Ezekiel 32:24

Two weeks after the laments over Pharaoh, the prophet spoke this funeral song. It is a solemn and deeply moving song over the crowds of Egypt and the pagan nations that have gone into sheol. We look here into sheol and see the nations gathered there, stripped of their glory, in the deepest humiliation and shame. Their bodies are in the pit, the grave, and their souls in sheol, the unseen regions. God's patience with them ran out, and the measure of their wickedness became full. Then judgments swept them off the earth. They passed away and went down into sheol. And what irony there is connected with it! "Whom do you surpass in beauty? Go down and be laid to rest with the uncircumcised." The prophet names Elam, Meshech, Tubal, Edom, the princes of the North, and the Zidonians as still existing there. Once great powers, but now cut off, they lie with the uncircumcised in weakness and disgrace.

These are solemn words. Behind them stands the undeniable truth that the human race goes on existing, consciously and for ever. But only the New Testament Scriptures give full light on the state to come.

Pharaoh would be consoled by seeing all the great ones of the earth overthrown like himself. They had already fallen like the uncircumcised — that is, like people God did not own, and so did not uphold. All of them must give way to this new power in the hands of Nebuchadnezzar. What marked Egypt out was the pride of human nature, which follows its own will and acknowledges no God.

Here is the judgment that sweeps the earth clean after long patience and sends the boastful down to the pit. There lie the finest of them, without a sign of any relationship to God, "with the uncircumcised." Assyria, Elam, Meshech and Tubal, Edom, Zidon and other nations north of Palestine lie there in utter weakness and humiliation. They are ashamed of the might they were once so proud of. They carry their disgrace down with those who go into the pit. The Lord's terror lasts, and it lasts most for those who most inflicted terror here with the sword.

This is a judgment, as we see, not of single people but of nations. It is the judgment of the whole world, as far as the world had yet come into the light of revelation — the circumcised along with the uncircumcised. Egypt was an outwardly circumcised people, but for her the sign meant nothing. Now they are all made equal by the one thing that merges every distinction: the common weakness and shadow of death. This funeral song never changes; it is the same for all of them, and that sameness is part of the lesson. It is meant to impress on us the common blank and desolation where so many energies, so many kinds of human character and activity, all come to one ruin in which nothing can be told apart.

Here mercy rejoices at length against judgment. The portion of Elam did not interfere, like Philistia, Damascus or Hazor, with the due development reserved for Israel in the latter day; and God will show His goodness on behalf of Elam when the kingdom comes.