Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1933
“Your rowers have brought you into great waters.” Ezekiel 27:26.
THIS was spoken by the Prophet concerning Tyre, that great mercantile city where all the commerce of the East found its outlet towards the West. Tyre, when the Chaldeans invaded Palestine, had greatly rejoiced at the fall of Jerusalem. She said, “Aha, she is broken that was the gates of the people: I shall be replenished now she is laid waste.” It was a cruel and selfish exultation. After a while the city in the sea came to feel the weight of the great oppressor’s arm, for thus said the Lord, “I will bring upon Tyrus, Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, a king of kings, from the north. He shall set engines of war against your walls and with his axes he shall break down your towers.” For 13 years the city endured a siege under Nebuchadnezzar and it was concerning this calamity that the Prophet said, “Your rowers have brought you into great waters” The merchant princes of Tyre had so managed the affairs of the State that they brought the Tyrians into desperate straits. They had incited them to stand out against the great king and they discovered, in due time, that they were striving against a power too strong for them. Their policy had been a mistake. Comparing Tyre to one of its own galleys propelled with oars, the Prophet declares, “Your rowers have brought you into great waters.”
All the glories and the woes of Tyre are now over. “What city is like Tyrus, like the destroyed in the midst of the sea?” That page of history has long ago been turned over to give place to the rise and fall of other cities and empires, but the prophetic expression is still full of power. To many persons in our own day we may well cry with Ezekiel, “Your rowers have brought you into great waters.”
I. First and foremost, this is truly applicable to SINNERS WHO ARE BEGINNING TO TASTE THE RESULT OF THEIR SINS—ungodly persons who have chosen their own ways and followed their own devices—and now, at last, are finding that the way of transgressors is hard. Sinners may go unpunished for many a bright hour of the morning of life, but as the day grows older, the shadows fall and their way is clouded over. I meet with many who may be well assured that God will ultimately punish sin because the first flakes of the endless fire shower have begun to fall upon them and they cannot escape. They are now beginning to reap the first ripe ears of that awful harvest whose sheaves of woe shall fill their bosoms, world without end. In those who sin with the flesh, the result of their vices is seen and felt to a horrible degree in their own bodies. Many a man bears in his bones the sins of his youth. Around us are many who already wish that they had never been born because of the condition into which their wantonness has brought them. The sin which at first seemed a dainty luxury, sweet to their palate, has now developed into a corrosive poison in their heart, eating their flesh as with fire and burning up their spirits. Lust was their pilot—the siren of pleasure lured them on and now they are wrecks—breaking to pieces on the rocks. Despondent, ashamed, haunted with nameless terrors, afraid to hope, they dare neither live nor die. They are overcome with alarm as they look forward, for if it is darkness behind and night around, tenfold blackness lies before them by reason of their transgression and their sins. O sinner spent with sin, “Your rowers have brought you into great waters.”
Certain transgressors are beginning to feel the result of wrong-doing in their circumstances. They have brought themselves from wealth to poverty by drunkenness, dishonesty, or vice. The owner of a fair estate is compelled to herd with the lowest of the low in a filthy lodging. He who was educated for a profession and is skilled in learned languages— employs his superior knowledge to beg and cheat—and even then remains in loathsome rags. Not even in this world does sin pay its servants good wages! Drunkenness and idleness clothe a man with rags—these are the livery of sin. Those godly men who spend their lives in the painful business of seeking out the fallen often harrow our feelings with the dread stories of those who are truly prodigals, not merely in parable, but in literal fact, who have wasted their substance in riotous living and now, if it were possible, would be glad to fill their belly with the husks that swine eat and no man gives to them.
Many a broken-down sinner has, in this house, found his way back to the Great Father. Oh, that it may be so during this service! Sorely tossed about in sickness and in need, both of them the result of your sin, you are in a sorry plight at this hour. “Your rowers have brought you into great waters.” You would not take Christ to be your Pilot in your youth—you were too proud to accept your father’s God, your mother’s Savior—you must have your own way and follow your own devices! And now the desperate tugging of your passions have brought you into deep waters, indeed. You said in your pride, “I will not be tied to my mother’s apron strings,” but you are now a captive, fastened with bonds of steel to one who will be no mother to you, but a destroyer! You gave up your boat to pirate rowers and now look where they have brought you! The waters about you are dark and tempestuous and no port is near. One thing you can do, and I would have you do it—warn others lest they come into your place of danger! With broken health and lost estate, at least be humane—when you are most in your misery, call to yourself the young who have not yet known your evil ways and charge them to shun your course! If you cannot be an example, I would use you as a beacon. “Though hand join in hand, yet shall not the wicked be unpunished”—and you are a proof of the same. “Your rowers have brought you into great waters.”