Ezekiel 20:34-36

“And I will bring you out from the peoples, and will gather you out of the countries in which you are scattered, with a mighty hand and with a stretched out arm, and with fury poured out, and I will bring you into the wilderness of the peoples, and there I will plead with you face to face. Just as I pleaded with your fathers in the wilderness of the land of Egypt, so will I plead with you, says the Lord Yahweh.”

As He had done with the people of old at the exodus from Egypt, so will He deal with His people in the future. Although they have forsaken Him they will not finally be allowed to be forsaken, for it is He Who is Lord and over all, and not them. His purposes will not be allowed to fail. Thus they will be brought to a situation where they will have to choose between blessing or judgment.

They wanted to be ‘like the nations' but there would come a day when He would no longer allow it. Indeed the nations would not want them, and that would be because of the hand of God. Thus would they be gathered out of the countries to which they had gone. But the picture is not one of untold blessing. Rather He would be dealing with them in His anger. He would be facing them up with what they were and would seek to bring them back into covenant with Himself, just as He had at Sinai. God will not be thwarted even by His people.

Note the emphasis that this will be in ‘the wilderness'. This will be a new Exodus, but here it also stresses that they will still be in barrenness (compare Hosea 2:6; Hosea 12:9). Their future blessing will depend on their response. There He will plead with them face to face, just as He had at Sinai in the wilderness. But many will not respond (Ezekiel 20:38) and will stay in the wilderness, just as the previously rebellious Israel in the time of Moses had died in the wilderness and had never seen the Promised Land.