“O thou that dwellest upon many waters, abundant in treasures, Thine end is come, and the measure of thy covetousness.” “Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, The beauty of the Chaldee’s excellency, Shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah.” “I will also make it a possession for the bittern, and pools of water; and I will sweep it with the besom of destruction, saith the Lord of hosts.”[293] [Sidenote: _Rise and Fall of Nations_] Every nation that has come upon the stage of action has been permitted to occupy its place on the earth, that it might be seen whether it would fulfil the purpose of “the Watcher and the Holy One.” Prophecy has traced the rise and fall of the world’s great empires,—Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome. With each of these, as with nations of less power, history repeated itself. Each had its period of test, each failed, its glory faded, its power departed, and its place was occupied by another. While the nations rejected God’s principles, and in this rejection wrought their own ruin, it was still manifest that the divine, overruling purpose was working through all their movements. [Sidenote: _Vision of the Cherubim_] This lesson is taught in a wonderful symbolic representation given to the prophet Ezekiel during his exile in the land of the Chaldeans. The vision was given at a time when Ezekiel was weighed down with sorrowful memories and troubled forebodings. The land of his fathers was desolate. Jerusalem was depopulated. The prophet himself was a stranger in a land where ambition and cruelty reigned supreme. As on every hand he beheld tyranny and wrong, his soul was distressed, and he mourned day and night. But the symbols presented to him revealed a power above that of earthly rulers. [Sidenote: _The Guiding Hand_] Upon the banks of the river Chebar, Ezekiel beheld a whirlwind seeming to come from the north, “a great cloud, and a fire enfolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the color of amber.” A number of wheels, intersecting one another, were moved by four living beings. High above all these was the “likeness of a throne, as the appearance of a sapphire stone; and upon the likeness of the throne was the likeness as the appearance of a man above upon it.” “And there appeared in the cherubim the form of a man’s hand under their wings.”[294] The wheels were so complicated in arrangement that at first sight they appeared to be in confusion; but they moved in perfect harmony. Heavenly beings, sustained and guided by the hand beneath the wings of the cherubim, were impelling these wheels; above them, upon the sapphire throne, was the Eternal One; and round about the throne a rainbow, the emblem of divine mercy.