Ezekiel 36:22-32

Ezekiel 36:22. Therefore say to the house of Israel, Thus saith the Lord Jehovah, Not for your sakes do I it, house of Israel, but on account of my holy name, which ye have profaned among the heathen, whither ye have gone.

Ezekiel 36:23. And I sanctify my name, the great, the profaned among the heathen, which ye have profaned in your midst; and the heathen know that I am Jehovah, saith the Lord Jehovah, when I sanctify myself in you before your eyes.

Ezekiel 36:24. And I will take you from among the heathen, and gather you from all the countries, and bring you into your land. (It should be noted that this part of the promise very clearly implied the breaking of the yoke of Babylon, and the precipitation of that power in some way from its present ascendancy. No one could mistake this to- be implied in such predictions; but it is only by this sort of implication that the doom of Babylon is referred to in Ezekiel.)

Ezekiel 36:25. And I will sprinkle upon you clean water, and ye shall be clean; from all your defilements and from all your idols will I cleanse you.

Ezekiel 36:26. And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit will I put within you; and I will take away the heart of stone out of your flesh, and give you a heart of flesh.

Ezekiel 36:27. And my Spirit will I put within you, and cause that ye walk in my statutes; and my judgments ye shall keep and do them.

Ezekiel 36:28. And ye shall dwell in the land which I gave to your fathers, and ye shall be to me a people, and I will be to you a God.

Ezekiel 36:29. And I will deliver you from all your defilements, and will call to the corn and increase it, and will not send famine upon you.

Ezekiel 36:30. And I will increase the fruit of the tree, and the produce of the field, that the reproach of hunger may no more light upon you among the heathen.

Ezekiel 36:31. And ye shall remember your ways that are evil, and your doings that are not good, and abhor yourselves on account of your iniquities, and on account of your abominations.

Ezekiel 36:32. Not for your sakes do I it, saith the Lord Jehovah, be it known to you: be ashamed and confounded because of your ways, O house of Israel.

In this rich and encouraging promise of good things to come there is, first, a very strong asseveration as to the ground on which God's contemplated interference for Israel's behoof was to proceed; negatively, not on their own account, positively, on account of his own name, which they had profaned. Looking simply to their state and conduct, the Lord, it is declared, could find occasion only for continued severity of dealing, and they themselves for profound humiliation and silent shame. The axe was here, therefore, laid at the root of all self-righteous boasting and fleshly confidences. Just as at first, when Moses said to their fathers, “Not for thy righteousness or for the uprightness of thy heart dost thou go to possess this land, for thou art a stiff-necked people” (Deuteronomy 9:5-6); so here the prophet disclosed the utter absence of any personal claim on the Divine goodness, and showed that whatever might henceforth be experienced, it must proceed from the upper spring of God's own grace and righteousness. In himself alone could the Lord find the motive of benevolent action. And while this laid all human merit in the dust, it furnished at the same time a rich ground of consolation and hope, such as could not be found in any inferior consideration or fleshly confidence. For it carried the humble heart of faith above the very sins and backslidings which had caused the judgments of Heaven to alight, and presented to it a source of life and blessing which even these could not stanch. And need we say, that as this was then the only hope of Israel, so now it is the one fountain-head of all the salvation that is experienced by the Christian? “Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but by his mercy, he saved us,” is the truth which is written on the threshold of faith, and which must pass into the experience of every sinner as he enters therein. No real life is attainable but such as carries in its bosom the death of all self-trust, and the renunciation of every personal claim on the goodness of God. And mortifying as this is to human pride, it yet provides the only solid and abiding peace for those who have come rightly to know the evil of sin; for it draws the soul up to God, and teaches it to form its expectations of good, not by any merit or demerit of its own, but by the large measures of God's own free and spontaneous beneficence, and the eternal principles of his high administration. The creature thus exchanges the vanity of a human ground for the infinite sufficiency of a Divine one, and the feebleness of an arm of flesh for the all-prevailing might of omnipotence.

