Last Sunday we saw the incredible miracle that the Spirit of God performed as He took the preaching and praying of Ezekiel and used them to raise up a pile of dead, dry bones into a living, breathing army. And we learned that Israel was like that pile of dead, dry bones.
Their unfaithfulness had ruined everything and left them without hope. But God is a God who fixes ruined things, who resurrects dead things, who intervenes when things are hopeless. Today's text then is really just a continuation of the miracle that began in verses 1 through 14. The new life that occurred in verses 1 through 14 is going to produce, here in verses 15 through 28, a new unity among the people of God and a new access to the presence of God. In fact, if we zoom out just for a minute and consider the big picture of the book of Ezekiel, what we discover is that at the end of chapter 37, God promises to establish His dwelling place, His sanctuary, His temple among this newly reconstituted covenant community. And then the bulk of the rest of the book of Ezekiel, in fact the last nine chapters, focuses almost exclusively on the temple, on this symbolic representation of the presence of God with His people.
So it's a big deal. The conclusion of this prophetic book of ups and downs, curses and blessings, threats and promises, the climax, the culmination of it all is that God will be with His people. He will have them.
They will have Him. It's a consummation. It's a marriage. It's a delightful, happy ending to what should have been a tragedy. And it's God who makes it all happen. There are three prerequisites to this happy ending that we're going to discover in our text today. Three things must happen and God promises to make all three happen. First, God will make His people a unified people. Secondly, God will make His people a sanctified people. And then thirdly, God will make His people an inhabited people, indwelt by the very presence of God Himself. And the added bonus, the cherry on top, the unexpected blessing is that these three prerequisites will not only be achieved by God, they will be maintained by God forever and ever and ever. There will be no expiration date of the blessings. The covenant community will be prevented by divine providence itself from ever wrecking and ruining this happy state of affairs ever again.
It's literally a happy ever after ending. So how does it all come about? Well it comes about first by God making His people a unified people.
A unified people. Our text begins with an illustration, a sign act similar to the other sign acts that Ezekiel has been performing throughout his ministry. This time he takes two sticks, writes the names of Judah and Joseph on them. Judah was the representative tribe of the southern kingdom of Israel. Joseph was the representative tribe of the northern kingdom of Israel. You'll recall that after King Solomon's death, the nation of Israel was divided into two nations, a northern kingdom and a southern kingdom. Ezekiel's sign act then was showing the exiles that God's intention was to reunite the previously divided children of Israel. Look at verse 21, then say to them, thus says the Lord God, behold I will take the people of Israel from the nations among which they have gone. The northern kingdom of Israel had been taken off to Assyria, the southern kingdom had been taken off to Babylon, and will gather them from all around and bring them to their own land. And I will make them one nation in the land on the mountains of Israel and one king shall be king over them all and they shall be no longer two nations and no longer divided into two kingdoms. God resurrects His spiritually dead people and the first thing He does after that miracle of resurrection is to repair the breach that had occurred within the covenant community.
And this breach ran deep, there was hurt and distrust and even hatred between the northern and southern kingdoms, a hatred that had endured now for almost 400 years. So this was no small point of division, but God was promising to repair the breach, to unify His people. I think one of the truths we have to acknowledge in all of this is that unity is important to God. Unity is important to God. God wouldn't promise unity and pursue unity if unity were unimportant to Him. Unity within the church is important to God.
And if it's important to God, it ought to be important to us. Psalms say, behold how good and pleasant it is when brethren dwell together in unity. Paul says in Ephesians 4, endeavor to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.
There is one body, one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all who is above all and through all and in you all. Paul exhorts the church, I appeal to you brothers by the name of the Lord Jesus Christ that all of you agree and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment. Unity in the church is important to God and so it should be important to us.
Now we are Protestants and at the core of our religious identity, in fact at the headwaters of our history, is a protest against people and institutions who in the name of Christianity endorse bad doctrine and engage in bad worship and practice bad behavior. We don't shy away from a fight when the purity of the church is on the line and that's a good thing. We should fight for the purity of the church because purity is important to God.
But here's my point, purity and unity are not mutually exclusive. If God loves both, we should love both and not pit the purity of the church against the unity of the church. When we confess our belief in one holy Catholic and apostolic church, we're confessing that the church is bigger than our small section of it, right? It reaches beyond the boundaries of Grace Church, beyond the boundaries of the PCA, beyond the boundaries of American Christianity, beyond even the boundaries of Protestantism.
God's church is universal, that's what we mean by Catholic with a little c. It reaches to the four corners of the earth, it touches every tribe and language and people and nation. And though this body of believers is so widespread and diverse, God sees it as one unified church. If unity is important to God, it ought to be important to us. But there is such a thing as false unity within the church, a unity that claims the name Christian but is not grounded in God's definitions and stipulations. This brand of unity is not Christian at all.
