Ezekiel 28:8

He claimed to be God; now he would learn what it is to be a man in weakness. The sword of the terrible stranger would stain his brightness. He would die the deaths of those killed in the heart of the seas. The sea would prove to be no unbreakable shelter, but his most shameful grave. He would die the deaths of the uncircumcised, of men farthest from God.

Shocking 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 plain: "You shall be as God." No doubt the likeness meant was a moral one — "knowing good and evil." Yet it was a place seized, not given by God, and it led on to still more open and extreme seizing of what was not his.

The prince was the head and centre and personification of that pride and wealth found in Tyre as a whole. Nor is there any character of pride baser, more blinding, more corrupting. It lives in selfishness, appeals to selfishness, and is exalted by it in its grossest form. No wonder that the New Testament brands covetousness as idolatry, and describes the love of money as a root of all evil.

Here, after long patience, the judgment sweeps the boastful off the earth and sends them down to the pit. There lie the finest of them, without a single token of relationship to God, "with the uncircumcised." There, in complete weakness and humiliation, lie Assyria, Elam, Meshech and Tubal, Edom, Sidon and other nations north of Palestine. They are ashamed of the might they were once so proud of. They bear their disgrace with all who go down to the pit.

Zechariah, the great prophet after the exile, had already announced the fate of Tyre once more. This was before Alexander came on his mission from God to make an end of the proud and wicked city. "Tyre built herself a stronghold," said the Lord through Zechariah, "and heaped up silver like dust, and fine gold like the mud of the streets." This came after Nebuchadnezzar had destroyed the Tyre on the mainland, and she had become the great island city. Zechariah went on: "See, the Lord will cast her out. He will strike down her power in the sea, and fire will devour her." Alexander did this. He laid proud Tyre in ashes. What evidence that all these words are divine!

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 foreshadowing of the final Antichrist, the man of sin. Behind the wicked prince and king stands another power: Satan.