Study Desk

The prince who is ruling them will shoulder his pack in the dark and escape through a hole that they dig for him in the wall. He will cover his eyes and not see where he is going.

I will scatter in every direction all the members of his court and his advisers and bodyguards, and people will search for them to kill them.

"Ask these rebels if they know what the parable means. Tell them that the king of Babylonia came to Jerusalem and took the king and his officials back with him to Babylonia.

"As surely as I am the living God," says the Sovereign Lord , "this king will die in Babylonia because he broke his oath and the treaty he had made with the king of Babylonia, who put him on the throne.

He broke his oath and the treaty he had made. He did all these things, and now he will not escape."

His best soldiers will be killed in battle, and the survivors will be scattered in every direction. Then you will know that I, the Lord , have spoken."

and lends money for profit. Will he live? No, he will not. He has done all these disgusting things, and so he will die. He will be to blame for his own death.

"Now suppose this second man has a son. He sees all the sins his father practiced, but does not follow his example.

He refuses to do evil and doesn't lend money for profit. He keeps my laws and obeys my commands. He will not die because of his father's sins, but he will certainly live.

His father, on the other hand, cheated and robbed and always did evil to everyone. And so he died because of the sins he himself had committed.

"But you ask, ‘Why shouldn't the son suffer because of his father's sins?' The answer is that the son did what was right and good. He kept my laws and followed them carefully, and so he will certainly live.

It is the one who sins who will die. A son is not to suffer because of his father's sins, nor a father because of the sins of his son. Good people will be rewarded for doing good, and evil people will suffer for the evil they do.

All his sins will be forgiven, and he will live, because he did what is right.

"But if a righteous person stops doing good and starts doing all the evil, disgusting things that evil people do, will he go on living? No! None of the good he did will be remembered. He will die because of his unfaithfulness and his sins.

When someone evil stops sinning and does what is right and good, he saves his life.

They put him in a cage and took him to the king of Babylonia. They kept him under guard, so that his roar would never be heard again on the hills of Israel.

"Mortal man," he said, "mark out two roads by which the king of Babylonia can come with his sword. Both of them are to start in the same country. Put up a signpost where the roads fork.

The king of Babylonia stands by the signpost at the fork of the road. To discover which way to go, he shakes the arrows; he consults his idols; he examines the liver of a sacrificed animal.

Now! His right hand holds the arrow marked ‘Jerusalem'! It tells him to go and set up battering rams, to shout the battle cry, to place battering rams against the gates, to throw up earthworks, and to dig trenches.

"Mortal man," he said, "King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylonia launched an attack on Tyre. He made his soldiers carry such heavy loads that their heads were rubbed bald and their shoulders were worn raw, but neither the king nor his army got anything for all their trouble.