touch his lips because his confession was that he would go, but he dwelt amongst the people of unclean lips and he had unclean lips.

He needed something from outside of him to touch him. When it touched him, then he went. God's people need again to be baptized in the spirit. They need to cry out in humility and brokenness before the true and living God, and if they will do that then God from heaven will hear. The problem of the world today is the church. We were called to be the salt that keep the putrefaction of this world from happening. We were called to be light.

As with the prophets and as with the priests, so went the people. You look in the New Testament, as have gone the pastors with all this woke agenda promoting and supporting Black Lives Matter, entertaining goats instead of feeding sheep, turning their sanctuaries into nightclubs and compromising the truth of God's word to draw a crowd. As have gone the pastors and the pulpit, so have gone the people. When salt loses its savor and its saltiness, it becomes of no effect only to be tossed out and trampled under the feet of men. May God raise up the Isaiahs of our day, the Jeremiahs, the Ezekiels, and the Daniels that won't bow.

Like the three Hebrew children, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, we are not bowing. Heat the furnace up and do what you have to do, but we are not bowing. They could not bow because they had already bowed. This is the scene before us as God is judging the nations roundabout. Now he turns his attention to Tyre. When Nebuchadnezzar is done with Jerusalem as it falls in 586, he will turn his attention toward Tyre. He will deal with the Amorites and the Moabites and the Edomites and the Philistines on his way to Tyre, but Tyre is going to be the main focus. He will besiege this city for 12 years and never penetrate all the way through.

He will never get to the island part of it. Because he does what God tells him to do and he never reaps the spoil of it because they move all of the riches from the mainland to this island, in Chapter 29 God says to Nebuchadnezzar, "Because you put all that effort in that I sent you to judge Tyre and you reap no reward of it, I am going to give you Egypt." He is going to turn his focus from there to Egypt and then the Assyrians will be conquered as God is using Nebuchadnezzar as his sword.

Let's dive into verse 1 of Chapter 26: "And it came to pass in the eleventh year, in the first day of the month, that the word of the Lord came unto me saying, Son of man, because Tyre hath said against Jerusalem, Aha!" All of these people are saying "Aha!" and it is like a "neener neener neener" because you thought you were better than everyone and now you are being judged by God. They are seeking to take advantage of it and we are going to see this right in the opening verses.

Tyre, the capital of the Phoenicians, that island city along with the shoreline part of it, were just 12 miles above what we would call modern-day Lebanon, just above the border of Israel. Anytime they did their trade upon land because their trade route would have to pass through Israel, which was the gateway to the south, to Egypt, and toward Moab and Ammon, they were taxed. There was tariff laid upon them.

If you bring your goods from Tyre and you pass through the land of Israel, we are going to tax you. The gates is where the taxes were collected. "She is broken that was the gates of the people. She is turned unto me. I shall replenish now that what she had laid waste." I am going to regain those taxes that I had to pay her. I am getting my money back. There is greed involved with Tyre taking advantage of God's people.

It seems to me all of our foreign policy today by this current administration against Israel and against the Middle East is based on greed. I cannot prove it and I am not political, but I think our country is the one who took out the pipeline. I think it is because of greed, because now we are going to profit from that. Why would Russia take out its own natural gas pipeline? They have the valves and they can just shut it. They do not have to destroy it. That is their wealth and that is how they are prospering.

What country has the capacity and the technology to do that and what country benefits from that? It will come out and it is because of greed. This is a greedy nation. They are going to laugh at Israel because no longer will Israel be able to tax them as they pass through their country and it is because of materialism. "Therefore thus saith the Lord God: Behold, I am against thee, O Tyrus, and I will cause many nations to come up against thee as the sea causes the waves to come up."

This is an interesting prophecy. There are seven prophecies that I can point to as we go through this chapter that God fulfilled. Nebuchadnezzar has laid siege to Tyre. He will be there twelve, almost thirteen years, and he will actually be the first that lays siege to this city. It is going to be like waves, one right after another as God is prophesying. In 525 BC, the Persians came to conquer Tyre and then...