And there are plenty of those imitations of unity masquerading around as the real thing. Back in the day, should Judah have said, you know, unity is important, we shouldn't squabble with our Jewish brothers and sisters to the north, let's just overlook our differences. So what if they worship golden calves at Dan, let's just all get along. We're all worshiping the same Yahweh and that's what matters most.
No, they shouldn't have said that. Likewise, should we say today, unity is the most important thing, denominational divisions over doctrine and interpretations and practices should not matter, let's just love Jesus and put our differences aside. To help answer that question, notice how the unification promised in Ezekiel 37 comes about.
In verse 19, God says, I am about to take the stick of Joseph and I will join with it the stick of Judah and make them one stick that they may be one in My hand. The unity God is after is first a unity that He Himself creates. It's a unity that only takes place in God's hand. We could say Christian unity is authentic only to the degree that its basis is in God. But even then we need to recognize that we're not talking about our sentiments about God.
God is nice to me, therefore I'll be nice to other people. We're talking about grounding our unity with other Christians in God as He actually is. His character, His truth, His definition of morality, the gospel of His son Jesus Christ, His absolute sovereignty and authority. A unity that's not grounded in God as He actually is, is a false pretend sort of unity. Matthew Henry the Puritan said those are best united that are united in God's hand. Whose union with each other results from their union with Christ. And their communion with each other results from their union with God. Unity is important to God, but it must be real unity.
Not the pretension of smiles and back slaps with people who reject our God and His gospel. Ephesians 1 describes real unity, the kind that God creates as a unity that is in Christ. Jesus Himself in His high priestly prayer for the church in John 17 describes real unity as a unity that's grounded in the unity that exists between God the Father and God the Son.
He prays, may they, meaning Christians, all be one just as you Father are in me and I in you. A unity that's not grounded in truth and obedience to God is not real unity. The fact of the matter is we cannot produce that kind of unity in the body of Christ. We can pursue unity, we can seek to preserve unity, but we cannot produce it.
Only God can do that as He conforms our hearts and minds and lives of His people to His truth and His will. And so while we need to value unity because God values it, the way to pursue unity is not by ignoring theological differences or tolerating each other's disobedience. The way to pursue unity is to repent from sin and return to the Lord.
Things which, by the way, cannot happen apart from the grace of God changing us. And as this process of repentance happens in the hearts of individual Christians, unity within the group will be the inevitable result. Unity is the fruit, not the goal of the Christian life.
We don't achieve unity by pursuing unity, we achieve unity by pursuing the unifier. True Christian unity comes as we each believe and obey and love God. This affirmation of God's unifying work among His people concludes with verse 22, which says, And I, God, will make them one nation in the land on the mountains of Israel, and one king shall be king over them, and they shall be no longer two nations and no longer divided into two kingdoms. So there's going to be a king who unites God's people, and we've already met this king in the book of Ezekiel.
Ezekiel's already spoken of this descendant of David who will sit on the throne reigning over God's covenant community forever. This unifying king, of course, is Jesus Christ. So did Christ unify the southern and northern kingdoms of Israel? Yes, He did.
In fact, He did much more. Ephesians 2 tells us that not only did Jesus Christ bridge the gap between dissenting Jews, He even bridges the gap between Jews and Gentiles. Paul says in Ephesians 2, But now in Christ Jesus you, Gentiles, who were once far off, have been brought near by the blood of Christ, for He Himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in His flesh the dividing wall of hostility that He might create in Himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. Christ is the king by which God's people, both northern and southern, both Jewish and Gentile, both Grace Church and non-Grace Church, are made one. And we should long for the day when that genuine and eternal unity will be made evident to all. But not only will God make His people a unified people, we see secondly that God will make His people a sanctified people, a holy people.
Verse 23 says, They shall not defile themselves anymore with their idols and their detestable things or with any of their transgressions, but I will save them from all the backslidings in which they have sinned and will cleanse them, and they shall be My people, and I will be their God. If we rewind a few centuries and consider the events that got Israel into the mess they were in during Ezekiel's day, we would discover that disobedience to God was at the root of it all. It was at the root of the division of Israel into northern and southern kingdoms. It was at the root of their being exiled from the land. It was at the root of God distancing Himself from them. And so if God was going to unify them, He would have to deal with the causes of disunity. If He was going to bring them home from exile, He was going to have to deal with the sins that caused them to lose the land in the first place and come under the chastening hand of God. If God was going to inhabit the temple again and make Himself an integral part of their lives, He would have to correct the moral disintegration that had necessitated His departure from Jerusalem's now ruined temple.
