SPEAKER_00: We begin our study in Ezekiel chapter 28, verses 1 and 2.
SPEAKER_00: Now the word of the Lord came to me, that is Ezekiel, the word of the Lord came to me again, saying, Son of man, say to the Prince of Tyre, thus says the Lord God, because your heart is lifted up, and you say, I am a God, I sit in the seat of gods in the midst of the seas, yet you are a man and not a God, though you set your heart as the heart of a God.
SPEAKER_00: Pause here for a minute.
SPEAKER_00: The Lord doesn't waste any time.
SPEAKER_00: He goes right after the king of Tyre and tells the king of Tyre his number one sin, and his number one sin is because of all of his wealth and all of his power and all of his influence with all the trade going across all the world, the man has come to the conclusion that he is a God.
SPEAKER_00: And the Lord says, your heart's lifted up, you say, that is, he's not afraid to tell people, he is demanding that he be recognized as a God.
SPEAKER_00: This isn't too unusual in Old Testament times.
SPEAKER_00: In Old Testament times, there's many, many cultures where the ruler, the king, demanded to be worshipped as a God.
SPEAKER_00: A few weeks from now we'll be headed into Daniel.
SPEAKER_00: And you're gonna see guys like Nebuchadnezzar building statues to themselves and asking everybody to kneel down and all this kind of thing.
SPEAKER_00: But the Lord speaks to this, and he says to him, You're not a God, you're a man.
SPEAKER_00: You are a man, though you set your heart as the heart of a God.
SPEAKER_00: Now we're gonna jump forward a few verses.
SPEAKER_00: From verses one and two, same chapter we go to verse, beginning in verse 11.
SPEAKER_00: Moreover, the word of the Lord came to me saying, Son of man, take up a lamentation for the king of Tyre.
SPEAKER_00: Say to him, Thus says the Lord God, you were the seal of perfection, full of wisdom, perfect in beauty.
SPEAKER_00: You were in Eden, the garden of God.
SPEAKER_00: Every precious stone was your covering.
SPEAKER_00: Let's pause right here.
SPEAKER_00: Who in here thinks that the king of Tyre was present in the events of the Garden of Eden in the book of Genesis?
SPEAKER_00: Don't raise your hand.
SPEAKER_00: He wasn't there.
SPEAKER_00: And yet the word of the Lord is speaking to this, and he is saying, You were present in Eden.
SPEAKER_00: So now what's happening is the prophecy of Ezekiel is shooting beyond the king of Tyre, and it's talking to one who is very much like the king of Tyre.
SPEAKER_00: Who was there in the Garden of Eden?
SPEAKER_00: We know this.
SPEAKER_00: Adam was there, Eve was there, and the serpent was there, Satan was there.
SPEAKER_00: So he's not talking about Adam, not talking about Eve, process of elimination.
SPEAKER_00: We're talking about Satan.
SPEAKER_00: You were the seal of perfection, verse 12, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty.
SPEAKER_00: You know, we don't really know what the serpent looked like before the Lord cursed the serpent to wiggle around on the ground and eat the dust of the earth.
SPEAKER_00: But everything that we know about Satan suggests that the serpent must have been this tremendously attractive, beautiful in appearance being.
SPEAKER_00: Full of wisdom, perfect in beauty.
SPEAKER_00: You were in Eden, the garden of God.
SPEAKER_00: Look at these next few verses.
SPEAKER_00: Every precious stone was your covering, the Sardius, topaz, diamond, beryl, onyx, and jasper, sapphire, turquoise, and emerald with gold.
SPEAKER_00: See that list of precious gemstones?
SPEAKER_00: A lot of those precious gemstones are used in the breastplate of the high priest in the Old Testament.
SPEAKER_00: But the breastplates of the high priest has twelve and Satan only has nine.
SPEAKER_00: He was always coming up short.
SPEAKER_00: But you see the description here.
SPEAKER_00: Can you imagine all those beautiful, having the appearance of all those beautiful stones?
SPEAKER_00: Ladies, do we have any, don't worry, I'm not going to take it from you, but ladies, do we have anyone who's wearing a gemstone as a piece of jewelry in here today?
