Ezekiel 27:4

This lament soon passes into an allegory. Tyre is addressed personally. Her position is set out vividly, and so is her self-satisfaction. From verse 4 the allegory of a ship is before us. It is a striking fit with the special character of Tyre.

The city of Tyre (the name means rock) was partly built on an island off the mainland in the Mediterranean Sea. It had a wonderful trade, and this twenty-seventh chapter describes all its variety. We read here how Syria, Persia, Egypt, Spain, Greece and every quarter of the ancient world laid their choicest and most precious things at the feet of Tyre, who sat enthroned on ivory, covered with blue and purple, from the isles of Elishah. Her beauty was perfect.

The ship here pictures Tyre for us. It is a very natural figure, and we still use it when we speak of the "ship of state." We think of the power and skill that human effort must put out to make it prosper, to catch favouring winds and avoid shoals and rocks... We may say that man has been working at this ship ever since, doing his best to perfect its beauty. We see how attractive it may be from the displays it keeps giving us of all the products of nature and of man which it brings together. It embodies, as it were, the restless, ever-craving spirit of man, the tireless energy that works in him.

Tyre has a different character, and has a prophecy of its own (Ezekiel 26 – 28). It represents the world and its riches, in contrast with Israel as the people of God. It rejoices, not like the others out of personal hatred, but because its interests were opposite: the destruction of what held back its career gave free course to its natural selfishness.

Satan uses Tyre to display the glory and riches of the world, and so she becomes an instrument against God. Through commerce Satan tries to make the curse ineffective. The earth was to bring forth thorns and thistles, and man was to eat bread by the sweat of his brow. Satan would set that sentence aside by bringing together the different products of the earth, filling the eye and the mind with them. He would hide the thorns by spreading a carpet of Tyre's merchandise over them.

It is all the fruit of a spirit away from God. That spirit searches the earth for whatever it can make gain of, and yet it can give no satisfaction. All of it is bound together like their bales of merchandise. This makes Tyre very glorious for the present — but in the middle of what is the very picture of instability, "in the heart of the seas."

But no fullness from outside, no glory even in the heart of the seas, could resist the word of the Lord. Tyre's day had come... We return to the earlier allegory. Tyre is a ship that goes down at sea. Nebuchadnezzar is the east wind that overturned her.