14 And the word of the Lord came to me: 15 “Son of man, your brothers, even your brothers, your kinsmen, the whole house of Israel, all of them, are those of whom the inhabitants of Jerusalem have said, ‘Go far from the Lord; to us this land is given for a possession.’ 16 Therefore say, ‘Thus says the Lord God: Though I removed them far off among the nations, and though I scattered them among the countries, yet I have been a sanctuary to them for a while in the countries where they have gone.’ 17 Therefore say, ‘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.’ 18 And when they come there, they will remove from it all its detestable things and all its abominations. 19 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, 20 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. 21 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.”
22 Then the cherubim lifted up their wings, with the wheels beside them, and the glory of the God of Israel was over them. 23 And the glory of the Lordwent up from the midst of the city and stood on the mountain that is on the east side of the city. 24 And the Spirit lifted me up and brought me in the vision by the Spirit of God into Chaldea, to the exiles. Then the vision that I had seen went up from me. 25 And I told the exiles all the things that the Lord had shown me.
The prophecy of hope emerges from the attitude the people in Jerusalem held and expressed about those who had been taken into exile. The exiles, they maintained, had left Jerusalem, and were in a foreign land, and this was therefore the mark of their God- forsakenness. God's blessing and favour - this was a deeply ingrained belief in the Jewish mind - could rest only on those who remained in Jerusalem. But Ezekiel tells them differently. The exiles were the ones with whom and through whom God would continue to work. This assurance is given (16, 17) in words full of wonderful promise and comfort, not only in terms of blessing to them during their exile, but also in the promise of future rehabilitation in restoration to the land. It is almost a repetition of the promise to the people of old of being brought out of the land of bondage and through the wilderness to the land of rest. Not only so, accompanying this promise of geographical restoration is that of moral and spiritual restoration also (18-20). This statement is a foretaste of the great 'new covenant' passages in chapters 36 and 37, in the promise of a new heart and a new spirit to the people, and is some indication, in the midst of the dark passages of Ezekiel's prophecy, of the long-term goal of his ministry to them. A wonderful word indeed, and one which we will study in greater detail when we come to these later chapters.
The remaining verses of the chapter (22-25) speak of the departure of the glory of the Lord from the city - in an eastward direction, as if towards the exile. We may be meant to infer from this that the presence of the Lord was now being transferred, as it were, to the camp of the exiles by the river Chebar, to do a work in them against the day when they returned to the land. Finally, in 24, 25, we are told that Ezekiel is restored to his normal state (the vision began, it will be remembered, at 8:1) and he communicates the visions he has had to the captives in Babylon.