SPEAKER_00: Okay, got a few, got a few.
SPEAKER_00: All right.
SPEAKER_00: We're here in the year 2026, and gemstones are still seen as so precious that people still wear them as pieces of ornamentation for their appearance.
SPEAKER_00: Satan had all of these gemstones in his appearance.
SPEAKER_00: He was strikingly beautiful, as it said in the previous verses.
SPEAKER_00: Look at this second part of verse 13.
SPEAKER_00: The workmanship of your timbrels and pipes was prepared for you on the day you were created.
SPEAKER_00: Timbrels and pipes.
SPEAKER_00: These are things that are describing the singing voice.
SPEAKER_00: The singing voice.
SPEAKER_00: I think my timbrels and pipes were damaged early on in life.
SPEAKER_00: I have no real singing voice whatsoever.
SPEAKER_00: I have singing volume, but I do this thing when I sing that rather than sing, I will just say the words with conviction real strong.
SPEAKER_00: But timbrels and pipes, you know, when a person has a beautiful voice, Mr.
SPEAKER_00: Jenny, when a person has a beautiful voice, when people hear that, it's a blessing, isn't it?
SPEAKER_00: If I'm sitting in front of someone who has a beautiful voice and we are worshiping together, I am tempted to just stop singing myself so I can take in what's happening.
SPEAKER_00: And then I remember, wait a minute, that's that singing is not happening for me, it's happening for God, so I got to keep on singing anyway.
SPEAKER_00: Little point of conviction for some of you here in the room, possibly.
SPEAKER_00: All right.
SPEAKER_00: Timbrels and pipes.
SPEAKER_00: From what we understand of Satan, before Satan fell, he was Lucifer, and Lucifer, based on what little the Bible tells us about him, may have been the leader of the choirs of worship in heaven.
SPEAKER_00: Some of you have heard this before.
SPEAKER_00: And here we have a description that his timbrels and pipes, the quality of his voice was tremendous because that's the way that God had created him.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 14 says, You were the anointed cherub who covers.
SPEAKER_00: I established you.
SPEAKER_00: That word cherub is another word for angel.
SPEAKER_00: Don't get some people get bogged down and they want to classify all the angels and ranks and things like that.
SPEAKER_00: What we see here is that he was originally, Lucifer was created as an angel.
SPEAKER_00: He was established by God as an angel.
SPEAKER_00: You were on the holy mountain of God, you walked back and forth in the midst of fiery stones.
SPEAKER_00: The idea here is that Lucifer, before he fell, was among the heavenly hosts, and he had freedom to walk about the heavenly courts with all of the other angels.
SPEAKER_00: Well, what happened?
SPEAKER_00: Verse 15 you were perfect in your ways from the day you were created until iniquity was found in you.
SPEAKER_00: By the abundance of your trading you became filled with violence within, and you sinned.
SPEAKER_00: Therefore I cast you as a profane thing out of the mountain of God.
SPEAKER_00: I destroyed you, O covering cherub, from the midst of the fiery stones.
SPEAKER_00: Now again, this is language that's being directed at the king of Tyre, and yet also beyond the king of Tyre.
SPEAKER_00: And so we shouldn't be surprised if there's a little bit of mixture of what's happening here.
SPEAKER_00: We don't know anything about the life of the angels in heaven before the rebellion that Lucifer started against God.
SPEAKER_00: But it is interesting that here we see this idea that Ezekiel is speaking God's word against the king of Tyre, and he says, the abundance of your trading.
SPEAKER_00: Now, why does a person engage in trading ultimately?
SPEAKER_00: What's the end goal of engaging in trading?
SPEAKER_00: Wealth.
SPEAKER_00: The idea is to become wealthy.
SPEAKER_00: And it's strange because I've never really, before getting into this lesson, I've never really put much thought into the idea that Satan has a desire for wealth.
SPEAKER_00: Just not something that occurred to me.
SPEAKER_00: I've always thought, well, Satan is a fallen angel.
SPEAKER_00: He has a desire for evil.
