Ezekiel 37:22

A REUNITED ISRAEL

‘No more two nations.’

Ezekiel 37:22

Because they are ‘My people,’ Jehovah makes the leading out of exile and the return to Canaan to be prophesied to them.

I. In view of the Messiah, He promises them a united nationality, and the inhabiting of Canaan for ever, the peaceful possession of the land.—The promise here has nothing to do with individuals. After the people of Israel relinquished their claim to nationality in presence of the manifested Messiah, there can be no further talk of their conversion as a nation to Christ; and so much the less as the Kingdom of God over Israel, as a nation, has passed over for fulfilment to the idea of humanity given in Israel. In this last and at the same time highest respect, the unity and eternity, kingly and priestly, under the one shepherd, here prophesied, have in Christianity—alike as regards the kingship and as regards the sanctuary—their universal and also their progressive realisation.

II. The literally verbal interpretation of our prophet has been repeatedly spoken against.—For in whatever way the prophets may prophesy the glorious future of Israel, the popular form of their discourse, expressed in accordance with the times, must not keep out of view the eternal hope of Israel, the Spirit-anointed One. Since the beginning and the end of God’s march in history through the world is man, is humanity, it must seem childish to believe that the ‘millennial kingdom’ will be centralised at Jerusalem, that this will be its capital under the Jews brought back to Palestine, that the Lord will at His coming again dwell in a real Temple, and that the law of Moses, and even the ceremonial and the civil law of Moses, will be the law of the kingdom, etc. This is ‘realistic’ exposition indeed; and while people cross and bless themselves with it against ‘spiritualism,’ the thought never troubles them that they are borne along by the materialistic current of the age. The New Testament has not thus understood, not thus expounded the Old. From God’s covenant with Abraham onward, the development of Israel moves in the direction of the formation of a nation and the possession of a land, the land of Canaan. The prophets would have been unintelligible to Israel had they prophesied to it a future without regard to these two particulars. How far that which after the judgment of the exile was prophesied, as restitution of people, land, and cultus, had to serve the purpose of affording the historical nexus and point of departure for the Messiah—to what extent what was prophesied on these points would have political earthly reality, could be discerned from the very character of the coming Messianic kingdom. A kingdom which, according to the confession before Pilate, is not of this world, could not fail to show that the apparent sensuousness of the prophecies portraying the future of the people and land of Israel is in reality spiritual allegory. In the history of the nation, in its institutions, etc., the vessels were sufficiently well placed for types and symbols, in order in due time to change the water in them into the wine of Christ.

III. The two powers, which in the second section of our chapter are destined to realise the idea of the symbolised unity of the nation, are the royal power ( Ezekiel 37:22) and the sanctuary ( Ezekiel 37:26).—As these express that which from the commencement Israel was appointed to be (Exodus 19:6), Israel’s destiny as a nation, they are the two pillars of its unity. When the kingdom was divided and the sanctuary was no longer the one sanctuary for all, then there came an end, first to Israel, and then to Judah. As without the raising up again of the kingdom of David, and without the restoration of the sanctuary of Jehovah, there can be no requickening, so there can be no reunion of Israel. That which the last destruction of the Temple, on the one hand, gives to the Jews to ponder to this very hour, Pilate on the other, by his question (St. John 19:15), laid on the consciences of their national representatives of that time, and in such a manner that we feel reminded of verses like John 19:22 and others here.

Illustration

‘The promise can relate only to Christian Israel, for the Jewish nation either completed itself in the Messiah by receiving Christ, or deprived itself of Him, as may be read in St. John 19:15. Then with the perishing of its spirit, its flesh also perished; what still remained in form of Israel was therefore broken up by the false Messiahs, the Romans, etc. It is a fundamental mistake still to seek at the present day to see in the Jews a nation, especially when the remains of nationality—the offspring of pride—which still manifested themselves in the Middle Ages in the individual members of the race, are being ever more and more spiritualised, or even materialised, by the spirit of indifference, into cosmopolitanism.’