“One Heart and a New Spirit”

Sunday, March 27, 2022

“‘Thus says the Lord God: I will gather you from the peoples and assemble you out of the countries where you have been scattered, and I will give you the land of Israel.’ And when they come there, they will remove from it all its detestable things and all its abominations. And I will give them one heart, and a new spirit I will put within them. I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, that they may walk in my statutes and keep my rules and obey them. And they shall be my people, and I will be their God.” (Ezekiel 11.17-20)

With its talk of unity and a heart directed toward serving God, this passage evokes many New Testament principles, even though it’s found in the Old.  In fairness, the entire Old Testament was constructed in order to pave the way for the New, but parts of it are difficult to comprehend—perhaps especially those that in some sense straddle the line between Old and New.  Most of Ezekiel fits into that category, and as a result it doesn’t get its fair share of study; but it contains important lessons both for the Jews during their captivity to Babylon, and for us today.

Before this oracle, one of the leaders of the people remaining in Jerusalem died, and although those leaders had been rejecting God’s law and creating more and more trouble, the prophet Ezekiel still mourned his death, taking it as a sign of God’s judgment on his people.  He asked God, “Ah, Lord God! Will you make a full end of the remnant of Israel?” (Eze 11.13).  God responded with the wonderfully encouraging promise with which we began.  In short, his answer was, no.  Rather than giving Israel what they deserved, he intended to gather the far-flung exiles from the lands where they’d been scattered, and bless them.  This is even more extensive than we might at first realize. 

When the northern ten tribes, the kingdom of Israel, had been conquered by the Assyrians in the 720’s BC, much of its population was deported to various regions, in keeping with Assyria’s divide-and-rule policy.  The Bible doesn’t record the details of where these Israelites ended up, and it also does not record any major return of those exiles to their native homeland.  What it does record, in fact, is a general lack of desire among the Babylonian exiles to return to Jerusalem and Judea, even when Cyrus and the Persians proclaimed the freedom to do so.  It’s only natural—they’d lived in their new homes in Babylonia for generations by then, and while the return “home” had been everyone’s goal, it wasn’t exactly an easy task to accomplish!  Thus, the Jews remained, for the most part, scattered where they’d been taken by various conquerors.

Thus, it’s an astonishing promise God made, to gather his people “out of the countries where [they] have been scattered,” and plant them back in their ancestral homeland (Eze 11.17).  It’s especially important to note that, as with many other times when God made this promise, he didn’t limit it to the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, but referred to “the whole house of Israel” (v15).

Has this happened?  Well, that depends on how you’re looking at it.  Whether the exiles in the far reaches of the diaspora chose to return following Cyrus’ decree, they had the ability and the legal right to do so, en masse, at that time.  Was God promising to force the Israelites home against their will?  No, it’s presented as a great blessing, not a burden.  In fact, while the great majority refused the call, many thousands did return and set up a new Jewish state in the land promised to Abraham and his descendants.  But, as usual when we discover underwhelming short-term fulfillments of grandiose promises from God, he wasn’t just talking about the physical.  He had in mind the spiritual, too.  This collected nation of God’s people were to have a new heart and a new spirit.  That sounds suspiciously like the new covenant God promised through the prophet Jeremiah, saying, “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (Je 31.33).  This also pertained to “the house of Israel” (v33a), and if the promise to “forgive their iniquity” and “remember their sin no more” (v34) wasn’t enough to clue us in, the New Testament tells us explicitly that this prophecy always meant the covenant that Christ would later inaugurate (He 8.6-13).  In the same way, this prophecy from Ezekiel isn’t just for the people of Israel, it’s for us!

Does that mean God no longer cares about his promises to the Jews?  Paul holds out hope.  He writes that “a partial hardening has come upon Israel” (Ro 11.25), and that God is eager to graft them back into the tree of Christ’s kingdom (vv23-24), hinting at the possibility of a greater degree of conversion to Christ, to come at some point in the future.  Up to now, we haven’t seen much of that, but it’s a worthy goal and prayer.  By and large, the Israelites have rejected their own Messiah.  The very next sentence in the prophecy we’ve been considering tells what God had in mind for the Israelites who refused to walk in his ways:

“But as for those whose heart goes after their detestable things and their abominations, I will bring their deeds upon their own heads, declares the Lord God.” (Ezekiel 11.21)

It’s easy to read that and come away with the conclusion that they simply got what they deserved.  But didn’t we find this prophecy is about the kingdom of Christ, more than the kingdom of David?  In fact, the same threat looms over our heads, if we seek to retain our old, stony heart.  Let God’s word and Spirit soften your heart and mold your goals and purposes to walk in his ways.  Adopt the unified heart and spirit of the people of God.

Jeremy Nettles

Share