Ezekiel 25

THE WORD OF THE LORD came to me: 2“Son of man, set your face against the Ammonites and prophesy against them. 3Say to them, ‘Hear the word of the Sovereign LORD. This is what the Sovereign LORD says: Because you said “Aha!” over my sanctuary when it was desecrated and over the land of Israel when it was laid waste and over the people of Judah when they went into exile, 4therefore I am going to give you to the people of the East as a possession. They will set up their camps and pitch their tents among you; they will eat your fruit and drink your milk. 5I will turn Rabbah into a pasture for camels and Ammon into a resting place for sheep. Then you will know that I am the LORD. 6For this is what the Sovereign LORD says: Because you have clapped your hands and stamped your feet, rejoicing with all the malice of your heart against the land of Israel, 7therefore I will stretch out my hand against you and give you as plunder to the nations. I will cut you off from the nations and exterminate you from the countries. I will destroy you, and you will know that I am the LORD.’ ”

8“This is what the Sovereign LORD says: ‘Because Moab and Seir said, “Look, the house of Judah has become like all the other nations,” 9therefore I will expose the flank of Moab, beginning at its frontier towns—Beth Jeshimoth, Baal Meon and Kiriathaim—the glory of that land. 10I will give Moab along with the Ammonites to the people of the East as a possession, so that the Ammonites will not be remembered among the nations; 11and I will inflict punishment on Moab. Then they will know that I am the LORD.’ ”

12“This is what the Sovereign LORD says: ‘Because Edom took revenge on the house of Judah and became very guilty by doing so, 13therefore this is what the Sovereign LORD says: I will stretch out my hand against Edom and kill its men and their animals. I will lay it waste, and from Teman to Dedan they will fall by the sword. 14I will take vengeance on Edom by the hand of my people Israel, and they will deal with Edom in accordance with my anger and my wrath; they will know my vengeance, declares the Sovereign LORD.’ ”

15“This is what the Sovereign LORD says: ‘Because the Philistines acted in vengeance and took revenge with malice in their hearts, and with ancient hostility sought to destroy Judah, 16therefore this is what the Sovereign LORD says: I am about to stretch out my hand against the Philistines, and I will cut off the Kerethites and destroy those remaining along the coast. 17I will carry out great vengeance on them and punish them in my wrath. Then they will know that I am the LORD, when I take vengeance on them.’ ”

Original Meaning

WITH THIS CHAPTER, we move into a new section of Ezekiel’s prophecy: a series of oracles against the surrounding nations (chs. 25–32). They are arranged as a series of six oracles addressed to Judah’s immediate neighbors (chs. 25–29, the first four in ch. 25), followed by a climactic seventh oracle against the traditional enemy, Egypt (chs. 30–32). The nations around Judah are addressed in clockwise order, starting with Ammon in the Transjordan to the east of the northern kingdom of Israel, and moving south to the other Transjordanian foes, Moab and Edom. After that, the prophet turns his attention west to Philistia in the southern coastal plain and then north to the coastal cities of Tyre and Sidon.1

Oracles against foreign nations are a common genre in the prophets and typically include a direct address by God to the nation concerned, charges of arrogant attitudes and/or actions (esp. against Israel), and a prediction of the nation’s doom.2 All of these elements are found in classical form in the oracle against Ammon (25:1–7).

In this oracle the Lord tells the prophet to set his face toward the Ammonites and prophesy against them (25:2), charging them with rejoicing over Judah’s downfall. They exulted in noisy triumph, saying “Aha!” (heʾāḥ, the ancient equivalent of cheering) when the sanctuary was desecrated, the land of Israel laid waste, and the people of Judah exiled (25:3). Instead of being appalled at the tragedy that had overcome the sacred place, the holy land, and the chosen people, they regarded their destruction as a cause for celebration. They saw it as proof positive that the triangular relationship between the nation of Israel, her land, and her deity was broken forever.3 Judah’s fall demonstrated to them the superiority of their gods over Yahweh. Hands, feet, and inner emotions were all united in celebration of the Ammonites’ hatred of Israel (25:6).4

Because of that attitude, the Ammonites too would experience judgment. Their own land would be laid waste, given to invaders from the East, a perpetual threat for those who inhabited the towns of the Transjordan (25:4). Their produce would be eaten by others and their people cut off, exterminated, and destroyed—a threefold fate to match their threefold rejoicing (25:4, 7).

