Ezekiel 25:4

Ezekiel 25 has a special character. The nations around Israel, and those living inside its territory, rejoiced to see Jerusalem and the sanctuary destroyed. So God would carry out judgment on them. Ammon, Moab, Edom, and the Philistines are the objects of this prophecy.

They would rejoice at the destruction of Jerusalem and at the setting aside of God's earthly sanctuary. He would let them know that though His earthly people had failed, He still was God. If judgment fell upon His own people because of their sin, His hand would also be upon those who hated the objects of His love.

He stands in marked opposition to the sanctuary and to the land of Israel. But the sanctuary is God's dwelling among men, and so the expression of grace — a grace made known more fully only in later times. In Christ we have had the fullest expression of it. He dwelt among men in a way that told out His delight in them. This is a step which He will never take back... The land of Israel is the portion God in grace has given them. In it He would show the blessedness of those who draw near to Him.

The main question is who the sons of the east are. Some, both Jews and Christians, take them to be the Chaldeans. But Theodoret seems to me more right: he views them as the Ishmaelites. After Nebuchadnezzar overthrew the existing state, they would pitch their tents, tend their flocks and herds, and live their nomad life in the land of the people who had celebrated when Jehovah's sanctuary was profaned, Israel's land left desolate, and Judah carried into captivity. It was a greater blow to become the possession of wandering Bedouins than simply to fall under the towers and strength and skill of the Babylonians.

He also covets the land for himself, as we find in the history of the Judges. Yet he can take possession of nothing. He is only the nomad raider that everything shows him to be. So, as others have noted, we have no cities of the land of Ammon; nothing that shows proper working of the soil or the care of a farmer. Rabbah is his one city... God, in His fitting ways, gives the land of Ammon up to raiders like himself, "the sons of the East." The word for east means what is opposite to you. But it can take on the sense we find in the east wind — what is against you, or hostile. "The sons of the East," such as the Ishmaelites, were men whose hand was against everyone, and everyone's hand against them. Under them Rabbah falls apart, and becomes only a home for camels, "the burden bearers" of the desert.

Heresy, as we know, takes away the portion of God's people, but it is able to do nothing with it. It cannot make the land fruitful in which it is simply a raider, and indeed cannot keep what it may lay hold of.

These prophecies begin with the judgment of Jerusalem, the centre of the former system of nations. God carries them out with the aim of making all these nations know Jehovah... So this knowledge of Jehovah comes by the judgment itself, not by any spiritual knowledge of Him that follows. It will be through judgment that all the nations shall know that Jehovah is God.