Eschatology · Israel & the imminent return
Prophecy watchers spend a lot of time on armies. Gog and Magog, the kings of the east, the beast and his ten horns. But long before Ezekiel describes an invasion, God tells the prophet to preach to something that cannot hear him — dirt. He tells him to prophesy to the mountains of Israel.
It is one of the strangest and most overlooked signs in the whole prophetic corpus. Before the bones live again, before the nations gather, the land itself is told it is going to come back to life. And in our lifetime, it has.
A Word Spoken to the Ground
In Ezekiel 36, the exiles are scattered, the land is desolate, and the surrounding nations have carved up the leftovers and mocked the God of a people who no longer had a country. Into that God speaks — not to the exiles first, but to the soil.
But you, O mountains of Israel, you will put forth your branches and bear your fruit for My people Israel; for they will soon come.
— Ezekiel 36:8, NASB1995
“For they will soon come.” The land is told to get ready because the people are on their way back. Then the promise widens: “I will multiply men on you, all the house of Israel, all of it… and the waste places will be rebuilt” (Ezekiel 36:10). “The desolate land will be cultivated… and they will say, ‘This desolate land has become like the garden of Eden’” (36:34–35). This is not vague poetry about spiritual renewal. It names a physical land, physically regathered people, and physical agriculture on ground that had gone to waste.
For roughly nineteen centuries, that oracle sat unfulfilled. The land was real, and it was empty — malarial marsh in the north, dead sand in the south, an Ottoman backwater that travelers described as a desolation. Mark Twain walked it in 1867 and called it a land that sat in sackcloth. The prophecy was on the books, and the ground was still asleep.
The Emphasis of the Watchmen
The teachers who fix their eyes on Israel — men who read Ezekiel with a map of the modern Middle East open beside it — keep pointing at the same thing: prophecy is not primarily about our cleverness in decoding it, but about God’s faithfulness in keeping it. Israel back in the land is not a lucky coincidence a preacher can exploit; it is a super-sign, a fulfilled word you can stand on to trust the words not yet fulfilled.
And their sobriety matters here. The point of Ezekiel 36 is not to make you a real-estate analyst of the last days. It is to make you certain that the God who said “they will soon come” and then, in His own timing, brought them — is the same God who said His Son will come, and will keep that word too. The regathered land is the down payment on the returning King.
Land Before Life — and Why the Order Matters
Read the chapters in sequence and you see the pattern God chose. Chapter 36: the land revives and the people return. Chapter 37: the dry bones come together and the breath enters them. The physical restoration comes first; the spiritual awakening follows. God brings the nation home in unbelief, and then, on His timetable, breathes life into it.
I will put My Spirit within you and you will come to life, and I will place you on your own land. Then you will know that I, the LORD, have spoken and done it.
— Ezekiel 37:14, NASB1995
That order should keep us both hopeful and humble. Hopeful, because the first half of the sequence has visibly happened — the branches are out, the fruit is on the trees, the waste places are cities. Humble, because the second half, the national turning of heart to their Messiah, is God’s work and God’s alone (Romans 11:26). We do not manufacture it; we watch for it. And we do not set dates on it, because Jesus was plain that the timing of these things is not ours to know (Acts 1:7).
Watching Soberly, Living Ready
So what do you do with a prophecy about dirt that came true? You let it do to your faith what it was designed to do — anchor it. If God kept a word about the mountains of Israel that sat dormant for nineteen hundred years and then came green in a single century, then His word about the return of Christ is not wishful thinking. It is the same kind of promise from the same faithful mouth.
That is meant to straighten your spine, not build you a bunker. The regathering is a mercy and a warning at once — a mercy, that God keeps every promise; a warning, that the clock He set is running. “When these things begin to take place, straighten up and lift up your heads, because your redemption is drawing near” (Luke 21:28).
The mountains were told to bear fruit because the people were coming. The people were brought back because the King is coming. And He staked His own credibility on it: “heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away” (Matthew 24:35). The land already answered that promise. Live like you believe the rest of it will too.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist