Passage: Ezek 28:11–19
Speaker: Mitch Kim
Series: Cultivating Our Eden
When pride puffs us up to feel too good (or bad) for a place, then exile happens. While we are formed in a barren wasteland to flourish by God’s presence and work a particular place (Gen 2:4–17), Adam and Eve are exiled from Eden because of their proud disobedience. Similarly the king of Tyre is blessed like Adam and Eve (“the signet of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty” [Ezek 28:11–14]), but he is exiled and destroyed. Walter Zimmerli says:
What is narrated here as the fate of princes is narrated in terms of primeval man, of man at the beginning, of man pure and simple. He was the one who was richly endowed, summoned to be beside God, adorned with perfect beauty. . . . In the pride and fall of the Prince of Tyre, there is repeated the story of “primeval man.” This is “Everyman’s story.”[1]
How do we get puffed up in pride? And what is the antidote? This week we will focus on how pride puffs us up and brings exile (Ezek 28:15–19), as well as how Jesus brings the antidote to that pride.
[1] Walter Zimmerli, Ezekiel (Hermeneia; Fortress, 1983), 95.