Mere unity would not be enough. God's children needed a complete spiritual and moral overhaul. How would God accomplish this overhaul, this renewal? Verse 24, My servant David shall be king over them, and they shall all have one shepherd. So this king who was mentioned in verse 22 is not only a king, he's also a shepherd, verse 24. Now a man can be both a king and a shepherd, right? King David was also a shepherd. But how is a king different from a shepherd? Well, the title king emphasizes authority, rule, but the title shepherd emphasizes care and concern. So we could say that king demonstrates position, shepherd demonstrates disposition. So this shepherd king, who again clearly is a reference to Jesus, would not only unify the covenant community under one authoritative head, he would also sanctify the covenant community by nurturing them and guiding them and ultimately by making them righteous. He would conform the children of God to the perfect righteous standard of holiness. Now we saw how Christ as a king unified the people of God. He's broken down that wall of division. Has Christ as shepherd sanctified the people of God?
Absolutely he has. This is the gospel. The New Testament tells us that Jesus has made the elect holy by becoming sin for them, which means that not only was he the shepherd, he was also the sheep, the scapegoat, who took the blame and died for the sins of others. But Christ's shepherding work doesn't end there. Scripture tells us that those whom Christ justified, he will also sanctify and ultimately glorify.
He will perfect them. He will bring all of his sheep from a place of moral corruption and divine judgment to a place of moral perfection and divine blessing. In other words, he's not just going to give us the blessings of the covenant. He's going to give us the character, the heart change that those blessings require.
Unholy people don't enjoy holy things. So God makes us a holy people, a sanctified people that we might enjoy the holy blessings he has in store. And what is the ultimate blessing God has in store for his people? We see it in verses 26 through 28, where God promises thirdly to make his people an inhabited people. God says in verse 26, I will set my sanctuary in their midst. Verse 27, my dwelling place shall be with them. Verse 28, then the nations will know that I am the Lord when my sanctuary is in their midst forevermore.
God will take up residence with his people. Now, I suspect that of all the things we've seen God promising in our text this morning, this last one might strike us as the most lackluster of them all. I mean, unity in the church we appreciate.
There's so many divisions and mean-spirited Christians and unfair, judgy people in the church. If God is going to fix that, then wonderful. Let the unifying begin. Sanctification is another promise that we get immediately enthused about.
If God can deal with my idolatries and backslidings, if he can make temptation lose its teeth and change my heart so drastically that I won't struggle with sin anymore, then amazing. Let the sanctifying begin. These blessings are practical and relevant and much needed. But what of God's promised presence? How do we react to that? God's promised to be in an everlasting covenant of peace with us.
How does that strike us? Do we get what God is promising here? Twenty-five years ago last month, Laura and I stood together in a church and pledged our faithfulness and love to each other. We each promised to the other that we would be there in wealth and poverty, through joy, through sorrow and sickness and health until death parts us. I stood there and made that promise to Laura that I would be there. She made that promise to me, and it was certainly a uniquely special moment in our lives.
But those of you who have been married for a few decades now know that what I'm about to say is true. Those vows Laura and I took on our wedding day mean so much more today than they did 25 years ago because we've lived life together, and she's still there. She's been there with me through it all.
The incredibly joyful moments, the unbearably sad moments, the boring mundane moments, the exciting unexpected moments. Hers is the first face I see in the morning, the last face I see at night. She's there. She's living life with me, and because of that, she understands me. She puts up with me.
She calls me out. She cheers me on. These are the joys and blessings of marriage. And this is the earthly shadow, the analogy of what God in heaven is promising to us. He's promising to be with us in sickness and in health and wealth and in poverty through the good, the bad, and the ugly.
God is there, and He will remain there because like a faithful husband, He has inseparably attached Himself to His people. He is in covenant with us. Do you know that the greatest privilege you have is being in covenant with God? You may not think so.
You may not feel so. You may not take that covenant very seriously, but I guarantee you God always, always takes His covenant with you dead seriously, Christian. He promised those exiles of old that He would not abandon them in Babylon but would make His dwelling place with them. He promises us in Christ that He will not let anything snatch us out of His hand but will keep us for eternity.
And here's the thing, beloved. Every blessing of the Christian life springs from the chief blessing that God is with us, that we are His and He is ours. The church unity that we so long for in this broken, divided world, it comes when it comes because God is with us. And all who find themselves in His company will be unified in creed, in conduct, in purpose, and in love for each other. The commitment to holiness, sanctification, which is so often anemic and missing from our lives, will in time come to characterize every child of God perfectly, but it will only come by virtue of the presence and power of God indwelling us and at work in us, recreating us into something new and righteous and beautiful and lasting. It all comes from God's presence with us, in covenant with us.