As a result of this judgment the Ammonites “will know that I am the LORD” (25:7). This recognition formula, which occurs over sixty times in Ezekiel as a whole, is a dominant theme in these foreign nation oracles. The nations will recognize the Lord’s sovereignty when he acts to judge not only his own people but them as well. In so doing, he will demonstrate that he is the only one with power to judge or to deliver; in the face of the Lord’s fury, their gods are impotent to save them.

The oracle against Moab (25:8–11) charges them with saying, “Look, the house of Judah has become like all the other nations” (v. 8). The irony is that there was not a little truth in that statement: Judah had indeed in large measure become like the nations in the way she lived, giving herself over to idolatry (20:32). But it could never be true in the sense in which Moab had intended, so that this statement is nothing short of blasphemy on her lips. They meant, “Judah’s fall demonstrates that her claims to elect status by the Lord are worthless; she is a reject nation, thrown onto the scrap heap of history along with her god.”5 Instead, it is Moab who will be utterly destroyed, along with Ammon. They are the ones who will be left unremembered on the stage of world history, along with their gods, thus demonstrating the reality and uniqueness of the Lord’s existence and sovereign power to act (25:10).

The Edomites (25:12–14) seem not merely to have gloated over the downfall of Judah but to have actively participated in it. The brief statement of verse 12 that “Edom took revenge on the house of Judah” is fleshed out in more detail in the book of Obadiah. There Edom is accused of aiding and abetting the Babylonians, seizing Judah’s wealth, cutting down the fugitives, and handing over the survivors (Obad. 11–14). Although they were from a biblical perspective close kin of the Israelites (Num. 20:14–15; Deut. 23:7–8), they had no compassion on their brothers. Moreover, instead of the Lord’s judgment on his people putting the fear of Israel’s God into their neighbors, they viewed it simply as an opportunity for personal gain and the settling of old scores. The result of their seeking revenge on Judah, however, will be God’s execution of vengeance on them, using his own people to do so (Ezek. 25:14).

In 25:15–17 the Philistines are likewise charged with trying to settle old scores, taking revenge with malice in their hearts, and seeking to work out their “ancient hostility” (lit., “eternal enmity”) toward Israel in the destruction of the chosen people. They too will experience the vengeance of God: The Kerethites will be cut off (Kereth sounds like kārat, the Hebrew word for “cut off”) and the Philistines destroyed. It will be vengeance for vengeance. Then they too will recognize the Lord’s sovereign power (25:17).

Bridging Contexts

WHY SHOULD A PROPHET who has spent so much time addressing the sins of his own people suddenly turn around and address the surrounding nations? Was it any of his business what these other nations thought and did? Even if the prophet had made it his business, what does it concern us, especially when the nations addressed have long since crumbled into the dust? What possible relevance could these chapters have for the twentieth-century reader? In practice, if not in theory, these chapters tend to be bracketed off and ignored in our thinking about the book of Ezekiel. If the book as a whole is rarely preached, that is doubly true of the oracles against the nations.

Intended audience and message. One answer to the question of relevance might be to see the prophet as a kind of international diplomat, a one-man precursor of the United Nations, addressing war crimes on a transnational level. The problem with that approach, however, is that there is no evidence that these oracles were actually delivered to the nations addressed or were ever intended to be.6 The real audience for these oracles is the Judean listener, not the putative listener in the nation addressed.7

So what message is contained in these foreign nation oracles for the Judean listener? (1) They are being assured that God does not operate on a double standard, whereby he judges only Israel’s sins while the nations are free to behave as they like. Judgment may begin with the house of God, but it doesn’t end there. The outpouring of God’s wrath extends not simply to the rebels in his own house but also to all those who refuse to recognize his sovereignty. They too must come to “know that I am the LORD”; that is, they must and will ultimately acknowledge that he is the only true God, the one who holds the nations in the palm of his hand, who raises up kingdoms and brings them down again according to his own good pleasure (cf. Isa. 40:15–24).

(2) In spite of the outpouring of God’s wrath on his people, they nonetheless remain his people, who are infinitely precious to him. It is noteworthy that the charge leveled against each of the foreign nations in Ezekiel 25 is that they have persecuted or insulted God’s chosen people, and thereby insulted God. To take God’s people lightly is never a safe thing to do in the Old Testament. In spite of the pattern of sin among Abraham’s offspring, God’s word to Abraham was still effective: “I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you” (Gen. 12:3). Those who rejoice over Israel’s downfall—even over her downfall at the hands of the Lord himself—are simply inviting a curse on their own heads, a curse that Ezekiel pronounces effective.

