AP

Ezekiel 19:1-2  And you, take up a lamentation for the princes of Israel, and say: “What was your mother?  A lioness!  Among lions she crouched; in the midst of young lions she reared her cubs. 

As Ezekiel reflected on the sadness of Israel’s Babylonian captivity and its causes, he used two images that would be very familiar to God’s people in his lament: the lion (2) and the vine (10).  When the dying Jacob blessed his sons in Egypt, he said of his fourth-born, Judah, “You are a lion’s cub, O Judah; you return from the prey, my son.  Like a lion he crouches and lies down, like a lioness – who dares to rouse him?  The sceptre will not depart from Judah, nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet, until he comes to whom it belongs and the obedience of the nations is his.  He will tether his donkey to a vine, his colt to the choicest branch; he will wash his garments in wine, his robes in the blood of grapes.” (Genesis 49:9-11)

Ezekiel picked up these themes and spoke to the devastated nation about their continued unfaithfulness and rebellion that led to their downfall.  The lion’s cubs had become proud and confident in their own strength, had been dragged with hooks and trapped and caged and taken to Egypt (4) and to Babylon (8-9).  Likewise, the “fruitful vine” whose “branches were strong, fit for a ruler’s sceptre” (10-11), but, for the same reason, had been ‘uprooted’, ‘shrivelled’, ‘stripped’, ‘withered’, ‘consumed by fire’ and ‘planted in the desert, in a dry and thirsty land’, so that ‘no strong branch [was] left on it fit for a ruler’s sceptre’ (12-14).

Is there no solution to this ongoing pattern of disobedience and devastation for God’s chosen people that continued through the period of the Judges and now continued through the Monarchy?  Only by God’s gracious intervention to break the cycle!  As the distraught, lamenting Apostle John was given to see at the end of his life: “Then one of the elders said to me, ‘Do not weep!  See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has triumphed.  He is able to open the scroll and its seven seals.’  Then I saw a Lamb, looking as if it had been slain, standing in the centre of the throne, encircled by the four living creatures and the elders” (Revelation 5:5-6a), and as the Lord Jesus said towards the end of his earthly life: “I am the vine; you are the branches.  If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5), so we see how the OT continually anticipates the coming of this powerful, victorious Saviour!

“’Twas Jesus, my Saviour, who died on the tree, to open a fountain for sinners like me; his blood is that fountain which pardon bestows, and cleanses the foulest wherever it flows.  For the Lion of Judah shall break ev’ry chain, and give us the vict’ry again and again.  For the Lion of Judah shall break ev’ry chain, and give us the vict’ry again and again.” (Henry Q. Wilson)

– Bruce Christian