Ezekiel 31:1
And it came to pass in the eleventh year, in the third month, in the first day of the month, that the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, And it came to pass in the eleventh year, in the third month, in the first day of the month, that the word of the LORD came unto me, saying,
The verse dates the message that follows to the first day of the third month in the eleventh year and records that the word of the LORD came to Ezekiel. It belongs to the group of prophecies against foreign or other nations, specifically the prophecies against Egypt in chapters 29–32. Those prophecies were delivered more than twenty-four centuries ago, when Egypt was one of the most ancient and powerful kingdoms in the world, then one of the greatest kingdoms and once the greatest empire on earth.
The verse begins a prophecy concerning Egypt and the certain fate and coming overthrow of Pharaoh and his host, addressed to the king of Egypt. Assyria is pictured as a lofty cedar, and its overthrow by the Chaldeans serves as a warning of Egypt's coming overthrow. The verse announces that the king of Egypt will become subject to the mighty monarch of Assyria. Through that subjugation Egypt absorbed Babylonian ideas of government, religion, and education, whose pantheistic ideas of God did not reveal the true God as He is but bore the marks of an apostate power planned by Satan.
The judgment announced includes dried-up rivers and abolished idols, describes the revolutions and state of Egypt, and declares that Egypt would become the basest of kingdoms. The prediction that Egypt would become the basest of kingdoms was literally fulfilled, and the prophecies of the certain fate of Pharaoh and his host have evident fulfillment. The chapter shows that the high places of the forest figuratively represent the supremacy of Gentile rule and that mountain in symbolic prophecy signifies government or kingdom, confirming that Micah 3:12 predicts the uprooting and abolition of the government, power, and nationality of Israel, the house of Jacob, and the placing of the Lord's professed people under Gentile rule with their enemies ruling over them.