Iran and US allowed Russian superyacht to cross Strait of Hormuz, source says

Ezekiel 22 is an extended indictment of Jerusalem's ruling class for a catalogue of financial and moral corruptions — taking bribes, charging interest, practicing extortion — all culminating in the accusation: 'me you have forgotten.' The verse addresses the specific pattern by which gain becomes the organizing principle of governance, displacing justice and covenant faithfulness.

While the original address is to Jerusalem's princes, the principle is applied by the prophets broadly to any governing authority. The structural pattern — public authority exercised for private financial benefit, with God forgotten — is the plain sense Ezekiel intends.

The tacit cooperation between the United States and Iran to permit a sanctioned oligarch's passage represents precisely this pattern: public authority (control of a strategic waterway, enforcement of sanctions) quietly deployed in service of private gain, with no public accounting. The declared purposes of those authorities — geopolitical pressure, sanctions enforcement — were 'forgotten' in the moment of financial convenience.

Ezekiel's word illuminates not only the ancient princes of Jerusalem but every governing class in every age that allows financial interest to silently override its stated obligations.

James 5:1-3 addresses the accumulation of obscene wealth in the context of the last days, framing the hoarding of treasure not merely as an economic behavior but as a moral indictment with eschatological weight. James's original hearers were communities watching wealthy landowners and merchants operate with impunity while the poor suffered; his word is that such wealth is already corroding, already building its case against its holders.

The phrase 'you have laid up treasure in the last days' carries deliberate irony: what is gathered with such effort and influence will serve only as testimony against the gatherer before God. The principle applies wherever extraordinary wealth generates extraordinary access to power that ordinary persons could never purchase.

A $500 million superyacht transiting a blockaded strategic waterway — after geopolitical rivals silently accommodated its passage — is a vivid image of exactly the kind of wealth James describes: wealth so large it bends the behavior of nations, wealth that appears to operate above the rules that govern ordinary commerce and ordinary people.

James does not call the believer to outrage but to sobriety: such treasure is already corroding. The power it purchases from governments is temporary; the accounting it accumulates before God is permanent.

Psalm 2 opens with a question about the character of international political behavior: nations rage, peoples plot, rulers 'take counsel together.' The psalmist's point is that beneath the declared hostilities and alliances of the nations lies a common orientation — rulers acting in concert, whether openly or secretly, in ways that are ultimately oriented against God's order.

The irony the Psalm develops is that enemies collaborate against the LORD even while appearing to oppose one another. The plain sense encompasses the full spectrum of international behavior, including the covert alignments of ostensible adversaries.

The spectacle of Iran and the United States — nations whose public posture toward one another is one of confrontation — quietly coordinating to benefit a third-party oligarch is a precise instance of the Psalm's pattern: rulers taking counsel together in ways that serve interests other than justice or the good of ordinary people, while their public declarations suggest otherwise.

The believer reads Psalm 2 and is not shocked. He knows that the entanglements of the powerful follow patterns older than any current geopolitical alignment, and that the LORD 'sits in the heavens and laughs' — not from indifference, but from absolute sovereign confidence.