Week 47 - Ezekiel 33-36, Revelation 18 (Nov. 19-25)

Notes

Ezekiel 33: The Fall of Jerusalem

As we have discussed previously, much of Ezekiel is written in this liminal time between the first exiles taken by Babylon in 605 and 597 BC, and the fall of Jerusalem in 586. That explains why, even though Ezekiel is an exile, he is still prophesying doom towards Jerusalem where King Zedekiah will rebel against Babylon in alliance with Egypt.

As we have seen, the composition of Ezekiel is not linearly chronological, but in chapter 33 the destruction of Jerusalem arrives when a “man who had escaped” (likely an exile) arrives in Babylon and announces the destruction of the city to the Jews already living in Babylon (which had occurred about 5 months prior to his arrival). This is a watershed moment in the Old Testament story. The walls of the city are torn down and Solomn’s Temple is reduced to ruins. This is also a watershed moment in the Book of Ezekiel. The tone is going to change now to one of restoration and healing, which (if you’ve been reading along you know well) is quite different from what we have read thus far. Here is the account of Jerusalem’s fall from 2nd Kings

24:20 Now Zedekiah rebelled against the king of Babylon.

25:1 So in the ninth year of Zedekiah’s reign, on the tenth day of the tenth month, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon marched against Jerusalem with his whole army. He encamped outside the city and built siege works all around it. 2 The city was kept under siege until the eleventh year of King Zedekiah.

3 By the ninth day of the fourth month the famine in the city had become so severe that there was no food for the people to eat. 4 Then the city wall was broken through, and the whole army fled at night through the gate between the two walls near the king’s garden, though the Babylonians were surrounding the city. They fled toward the Arabah, 5 but the Babylonian army pursued the king and overtook him in the plains of Jericho. All his soldiers were separated from him and scattered, 6 and he was captured.

He was taken to the king of Babylon at Riblah, where sentence was pronounced on him. 7 They killed the sons of Zedekiah before his eyes. Then they put out his eyes, bound him with bronze shackles and took him to Babylon.

8 On the seventh day of the fifth month, in the nineteenth year of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, Nebuzaradan commander of the imperial guard, an official of the king of Babylon, came to Jerusalem. 9 He set fire to the temple of the Lord, the royal palace and all the houses of Jerusalem. Every important building he burned down. 10 The whole Babylonian army under the commander of the imperial guard broke down the walls around Jerusalem. 11 Nebuzaradan the commander of the guard carried into exile the people who remained in the city, along with the rest of the populace and those who had deserted to the king of Babylon. 12 But the commander left behind some of the poorest people of the land to work the vineyards and fields.

EZEKIEL 35:5: EDOM’S BETRAYAL

There was an 8-chapter-long section in Ezekiel of prophecies against various nations in which Edom was included (25:12-14). However, Ezekiel returns to speak again about only Edom after the fall of Jerusalem. This is because of what occurred during Nebuchadnezzar’s campaign against Judah. Edom is the nation descended from Esau, and God, through His word, reveals that He expects them to have some familial loyalty or fellow feeling for the descendants of his brother Jacob (Israel). However, when Nebuchadnezzar came to destroy Judah, Edom cheered on the Babylonians (see Psalm 137, Joel 3:19, Obadiah 1-14). Ezekiel even implies an active role for Edom in Judah’s demise by saying that they “delivered the Israelites over to the sword at the time of their calamity” (35:5). Edom believed that they would take possession of Judah when Babylon withdrew. Still, God was angered by their arrogance and disloyalty, so He promised to desolate them here.

Revelation 18: The Destruction of Babylon

The angel who shouts out that Babylon has fallen (echoing Isaiah 21.9 and Jeremiah 51.8) is bringing the news that human arrogance and oppression, and the wanton luxury and vice to which they lead, will not have the last word. God will have the last word, and creation itself will hear this word as a word of freedom, a sigh of relief, a flood of glorious light (verse 1) let in upon a darkened dungeon.

The judgments articulated in verses 6-8 are carefully structured so as to emphasize that what happens to the wicked city is what she has brought upon herself. These are not arbitrary. Nor will the vengeance be brought about through the agency of God's people; vengeance is too dangerous a weapon to be handled by the followers of the lamb (Romans 12.19, quoting Deuteronomy 32.35). It is God's own work, turning wickedness back on itself, allowing arrogance to reach a giddy height from which it can only crash helpless to earth (verse 7, echoing Isaiah 47.8-9). Babylon is to be given the only medicine she knows, the medicine she mixed for others; she has been using her cup to brew a potion for those she wanted to poison, and she will now have to drink it herself (verse 6).

NT Wright, Revelation for Everyone, 159

Revelation 18: The Implications of the Fall of Babylon

John believed in the God of the Exodus, the God who sets slaves free. A huge amount of his book, as we have wil do again, this time on a cosmic scale - and that the basic act of slave-freeing has already taken place with the sacrificial death of Jesus. With your own blood you purchased a people for God' (5.9). That's Exodus-language, buying-slaves-to-set-them-free language. Now John looks at Rome/Babylon and sees, with his mind's eye, the slave-market. He sees, perhaps, families: captured far away and now auctioned off, the husband to this person, the wife to that, the beautiful daughter to a seedy, smirking old man, the strong son to a mine-owner. The system is rotten, and its rottenness infects everything else that happens in such a city.

John can clearly understand the shock and bemusement of the merchants and mariners, can hear their cries of dismay echoing out across the countryside as they see the plume of smoke and smell the acrid, bitter smell. He can appreciate how great this ruin is. He has written a beautiful and haunting lament over it. But he has no sympathy for Babylon. Babylon, after all, has accused and condemned God's people, and now God is passing that same sentence on her (verse 20). God is (in other words) allowing the ancient law of Deuteronomy 19.16-20 to come into force in this particular case. The false accuser must suffer the penalty he intended to inflict on his victim. For Babylon has gained her power from the monster, and the monster from the accuser, the satan, the old dragon who, though out of sight for the moment, is remembered from chapter 12 and will shortly reappear.

The whole system is built on lies, on false accusations and false claims. So much of Revelation is about being able to tell the difference between the lie and the truth; and so many of the lies appear as accusatons. That is why it is so difficult to overthrow the Babylons of his world, unless it is simply by the force of the new Babylon, whatever that may be. In fact, it is impossible - except through the blood of the lamb, and the faithful witness of his followers.

Once more, in case anyone should feel the last vestiges of sympathy for Babylon and all that it stood for, we have the explanation: Babylon is a city founded on violence, not only the blood of the martyrs. Babylon has been at the centre of a network of violence that spanned the world, and all who have been slaughtered on earth have, in a sense, been slaughtered at the behest of Babylon. The merchants have grown rich on the back of military conquest. Money and power have done their collective worst, and John lumps them together, as we have seen, under the metaphor of fornication. Babylon the whore is gone, and will not return. And we, who live in the shadow of modern Babylons, can and must shudder as we, too, watch the plume of smoke and smell the bitter smell.

NT Wright, Revelation for Everyone, 166