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Education
“I will also make it a possession for the bittern, and pools of water:
and I will sweep it with the besom of destruction, saith the
Lord of hosts.”
Jeremiah 51:13
;
Isaiah 13:19
;
14:23
.
Every nation that has come upon the stage of action has been per-
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mitted to occupy its place on the earth, that it might be seen whether it
would fulfill the purpose of “the Watcher and the Holy One.” Prophecy
has traced the rise and fall of the world’s great empires—Babylon,
Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome. With each of these, as with nations
of less power, history repeated itself. Each had its period of test, each
failed, its glory faded, its power departed, and its place was occupied
by another.
While the nations rejected God’s principles, and in this rejection
wrought their own ruin, it was still manifest that the divine, overruling
purpose was working through all their movements.
This lesson is taught in a wonderful symbolic representation given
to the prophet Ezekiel during his exile in the land of the Chaldeans.
The vision was given at a time when Ezekiel was weighed down with
sorrowful memories and troubled forebodings. The land of his fathers
was desolate. Jerusalem was depopulated. The prophet himself was a
stranger in a land where ambition and cruelty reigned supreme. As on
every hand he beheld tyranny and wrong, his soul was distressed, and
he mourned day and night. But the symbols presented to him revealed
a power above that of earthly rulers.
Upon the banks of the river Chebar, Ezekiel beheld a whirlwind
seeming to come from the north, “a great cloud, and a fire infolding
itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as
the color of amber.” A number of wheels, intersecting one another,
were moved by four living beings. High above all these “was the
likeness of a throne, as the appearance of a sapphire stone: and upon
the likeness of the throne was the likeness as the appearance of a man
above upon it.” “And there appeared in the cherubims the form of a
man’s hand under their wings.”
Ezekiel 1:4, 26
;
10:8
. The wheels
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were so complicated in arrangement that at first sight they appeared
to be in confusion; but they moved in perfect harmony. Heavenly