Ezekiel 28:9
Wilt thou yet say before him that slayeth thee, I am God? but thou shalt be a man, and no God, in the hand of him that slayeth thee. Wilt thou yet say before him that slayeth thee, I am God? but thou shalt be a man, and no God, in the hand of him that slayeth thee.
Ezekiel 28:9 belongs to a warning against rebellion spoken to the prince and ruler of Tyre, presented also as the king of Tyre. The ruler had lifted up his heart in self-exaltation to claim divine status, saying he was God, though he was merely a human being and not divine. When he is in the power of the one who kills him, he cannot maintain his claim to divinity but is exposed as mortal and powerless, a man and no god.
Because of that pride, God brings fearsome strangers from the nations, the terrible of the nations, against him to tarnish his brightness and splendor and to bring him down to the pit to die a violent death, the deaths of those slain in the midst of the seas. His death in the hand of his slayer and conqueror exposes his false claim and carries out divine judgment on his pride. The chapter to which the verse belongs explains how God deals with fallen angels and fallen people, referring first and primarily to Lucifer while also describing a broader movement of rebellion against God.
The Tyrian king acts as Satan's earthly representative because Satan fully controlled that government and worked through the ruler rather than appearing on earth in person. In this application Satan is the prince of evil and covering cherub who set his heart as the heart of God and claimed divinity. The account of self-exaltation warns that pride can lead people to oppose God and persecute His servants, that great experience or knowledge is of no benefit unless it leads to honoring God and His Son, and that opposing claims and deceptions will continue to arise through human agents.
At the end God will vindicate His law and deliver His people, and the word will be fulfilled when Satan is slain and proved to be merely a man and not divine. Satan as the root and his followers as the branches will be cut off together with rebellion, destroyed from among the fiery surroundings, from the midst of the stones of fire, made a terror that will never exist again, so that sin, sinners, and the wicked are no more. In light of the verse, Lucifer watches every movement to gain a hold through disguised influence, working on minds to draw them away from saving the perishing toward unessential details, toward jots and tittles, fault-finding in books, and non-testing differences of opinion magnified until prominent and enlarged. That work brings confusion among believers and unbelievers, into the ranks, hinders the advancement of the work, and lets Satan triumph, so that silence on such subjects is wisdom and is wise and eloquent.