(3) Ezekiel’s Judean hearers are reminded that God has his own consistent designs behind all the events of history, the prime purpose of which is to bring glory to himself. Judgment will fall on these nations who mock and abuse Judah in her hour of distress for the same reason that it fell originally on Judah herself: The Lord will thereby be recognized as a powerful and holy God, who acts in and through history.

This consistency of design on God’s part is itself a message of encouragement to God’s people. The one who said, “Whoever curses you I will curse,” is the same one who said, “All peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” If the first statement is still operative, then so also is the second. The fact that this goal had not yet been achieved indicated to the people of Judah that God’s purposes were not yet at an end as far as their nation was concerned, no matter how bleak her future outlook may have seemed from a human perspective.

Contemporary Significance

SATAN’S STRATEGIES. The assaults of Satan on the church come in a number of different forms. Essentially, however, they boil down to three basic strategies: persecution, seduction, and deception. When he adopts the strategy of persecution, Satan appears as a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour (1 Peter 5:8). But he can also just as easily dress himself as an angel of light, seeking to deceive God’s people (2 Cor. 11:14), or he can utilize the Great Prostitute to seduce God’s people (Rev. 18). All three of these strategies have been at work in his assault on Judah through the surrounding nations, as we will see in the next few chapters, and the oracles against the foreign nations give God’s answers to Satan’s assaults in order to fortify his people.

The nations immediately surrounding Judah, which are the focus in Ezekiel 25, have been Satan’s willing tools in persecuting God’s people. Taking advantage of God’s acts of judgment, they rejoiced at her downfall and made it worse. God’s answer to his people’s cry of “How long, Sovereign Lord?” (cf. Rev. 6:10) is a declaration of judgment on the persecutors. The blood of the martyrs cries out for justice, and justice it will receive. The message to the church or the Christian undergoing persecution is that God sees what is happening and in due season will act and judge.

The certainty of judgment on those who lift a finger against God’s elect applies not merely to Satan’s human agents but to the spiritual forces of evil as well. They will ultimately be thrown into the lake of burning sulfur, where they will be tormented day and night forever (Rev. 20:10). Such an eternal punishment is a fitting end for Satan, the one whose “eternal enmity” toward God and his people finds merely a faint echo in the “eternal enmity” between the Philistines and Israel (Ezek. 25:15).

God’s delay in judgment. But if God will ultimately act to break the teeth of the wicked, why does he wait so long? Why does he not immediately intervene to bring on them the judgment they deserve, just as he acted to judge Jerusalem? Sometimes, of course, he does, as in the case of Sodom and Gomorrah, but those cases seem to be the exception rather than the rule. One answer to the question of why God delays is so that he may show mercy even to the wicked. The persecutors themselves may yet be shown mercy. Thus Peter answers those who accuse God of tardiness in keeping his promises of justice by the assertion that “[God] is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9). God delays the coming of judgment so that Saul the persecutor can be turned into Paul the apostle.

However, the display of God’s mercy is not the only reason for his delay. The persecution of the church and the martyrdom of Christians is not simply a means to an end—a way of strengthening the church and bringing about conversions—it is an end in itself. Simply put, martyrs bring glory to God as they lay down their lives. As people freely give up their lives in the service of the gospel, they demonstrate that, for them at least, the Lord is God. He is more precious to them than life itself. In some cases, persecution may strengthen the church. In others, it may seem to succeed in stamping it out.8 But in every case, it brings about a testimony to the lordship of Jesus Christ. That testimony may be accepted or rejected by the persecutors here and now. But ultimately God will not be ashamed to be known as the God of those who have suffered for him, and the knowledge of his universal lordship will then be universally recognized even by those who sought unremittingly here on earth to stamp that knowledge out.

A warning. However, it may also be that in some cases we fill the role of the surrounding nations rather than that of God’s suffering people. For a common theme in God’s accusation of the nations is that they rejoiced at the divine judgment falling on others. Perhaps we too have been heedless or even happy when our opponents have apparently received their “comeuppance” at the hands of God, whether those opponents be inside or outside the Christian community. We have perhaps been secretly, or not so secretly, glad over the fall of prominent televangelists; some have even gleefully proclaimed that the AIDS virus is a judgment from God against homosexuals.

God’s judgment is real in history as well as beyond history, but it should never be contemplated lightly. We would do well to remember the words of Jesus that the measure we use in judging others will be the same one used on us (Luke 6:38). Rather, with reverent fear and trembling before the awful reality of the judgment of God, we should seek to persuade all people to flee the wrath to come (2 Cor. 5:10–11).