Week 27 Ezekiel
Yesterday I was thinking about Ezekiel’s prophecy predicting the decline-&-fall of king Zedekiah. There were a couple of niggling details that didn’t exactly line up (I figure there’s likely explanations for them but at this point I don’t know them – so they sound like discrepancies), but overall the forecast was true – Jerusalem fell and Zedekiah died in exile.
When I got to Ezekiel 17 today it sounded like Zedekiah’s fall was getting a revisit. But this time there weren’t any names mentioned. Ezekiel talks about…
A king who had been coronated by the king of Babylon…
Who then rebelled against Babylon…
And made an alliance with Egypt…
After which he was revisited by an annoyed Babylonian army…
The prophecy finishes like this: the king of Israel will die in Babylon, the land of the king who put him in power and whose treaty he despised and broke.
Sounded like a Confirmatory Prophecy about Zedekiah.
Anyway that prophecy also said the Lord would rescue a tiny little shoot & transplant it. That shoot would grow into a tall cedar.
Since the last paragraph of Kings said that king Jehoiachin – who was already in exile – was taken out of his Babylonian jail in the end and given his freedom did that mean Jehoiachin was the cedar shoot? Maybe. He was pretty much the end of the David-family bloodline. But he was pretty fragile. Maybe the big cedar would grow up later.
Note: quote from Ezekiel 17:16 (NLT). And see 2 Kings 25.