SPEAKER_00: He has a desire for us to follow him in evil.
SPEAKER_00: He wants to corrupt the creation that God has made.
SPEAKER_00: But there are some things in these verses that sort of point to the idea that a pursuit of wealth, if not managed with a worship of Almighty God, can result in such inflated pride that a person can think themselves the equal of God.
SPEAKER_00: The equal of God.
SPEAKER_00: God says in verse 16, I destroyed you, O covering cherub, from the midst of the fiery stones.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 17, Your heart was lifted up because of your beauty.
SPEAKER_00: You corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendor.
SPEAKER_00: I cast you to the ground, I laid you before kings that they might gaze at you.
SPEAKER_00: Now this clearly hasn't happened yet, has it?
SPEAKER_00: It's happened to the king of Tyre.
SPEAKER_00: I'll talk about that in a few moments.
SPEAKER_00: But it hasn't happened to Satan yet.
SPEAKER_00: But you know, we just started a new Bible study on the book of Revelation in here last night.
SPEAKER_00: And one of the things that the book of Revelation tells us is that a day does come where finally Satan's number comes up, and he is thrown once and for all into the lake of fire, never to be a problem for anybody ever, ever, ever again.
SPEAKER_00: And there are verses in Revelation that point to the idea that the destruction of Satan and his antichrist and his beast is something that is witnessed by the leaders of the world, and they sort of look down on that and they bemoan what has happened, but at the same time they also sort of come to the realization that what they've been following all this time hasn't been worth following.
SPEAKER_00: Shame, great shame comes upon Satan and his Antichrist and the beast and the prophet as they are being destroyed.
SPEAKER_00: The kings gaze at them as they lay down on the ground.
SPEAKER_00: They gaze at these at their fate.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 18, continuing God's words, you've defiled your sanctuaries by the multitude of your iniquities, by the iniquity of your trading.
SPEAKER_00: Therefore I brought fire from your midst, it devoured you, I turned you to ashes upon the earth in the sight of all who saw you.
SPEAKER_00: All who knew you among the peoples are astonished at you.
SPEAKER_00: You have become a horror and shall be no more forever.
SPEAKER_00: All right, so that's going to conclude our reading.
SPEAKER_00: Let me tell you what happened to the nation of Tyre and the ruler of Tyre.
SPEAKER_00: Shortly after Ezekiel spoke these words, within a few years, the same Babylonian Empire that ended up conquering Judah turned its sight on the riches of Tyre.
SPEAKER_00: Nebuchadnezzar and his army marched upon Tyre, and Tyre, in that great fortress that they had developed on that island, sacked all of their wealth in there, and for thirteen years Nebuchadnezzar laid siege to that nation.
SPEAKER_00: That nation had enough provision and enough wealth to last 13 years without any food coming in and without any trade going out.
SPEAKER_00: But finally, after 13 years, they said, we've got to sue for peace.
SPEAKER_00: We can't maintain this.
SPEAKER_00: And so Babylon ended up conquering Tyre.
SPEAKER_00: And when it conquered Tyre, it did what it normally does.
SPEAKER_00: It pulled the leaders out and had them executed publicly.
SPEAKER_00: Time passed after that.
SPEAKER_00: 100 years, 200 years, 250 years.
SPEAKER_00: And 250 years after that, there was a guy who came on the scene by the name of Alexander the Great.
SPEAKER_00: Not Alexander the Average, not Alexander the slightly better than usual.
SPEAKER_00: Alexander the Great came on the scene.
SPEAKER_00: In those 250 years, Tyre had re-established its fortunes.
SPEAKER_00: It had made its island even more difficult to attack.
SPEAKER_00: It became a it learned its lesson from the Babylonian siege, and it made itself even more powerful and even more mighty militarily.
SPEAKER_00: Now I find this stuff fascinating.
SPEAKER_00: Those of you that don't, just keep your eyes open for me a little bit, all right?
SPEAKER_00: Alexander the Great came on the scene and he sent some envoys to Tyre to talk about some things.
SPEAKER_00: Tyre took Alexander's envoys, took them to the top of the wall, executed them publicly, and threw their bodies down over the other side of the wall.
