I will give you a new heart
Ezekiel 36:26-27 God fulfilled this prophecy on the day of Pentecost
“Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will be careful to observe My ordinances.”
Ezekiel 36:26-27 NASB1995
The Lord surprised me today by pointing me to the prophet Ezekiel. The prophet hasn’t come up in any other Heaven On Wheels devotional, so let’s start with a little background about Ezekiel.
The name Ezekiel means “God is strong” or “God strengthens”, depending on the translation. He is acknowledged as a prophet in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, and received his prophetic visions from God between 593 and 571 BC. The Book of Ezekiel is divided into three parts (from Wikipedia)
Ezekiel has the broad threefold structure found in a number of the prophetic books: oracles of woe against the prophet's own people, followed by oracles against Israel's neighbours, ending in prophecies of hope and salvation:
Prophecies against Judah and Jerusalem, chapters 1–24
Prophecies against the foreign nations, chapters 25–32
Prophecies of hope and salvation, chapters 33–48.
Today’s verses come from the latter section, and the NASB translation calls out Chapter 36 with two section headers: “The Mountains of Israel to be Blessed” and “Israel to Be Renewed for His Name’s Sake”. In these verses, Ezekiel is passing along God’s assurances that Israel will recover from the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple and will experience a spiritual renewal as well. He also anticipates the Second Covenant after the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Under the first covenant, God’s laws worked on the outward aspects of spiritual transformation — follow these laws to please Him. Here, God promises a new heart (a change of heart) to work on His followers from the inside out. In the words of Charles H. Spurgeon1,
“True religion begins, then, with the heart, and the heart is the ruling power of manhood. You may enlighten a man’s understanding and you have done much, but as long as his heart is wrong, the enlightenment of the understanding only enables him to sin with a greater weight of responsibility resting upon him.”
What’s this “new heart” and “new spirit”? Jesus referred to this when He spoke of being born again during His discussion with the Pharisee Nicodemus. In 2 Corinthians 5:17, Paul writes of believers being “a new creature” in Christ.
In ancient times, the heart was considered to be the source of one’s will and the source of feeling and action. Referring to someone as having a heart of stone meant that they were inflexible and stubborn, while a heart of flesh was a heart that (in the words of Adam Clarke):
“…can feel, and that can enjoy; that can feel love to God and to all men, and be a proper habitation for the living God.”2
Image from “Pentecost: Why and How to Celebrate”, BuildingFaith.org
Verse 27 foresees the Holy Spirit, which dwells in all believers (Romans 8:9) and is noted in Acts 1:5 and 1:8 as filling believers with special power. Once again, Charles Spurgeon provides the perfect commentary regarding the Holy Spirit:
“The Holy Spirit cannot dwell in the old heart; it is a filthy place, devoid of all good, and full of enmity to God. His very first operation upon our nature is to pull down the old house and build himself a new one, that he may be able to inhabit us consistently with his holy spiritual nature.”
What’s this “cause you to walk in My statutes” thing Ezekiel’s referring to? He means that by being spiritually transformed and having the Holy Spirit dwelling inside the believer, the believer is assisted in obeying God’s law. As David Guzik put it in an Enduring Word commentary:
Obedience would be more of a matter of being what God has already made the believer as a new man or woman in Jesus Christ, filled with God’s own Holy Spirit.
As Barb noted in her recent series on the Epistle of Galatians, trying to reach God by following the law does not work. The Holy Spirit brings us the Fruit of the Spirit and that amazing transformation creates a new heart in believers.
It took about six hundred years, but God fulfilled the prophecy on the day of Pentecost (a Jewish festival at the time) as described in Acts 2:1-4.
Heaven On Wheels Daily Prayer:
Our Father in Heaven, as I read the words of Ezekiel, I am reassured that Your patience and love toward believers is the same yesterday, today, and forever. You have my praise and thanks that in Christ, my heart has been cleansed, and that by Your grace the Holy Spirit dwells within me, guiding me into all truth. I praise Your holy name in the name of my Savior Jesus Christ, AMEN
Scripture quotations taken from the (NASB®) New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995, 2020 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. lockman.org.
Commentary from Enduring Word used with written permission of the author.
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Spurgeon, Charles Haddon "The New Park Street Pulpit" Volumes 1-6 and "The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit" Volumes 7-63 (Pasadena, Texas: Pilgrim Publications, 1990)
Clarke, Adam "Clarke's Commentary: The Holy Bible Containing the Old and New Testaments with a Commentary and Critical Notes" Volume 4 (Isaiah-Malachi) (New York: Eaton and Mains, 1827)