Ezekiel 36:26 NASB
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.
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A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you. The third step in the progress of sanctifying God’s Name (comp. Ezekiel 11:19, where a similar promise is made, and Ezekiel 18:31, where the new heart is represented as a thing Israel must make for herself).
This antinomy frequently occurs in Scripture, which never shrinks from holding man responsible for the production of that, as e.g. faith, for which he is incompetent without the help of Divine grace.
Besides the cleansing of her guilt and her restitution in consequence to God’s favor, Israel is promised such an inward renovation of her moral and spiritual disposition as to secure that she shall in future adhere to the worship and service of God.
This change is described in a fourfold way.
- Negatively, as a removal of the old, stony, unsusceptible heart, which had remained impervious to all appeals and insertsible to all higher feelings (Zechariah 7:12).
- Positively, as a new heart and a new spirit, called elsewhere “one heart” and “a heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 11:19; Jeremiah 32:39), “a heart to know God” (Jeremiah 24:7).
- Causally, its existence being traced to the indwelling of God’s Spirit, who writes God’s Law upon the new heart, and inclines it to a life of obedience thereto (Jeremiah 31:33).
- Practically, by its manifestation, walking in God’s statutes and keeping God’s judgments (Ezekiel 11:20). The account here furnished of the moral and spiritual change proposed to be inwrought on Israel, responds exactly with that given in the New Testament of the regeneration of the individual soul (John 3:3-8; Romans 8:2,5,9; Galatians 5:22; Titus 3:5,6; 1 Peter 1:22).
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