Ezekiel 28:1

This third message in the series closes the prophecy against Tyre, and adds a short word of judgment against Zidon, its mother city... Each one had its own distinctive points. The first brought out the short-lived pleasure the great trading city took at Jerusalem's fall. The second showed its trade, which drew in everything, suddenly come to nothing while men everywhere looked on in dismay. Here "the prince of Tyre" stands out, and the downfall of his pride that nothing can undo.

It seems that Ithobalus, as Josephus calls him, or Ithbal the second, according to the Phoenician records, ruled in the time of the prophet... He is the typical prince of the world in that day, and later prophecies about the Antichrist, or man of sin still to come, borrow many of the same expressions. The prince was the head, the centre, and the very picture of the pride and wealth found in Tyre as a whole. No kind of pride is lower, more blinding, or more corrupting. It lives on selfishness, appeals to selfishness, and selfishness lifts it up in its crudest form. No wonder the New Testament brands greed as idolatry, and calls the love of money a root of all evil.

Here we have a message addressed to the prince of Tyre. In it we see the effect on him of all the wealth he has gathered, and of the power that comes with it: it lifts his heart to a place more than human... Monstrous as this is, it is still only the natural growth of what happened in the Garden of Eden, when the evil one tempted with the words, "You will be like God." No doubt the likeness offered there was a moral one — "knowing good and evil." Still, it was a place seized, not given by God, and it leads on to seizing more and more openly.

The word to the prince of Tyre is about what he has become in his pride after he is prince. The word to the king is about what he was before he is king — before iniquity was found in him. The prince's wisdom went beyond Daniel's; no secret could be hidden from him. Who was Daniel? The chief of the wise men in Babylon. "No secret" clearly points to his telling Nebuchadnezzar's dream, and reading the writing on the wall at Belshazzar's feast. The prince of Tyre, inspired by Satan, matched and passed Daniel in wisdom, in the world's eyes.

Ezekiel 28 shows the prince and the king of Tyre, both judged for their pride. The prince of this world's glory appears here as a man... There is little doubt that in what follows, in Ezekiel 28:11 to 19, the king of Tyre stands as a picture of Satan — the prince and god of this world. He was a creature of God, and his heart was lifted up. He spoiled his own brightness, fell away from God, and became the enemy of God and man. His advantages were the very thing that led to his fall.

Had the prince of Tyre twisted everything he had learned from living close to Israel? God would teach him that his responsibility matched what should have been his gain, not his pride. So his doom would be harder, surer, and swifter... If he set himself up to be God, he would feel what it is to be a man in weakness, when the sword of the dreaded stranger stained his brightness... The sea would prove no safe fortress for him, but his most shameful grave.