Eschatology — before God spoke to the scattered people, He spoke to the ground they had left
Ezekiel is told to prophesy. That is ordinary enough for a prophet.
What is not ordinary is the audience. God does not send him to a king, a council, or a congregation. He sends him to a landscape.
Also, thou son of man, prophesy unto the mountains of Israel, and say, Ye mountains of Israel, hear the word of the LORD. (Ezekiel 36:1, KJV)
Preach to the hills. Address the ridgelines. Tell the dirt what is coming.
It sounds like poetry until you keep reading and realize God is doing something very deliberate with the order of events — and that order is the most under-noticed thing in the whole prophetic conversation about Israel.
A Word Addressed to Dirt
The mountains of Israel had been a byword. Conquered, stripped, and mocked. God says as much a few verses in: the surrounding nations had taken the land and made it a possession, and the name of it a joke among the heathen. That was the situation Ezekiel wrote in, and it stayed roughly the situation for a very long time afterward.
Then this:
But ye, O mountains of Israel, ye shall shoot forth your branches, and yield your fruit to my people of Israel; for they are at hand to come. (Ezekiel 36:8, KJV)
Read that last clause again, because it is the hinge of the chapter. For they are at hand to come. The reason the hills are told to bear fruit is that the people are on their way. The harvest is not the reward for the return. The harvest is the preparation for it.
God tells the land to get ready before He tells the people to come home.
The Order God Chose
Stay with the sequence, because Ezekiel 36 lays it out with unusual clarity and most readers rush past it to the famous verse.
First, the land is addressed and told to become fruitful again (verses 1 through 15). Second, the people are physically gathered out of the nations and brought back into that land (verse 24). Third — and only third — the heart is changed (verses 25 through 27).
For I will take you from among the heathen, and gather you out of all countries, and will bring you into your own land. (Ezekiel 36:24, KJV)
A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. (Ezekiel 36:26, KJV)
Twenty-four comes before twenty-six. That is not a trivial observation. It means the physical regathering described here happens to a people who do not yet have the new heart. They come back as they are — unbelieving, unconverted, still stony — and the spiritual work follows the geography.
Anyone waiting for Israel to repent first and then be restored is reading the chapter backwards. God says He will bring them in and then deal with the heart. That is exactly what the text says, and it should shape how a believer reads a newspaper.
Why He Does It, in His Own Words
And in case anyone should mistake this for a reward, God removes the possibility entirely, twice, in the plainest language in the chapter.
Therefore say unto the house of Israel, Thus saith the Lord GOD; I do not this for your sakes, O house of Israel, but for mine holy name’s sake, which ye have profaned among the heathen, whither ye went. (Ezekiel 36:22, KJV)
There it is. Not merit. Not national virtue. Not because Israel earned a second look. God attaches the promise to His own name, and by doing so He makes the fulfillment as certain as His character — and as impossible to forfeit by bad behavior.
Paul says the same thing centuries later in one dense line:
For the gifts and calling of God are without repentance. (Romans 11:29, KJV)
Without repentance in the King James does not mean God gives without requiring repentance. It is the older sense of the word: without a change of mind. God does not have second thoughts. He does not issue a calling and then quietly withdraw it when the recipient disappoints Him. If He had, Israel would have been finished a dozen times over — and so, if we are honest, would you.
What the Ground Did
Here is where the chapter stops being an abstraction.
Travelers who crossed that territory in the eighteen hundreds left descriptions of it, and the descriptions are consistent to the point of monotony: bare hills, eroded terraces, malarial marsh on the coastal plain, sparse population, agriculture at a subsistence level. This was not propaganda from one side or the other. It was what people saw, and wrote down, in ordinary travel accounts.
And then, over the last century and a half, the hills that had been stripped for centuries were terraced and planted again. Marshland was drained. The Negev — desert in anybody’s accounting — was put under irrigation. A territory that had exported almost nothing became a food exporter.
And the desolate land shall be tilled, whereas it lay desolate in the sight of all that passed by. And they shall say, This land that was desolate is become like the garden of Eden; and the waste and desolate and ruined cities are become fenced, and are inhabited. (Ezekiel 36:34-35, KJV)
Note the phrase in the sight of all that passed by. God says the desolation was public, observed by travelers — and that the reversal would be public in exactly the same way. It would be something outsiders remark on.
I am not going to tell you that any particular orchard is a prophetic fulfillment on a chart. That is the kind of overreach that has embarrassed teachers before and will again. What I will say is this: the text specified an order — land first, then feet, then heart — and the first two steps of that order are not hypothetical anymore. They are matters of public record.
How to Watch This Without Losing Your Head
Which brings us to the discipline, and the church badly needs it.
There is a way of reading current events that is not sober watching but appetite. It reaches for the headline first and the text second. It treats every border incident as a countdown and every alliance as a fulfilled verse, and when the month passes and nothing happened, it simply finds another headline. That habit has done real damage — not because watching is wrong, but because it trains people to distrust the whole subject.
The corrective is not to stop watching. It is to reverse the order of operations.
Read the text first. Know what Ezekiel 36 actually claims before you go looking for it in the world. The chapter promises a fruitful land, a physical regathering, and a spiritual awakening, in that sequence, for the sake of God’s name. That is the claim. Anything beyond it is your addition.
Hold events loosely and the text tightly. Events are evidence that the promise is in motion. They are not the promise. The promise does not depend on them and is not disproved by a quiet decade.
Set no dates. Not softly, not as a hunch, not as “I think we are looking at.” Every date that has ever been set has failed, and each failure was paid for by somebody’s faith.
Let it make you sober rather than excited. The correct response to a God who keeps twenty-five-hundred-year-old promises to a hillside is not adrenaline. It is reverence.
The Promise Still Outstanding
Because the third step has not happened yet.
The land has answered. The people have returned. The heart of stone is, by any honest reckoning, still largely stone — and God has said plainly that He is going to deal with that too. The same chapter that promised fruit on the mountains promised a new spirit in the people, and He has never yet delivered two-thirds of a promise and stopped.
That is the part still ahead. Not a political settlement. A resurrection of the heart, done by God, on a nation that could not do it for itself.
The Word That Is Also Yours
And now look at what you just read, because Ezekiel 36:26 is not only about Israel.
A heart of stone taken out. A heart of flesh put in. A new spirit placed within a man who had no means of generating one. That is the new birth, described in the Old Testament with a precision that should stop you cold. It is what Jesus told Nicodemus he needed and could not manufacture. It is what God does, unilaterally, for people who bring nothing to the transaction but the stone.
And notice the motive is identical. Not for your sakes. For His name’s sake.
If you have been trying to soften your own heart by effort — more discipline, more reading, more resolve — Ezekiel 36 is telling you that you have been attempting a surgery on yourself with no instruments. Stone does not become flesh by trying harder. It is removed and replaced, by God, on request.
He told a landscape what He was going to do, twenty-five centuries before He did it, and then He did it. He is not going to run out of faithfulness in your case.
Ask Him for the heart. He has been in the business of that specific miracle for a very long time.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist