7. Ye shall know. Instead of acknowledging God and heeding His revelations, the people “mocked the messengers of God, and despised his words, and misused his prophets, until the wrath of the Lord arose against his people, till there was no remedy” (2 Chron. 36:16). They refused to acknowledge the genuineness of the divine message until rudely awakened by the doom threatened by these despised prophets. The fulfillment of prophecy constituted the divine seal upon the validity of the prophet and his work.
In their idolatry the Israelites had compared Jehovah with the gods of the heathen and had regarded Him as only one of the many deities to be worshiped. Their choice of gods had been on the basis of who they thought would bring them the greatest prosperity (see 2 Chron. 28:23). In combating this demoralizing philosophy the prophets had set forth two main lines of evidence to prove the superiority of the true God over those who were gods only in name: first, Jehovah’s creative power, and second, His prophetic ability (Isa. 45; Jer. 10). This latter evidence is here presented as the one that would eventually force from the lips of the stubborn Israelites the confession that Jehovah was, after all, the true and only God. How the heart of God had hoped that such an acknowledgment would come while there was yet remedy! How loath God was to permit His chosen ones to reap the fruits of their own stubborn unbelief!
Prophecy and its fulfillment are elsewhere set forth as a reason for belief: “And now I have told you before it come to pass, that, when it is come to pass, ye might believe” (John 14:29). This constitutes, perhaps, the most powerful evidence that the Scriptures are divine, and that God is what He has declared Himself to be. Prophecy is the argument against which the skeptic has found no logical rebuttal. In our day there is an accumulation of prophetic evidence. Those who refuse to acknowledge its validity and thus the claims of the God who uttered it, will finally, like Israel of old, be forced to acknowledge the sovereignty of the only true and living God.
The expression “ye shall know” or its equivalent occurs 88 times in Ezekiel, and is the keynote of the book. It was because Israel did not “know” that they were carried into captivity (Isa. 1:3; 5:13; Hosea 4:6). The Captivity was an educational process. Through sore adversity, God’s people were to learn what they had failed to learn during times of prosperity (DA 28; see IV, 31).