Ezekiel 36:8

"But ye, O mountains of Israel, ye shall shoot forth your branches, and yield your fruit to my people Israel; for they are at hand to come. For, behold, I am for you, and I will turn unto you, and ye shall be tilled and sown; and I will multiply men upon you, all the house of Israel, even all of it; and the cities shall be inhabited, and the waste places shall be builded; and I will multiply upon you man and beast; and they shall increase and be fruitful; and I will cause you to be inhabited after your former estate, and will do better unto you than at your beginnings: and ye shall know that I am Jehovah. Yea, I will cause men to walk upon you, even my people Israel; and they shall possess thee, and thou shalt be their inheritance, and thou shalt no more bereave them of children. Thus saith the Lord Jehovah: Because they say unto you, Thou land art a devourer of men, and hast been a bereaver of thy nation; therefore thou shalt devour men no more, neither bereave thy nation any more, saith the Lord Jehovah: neither will I let them bear any more the shame of the nations, neither shalt thou bear the reproach of the peoples any more, neither shalt thou cause thy nation to stumble any more, saith the Lord Jehovah."

ISRAEL'S RESTORATION TO PALESTINE (Ezekiel 36:8-15)

"They are at hand to come ..." (Ezekiel 36:8). Despite the fact that about forty years would yet expire before Israel reentered Palestine, their repatriation is represented as something "at hand." This is in keeping with the custom of all the prophets of considering that anything God has promised to do is actually "at hand," regardless of exactly when it will occur. The promise of God makes itas sure as if it had already happened.

Pearson has summarized the promises of Israel's re-entry into Palestine as inclusive of: "(1) The wonderful fruitfulness and productivity of the land; (2) the re-population of Palestine; (3) the elimination of scarcity; (4) freedom from reproach; and (5) the security and prosperity of the nation in a degree even surpassing their former estate' and the time of their `beginnings.'"[5]

We agree with Cook that these great promises of material blessings in their ultimate meaning were typical of the spiritual blessings in the times of Messiah; "But we may not doubt that the prophecy had as its first objective the return of prosperity to the land and the people, after their return from Babylon."[6]

The sad thing is that this projected picture of the restored Israel in Palestine never turned out that way at all. There are two explanations offered by different schools of thinking as to the meaning of this fact. (1) The millennialists postpone the actual and complete fulfillment of these promises to some future time during the Millennium. (2) Others point out that, since all of God's promises are contingent, absolutely, upon some acceptable degree of obedience and cooperation of the people themselves to whom the promises came (See Jeremiah 17:7-10), and that no such obedience or cooperation on the part of Israel ever occurred, the prophecies have never been fulfilled, nor will they ever be. The continued apostasy of Israel, the further development of that judicial hardening already pronounced against the race of Israel by Isaiah 6:9, never diminished, but became worse and wore, until it was confirmed by Jesus Christ himself as terminal and irrevocable (Matthew 13:14f), resulting finally in their rejection and murder of the Christ himself when he came, incurring the judgment of destruction upon the nation and their city of Jerusalem, as recorded in Matthew 24, a judgment executed by the overthrow of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. In view of all these things, the prophecies here were unfulfilled, nor shall they ever be fulfilled.

This writer accepts this explanation as correct and is fully convinced that the Jewish race, along with all other races, as such, are not vital factors at all in the problem of human redemption. God's message to all races and nations is simply this: "Whosoever will may come!" No man will ever be either saved or lost eternally on the basis either of his race or his "nation." Salvation, beginning with the Advent of Jesus Christ and ever afterward is an individual matter.

All of the wonderful things prophesied of Israel in this chapter, as regards their physical and temporal welfare, were things God intended to do and would have done if Israel had done their part.

Look what Israel did. When God ordered them to go back to Palestine, and when Cyrus the king of Persia himself authorized their departure and even paid part of the cost, only a pitiful little handful of the captives responded. The vast majority, according to Josephus, already growing wealthy in Babylon, elected not to go.

And the group that went, look what they did. Malachi records that the priesthood itself turned out to be a bunch of robbers, robbing God himself; and the people were not paying their tithes, nor doing anything else that Jehovah had commanded; and even the ones who brought sacrifices brought the sick, the lame, and the blind and other illegal sacrifices. God even cursed the reprobate priesthood.

Malachi even challenged the people to obey the Law of Moses and to bring the whole tithe into God's storehouse, "Prove me now, saith Jehovah of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it" (Malachi 3:10). Did it happen? Certainly not. The wickedness of Israel prevailed. This same wickedness prevented many other of the projected blessings of Israel from being given by the Lord.

And yet, enough of the promises were fulfilled to encourage and bless the remnant who "waited for the kingdom of God."

They were indeed returned to Palestine; the cities were rebuilt, the land repopulated, and they were the objects of God's signal protection, especially from the ravages of Alexander the Great in the fourth century B.C. Also the hand of God is clearly seen in many other inter-testamental developments: (1) the provision of the Greek language as the near-universal medium of communication, (2) the tragedy leading to the building of synagogues, (3) the events leading to the reading of the prophets, along with the Law, in the weekly sabbath services, (4) the complete disillusionment of the whole pagan world with the prevailing paganism of the times, and (5) the development of the judicial hardening of all mankind as a prelude to the First Advent of Christ.

Also, throughout this period, the preservation of the Jewish records of the genealogies of the tribes and of the House of David made it possible for Jesus Christ Himself to be positively and accurately identified as the legitimate heir to the throne of David, and at the same time a descendant of David through Nathan instead of Solomon (Matthew 1 and Luke 3).

Feinberg freely admitted that these prophecies were not fulfilled upon the return of Israel from Babylon, stating that, "The conditions depicted here are clearly millennial."[7] This opinion is echoed by a number of scholars; and as long as the fact of the reign of Christ in this present dispensation is understood as the Millennium, the opinion is correct. However, when the Millennium is projected as a literal thousand years reign of Jesus Christ on a literal throne in Jerusalem involving a wholesale return of racial Israel as Christ's followers, such notions must be rejected as unsupported by the Holy Scriptures. (For those who may be interested in the pursuit of this subject, see Revelation 20 of my series of commentaries on the New Testament.)

"Thou shalt no more devour men ... nor bereave ..." (Ezekiel 36:13). It will be remembered that this was precisely the charge that the unfaithful spies brought against "the mountains of Israel" when they gave their evil report to Moses (Numbers 13:32). It is still not clear what lay behind such a false charge. "A land incapable of supporting its people, or wherein they suffered loss through war or other divine scourges could be said to bereave the people."[8]

Whatever the basis of the saying and regardless of its truth or falsity, God here prophesied the termination of it.

"Israel shall no more bear the shame of nations ... neither shall (they) stumble any more ..." (Ezekiel 36:15). As we have already seen, "That portion of the nation which returned from captivity not only continued under the rule of the heathen, but also, in various ways, they continued to bear the contempt of the nations; and eventually Israel not only stumbled, but fell very low in their rejection of the Saviour; and the nation of Israel was again conquered, destroyed and scattered; and the land was utterly devastated and wasted."[9]

This projected return of Israel to Palestine implied a gathering of Israel from all the places where God had scattered them; and there is no way that the handful of returnees from Babylon fulfilled that intention upon God's part. When did such an ingathering happen.'? Cook, it appears to us, was absolutely correct when he declared that, "The reunion will be in those days when Israel shall be gathered into the Church of God."[10]