23 And I will vindicate the holiness of my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, and which you have profaned among them. And the nations will know that I am the Lord, declares the Lord God, when through you I vindicate my holiness before their eyes. 24 I will take you from the nations and gather you from all the countries and bring you into your own land. 25 I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. 26 And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. 27 And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. 28 You shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers, and you shall be my people, and I will be your God. 29 And I will deliver you from all your uncleannesses. And I will summon the grain and make it abundant and lay no famine upon you. 30 I will make the fruit of the tree and the increase of the field abundant, that you may never again suffer the disgrace of famine among the nations. 31 Then you will remember your evil ways, and your deeds that were not good, and you will loathe yourselves for your iniquities and your abominations. 32 It is not for your sake that I will act, declares the Lord God; let that be known to you. Be ashamed and confounded for your ways, O house of Israel.
33 “Thus says the Lord God: On the day that I cleanse you from all your iniquities, I will cause the cities to be inhabited, and the waste places shall be rebuilt. 34 And the land that was desolate shall be tilled, instead of being the desolation that it was in the sight of all who passed by. 35 And they will say, ‘This land that was desolate has become like the garden of Eden, and the waste and desolate and ruined cities are now fortified and inhabited.’36 Then the nations that are left all around you shall know that I am the Lord; I have rebuilt the ruined places and replanted that which was desolate. I am the Lord; I have spoken, and I will do it.
37 “Thus says the Lord God: This also I will let the house of Israel ask me to do for them: to increase their people like a flock. 38 Like the flock for sacrifices, like the flock at Jerusalem during her appointed feasts, so shall the waste cities be filled with flocks of people. Then they will know that I am the Lord.”
Our own view is that there is truth and error in both the positions mentioned in the previous Note. As to the first, we must recognize that the real fulfilment of 26, which is the promise of the new covenant, takes place in relation to Christ (cf His words in the Upper Room, 'This cup is the new covenant in My blood'). That covenant was initiated and instituted in the death that He died upon the cross. In this sense, therefore, the Reformers were right when they said that Ezekiel's words necessarily referred to the Church as the new Israel of God. One might think therefore that that is all there is to be said, but this is not so, and for this reason: the words in 24 about the gathering of Israel back to their own land have no point of application either in our Lord's words about the new covenant spoken in the Upper Room, or in any other references to it in the New Testament. So that we must either say that 24 must be taken literally to refer to the return of the Jews under Ezra and Nehemiah, and the rest of the prophecy spiritualised and referred to our Lord's teaching (but are we justified in spiritualising one bit and literalising another, simply to make it fit into a preconceived interpretation?), or look for a further fulfilment of the 'return to the land' prophecy in the future. It is this latter idea that the dispensational view maintains, asserting that the passage has reference to a future that God has for and with His people, the Jews. The problem, however - and this in our estimation is the fatal objection to such a view - is that they speak of this 'future' as being after the Church of Christ is redeemed and taken to glory. This is a manifest impossibility, since the final redemption of the Church is the end of history and the beginning of the eternal state, and it is a misunderstanding of both Scripture and history to suppose it possible for such a thing to happen. As C.S. Lewis puts it, 'When the Author walks on to the stage, the play is over'. We shall continue to look at this in the next Note.