Ezekiel 28:5

The prince of Tyre, who is also called the king, was Ithobalus, according to the Jewish historian Josephus. The Phoenician records call him Ithobaal II. He was the high point of Tyre's pride and wealth; all the terrible pride of the city came to a head in him. His heart was so lifted up that he claimed to be a god and that he occupied the very seat of God. He boasted of greater wisdom than the wisdom of Daniel. He is a picture of the final Antichrist, the man of sin. Behind the wicked prince and king stands another power: Satan.

No kind of pride is baser, more blinding, or more corrupting. It lives in selfishness, appeals to selfishness, and is lifted up by it in its grossest form. No wonder the New Testament brands covetousness as idolatry, and calls the love of money a root of all evil… It is common to all who amass wealth to give themselves credit for wisdom. So did the prince: wiser than Daniel, he discerned what was hidden from others. Alas! what folly and poverty. Was he rich toward God? No — he had amassed riches, and gold and silver had crowded into his treasury. This was the aim of his wisdom, this its triumph, for it was his own doing. Self, not God, was in all his thoughts.

The prince's wisdom went beyond Daniel's; no secret was hidden from him. Who was Daniel? Chief of the wise men in Babylon. The prince of Tyre, inspired by Satan, equalled and surpassed (in the world's estimation) Daniel in wisdom. Here is another mark of the power of the prince of this world. He would not only have Tyre rival Jerusalem in wealth; he would also raise up a man to outrival Daniel, so that he might persuade men that true wisdom was not the gift of God.

We have now an address to the prince of Tyre. In it we see what the piled-up wealth, and the power that came with it, did to him: it lifted his heart to a place higher than human… Monstrous as all this may be, it is still, after all, the natural growth of what happened in the Garden of Eden itself. There the temptation the evil one offered was plainly, "You will be like God." No doubt that was meant as a moral likeness — "knowing good and evil." Still, it was a place he seized, not one God gave him, and it naturally led to even more open and extreme seizing.

Commerce may not be wrong in itself. Still, it opens a wide door to unrighteous ways, and it needs more grace to resist than the open sins of the world… Power and religion may actively stir up ambition and hatred. But trade feeds the covetousness of the heart — secret, and sometimes not even suspected.

The commerce so famous in that city has spread its wing over the cities of our day. They follow in the steps of Tyre, and with the same unrighteousness they await the same doom… The spirit of Mammon rules the age. Under its influence the truth is twisted, and becomes the profession of covetous men who suppose that gain is godliness. From such we turn away.

He put himself forward as God. Now he would feel what it is to be a man in weakness. The sword of the dreaded invader would stain his splendour, and he would die the deaths of those killed in the heart of the seas. It would prove no unbreakable shelter then, but his most shameful grave.