But in regard to the promise before us, it is to be considered not only that God finds the ground of action solely in himself, but in himself with respect to his own glory, or the vindication of his name before the world. By what has happened in Israel, and what is still proceeding among them, this name is blasphemed; for it seems as if Jehovah, the God of Israel, were unable to stand before the might of heathenism, and protect and bless his people. Such thoughts, however naturally arising in the circumstances, proceeded on a partial and mistaken view of the character of Jehovah, and especially from an ignorance of his essential righteousness. The heathen judged of Jehovah from their own idol-gods, and hence had no way of accounting for the desolations that had befallen the land and people of Canaan but the comparative impotence of Him in whom they trusted. Therefore, in wiping away this foul reproach, the Lord must act in such a manner as would serve to bring clearly out in the light of day the righteousness which forms the most distinguishing element of his character, and which required only to be understood, both to explain what had taken place of evil, and secure the introduction of the contrary good. But how could such a manifestation of the Divine righteousness be given? It must plainly begin where the evil had its rise in the hearts of the people with whom God's name was associated. The love of sin there was the polluted fountain-head from which the whole succession of troubles and disasters had sprung; and nothing could effectually reach the evil which did not provide for the re-establishment of holiness in their hearts. Therefore Israel must first of all be made a holy people, their pollutions must be done away, their hearts subdued and wrought into a conformity to God's holiness, that they might be known to be his chosen ones from the bright reflection seen in them of his own pure and righteous character. Then, understanding from the regenerated state and exemplary lives of his people what sort of being Jehovah is, the heathen would find a ready explanation of all the tribulations that he had brought upon Israel in the past; they would perceive these to be only the necessary vindications of Jehovah's righteousness on a people who refused to yield themselves to his authority and comply with his will. At the same time, also, the way would be opened for the introduction of a more blessed and glorious future; for the people now entering with their very hearts into the righteousness of God, became capable of the highest outward good from his hand; and all the peculiar blessings of the covenant in a land replenished with the bountifulness of heaven would once more become their portion. Thus God would vindicate the glory of his name by first forming his people to the possession of his own holiness and then by treating them, as thus renewed and sanctified, to the richest outward tokens of his favour and goodness. (Such appears to be the leading design and purport of this prophecy. Hengstenberg, in his Christology, on the passage, has viewed the matter as if it was God's faithfulness to his covenant that was at stake, which required that a seed of blessing should still be found among the people of the covenant, notwithstanding all their sins and defections. That certainly is true, but, as Hävernick justly remarks, not the truth under consideration here. The heathen did not reproach God for want of fidelity to his own covenant; for in truth they did not know what that covenant really was or required. This was precisely the thing to be made plain; God must let them know that here holiness was everything, and that by the possession or the want of it all his outward dealings must be regulated.) Keeping in view the distinctive character of the prophecy as now explained, no difficulty can be found in regard to its particular expressions. Thus the expression in Ezekiel 36:23, “I sanctify my name,” is at once seen to refer, not to what this name is in itself, but to the reflection given of it in his people. It had been profaned by their wickedness and misery, it must again be sanctified by their returning to holiness and blessing; for God is sanctified when what he is in himself becomes apparent in the world, especially in those who stand nearest to him. So also the expression at the close of the same verse, “when I sanctify myself in you before your eyes;” for which many critical authorities, both ancient and modern, would substitute, “before their eyes,” namely, those of the heathen. This expression creates no difficulty to a person who enters thoroughly into the import of the passage, for it points to the fact that Israel as well as the heathen needed the manifestation in question of Jehovah's righteousness. It must be done first before the eyes of the people, who by their depravity had lost sight of God's real character; and then what was seen by them experimentally would also be seen reflectively by the heathen who dwelt around. This twofold perception of God's character is also brought out in other passages of our prophet; as in chap. Ezekiel 20:41-42: “And I will be sanctified in you before the eyes of the heathen, and ye shall know that I am Jehovah.” Finally, the mention, in Ezekiel 36:25, of clean water to be sprinkled on the people as the means of purification can only be understood symbolically; it does not refer to any mere external rite, or to any specific ordinance of the old covenant, such as the lustration ceremony with water and the ashes of the red heifer (Rosenmüller, Hengs.), or to the ablutions connected with the consecration of the Levites (Hävernick); it is rather to be viewed in reference to the purifications by water collectively, which were all, in one respect or another, symbolical of the removal of impurity, and the establishment of the worshipper in a sound and acceptable condition. This was no more of a merely formal and outward character in Old Testament times than it is now, as we may learn from the whole tenor of this prophecy. It was by their moral pollutions most of all that the people of Israel had profaned God's name and drawn down his displeasure; and the purification, which was to undo the evil and again to sanctify the name of God, could be nothing short of a conformity to God's own righteousness, which throughout all ages is the same. The whole of the water-lustrations of the Jews were symbolical of this purity of heart and conduct; and in referring to them here the prophet simply expresses in symbolical language a great spiritual promise the Lord would make Israel in reality what under the law was outwardly denoted by a sprinkling with clean water. He gives himself, indeed, the interpretation in the verses that follow, where the change is described by the Lord's imparting to them a new heart, and putting his own Spirit within them. In short, the peculiar blessing promised for the future was their being raised to the participation of God's holiness, precisely as in the past the great evil was their having become morally so unlike him.