"I do not want you to be ignorant of this mystery, brothers, so that you may not be conceited: Israel has experienced a hardening in part until the full number of Gentiles has come in. And so all Israel will be saved." — Romans 11:25–26
1. The Recurring Testimony of Ezekiel
Before moving into the content of Ezekiel 36, a single observation about the book as a whole sets everything in context. The most repeated phrase across all of Ezekiel — appearing in nearly every chapter — is then they will know that I am the Lord. It functions as a refrain, appended again and again to God's announcements of both judgment and restoration. Understanding why he keeps returning to this phrase is the key to understanding what Ezekiel is doing.
Prophecy, when it is fulfilled, forces a conclusion. If God announces what he is going to do before he does it — and then does it — through every circumstance that could have prevented it — the only reasonable conclusion is that he can see the future and that he is sovereign over the events that shape it. This is the purpose of the phrase. Every act of judgment, every act of restoration, every exile and every return is calibrated toward a single end: so that you will know that I am the Lord. Not the Lord in the abstract — but the Lord who speaks, who keeps his word, who is present in history, and who is working all of it toward a purpose.
The phrase is not a footnote. It is the thesis.
2. Ezekiel 36: A Land Reclaimed and a People Shamed
Ezekiel is prophesying during the exile. The northern kingdom of Israel has already been scattered by Assyria. Judah is in Babylon. The land lies largely desolate. The surrounding nations — Edom chief among them — have moved into what was left behind, celebrating the punishment that fell on God's people.
God's response is pointed. He had used those surrounding nations as instruments of discipline. But they had taken the assignment beyond its mandate. They were not reluctant agents of correction — they were gloating, harboring malice, making the land their own possession not as executors of God's purposes but as enemies of his people.
Chapter 36 opens with God addressing the mountains of Israel directly, speaking on behalf of the land as much as the people. The nations had said: "Aha, the ancient heights have become our possession." God's answer is a declaration of jealous wrath — not against Israel, but on behalf of them. Even while Israel was being disciplined, God never abandoned the covenant he had made with them. He had sent them into exile because of their idolatry, their bloodshed, and their failure to be a witness to the nations. But the nations using Israel's punishment as an excuse to mock and occupy had crossed a line. In the language of Genesis 12:3, they had positioned themselves on the wrong side of a promise that has never expired.
Key Principle: God can use a nation as an instrument of discipline without endorsing that nation's motives. The surrounding nations acted with malice. God's judgment against them was not inconsistent with his judgment against Israel — it was an expression of the same covenant faithfulness, turned in a different direction.
3. The Heart Behind the Holy Name
Chapter 36 reaches its pivot at verse 22: "It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am going to do these things, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations where you have gone."
This can easily be misread as a statement about wounded divine pride. It requires careful handling, because the passage that contains it also explains what kind of beings human beings are and what they were made for.
God has not created human beings as incidental features of the universe. He created them for relationship — in his image, as relational beings, with a capacity that nothing else in all of creation can satisfy. Every human being who has ever lived has been made for the very thing the gospel offers: a restored relationship with the one who designed them. Given that, the most loving thing God can do is ensure that humanity has every possible opportunity to know who he is.
The problem was that Israel, his designated witness to the nations, had completely failed in that role. In the land, they were shedding blood and pursuing foreign gods. Among the nations in exile, they continued to profane his name simply by being there — because their presence in exile led the surrounding nations to conclude that their God had either abandoned them or was not powerful enough to protect them. The logic of the ancient world was straightforward: a people scattered from their land means their god lost. If the Lord does not bring Israel back, the nations will conclude he cannot. His name — his character, his reputation, his reality as the one true God — is at stake in what he does with his people.
To abandon Israel would not be an act of justice. It would be a deception, leaving the nations with a fundamentally false picture of who God is. He will restore Israel not because Israel has earned it, but because their restoration is the testimony that tells the world the truth.
Key Principle: God is not a petty deity defending his reputation. He acts for the sake of his name because his name is the world's only access to the truth about who he is. Every person alive has been made to know him. Allowing his name to be permanently maligned is not wounded pride — it is humanity being cut off from the only thing that can satisfy them.
