I will put an end to your noisy songs, and the music of your harps will be heard no more. – Ezekiel 26:13

Today's Scripture Reading (June 28, 2020): Ezekiel 26

William Shakespeare places the words in the mouth of his tragic hero, General Macbeth.

          Out, out brief candle!

          Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

          That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

          And then is heard no more:

          It is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

          Signifying nothing.

Sometimes, life seems like a bad play, or maybe an okay play spoiled by a horrible final act. Or a good movie that is so filled with special effects and battle sequences that the plot suffers and, eventually, fails. Somehow, everything that matters about life is hidden from our eyes. There is a lot of noise present all around us, but it is absent of meaning.

It happens more often than we might want to admit. Our social media pages are filled with noise, that in the end, are often meaningless because we never understood the situation in the first place. Our words become noise, but while we desperately want them to convey meaning, the meaning is lost if it was ever there in the first place. They signify nothing.

Ezekiel has heard the songs of Tyre. They tell a story without understanding; they seek to convey meaning, but they do so without a purpose. The city has watched the destruction of Jerusalem and has mistakenly believed that they are immune to their enemy's fate. That Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonian War machine would never turn their fury toward them. But they are mistaken. The Babylon war machine is already on its way, and the songs of the city are devoid of understanding; they are noise, and nothing more.

And so Ezekiel warns the city that they are not all that different from their neighbor, Jerusalem. The reality of the history of Tyre is that just after the fall of Jerusalem, the Babylonian army moved their focus to the Lebanese city. Tyre did not fall, but it was severely weakened, and the city was destroyed economically. It ended up paying a massive tribute to Babylon. The city's defeat made its former protestations nothing more than noise, without meaning and signifying nothing. No one was exempt from the Babylonian conquest, but that might have been an understanding that could only be gained in the presence of the defeat that turned the songs of the city into nothing more than noise.  

Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: Ezekiel 27