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Peter 1:24, 25.
The Burden of Tyre
[Illustration: TYRE BY THE SEA
"They shall destroy the walls of Tyrus, and break down her towers." Eze. 26:4.]
Tyre was the greatest maritime city of antiquity. Its inhabitants, the Phoenicians, traded in the ports of all the known world. Ezekiel describes the heart of the seas as its borders. "Thy builders have perfected thy beauty," he says. He tells how all countries traded in its marts and contributed to its wealth. And then, obeying the word of the Lord, the prophet bears a message of rebuke and warning,--"the burden of Tyre,"--and pronounces the coming judgment:
"Thus saith the Lord God: Behold, I am against thee, O Tyrus, and will cause many nations to come up against thee.... And they shall destroy the walls of Tyrus, and break down her towers: I will also scrape her dust from her, and make her like the top of a rock. It shall be a place for the spreading of nets in the midst of the sea: for I have spoken it, saith the Lord God." Eze. 26:3-5.
The accounts of travelers bear witness that the prophecy has been fulfilled. As to the site of the island city of Ezekiel's day, Bruce, nearly a century ago, said that he found it a "rock whereon fishers dry their nets." (See "Keith on the Prophecies," p. 329.)
In more recent times, Dr. W.M. Thomson found the whole region of Tyre suggestive only of departed glory:
"There is nothing here, certainly, of that which led Joshua to call it 'the strong city' more than three thousand years ago (Joshua 19:29),--nothing of that mighty metropolis which baffled the proud Nebuchadnezzar and all his power for thirteen years, until 'every head' in his army 'was made bald, and every shoulder was peeled,' in the hard service against Tyrus (Eze. 29:18),--nothing in this wretched roadstead and empty harbor to remind one of the times when merry mariners did sing in her markets--no visible trace of those towering ramparts which so long resisted the utmost efforts of the great Alexander. All have vanished utterly like a troubled dream, and Tyre has sunk under the burden of prophecy.... As she is now, and has long been, Tyre is God's witness; but great, powerful, and populous, she would be the infidel's boast. This, however, she cannot be. Tyre will never rise from her dust to falsify the voice of prophecy.
"Dim is her glory, gone her fame, Her boasted wealth has fled; On her proud rock, alas! her shame, The fisher's net is spread. The Tyrian harp has slumbered long, And Tyria's mirth is low; The timbrel, dulcimer, and song Are hushed, or wake to woe."
--"The Land and the Book," Vol. II, pp. 626, 627.
The Desolation of Babylon
Yet another city of ancient times there was, the mightiest of them all, whose fate was a subject of prophecy, and whose history bears special testimony for us today; for, more than any other, the Lord used that city as a symbol of the pride of life and the exaltation of the selfish heart against God.
Let us study briefly the desolations pronounced upon Babylon of old.
[Illustration: BABYLON IN THE DUST
"Babylon shall become heaps,... without an inhabitant." Jer. 51:37.]
While Babylon was still the mightiest city of the world, with the period of greatest glory yet before it, the Lord revealed its ignoble end. By the prophet Isaiah He declared:
"Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldees' excellency, shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah. It shall never be inhabited, neither shall it be dwelt in from generation to generation: neither shall the Arabian pitch tent there; neither shall the shepherds make their fold there. But wild beasts of the desert shall lie there; and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there. And the wild beasts of the islands shall cry in their desolate houses, and dragons in their pleasant palaces: and her time is near to come, and her days shall not be prolonged." Isa. 13:19-22.
Never could a more doleful future have been pictured for a city full of splendor, the metropolis of the world. About one hundred and seventy-five years after this word was written on the parchment scroll, the Medes and Persians were at the gates of Babylon. Her time had come, and Chaldea's rule was ended.
"Fallen is the golden city! in the dust, Spoiled of her crown, dismantled of her state. She that hath made the Strength of Towers her trust, Weeps by her dead, supremely desolate!
"She that beheld the nations at her gate Thronging in homage, shall be called no more 'Lady of Kingdoms!'--Who shall mourn her fate? Her guilt is full, her march of triumph o'er."
But still, under Medo-Persia, and later under the Greeks, the city itself was