the Fourth Week after Easter
Click here to join the effort!
Daily Devotionals
Our Daily Homily - Volume 3
Ezekiel 26:21—Though thou be sought for, yet shalt thou never be found again, saith the Lord God.
Tyre, to the world of her age, was what Venice was in the Middle Ages, and London today. She was strong in the sea; the carrying trade of the world was in her hands. Carthage, which was able to conflict with Rome, was her daughter; and the coasts of Cornwall were visited by her merchant vessels. In the days of Ezekiel she was a proud and populous city. But the prophet predicted her approaching fall. Her songs would cease; her walls would be overwhelmed in the floods of armed men; and the rocks on which she stood would be as bare as before a fisherman’s hut was built on them. And as the prophet anticipates the future, he says that her site would be sought in vain; a prediction so literally fulfilled that it is only of late years that careful research has been able to pronounce where Tyre stood.
This chapter seems to underlie the description given in the Apocalypse of the fall of Babylon, when the mighty angel shall take up a stone, like a great mill-stone, and cast it into the sea; when all human voices shall cease from her vast solitudes, and the grinding of the mill-stone shall be for ever silent. So shall perish every false system; all mere traditionalism and ritualism; all that savours of human pride; all the blandishments and impurities of the unfaithful Church, which sought to turn men’s hearts from God.
What a contrast to this are the words of Jeremiah (Jeremiah 50:20): "In those days the iniquity of Israel shall be sought for, and there shall be none; and the sins of Judah, and they shall not be found." Refuse the love of God, and you are doomed; you will leave no enduring record. Trust in Him, and your sins will be blotted out as if they had never been.
