God’s promise to justify and to sanctify

Sermon for Midweek of Exaudi

Romans 8:29-39  +  Ezekiel 36:25-27

Israel’s return from captivity in Babylon is prophesied in Ezekiel chapter 36. God promises to return them to their land. But He promises to do much more for them than that. Here, in the three short verses before us, God’s plan is revealed—His plan to turn Israel, finally, into the people they were always meant to be. His plan to justify them, and to sanctify them, by His Son and by His Spirit.

The Son of God, the promised Messiah, is not specifically mentioned in Ezekiel’s words. But He’s there beneath verse 25, together with the Spirit of God: Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean; I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols. The whole picture of sprinkling unclean people with clean water in order to cleanse them comes from the Law of Moses. That’s how a ceremonially unclean person was to be ceremonially cleansed. If, for example, a person touched a dead body, the Law considered that person ceremonially unclean until he was sprinkled with the water of purification. And if a person wasn’t sprinkled with that water and tried to approach God’s tabernacle in his unclean state, he was to be cut off from Israel, permanently excluded from the people of God.

If touching a dead body made a person ceremonially unclean before God, how much more did idolatry make a person truly unclean! There’s nothing morally, inherently wrong with touching a dead body. That was a ceremonial picture God used to teach Israel about uncleanness. The true uncleanness that makes a person unable to stand in God’s presence is sin, and idolatry is the chief sin from which all other sins flow. And the Israelites had been guilty of it in spades. So the people didn’t only need to be purified for ceremonial purposes. They needed the forgiveness of sins.

That forgiveness could only be purchased through a true atoning sacrifice. Not by the ceremonial sacrifices of animals, but by the actual sacrifice of Substitute that was worth the lives of every sinner. Only the sacrifice of the Son of God could actually atone for their sins.

And only the preaching of the Gospel and the purifying waters of Holy Baptism could apply the Christ’s atoning blood to those who needed God’s forgiveness. As the writer to the Hebrews says, Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. That pure water that actually cleanses our consciences is the water connected to God’s promise, He who believes and is baptized will be saved.

So Ezekiel’s words are a prophecy both of the sacrificial death of the Son of God and of the Holy Spirit’s working, through the Word and through the water of Baptism, to cleanse the Israelites—and all people! —of their idolatry, and of all their sins. It was a prophecy of justification, which would be brought about by the Son of God and by the Spirit of God. Not the justification of the whole nation of Israel, but of those in Israel who would be brought to faith in Christ Jesus. Not of believing Israelites only, but of all sinners who would hear and believe in God’s promise of justification through faith in the Lord Jesus.

That’s what the next verse is talking about: I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. Israel’s old heart, and your heart and my heart by nature, was made of stone. It didn’t listen to God’s word. It was determined to believe what it wanted to believe, to worship how it wanted to worship, and to pursue every sinful pleasure, every prideful thought. But God promised Israel that He would give them a new heart and a new spirit. Not magically, not by zapping it into them, but through the preaching of His Word, of His Law and His Gospel, He would bring them to repent of their idolatries and all their stubborn rebellion, and to become new people, with new desires, and with a new love—a love for the God who gave His only-begotten Son into death for their sins. In other words, He would create a new man within them.

And that new man who would be created would no longer walk according to the flesh, would no longer turn to idols for help, or ignore God’s word and God’s commandments, but would truly love the Lord, love His word, and be eager to walk according to His commandments, as we see in the third verse of tonight’s lesson: I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will keep My judgments and do them. What Ezekiel is describing here is what we usually refer to as sanctification, the Holy Spirit’s ongoing work of turning believers into people who lead holy lives, who walk according to God’s commandments. Sanctification always begins simultaneously with justification, and it must continue throughout a person’s life. If it doesn’t, if you don’t want to walk in God’s statutes, if you don’t struggle against the Old Man and his evil desires, if the Spirit of God is not working within you to keep God’s commandments, then you don’t have justifying faith, either. But if you, as Christians, no longer view sin as something desirable but as something detestable, because God Himself detests it, that’s the work of God’s Spirit within you. If you are determined to please God and not yourself, that’s the work of God’s Spirit within you. If you love the word of God and are eager to submit to it, that’s the work of God’s Spirit within you.

Again, this is not a promise that every Israelite would be justified and sanctified. Those who didn’t want God’s Spirit dwelling in them would not be forced to become temples of the Holy Spirit, just as those who didn’t want to be baptized wouldn’t be forced into Baptism. What we have here in Ezekiel is a gracious Gospel promise that would be extended to Israel, and beyond Israel, in connection with the coming Christ. It’s a promise of spiritual deliverance of those who were once bound in sin, and of Spirit-worked godliness in those who formerly were ungodly and idolatrous.

And it’s important to notice who is in charge of all this. It’s not you, or I. It’s God who does it to you and for you. It’s God who justifies, on the basis of Christ’s atoning sacrifice. It’s God’s Spirit who converts unbelievers and changes them into believers, who takes sinners and turns them into saints. As for those who remain unconverted and unbelieving, they have only themselves to blame. Because, as Ezekiel prophesies in tonight’s reading. God offered purification and a new spirit to everyone, on the basis of Christ’s atonement, which would also be for everyone. Don’t let God’s promise pass you by! Embrace it, and rejoice in it, in God’s plan to justify you and to sanctify you, by His Son and by His Spirit. Amen.