Ezekiel 20:45

"And the word of Jehovah came unto me, saying, Son of man, set thy face toward the south, and drop thy word toward the south, and prophesy against the forest of the field in the South; and say to the forest of the South, Hear the word of Jehovah; thus saith the Lord Jehovah, Behold, I will kindle the fire in thee, and it shall devour every green tree in thee, and every dry tree: the flaming fire shall not be quenched, and all faces from the south to the north shall be burnt thereby. And all flesh shall see that I, Jehovah, have kindled it; it shall not be quenched. Then said I, Ah Lord Jehovah! they say of me, Is he not a speaker of parables?"

PARABLE OF THE GREAT FOREST FIRE

This parable emphatically teaches the total destruction of Jerusalem. If there could be any doubt of what is prophesied, the following chapter spells it out in language so blunt and specific as to shock the evil men who pretended not to understand it.

Incidentally, the Hebrew Bible begins the following chapter with verse 45 here; but we choose to discuss this paragraph in the same chapter where we find it in our English Bibles. "The riddle here was easy to solve, and Ezekiel was dealing with a sharp-witted people; but the sinful men who heard it simply did not wish to understand it, therefore they claimed it was too difficult to interpret. Ezekiel at once took that pitiful excuse away from them with the devastating message of the "Song of the Sword" in the following chapter."[22]

"The fire ... shall devour every green tree and every dry tree ..." (Ezekiel 20:47). Ezekiel 21:3 reveals that the green tree and the dry tree here stand for the wicked and the righteous, both of whom will perish in the forthcoming holocaust. It is regrettable that some scholars jump to the conclusion that this contradicts what the prophet said in Ezekiel 18 regarding the fact of God's judgments being strictly on an individual basis. However, such errors are due to the false interpretation of what God said there through Ezekiel. The "death" mentioned there as the penalty of wickedness is not temporal, at all, but eternal. Failure to see that, enables a scholar such as McFadyen to write that, "This rather conflicts with his theory of individual retribution which he so fully expounded in Ezekiel 18."[23] Canon Cook accurately explained that, "The equity of God is fully vindicated in the fact that the `death' prophesied here was only temporal, while the death promised to the disobedient in Ezekiel 18 is eternal."[24]