4. The New Covenant in Ezekiel's Language
The restoration Ezekiel 36 describes is not merely geographical. God is not simply promising to bring Israel back to a piece of land. The heart of what he announces in verses 25–27 is something far more profound:
"I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean... I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees."
This is the language of the New Covenant. It maps directly onto Jeremiah 31:31–34, where God announces that he will write his law on their hearts rather than on tablets of stone. The mechanism of transformation — an internal work of the Spirit rather than an external code requiring compliance — is precisely what the New Covenant provides. Six centuries before Christ, Ezekiel is describing in concrete terms what Paul will later explain as life in the Spirit: the removal of the heart of stone, the implantation of a new heart, the Spirit moving a people to walk in God's decrees.
The chapter's promise culminates in the refrain: "Then you will know that I am the Lord." All of it — the cleansing, the return to the land, the new heart — exists in service of restored relationship with the one for whom every human being was made.
5. Romans 9: Election and the Clay
Paul opens Romans 9 with personal anguish. He would be willing to be cut off from Christ himself if it could bring his own people — the Israelites — to salvation. This is the emotional register from which the entire three-chapter argument proceeds: a man who loves his people, is heartbroken by their condition, and is trying to help them — and the Gentiles who have now believed — understand what God is doing.
The first thing Paul establishes is definitional. Not everyone descended from Abraham is Israel. The covenant line ran through Isaac, not Ishmael. Through Jacob, not Esau. Before Jacob and Esau had done anything — good or bad — the word had come: the older will serve the younger. The choice preceded any human action. It was grounded entirely in God's sovereign purpose in election.
This leads to the objection that haunts the chapter: Is God unjust? He answers by quoting God's own words to Moses — "I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion" — and pointing to Pharaoh, raised up specifically to display God's power and make his name known throughout the earth. The hardening of Pharaoh is not a picture of God arbitrarily condemning someone for sport. It is a picture of God working through human choices — including obstinate ones — to accomplish purposes larger than any individual decision. The same sun that softens wax hardens clay. The sun is not at fault for what the material does under it.
The image Paul reaches for is the potter and the clay. The same lump can become a vessel for noble purposes or a vessel for common use. The potter has that right. But the deeper point is not a rigid doctrine of predestination — it is a statement about patience. What if God, choosing to display his wrath, bore with great patience the objects of that wrath precisely so that the riches of his glory could be made known to those who would choose him? The delay before final judgment is not indifference. It is the patience of someone holding the door open as long as possible.
6. Romans 10: The Stumbling Stone and the Word of Faith
Paul can testify to Israel's religious zeal. It is genuine. But zeal without knowledge is a destructive thing, and the knowledge Israel lacked was not mastery of the law's external requirements — it was the knowledge of who God actually is, and what he was always driving toward.
Israel pursued righteousness as though it could be achieved through compliance with the law. The law, however, was never designed to produce righteousness through compliance. It was designed to make one thing unmistakably clear: compliance alone cannot get anyone there. Everyone needs a savior. The law was a mirror, not a ladder. The Jews tried to climb it.
The result was that they stumbled over the very thing the law was meant to lead them to. "See, I lay in Zion a stone that causes men to stumble and a rock that makes them fall, and the one who trusts in him will never be put to shame" (Isaiah 8:14, 28:16). The Messiah — the one the whole system pointed toward — became the obstacle that their performance-based framework could not accommodate.
The righteousness that comes by faith requires no heroic ascent into heaven and no descent into the deep. It does not require the individual to bring Christ down or raise him up by their own effort or merit. It requires only confession and belief: that Jesus is Lord, and that God raised him from the dead. The law does not appear in that equation — not because the law is bad, but because the law's purpose was always to drive people toward the one thing that actually works: trust in the God who saves.
This is not a surprise development in the story. Moses himself had already testified that God would make Israel envious through a nation that was not a nation. Isaiah had already said that God would be found by those who were not looking. The Gentile mission was embedded in Israel's own prophetic tradition, and Israel's prophets had already witnessed to it.
7. Romans 11: The Olive Tree
Paul opens the final chapter of this argument with a sharp question: Has God rejected his people? And answers it with equal sharpness: "By no means!" Paul himself is an Israelite, of the tribe of Benjamin — living proof that the hardening is not total. There is, as in Elijah's time, a remnant chosen by grace.
