Ezekiel 30:26

This is a separate short prophecy about how incurable the break is that God has already made upon Egypt. That break clearly came when they were defeated at the battle of Carchemish, a blow from which they never recovered. Egypt was again showing activity and energy for the time, and the prophecy forbids any revival of hope because of it. God announces that no bandage would bind up the broken arm to let it hold the sword again. On the contrary, He would break that arm and the other one too, and cause the sword to fall out of Pharaoh's hand.

Had Pharaoh-Necho pushed forward the successes and conquests of Egypt? So much the more humiliating were the reverses that would break the power of Egypt from then on. They hoped for healing or recovery, but in vain: the LORD had put Pharaoh down beyond remedy.

The Lord sets up this Chaldean, this Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, and commits the sword to him. God formally puts power in the earth into his hand — power to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do well.

Here God names the instrument of His vengeance plainly. He had not the smallest sympathy with the most ruthless of the nations and their drawn swords. He had none with the wicked into whose hand He sold the country, none with the strangers who wasted it. But the hour had come to judge Egypt's proud wickedness, and the worst was the fitting one for that dreadful task.

Egypt has been a breaking staff to Israel. It was a staff of reed that offered much but never kept its promises. It brought only ruin to everyone who trusted it. Going down to Egypt for help was the constant snare of God's people. God had delivered them from that land, and in their own deliverance they had seen His judgment on it. Yet again and again they could turn back to it. So for Israel's sake God Himself must break this staff that they leaned on.

It was not only foreign mercenaries who would be scattered among the nations, but the Egyptians themselves. The men of Egypt learned it painfully in their dispersion, and knew that it was the LORD's doing.

"At the end of forty years I will gather the Egyptians from the peoples among whom they were scattered… and there they shall be a lowly kingdom. It shall be the most lowly of the kingdoms, and never again exalt itself above the nations… And it shall never again be the reliance of the house of Israel." How remarkable, and how exactly fulfilled! No human wit could have forecast it.

This series of prophecies begins with the judgment of Jerusalem, the centre of the former system of nations. They are carried out with the object of making them all know the LORD… In general, then, these prophecies show us the LORD's power. They make Him known to all by the judgments He carried out. This was already partly realised in the conquests of Nebuchadnezzar, but it will be fully accomplished later on in favour of Israel.

This knowledge of the LORD comes by the judgment itself. It does not come by any spiritual knowledge of Him that follows… All the nations will know that the LORD is God through judgment.