A New Heart

Hold a stone in your hand. Cold. Hard. It doesn't feel anything, and it never changes. Now put your hand on your chest and feel your heartbeat. Warm, alive, moving. God once made a promise about those two things.

It is the twelfth year of the exile, in Babylonia. One day a man stumbles into the exiles' settlement. He has escaped from Jerusalem and travelled hundreds of miles, and he brings the news they have dreaded: The city has fallen. The prophet Ezekiel had warned this would happen. Now it has. The temple is gone. The exiles are a scattered people, mocked by the nations, who say: these are the Lord's people, and yet they had to leave his land. But now, after years of warnings, Ezekiel's messages begin to change. God starts speaking about hope.

God begins by explaining why he will act. Not because his people deserve it. They have dishonoured his name wherever they went. But God says: I will act for the sake of my holy name. I will show the nations who I am. And then he makes a promise in five parts. First, home. “For I will take you from among the heathen, and gather you out of all countries, and will bring you into your own land.” Every scattered family, from every country. Second, cleansing. “Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean.” From all your filth and all your idols, I will wash you. Like a priest sprinkling water in the temple, God himself will make them clean.

And third, the heart of the promise. “A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh.” God's people had become hard-hearted. Prophet after prophet had spoken, and their hearts stayed like stone, cold and unmoved, no matter what God said or did. You can't fix a stone heart by polishing it. You can't make it soft by trying harder. It needs to be replaced. So God says, I will do it. I will take out the stone, and put in a living, beating heart, one that can feel, respond and love.

Fourth: “And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them.” God won't just give them rules and hope they manage. He will put his own Spirit inside them, so that they want to follow him and are able to. And fifth, a family promise, the one God had made again and again since the days of Moses. “And ye shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers; and ye shall be my people, and I will be your God.” Imagine hearing this in the week you learned your city had been destroyed. Everything is lost, and God says: I am not finished with you. I will make you new from the inside out.

When the Bible talks about the heart, it usually means more than feelings. In Hebrew thought, the heart, lev, was the centre of the whole person: where you think, decide, remember and choose, as well as where you feel. So a heart of stone was not only a cold heart. It was a mind and will that had become stubborn and unable to respond to God. That is why God promised not a repair, but a new heart.

You'll find this promise in Ezekiel chapter thirty-six, verses twenty-four to twenty-eight. Home, cleansing, a new heart, God's Spirit, and his people once again. So here is a question to carry with you. Is there any part of your heart that feels hard like stone, that you could ask God to make new?