Abusive and tyrannical authority is universally decried. Problems arise when people throw out the authority with the abuse, as well as when they disagree over the definitions of “abuse” and “tyranny.”
One man’s tyranny is another man’s well-earned spoils of victory and “political mandate,” as it were.
The prophet Ezekiel was charged by God to condemn Israel’s abusive authority in religious and secular matters. Israel was pictured as a lioness, who raised a cub who “learned to catch prey and devoured men” (Ezekiel 19:1-9). Those subject to the cub’s abuse were not inclined to sit and take it. They caught him in a pit and brought him with hooks to Egypt.
The lioness did not learn from this, but was intent on achieving her goal, and raised another cub who, she thought, would succeed with more of the same, and worse. In addition to catching prey and devouring men, he seized widows and laid waste to cities.
The subjects, having honed their tyranny-busting discernment, took him down, too (Ezekiel 19:8-9).
Governing structures send out increasingly oppressive “leaders” who suppose that their success lies in oppressing people. They view their role as “catching prey” (conquering opponents and disappearing them). They consider as appropriate means such things as devouring men (the condition of individual people is unimportant), seizing widows (taking advantage of vulnerable and defenseless and voiceless people), and laying cities waste (destroying communities for the “higher good”).
It is not the average man who is to be caged and silenced, but the rogue lion cubs.