SPEAKER_00: Alexander the Great did not like that.
SPEAKER_00: And he decided to attack.
SPEAKER_00: Well, the problem was, how do you attack an island that has traps set in the water around it?
SPEAKER_00: So Alexander the Great, you know, again, not Alexander the average, not Alexander the slightly better than normal.
SPEAKER_00: Alexander the Great took the nearby capital that was based on the land, turned it into rubble, dumped the rubble into the sea, and created a half-mile road that was 200 feet wide from the landmass to the island.
SPEAKER_00: That still stands here today.
SPEAKER_00: Tyre is no longer an island, now it is a peninsula.
SPEAKER_00: And as they were marching across that great road that Alexander the Great built, the people there on that island weren't giving up without a fight.
SPEAKER_00: And they brought in flaming boats from both sides to try to attack that.
SPEAKER_00: Alexander said, Okay, my road idea is great, but it's not enough.
SPEAKER_00: I have to somehow attack them from the sea.
SPEAKER_00: Oh, I know what I'll do.
SPEAKER_00: I'll go and capture their navy and use their own boats against them.
SPEAKER_00: Again, Alexander the Great.
SPEAKER_00: He ended up conquering that area, put many, many of its leaders and citizens to the sword, and completely sacked whatever treasury they had.
SPEAKER_00: Alright.
SPEAKER_00: So what does all of that have to do with Satan and what we've been reading in these verses?
SPEAKER_00: Well, Tyre went through one humiliating defeat at the hand of the Babylonians, went through another humiliating defeat 250 years later at the hands of Alexander the Great.
SPEAKER_00: But its ultimate defeat, its ultimate defeat isn't going to come from some army or from some nation.
SPEAKER_00: The ultimate defeat of Tyre and the ultimate defeat of Satan is going to come from the hands of Almighty God Himself.
SPEAKER_00: Alright?
SPEAKER_00: Let's take a look here.
SPEAKER_00: First, it talks about his appearance in verse 12.
SPEAKER_00: And by all accounts, Satan's appearance is very beautiful, isn't it?
SPEAKER_00: You know, all too often when we think of the devil, we get that cartoon image in our eye in our minds of the underwood devil ham character with the red long underwear and the pitchfork and the horns and all.
SPEAKER_00: And, you know, we we down through the ages, we're not the only culture to do this, but down through the ages, almost every culture creates a picture of Satan that is laughable, something that's not to be taken all too seriously.
SPEAKER_00: Satan in the movies of our culture is often presented as some lizard-like monstrous being because of his other name, the dragon.
SPEAKER_00: But if he were to walk into this room right now, none of you would be looking at me.
SPEAKER_00: You'd be looking at him, because he would be by far the most attractive person in the room.
SPEAKER_00: You couldn't help yourself but look at him.
SPEAKER_00: He has a very beautiful appearance, which fueled his pride.
SPEAKER_00: Want you to notice the location that he was in, Eden.
SPEAKER_00: He's been a problem for mankind from the beginning.
SPEAKER_00: From the beginning.
SPEAKER_00: He's an ancient foe.
SPEAKER_00: He has intelligence.
SPEAKER_00: He has understanding of human nature.
SPEAKER_00: He's been able to watch human history from the very beginning and see how we act.
SPEAKER_00: Notice that he's covered how he's covered with these jewels and how he has this wonderful voice.
SPEAKER_00: Notice that he had a place with the angels before the fall.
SPEAKER_00: They're at the holy mountain of God.
SPEAKER_00: Notice that everything was perfect until iniquity, the Bible tells us, was found in him.
SPEAKER_00: What was that iniquity?
SPEAKER_00: Well, pride, because of his appearance, because of his voice, because of his position, and perhaps because of his wealth and his trading, led to him thinking that he deserved to be worshipped, that he was equal to God.
SPEAKER_00: Pride.
SPEAKER_00: Pride was the downfall of Satan.
SPEAKER_00: Beginning in verse 16, we also see this desire for wealth.
