4. The idea of regeneration is very prominent in Ezekiel’s teaching. The need for a radical change in the national character was impressed on him by the spectacle which he witnessed daily of evil tendencies and practices persisted in, in spite of the clearest demonstration that they were hateful to Jehovah and had been the cause of the nation’s calamities. And he does not ascribe this state of things merely to the influence of tradition and public opinion and evil example, but traces it to its source in the hardness and corruption of the individual nature. It was evident that no mere change of intellectual conviction would avail to alter the currents of life among the exiles; the heart must be renewed, out of which are the issues both of personal and national life. Hence the promise of regeneration is expressed as a taking away of the stony, unimpressible heart that was in them, and putting within them a heart of flesh, a new heart and a new spirit. In exhorting individuals to repentance Ezekiel calls on them to make themselves a new heart and a new spirit,(174) meaning that their repentance must be genuine, extending to the inner motives and springs of action, and not be confined to outward signs of mourning.(175) But in other connections the new heart and spirit is represented as a gift, the result of the operation of the divine grace.(176)
Closely connected with this, perhaps only the same truth in another form, is the promise of the outpouring of the Spirit of God.(177) The general expectation of a new supernatural power infused into the national life in the latter days is common in the prophets. It appears in Hosea under the beautiful image of the dew,(178) and in Isaiah it is expressed in the consciousness that the desolation of the land must continue “until spirit be poured upon us from on high.”(179) But no earlier prophet presents the idea of the Spirit as a principle of regeneration with the precision and clearness which the doctrine assumes in the hands of Ezekiel. What in Hosea and Isaiah may be only a divine influence, quickening and developing the flagging spiritual energies of the people, is here revealed as a creative power, the source of a new life, and the beginning of all that possesses moral or spiritual worth in the people of God.
5. It only remains for us now to note the twofold effect of these operations of Jehovah’s grace in the religious and moral condition of the nation. There will be produced, in the first place, a new readiness and power of obedience to the divine commandments.(180) Like the apostle, they will not only “consent unto the law that it is good”;(181) but in virtue of the new “Spirit of life” given to them, they will be in a real sense “free from the law,”(182) because the inward impulse of their own regenerate nature will lead them to fulfil it perfectly. The inefficiency of law as a mere external authority acting on men by hope of reward and fear of punishment was perceived both by Jeremiah and Ezekiel almost as clearly as by Paul, although this conviction on the part of the prophets was based on observation of national depravity rather than on their personal experience. It led Jeremiah to the conception of a new covenant under which Jehovah will write His law on men’s hearts;(183) and Ezekiel expresses the same truth in the promise of a new Spirit inclining the people to walk in Jehovah’s statutes and to keep His judgments.
The second inward result of salvation is shame and self‐loathing on account of past transgressions.(184) It seems strange that the prophet should dwell so much on this as a mark of Israel’s saved condition. His strong protest against the doctrine of inherited guilt in the eighteenth chapter would have led us to expect that the members of the new Israel would not be conscious of any responsibility for the sins of the old. But here, as in other instances, the conception of the personified nation proves itself a better vehicle of religious truth from the Old Testament standpoint than the religious relations of the individual. The continuity of the national consciousness sustains that profound sense of unworthiness which is an essential element of true reconciliation to God, although each individual Israelite in the kingdom of God knows that he is not accountable for the iniquity of his fathers.