Ezekiel is preaching to exiles in Babylon around 586 BC, after Jerusalem has fallen and the temple has been burned. The covenant looked finished. The people had broken it for centuries, and the curses of Deuteronomy had finally landed. Into that wreckage Ezekiel announces something the Torah did not promise: God himself will perform the obedience he requires. He will replace the organ that failed. The audience is a people too far gone to reform themselves, which is exactly the audience this oracle was written for.

From the writers we read together

Dallas Willard

philosopher at USC, author of The Divine Conspiracy and Renovation of the Heart (1935-2013)

Willard spent forty years arguing that Christian formation is the actual replacement of the inner life — not the polishing of the outer one. Renovation of the Heart is essentially a long meditation on Ezekiel 36. The will, the mind, the body, the social self, and the soul are each touched by grace and slowly retrained. What Ezekiel calls a new heart, Willard calls a renovated character. Both insist that real change is not behavior management; it is the replacement of the source from which behavior comes.

Willard's warning, though, is that we have largely settled for the heart of stone with religious decoration on it. We have learned to talk about grace without expecting grace to make us into different people. Ezekiel's promise is more aggressive than that. God says he will cause us to walk in his statutes. The new heart is not a feeling to wait for; it is a Spirit-given capacity already at work in everyone the gospel has actually reached. The question Willard would press on you today is whether you are cooperating with that work or merely admiring it from a distance.