SPEAKER_00: You know, it's weird to think of Satan having a desire for wealth, but it is something that explains the whole mark of the beast thing that we run into in Revelation.
SPEAKER_00: Why does Satan want to have people have the mark of the beast so that they cannot buy or sell unless they have the mark upon them?
SPEAKER_00: Ultimately, Satan is very interested in how you spend your money, how I spend my money.
SPEAKER_00: How we spend our money or how we don't spend our money in many cases can be an extension of our love for the Lord or taking the Lord for granted.
SPEAKER_00: Satan's very interested in the commerce of this world.
SPEAKER_00: He's very interested in how we do our business or don't do our business.
SPEAKER_00: God calls Satan a profane thing after he has been cast down.
SPEAKER_00: In God's eyes, Satan is not this beautiful thing any longer.
SPEAKER_00: He is a profane thing.
SPEAKER_00: You know, sometimes things that God declares to be profane are nonetheless attractive in the eyes of the world.
SPEAKER_00: Satan's a profane thing.
SPEAKER_00: He's filled with vanity, he's filled with pride.
SPEAKER_00: And thankfully, even in this passage in the Old Testament, we have an indication of his future humiliation.
SPEAKER_00: He is going to be destroyed, he'll be cast into the lake of fire.
SPEAKER_00: That's in Revelation chapter 20 and verse 10.
SPEAKER_00: So as we go through these things, as we go through these things, we're reminded as we're looking at the prophecies of the Old Testament.
SPEAKER_00: Prophecies of the Old Testament most often are prophecies about Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: And isn't that a wonderful thing?
SPEAKER_00: We all love the fact that those prophecies of the Old Testament are pointing to things that Jesus did in the Gospel times and things that Jesus is going to do in the future.
SPEAKER_00: Prophecies of the end times are throughout the Old Testament.
SPEAKER_00: Even as early as the book of Genesis, we have prophecies of the end times that are going to happen in the book of the Revelation.
SPEAKER_00: Prophecies in the Old Testament show us the heart and the mind of God toward his people, whether it's the people of Israel or whether it's his people today, his people in the church.
SPEAKER_00: And in this particular section of Scripture that we looked at today, we even have a prophecy that God at some point in the future is taking care of the problem of evil once and for all.
SPEAKER_00: Once and for all.
SPEAKER_00: So our main takeaway today is an optimistic one.
SPEAKER_00: When we become weary because we see that we're living in a world that's filled with sin, when we become tired because we think that this world is going in the wrong direction, when we begin to lose heart and to lose hope because we think that we're too far gone, we need to remember that God's word from the beginning has been saying, I've got this under control.
SPEAKER_00: There a day is coming in the future when sin and Satan and all of the evil of the world will be put aside and everything will be set straight.
SPEAKER_00: And if we have Jesus as our Lord and Savior, we're going to have ringside seats for all of that.
SPEAKER_00: And it should be a wonderful, wonderful time.
SPEAKER_00: We're not doing Ezekiel next week, okay?
SPEAKER_00: We're done with Ezekiel.
SPEAKER_00: But we will be having Bible study next week.
SPEAKER_00: Let's close in prayer.
SPEAKER_00: Heavenly Father, we love you.
SPEAKER_00: We thank you that this problem of evil that confronts us day in and day out has already been settled.
SPEAKER_00: And Lord, that you've been telling us that it's a settled thing, even during the times of the Old Testament.
SPEAKER_00: That your word, when we go to your word, we can run into things again and again that give us reason to pause and to thank you for what it is that you've promised.
SPEAKER_00: Lord, we pray, having heard words about our enemy today, we pray that we would be conscious of satanic, demonic activity that may be going on around us.
SPEAKER_00: And Lord, we pray that we would not see that and be fearful, but we would see that and realize that we fight against an already conquered foe.
SPEAKER_00: Lord, we thank you for the salvation we have in Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: All that Satan can do to us is simply things in this present time.
SPEAKER_00: And the day is coming soon, Lord, when he will have no impact on our lives whatsoever when we are with you in spirit and in truth.
SPEAKER_00: We pray this in your mighty name, Lord Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: And God's people said, Amen, and we are dismissed.