A Heart of Stone Traded for a Heart That Beats

God had just promised to come and find his scattered sheep himself, and his sheep were scattered a very long way. Ezekiel lived among them in Babylon, beside a wide, muddy canal, hundreds of miles from home.

Jerusalem was a heap of ashes, and its people lived among strangers who loved to mock them.

"So these are the LORD's people," they sneered. "And their God couldn't even keep them in his own land!"

God's people had brought this on themselves by bowing to idols and filling Jerusalem's streets with blood. Even here, they listened to Ezekiel like people listening to a good singer. (They loved his voice and hummed along, then went home and did exactly as before.)

Then God gave Ezekiel a message for the captives.

"Tell my people this," God said. "I am about to act, and it is not for your sake. I am doing it for my holy name, the name you have made the nations laugh at. I will show them how holy it is, and they will know that I am the LORD."

"I will take you out of the nations.
I will gather you from every country
and bring you home to your own land.
I will sprinkle clean water on you,
and you will be clean,
washed of every idol.
I will give you a new heart
and put a new spirit in you.
I will take the heart of stone out of you
and give you a heart of flesh.
I will put my Spirit inside you
and make you able to walk in my ways.
You will be my people,
and I will be your God."

God was doing all the work in that promise. He never once said, "Try harder." A stone cannot decide to be soft.

(A heart of flesh is a living heart. Put a hand on your chest. That bump, bump is what God meant.)

"I will make the grain grow thick and fill the trees with fruit," God went on, "and the nations will never laugh at you for being hungry again." (The neighbours would have to find something new to sneer about.)

The promise ended strangely. "Then you will remember the wicked things you did," God said, "and you will hate them. Be ashamed of your ways, O Israel."

A stone feels nothing at all. Only a living heart can be sorry.

Ezekiel could speak the promise, but he could not reach inside a single chest. Some captives did go home, but their hearts kept wandering. The words waited in Ezekiel's scroll.

More than six hundred years later, one night in Jerusalem, a leader named Nicodemus, who taught God's law, came to see a new teacher. "No one can enter God's kingdom," the teacher told him, "unless he is born of water and the Spirit." Clean water and a new spirit: Ezekiel's words, spoken by someone who had come to do them.

A few years later that teacher died on a cross for people who had not earned it, and on the third day he rose. Weeks later he poured out God's Spirit. Peter told the crowd in Jerusalem about him, and about three thousand people were cut to the heart and washed in water.

A stone is never cut to the heart. These hearts had started to beat, and Jesus had started them.