explain how the unification of the two kingdoms should be brought about. The first step should be the bringing of the people home to their own land (Ezekiel 37:21, Ezekiel 37:22); the second, their purification from idolatry (Ezekiel 37:23); the third, the installation over them, thus united and purified, of one King, the ideal David of the future, or the Messiah (Ezekiel 37:24, Ezekiel 37:25); the fourth, the establishment with them of Jehovah's covenant of peace (Ezekiel 37:26), and the permanent erection amongst them of Jehovah's temple (Ezekiel 37:27, Ezekiel 37:28).
I will take the children of Israel from among the heathen. That tills promise was intended to find an initial and partial fulfillment in the return from Babylon is undoubted. That it was also designed to look across the centuries towards the final ingathering of God's spiritual Israel into their permanent inheritance, the heavenly Canaan, an examination of its terms shows. These clearly presuppose a wider dispersion of Israel than had then, i.e. in Ezekiel's day, taken place; and that Israel has never yet been made one nation upon the mountains of Israel, is incontestable. Nor is there ground for expecting she ever will be. Not even after the exile closed did all Israel return to Palestine. Nor did it ever come true in their experience that one king was king to them all, since, in point of fact, they never afterwards had an earthly sore-reign at all who was properly independent. If, therefore, the prince who in the future should shepherd them was not to be a temporal monarch, but the Messiah, the probability is that the Israel he should shepherd was designed to be, not Israel after the flesh, but Israel after the spirit, who should walk in his judgments and observe his statutes, and who, in the fullness of the times, should develop out into the Christian Church. Hence it seems reasonable to conclude that their own land, into which they should eventually be brought, would be not so much the veritable soil from which their ancestors had been expelled, as the country or region in which the new, rejuvenated, reunited, and reformed Israel should dwell, which, again, should be n territory cleansed from sin and idolatry, so as to render it a fit abode for a people devoted to righteousness. Viewed in this light, their own land was first Canaan, in so far as after the exile it was cleansed from idolatry; now it is those portions of the earth in which the Christian Church has been planted, so far as these are influenced by the holy principles of religion; finally, it will be the new heavens and the new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness (scrap. Ezekiel 34:24; Ezekiel 36:24).