Reformational Commentary on Ezekiel 39:7
"So will I make my holy name known in the midst of my people Israel; and I will not let them pollute my holy name any more: and the heathen shall know that I am the LORD, the Holy One in Israel." (Ezekiel 39:7)
"And I will sanctify my great name, which was profaned among the heathen, which ye have profaned in the midst of them; and the heathen shall know that I am the Lord, saith the Lord God, when I shall be sanctified in you before their eyes." (Ezekiel 36:23)
"...thou hast magnified thy word above all thy name." (Psalm 138:2)
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." (John 1:1)
Several plain objectives in God's intervention on Israel's behalf against Gog and his barbarian allies, and in the ensuing terrible fire sent forth by the Lord in Ezekiel 39:6, are now made clear:
- That the "house of Israel" Ezekiel 39:29, that is, the Jews, will now have demonstrable confirmation in the realm of temporal affairs (additional to the Spirit's transformation of their hearts to repent and seek forgiveness in Christ alone)1 that Jesus is none other the LORD of Hosts, their Messiah, the Holy One in Israel to Whom they were blinded;2 for God the Father has magnified His Word above all His Name, and who is His Word but the Logos, that is, The Son, Jesus Christ? Therefore, making known the Lord’s holy Name (as the verse says) in the midst of Israel is a full revelation of Jesus as Messiah to the Jews and is also a nationwide saving act of God bestowed upon the Jewish people at that time (and not just in Israel, but to the Jews worldwide).
- That the Lord will not just redeem that generation of Jews, but will maintain the Jewish people continually within the broader
church right through to His coming, because this verse promises that the Lord "will not let them pollute my holy name any more".
"For this is as the waters of Noah unto me: for as I have sworn that the waters of Noah should no more go over the earth; So have I sworn that I would not be wroth with thee nor rebuke thee. For the mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed; but my kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed, saith the LORD that hath mercy on thee." (Isaiah 54:5 - NOTE that these blessings upon Israel fall when it is drawn back to the Messianic faith and therefore, being joined to the Gentile church transcendent at that time, the same blessing matrix applies to the non-Jewish members of the church; accordingly, the coming Philadelphian church era will entail no more grand temporal judgments upon the (increasingly godly) nations).
This point is again made clear at the end of this chapter of Ezekiel (Ezekiel 39:29). - That the heathen, that is, the barbarian nations of the East primarily, but the ungodly of the West both secondarily and by inference, will know that Jesus Himself is the Holy One in the now Messianic nation of Israel; that is, the conversion of the Jews will not be concealed to the world beyond, but become a global talking point; this is expressed again in Ezekiel 39:21 and Ezekiel 39:23.
- That God's covenant Name ("Yah-weh"), hitherto "profaned" by the vileness of the Jews in every land whithersoever they have been scattered, will be conversely sanctified in the conversion to Christ of the Jews (see Ezekiel 39:26).
- That the world, especially the apostate "Christian" realm (Romanism, Orthodoxy, Arminianism and other Reformation-forsaking forms of "Protestantism"), will see that the Reformed faith of Luther, Calvin, Knox, the English Puritans, the early church and the pre-Reformation faithful few such as the Hussites and Wycliffites et al was and remains the one and only true Christianity approved of and owned by Christ, His Father and the Holy Spirit.
All of the foregoing is summarised elsewhere in the Old Testament prophetic works thus:
"And he shall stand and feed in the strength of the Lord, in the majesty of the name of the LORD his God; and they shall abide: for now shall he be great unto the ends of the earth.” (Micah 5:4)
"For thy Maker is thine husband; the LORD of hosts is his name; and thy Redeemer the Holy One of Israel; The God of the whole earth shall he be called." (Isaiah 54:5)
FOOTNOTES
As Ezekiel 39:21-29 (the sweet and joyous epitaph to the Gog-led attack on Israel) shows, it will be a Reformational Christian nation of Israel that the Lord will deliver, because a state of happy reconciliation to God is celebrated in the text along with a promise of unbroken, continuous abiding in His favour rather than in His displeasure as hitherto; and there can be no reconciliation with God absent being in Christ, as follows:
"To wit, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them; and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation." (2 Corinthians 5:19)
Likewise, there can be no true conversion to Jesus absent the new nature imparted by God in a sovereign and undeserved act of His elective mercy in which
He unilaterally gives a heart of saving faith to enable the sinner to come to Christ.
Whereas the Antigospel of Arminianism (which has eclipsed the gospel of grace amidst ostensible Protestantism since the dreadful apostasy of the 1800s
began) holds that the new birth is a consequence of coming to Christ for salvation, the Reformational gospel of grace holds that no man can come to
Christ without first being born again and having a new heart willing to have Jesus be his Saviour; under the popular Arminian model of today, the sinner
is utterly graceless and latently hostile to Jesus when asking to be saved!
The coming conversion of the Jews will show this microscopic reality on a grand, macroscopic scale, as follows:
"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. And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them." (Ezekiel 36:26-27)
Walking in God's statutes is no less than the exercise of faith (without which it is impossible to please God (Hebrews 11:6)) and, as can be seen from
the passage above, is caused by the indwelling of the Spirit of God and follows upon the creation, by God, in the sinner of a new "heart of flesh",
one that is inclined to loving and serving God.
Professing Christians today, therefore, who spread Romish notions about Israel being no longer part of God's redemptive plan are unschooled and unlearned,
rash and impudent, and should remember what Paul said of their coming conversion:
"For I would not, brethren, that ye should be ignorant of this mystery, lest ye should be wise in your own conceits; that blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in. And so all Israel shall be saved: as it is written, There shall come out of Sion the Deliverer, and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob: For this is my covenant unto them, when I shall take away their sins. As concerning the gospel, they are enemies for your sakes: but as touching the election, they are beloved for the fathers' sakes." (Romans 11:25-28)
2. Note the wording in Isaiah 63, which also refers to events pertaining to Ezekiel 38-39:
"Doubtless thou art our father, though Abraham be ignorant of us, and Israel acknowledge us not: thou, O LORD, art our father, our redeemer; thy name is from everlasting. O LORD, why hast thou made us to err from thy ways, and hardened our hearts from thy fear? Return for thy servants' sake, the tribes of thine inheritance." (Isaiah 63:16-17)
Here it is laid out in plain language that God hardens whom He will and has mercy upon whom He will (as Romans 9:18 reminds us) and,
in the case of Israel, that was done to demonstrate that without grace from God (to which no man is entitled) even a nation
chosen for special favour (as Israel was) will act in a desperately wicked, God-hating fashion; only the rebirth can implant in a man
love for God's ways, and "fear" (i.e. holy respect) for God, but God only grants the rebirth to His elect; and election, be it noted,
is not based on ethnicity or on God's love for a privileged ancestor (this being a common mistake the Jews have always made), but on
God's sovereign, irrevocable and eternal decree from before the foundation of the earth.
Accordingly, as absolute Sovereign over the hearts of man, God also chooses the very delusions the reprobates live and die by
(as Isaiah 66:4 asserts),
yet most professing Christians today ahbor and deny this doctrine, being drunk on the wine of Anti-Reformation Arminianism,
the very Wormwood of Revelation 8:10-11 sent by God as a soul-destroying curse on His enemies.
