Visions of the Kingdom: Week 39

Ezekiel 36:1-38: Blessings on the Land

• 36:13 "you devour men" - Numbers 13:32
• 36:17 "defiled it by their own ways and deeds" - they had desolated their own land.
• 36:22 "for my Holy Name" - God cannot go back on His word
• 36:23 "profaned among the nations" - in their scattering throughout the nations, they have not brought glory to God. Do you cause others to profane or give glory to God?
• 36:24 "into your own land" - God has reserved this tiny plot of land for Israel alone.
• 36:25 "I will cleanse you" - 1 Corinthians 6:11 not merely covered by the blood of bulls and goats, but cleansed - symbolized by Jesus washing His disciple's feet, and by the ritual washing of Moses.

  “From all your actual filthiness, as well as from all your original filthiness, will I cleanse you. From all your secret filthiness, and from all your public filthiness; from everything that was wrong in the family; from everything that was wrong in the business; from everything that was wrong in your own heart — ‘From all your filthiness will I cleanse you.’” (Spurgeon)

• 36:27 "My Spirit within you" - Israel will be born again, the longing of Paul the Apostle.
• 36:28 "then you will live in the land" - not the return with Zerubbabel, Nehemiah, and Ezrah, which was a foreshadowing lacking many details prophesied, but a final restoration.
• 36:34 "desolate in the eyes of all who pass through" -

  In 1867 the American author Mark Twain toured the land of Israel and described it as a “desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds—a silent mournful expanse…. A desolation…. We never saw a human being on the whole route…. hardly a tree or shrub anywhere…. Even the olive tree and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country.” (The Innocents Abroad)

• 36:38 "flocks of men" - no longer flocks of animal sacrifices, but men offering their bodies as a living sacrifice.