←Ezekiel 21→BSB

This chapter is unified by references to a sword (21:3–5, 9, 11–12, 14–16, 19, 28–30), which in each case depicts God’s judgment.

• The Lord was the fundamental enemy whom Israel had to fear, for he was about to unleash an all-encompassing judgment against it.
• One would expect the righteous to avoid judgment and the wicked to receive it. This pairing parallels the green tree and the dry tree of the parable (20:47–48). The judgment of sin would be like a very hot fire burning all it touched.

Ezekiel’s groaning showed that in the coming judgment, the boldest heart would melt and the strong knees would become . . . weak. The judgment that had previously been announced had now become a bitter reality (cp. 7:1–4).

a sword is being sharpened and polished: These processes prepared a weapon for deadly effectiveness; once it was prepared, it would be handed over to the executioner, who would use it against God’s people.

As the representative of the Lord, Ezekiel was to clap his hands in a threatening gesture and take the sword and brandish it . . . three times to represent the completeness of the coming massacre. There would be nowhere to run and nowhere to hide from the slashing sword of judgment when the Lord was ready to satisfy his fury by destroying his people. Their hearts would melt with terror at the awful massacre.

The sword of the Lord was not an abstract metaphor; it would take shape as the sword of Babylon’s king. Nebuchadnezzar’s preparation for this campaign was depicted when Ezekiel drew a map showing Nebuchadnezzar’s two possible campaign objectives—Rabbah, the capital of Ammon, and Jerusalem, the capital of Judah.

A treaty with the Babylonians would not save the people of Jerusalem because they had been unfaithful to the terms of that treaty. The king of Babylon would remind the people of their rebellion by publicly demonstrating that rebellion against a covenant overlord had consequences. If this was true of rebellion against their Babylonian master, how much more when they rebelled against the Lord?

• This judgment would extend against Zedekiah, the corrupt and wicked prince of Israel, as well as against the people. Ezekiel identifies Zedekiah by title rather than by name, indicating that his office was also under judgment. He would be stripped of the emblems of royalty and brought low, while the Lord exalted the lowly. The old order would experience destruction.
• the one appears who has the right to judge it: This coming judge is often understood to be the Messiah (cp. Gen 49:10). In this context, however, the Lord was handing Judah over to the Babylonians for judgment (see Ezek 23:24). Ezekiel was probably reshaping the traditional messianic oracle of Gen 49:10 into a message of imminent judgment by the hand of Nebuchadnezzar, acting as an agent of God. God temporarily took away the scepter from Judah because Israel’s rulers had sinned, but he would eventually give it back.

The Ammonites had no cause to rejoice in the reprieve that came when Nebuchadnezzar went toward Jerusalem rather than Rabbah (21:18–20)—they, too, were among the wicked for whom the day of final reckoning had come.

The sword would return . . . to its sheath, not to rest there, but to accomplish the Lord’s judgment against its own country, Babylon. God would also pour out . . . fury and the fire of his anger on Babylon. It had no special protection simply because God had used it as his tool in judging others. Judgment may have begun with God’s household (1 Pet 4:17), but it did not end there. God’s judgment included the pagan nations around Judah.