The image he reaches for to describe the relationship between Israel and the Gentiles is an olive tree — one of the most important metaphors in the New Testament for understanding what has and has not changed in God's economy.
Israel is the cultivated olive tree. The roots go deep — Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the covenants, the promises, the patriarchs. Some of the natural branches have been broken off, not arbitrarily but because of unbelief. The Gentile believers — wild olive branches — have been grafted into that same tree. Not a new tree. The same one, with the same root, sharing the same nourishing sap.
The implications flow in both directions. The Gentile believer has nothing to boast about. The branch does not support the root — the root supports the branch. Wild branches grafted contrary to nature into a cultivated tree have no standing for arrogance. If God did not spare the natural branches when they fell into unbelief, he will not spare a grafted branch that does the same. And the natural branches can be grafted back in. If God was willing to graft in wild branches that were not seeking him, how much more readily will he restore the natural branches to the tree that has always belonged to them?
Key Principle: The church does not replace Israel. It has been grafted into Israel's covenant promises. Replacement Theology — the claim that God is finished with Israel and has transferred all her promises to the church — is not only theologically wrong. It is precisely the arrogance toward the natural branches that Paul explicitly warns against. We did not bring the root into existence. The root supports us.
8. The Hardening and the Fullness
The mystery Paul does not want the Gentile believers to miss is this: Israel's hardening is partial and temporary. It is in part — there has always been a remnant who believed. And it has a terminus — it will last until the full number of Gentiles has come in.
The logic behind this arrangement becomes visible when the sequence is traced. If Jesus had returned immediately after the resurrection, how many Gentiles would have entered the kingdom? Virtually none — the gospel had barely begun to spread. The hardening of Israel has opened a window of time in which the message goes to the nations. The Gentiles who come to faith — now worshipping Israel's Messiah — become the very thing that will eventually provoke Israel to jealousy. Moses had already said it. Isaiah had already said it. Paul sees it as the hinge of history: "Because of their transgression, salvation has come to the Gentiles to make Israel envious."
There is a gap in the prophetic calendar — what Daniel will later describe with precision — and that gap is the Time of the Gentiles. The prophetic clock that was running through Israel's history stopped when the nation rejected their Messiah. It will not resume until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. (The precise structure of this gap in Daniel's prophetic calendar will be examined in a later session.)
When the fullness is complete, Paul declares: "The deliverer will come from Zion; he will turn godlessness away from Jacob. And this is my covenant with them when I take away their sins." The gifts and calling of God, he concludes, are irrevocable.
9. "All Israel Will Be Saved"
What does it mean? The question invites careful handling, because a flat reading runs immediately into the foundational law of the created order: free will. God does not override genuine human choice. Every person who has ever lived has a genuine decision to make.
Paul is not predicting a mass conversion by divine fiat. He is announcing the arc of what God is doing with his people and the direction in which history is moving. The covenant promises made to Abraham, confirmed through Isaac and Jacob, formalized through Moses, extended through David, and announced in Jeremiah as a new covenant — none of those have expired. The logical conclusion toward which the entire prophetic tradition points is that God will do what he said he was going to do with Israel.
The mechanism of that fulfillment is bound up with the Millennial Kingdom — a period after the return of Jesus in which Israel inhabits the land, sees their Messiah, and has at last every reason to recognize who he is and what he has done. The irrevocability of the covenant does not cancel human freedom — it establishes the conditions under which Israel's choice becomes genuinely available in a way it has not been before. The prophet Zechariah describes the moment: they will look on the one they have pierced, and they will mourn (Zechariah 12:10). How many, ultimately, will choose? That remains with God. But the direction is unmistakable.
10. Ezekiel 37: The Valley of Dry Bones
Between Ezekiel 36's promises of restoration and chapter 38's account of the final military assault on Israel, Ezekiel 37 stands as the pivotal prophecy of how those promises will actually be fulfilled. It is one of the most famous visions in the entire Old Testament, and one of the most frequently misread — taken as a generic metaphor for spiritual renewal when it is in fact a specific, datable prophetic statement about what God is going to do with the physical people of Israel at the end of the age.
The vision is stark. Ezekiel is set down in the middle of a valley filled with bones — a great many of them, scattered across the floor, very dry. The Lord asks: "Son of man, can these bones live?" Ezekiel's answer is the only honest one available to a creature looking at evidence like that: "O Sovereign Lord, you alone know."