What an incredibly underappreciated gift is the presence of God. Just as there can be a false, pretentious sort of unity, that's a far cry from real Christian unity, and just as there can be a false, hypocritical sort of sanctification, a put-on piety that's nothing like the real holiness, so there can be a false pretend and put-on sense of the presence of God in a person's life. You see, the God who is promising His presence with His people is the God of the Bible, the God as He reveals Himself in creation and Scripture, not the God as we envision Him or imagine Him or want Him to be.
And there are plenty of pretenders who are very verbose with their accolades of how close they are to God or how blessed they are by God, but their life doesn't reflect any real knowledge of the God they claim to know so well. In fact, when this promise of God to set His sanctuary in the midst of His people forever began to actually come true, you know what people did? They reviled God. They mocked Him.
They hated Him for it. John chapter 2 records the conversation Jesus had with the Jews of His day. They were asking Him for a sign to prove His prophetic office, and the sign He gave them was this, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up. Then the Gospels explained that Jesus was speaking about the temple of His body. In other words, Jesus was claiming to be the temple, to be the sanctuary, to be God's dwelling place with man. So when Ezekiel spoke of God taking up residence with His people, he was referring to Jesus Christ, who is the King and the Shepherd and the temple and the sacrificial lamb and everything else that those old covenant symbols pointed forward to. In Christ, all of God's promises, 2 Corinthians 1-20, are yes and amen. But the Jews, who were the first recipients of this ancient promise coming to fulfillment, missed the point.
They rejected the Messiah because they valued the symbol more than the substance. Scripture says of these that on the last day they will approach God and say, Hey there, God, it's us. We're the ones who did all these things for You. But God will say to them, I never knew you. Depart from Me, you workers of lawlessness. But to those who receive Him on His terms, those who humbly acknowledge their need for unity and sanctification, those who delight in the presence of God as He is, to them He will say, Well done, good and faithful servant.
Enter into the joy of your Master. God is with His people and His people are with Him, united to each other and united to their God in an everlasting covenant of peace. Ezekiel prophesied these things to a chastened group of exiles almost 600 years before Christ's earthly ministry. And this group of exiles and their children experienced a small foretaste of the fulfillment of these promises. They did eventually return to the promised land.
There was a single unified nation. The temple was rebuilt. But it was nothing compared to the former glory of the previous temple. But then Christ came. And these promises took on a fuller, broader, more expansive meaning than that old covenant community could have ever imagined. The promise of a unified people would include not only Jews but also Gentiles. The promise of sanctification was not merely outward and external holiness, but a real inward holiness that emanated from the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit of God Himself. The promise of God dwelling with His people would be quite literally fulfilled as the Son of God left the glories of Heaven and walked upon this earth with us, like us, although in Him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.
But even that generation of believers, those who lived during the earthly ministry of Jesus, did not experience the fullness of the blessings that were promised back in Ezekiel's day. The consummation, the ultimate fulfilling of these promises, is in fact still ahead of us. The Bible describes a day when the unity of God's people will be perfected, when the sanctification of God's people will be complete, when the presence of God will fill all things, without limit, without restraint, without sin, without death, and without an expiration date.
This blessed state of perfection will continue forever and ever and ever and ever. Do you long for that day? Do you want to be a part of the unimaginable joy of that day? Are you content to just scrounge around in Babylon for temporary half-hearted pleasures? If we are to avail ourselves of the exquisite delights that God has in store for His children in the new heavens and the new earth, we need God's chosen King to rule over us. We need God's chosen Shepherd to nurture us. And we need God's promised presence to fill us and satisfy us. In short, we need to cast ourselves upon Jesus Christ for the saving of our souls.
Jesus says, come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I'll give you rest. How do you come to Christ? You don't come to Him by going to a certain place or doing a certain thing.
It's not about a location or an activity. It's about the posture of your heart toward God. Is He your hope? Is He your joy? Is He our unity as a church?
Is He the reason we enjoy each other and want to be together? Is He our righteousness, removing all need for us to brag about our virtue? Is He our cherished friend, the one whose presence makes life not merely bearable, but full of delight and expectancy and hope? This is what it means to be in covenant with God. And this is what we have as children of His covenant.
So lift up your heads, exiles. Find comfort for your souls, sinners, for God is our God, and we are His people. Let's pray. Lord, words fail us, your goodness to us, your forbearance with us, your promises to bless and heal and restore are so far beyond our ability to even appreciate them as we ought to. Lord, we do say thank You. Thank You for rescuing us from ourselves. Thank You for never letting us go. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.
