Ezekiel 19:1 - Meaning and Application

These words give the prophet orders to mourn over the fall of the royal house, which had long stood high because of the covenant God made with David and his family. So the fading and ending of that house were rightly lamented by all who valued God’s covenant. After a long account of that covenant with David (Psalm 89:3, Psalm 89:20, and following), the psalmist also grieves over the ruin of David’s family (Psalm 89:38, 39): “You have cast off and rejected, you have made void the covenant with your servant and profaned his crown.”

The kings of Judah are here called princes of Israel. Their honor had been lowered, and they had become only like ordinary princes. Their moral purity was also lost, because they had become corrupt and idolatrous like the kings of Israel, whose ways they copied. The prophet must take up a lament over them. That is, he must describe their sad fall as someone who feels it deeply himself and wants his hearers and readers to feel it too. How can we expect others to be moved by what does not move us?

Ministers, even when they warn boldly of judgment, should still grieve deeply over the ruin of sinners, as people who have no delight in the day of trouble. He is not told to keep advising the princes of Israel, since that had already been done often and to no effect. The decision had been made, so he must now lament them.

He is also told what image to use. He must compare the kingdom of Judah to a lioness, because it had so badly fallen from what it once was, when it stood like a queen among the nations (Ezekiel 19:2). The royal family was like a mother to the kingdom, a mother who should have cared for and guarded it. But here she is a lioness, fierce, cruel, and greedy for prey. When they left behind true faith in God, they soon lost common decency too. When they did not fear God, they did not care about people. She lay down among lions. God had said his people would dwell apart from the nations, but they mixed with them and learned their ways. She raised her cubs among young lions, teaching the young princes the way of tyrants. Eastern kings often acted as if they had absolute power, and she filled her sons with that same idea, making them think they could enslave their subjects and do as they pleased with their lives and property.

He must also compare the kings of Judah to lions’ cubs (Ezekiel 19:3). Jacob had compared Judah, especially David’s house, to a lion’s cub because it would be strong and frightening to its enemies (Genesis 49:9). If they had held to God’s law and promise, God would have kept for them the strength, majesty, and rule of a lion. He does keep that in Christ, the Lion of the tribe of Judah. But these lions’ cubs were lions only toward their own subjects. They were cruel and oppressive, preying on people’s estates and freedoms. When rulers make themselves a terror to the people they should protect, it is just with God to make others a terror to them.

The first lament is for Jehoahaz, one of this lioness’s cubs. He became a young lion (Ezekiel 19:3). He was made king, and he thought that meant he could do as he pleased, feeding his ambition, greed, and revenge. He quickly learned all the arts of tyranny. He learned to catch prey and devour people. Once power was in his hands, all who had ever offended him in any way were made to feel his anger and became victims of his rage.

But he did not prosper long in his rule. The nations heard about him, how violently he acted as soon as he came to the throne, how he trampled justice and what was sacred, and how he broke every promise. So they saw him as a dangerous neighbor and dealt with him as shepherds gather against a roaring lion attacking prey (Isaiah 31:4). He was caught in their pit like a wild animal. His own subjects did not dare defend their liberties, but God raised up a foreign power that soon ended his tyranny and brought him in chains to Egypt. There Jehoahaz was carried away as a captive and never heard from again.

The same kind of sin and fall is then described in his successor Jehoiakim. For a while Judah hoped Jehoahaz would return from Egypt, but at last they gave up hope and made another of the lion’s cubs a young lion (Ezekiel 19:5). Instead of learning wisdom from his brother’s fate and ruling with fairness and restraint for the good of the people, he followed the same path. He went up and down among the lions (Ezekiel 19:6). He kept company with men as fierce and violent as himself, and he took his guidance from them, just as Rehoboam followed the rash advice of hot-headed young men.

He soon learned to catch prey and devour people (Ezekiel 19:6). He seized his subjects’ property, fined them, imprisoned them, and filled his treasury with robbery and injustice, through confiscations, forced seizures, and penalties. He swallowed up everything in his path. He even learned how to find what people had hidden away and where they had stored their wealth. He knew their desolate places (Ezekiel 19:7), the places where they hid their money and sometimes hid themselves. He knew how to track down both. By his oppression he laid waste their cities and emptied them, forcing people to move their families somewhere safer. The land became empty, and the villages were deserted. Though the land had plenty, people left it all behind because they feared his roaring.

He took pride in making everyone afraid of him, as a lion makes the beasts of the forest tremble (Amos 3:8). By his threatening roar he stunned them so deeply that they fell down in fear. With no strength left to escape, they became easy prey, as people say lions do. He bullied, threatened, and boasted his way into taking what others had. He thought this would secure his rule, but it only hastened his ruin (Ezekiel 19:8). The nations rose against him on every side to restrain and bring down his extreme power, joining together for their common safety. They spread their net over him and set traps against him. God brought bands of Syrians, Moabites, and Ammonites, along with the Chaldeans (2 Kings 24:2). He was caught in their pit. Nebuchadnezzar bound him with chains to take him to Babylon (2 Chronicles 36:6). They caged this lion, chained him, and brought him to the king of Babylon (2 Chronicles 36:9).

What became of him, we do not know. But his voice was never again heard roaring across the mountains of Israel. His cruelty had come to an end. He was buried with the burial of a donkey (Jeremiah 22:19), though he had lived like a lion and had been the terror of the powerful in the land of the living.

We should see here the justice of God. He brings down those who terrorize and enslave others, and he turns their own power back on them. They were given authority for good, to build up others, but they abused it to destroy. So God treats them as the wild beasts they chose to be, like roaring lions and hunting bears. Solomon says wicked rulers are like that to poor people (Proverbs 28:15).

The same is true of those like Ishmael, who had every man’s hand against him in the end. People have long noticed that bloody tyrants seldom die in peace. They often receive, as it were, blood to drink, because that is what they deserve.