SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 3/21/2015
8:54 PM
My Worship Time Focus: The Tree
Felled PT-1
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Ezekiel
31:1-9
Message of the
verses: “1 In the eleventh year, in
the third month, on the first of the month, the word of the LORD came to me saying, 2 “Son of
man, say to Pharaoh king of Egypt and to his hordes, ’Whom are you like in your
greatness? 3 ’Behold, Assyria was a cedar in Lebanon With beautiful branches
and forest shade, And very high, And its top was among the clouds. 4 ’The
waters made it grow, the deep made it high. With its rivers it continually
extended all around its planting place, And sent out its channels to all the trees
of the field. 5 ’Therefore
its height was loftier than all the trees of the field And its boughs became
many and its branches long Because of many waters as it spread them out. 6 ’All
the birds of the heavens nested in its boughs, And under its branches all the
beasts of the field gave birth, And all great nations lived under its shade. 7
’So it was beautiful in its greatness, in the length of its branches; For its
roots extended to many waters. 8 ’The cedars in God’s garden could not match
it; The cypresses could not compare with its boughs, And the plane trees could
not match its branches. No tree in God’s garden could compare with it in its
beauty. 9 ’I made it beautiful with the multitude of its branches, And all the
trees of Eden, which were in the garden of God, were jealous of it.”
We begin a new main section, which is the fifth in Warren
Wiersbe’s commentary on Ezekiel from the ninth chapter of his book. We will be studying chapters 29-32 from this
section and so that means that we only have two more chapters to look at but
there is three more main points and five more sub-points to look at and then
Ezekiel will be done writing about the nation of Egypt.
We have been giving the date when looking at these
different messages that Ezekiel was writing and also speaking to the exiles and
this one is dated June 21, 587 BC, which is less than six weeks before
Jerusalem will fall to the Babylonians. We
see in this section a message about a tree and when we were studying the book
of Daniel two years ago Daniel also spoke of a great tree, and in both cases
the trees were cut down. Dr. Wiersbe
writes: “In Scripture, a tree is
something used as the image of a nation or an empire (chap. 17; Dan. 4). The argument the prophet presented was
simple, Egypt boasted in its greatness, yet Egypt wasn’t as great as Assyria,
and Assyria was conquered by Babylon. Conclusion: if Babylon can conquer Assyria, Babylon can
conquer Egypt.” With this said we will
first look at Assyria’s greatness which covers verses 1-9 written above.
Egypt thought that they were a great nation and so the
question is asked of them “Who can be compared with Egypt,” and the answer
comes back that Assyria is compared to Egypt, which probably was something
Egypt liked to hear about. In these
verses we see how great Assyria was, by showing that they had much power and
had conquered many nations and had much wealth.
However we always must remember that God is in control of all the
nations and He can use them to accomplish what He wants them to do in order to
cause His plans to be fulfilled. Assyria
was raised up in order to conquer the Northern Kingdom and in 722 BC that is
what they did. God also used them to
test the Southern Kingdom, which they did when Hezekiah was on the throne. One of the great stories of the Old Testaments
of faith that Hezekiah had in the Lord and he displayed that faith by praying
to the Lord for Him to defeat Assyria.
The story of this is found in Isa. 37; 2 Kings 19; and 2 Chronicles 32. The Assyrians were making fun of Judah but in
the end the angel of the Lord killed 185,000 Assyrian soldiers in one night and
Judah was saved. That was the beginning of
the end of Assyria as later on Babylon would conquer them.
3/21/2015 9:19 PM
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