Ezekiel 32:19 Whom dost thou pass in beauty? Go down, and be thou laid with the uncircumcised.
Preparing for the Inevitable
I don’t think there is any doubt that the Egyptians were absolutely obsessed with the afterlife. If you think about the pyramids and all that the Egyptians went through to ensure a good afterlife for the pharaohs, it is quite obvious that they were taken with this. If you were to walk around the Egyptian’s cemetery a few thousand years ago and say, “Where is Pharaoh buried?” they would have pointed up at this skyscraper of a tombstone called a pyramid in answer.
Yet, Ezekiel, God’s prophet, has a very different picture of the afterlife for Pharaoh. It is a lament, a funeral dirge, and it is a reminder that death is the great equalizer. This is not a theology of the afterlife, but a poetic rendering of a great truth: death is the great equalizer.
God says in verse 18, “Son of man, wail for the multitude of Egypt, and cast them down.” I don’t think God is so much making a command as He is informing Ezekiel of what is inevitable, that all mankind, Pharaoh included, would go down “into the pit.”
God asks Pharaoh, “Whom dost thou pass in beauty? go down, and be thou laid with the uncircumcised.” God is saying, “Whom do you excel in beauty, Pharaoh?” Pharaoh replies, “We are greater than anyone and everyone.” Then, God says, “Lie in death with everyone.”
God gives this very visual tour of the underworld to which Pharaoh is going. All the conquerors are there. The following verses mention Asshur, Elam, Meshech, Tubal, Edom, and the Zidonians.
These names mean nothing to us anymore, and that is the point. These were all great conquerors, and Pharaoh and Egypt were the conquerors of the conquerors. Whether you are the conqueror or the conquered, the slayer or the slain, the pharaoh or the slave, you will end up in the same place, death.
In verse 31, God says, “Pharaoh shall see them, and shall be comforted over all his multitude.” In other words, it is a morbid kind of comfort that Pharaoh would receive by saying, “Well, at least I am not the only one here.”
The takeaway from all this is that you don’t prepare for the inevitable by conquering life; you prepare for the inevitable by surrendering it to God. It doesn’t matter whether you are a pharaoh or a slave, whether you wield the sword or are slain by it. God said, “I shall brandish my sword…and…the sword of the king of Babylon shall come upon thee…and they shall spoil the pomp of Egypt.”
Egypt was an arrogant, pompous nation led by the arrogant Pharaoh who thought that Egypt would gain significance by conquering life and everyone else. The truth is that significance is found when, instead of trying to conqueror life, we surrender our life to the God Who gives it to us each day.