Ezekiel 32:32

The Spirit of God adds a fresh message in two parts. .. The second is a developed picture of what the previous chapter sketched only briefly. The once mighty monarch and his multitude are now weak and pitiful in the lower parts of the earth, in Sheol like all who had fallen before him. His only comfort is that he and his people share the unavoidable doom of princes and peoples.

Here it is the judgment that sweeps them off the earth after long patience and sends the boastful down to the pit. There lie the fairest, 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 others north of Palestine. They are ashamed of the might they were once so proud of, and they bear their disgrace with those who go down to the pit. The Lord's terror remains, and most of all for those who inflicted the most terror here with the sword.

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. And what irony goes with it! "Whom do you surpass in beauty? Go down and be laid with the uncircumcised." Assyria is named first. She was a cruel, pitiless, destructive power. Now she, who once caused "terror in the land of the living," is helpless, with all her power gone in the unseen world.

This is a judgment, as we see, not of single people but of nations. It is the judgment of the whole world, so far as it had yet come into the light of revelation. It falls on the circumcised together with the uncircumcised. Egypt was outwardly a circumcised people, but the mark meant nothing for them. Now all stand equal in the thing that merges every distinction: the common lifelessness and shadow of death. The dirge never changes, the same for every one of them, and that is part of the lesson it is meant to teach. It is meant to impress us with one blank desolation. So many energies, and so many kinds of human character and activity, all come into one ruin, with nothing left to tell them apart.

Tyre stood for commercial glory. Egypt stood for governmental pride founded on power. God judges both completely, casts them down and destroys them beyond remedy (Ezekiel 26:21; 27:36; 31:18). Compare Ezekiel 32:32. This has been fulfilled to the letter in the mainland Tyre, and the Egypt of the Pharaohs.

Thank God, we are now going to come out into brighter things!... Resurrection is all of God. Here it is plain that man has no ability at all. He is out of the account, so God is free to show Himself as He wishes. Then the grave itself is no obstacle to Him. It becomes instead the means of a brighter display of His divine glory. So among the names here, Egypt herself is to have her resurrection and blessing in the coming day, and Assyria too, as Isaiah testifies.

The Christian feels for people in view of eternity. But, thank God, God has entrusted him with the gospel, the ministry of reconciliation. It rests on the atonement of the One who was once here revealing God in perfect grace, yet men despised and rejected Him.