God instructs him to prophesy to the bones. As he does, there is a rattling sound, and the bones come together — bone to bone. Tendons appear. Flesh covers them. Skin covers the flesh. But there is no breath. A second instruction: prophesy to the four winds and call breath into them. Breath enters, and a vast army stands up on their feet.
Then God interprets his own vision: "Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel." Not a metaphor for spiritual dryness in general. Not an allegory about any given congregation. The whole house of Israel — the scattered, exiled, dispersed nation — is the valley of bones. And God is going to open their graves and bring them back to the land of Israel: "I will put my Spirit in you and you will live, and I will settle you in your own land. Then you will know that I the Lord have spoken, and I have done it."
The two-stage structure of the vision — bones assembling first, then breath entering — reflects the pattern of Israel's actual restoration. First, the physical return to the land. This process began in earnest in 1948 with the reestablishment of the state of Israel, and it is ongoing. A nation that did not exist for nearly two thousand years has been reconstituted in its ancient homeland. The bones have come together. The flesh is on them. But the Spirit has not yet been poured out on the whole house in the way the prophecy describes. That second stage awaits the events Ezekiel goes on to describe.
Key Principle: The Valley of Dry Bones is not a metaphor about spiritual renewal in general. It is a specific prophetic statement about the physical and spiritual restoration of the whole house of Israel — a restoration that has already begun in history and will be completed at the end of the age.
11. The Two Sticks: One Nation, One King
The vision of the valley gives way immediately to a second prophetic act. God instructs Ezekiel to take two sticks of wood. On one he writes: belonging to Judah and the Israelites associated with him. On the other: belonging to Joseph — the stick of Ephraim — and all the house of Israel associated with him. Then he is to join them in his hand until they become one.
The symbolism is direct. The Divided Kingdom — the northern ten tribes scattered by Assyria, and the southern kingdom exiled to Babylon — will be reunited. God is not going to restore a fragment of his people. He is going to reconstitute the whole. One nation. One land. And then the detail that anchors the entire promise in its ultimate fulfillment:
"My servant David will be king over them, and they will all have one shepherd."
David has been dead for centuries when Ezekiel writes this. The promise is not about a resurrected King David ruling in Jerusalem. It is about the one to whom the Davidic Covenant ultimately points. The Messiah — Jesus, the son of David — is the shepherd of whom David was a type. He is the king who will reign over the reunited nation in the land God promised to Abraham.
The covenant cascade that follows is comprehensive. God will make an everlasting covenant of peace with them. His sanctuary will be among them forever. They will be his people and he will be their God. Then the nations around them will know — the refrain again — that the Lord makes Israel holy.
In this one passage, Ezekiel is describing the fulfillment of every major covenant promise in the biblical narrative. The Abrahamic Covenant — the land, the nation, the blessing — the Davidic Covenant — the eternal king from David's line — and the New Covenant — the Spirit, the cleansing, the restored relationship between God and his people — all converge here. The Mosaic Covenant, the conditional covenant that Israel repeatedly broke, has been superseded by the New. What remains is the fulfillment of what God unconditionally promised.
12. The Millennial Kingdom and the Covenant Promises
The fulfillment Ezekiel describes does not arrive at the moment Jesus returns. What follows his return — the end of the time of Jacob's trouble, the defeat of the Antichrist, the pouring out of God's wrath on those who have aligned against him — these events set the stage for what Scripture calls the Millennial Kingdom: the thousand-year reign of Jesus on earth, ruling from Jerusalem, with Satan bound.
This is the moment toward which the covenant promises to Israel have been building. The land, fully inhabited. The nation, reunited. The king, enthroned. The Spirit, poured out. The nations, watching. Everything Ezekiel 37 describes finds its location here.
The church — those already with Jesus at his return, already in their resurrected bodies, already having made their choice — will not be watching from the sidelines. They will reign with him as priests and rulers. The choice that defined their lives has already been made and sealed. The Jews, by contrast, will be doing what every human being must do in every age: responding to what God has placed before them. They will see their Messiah. They will see the fulfillment of every promise made to their ancestors. The response of the whole house of Israel — across the generations, across the period of the Millennium — is the culmination of the drama that began with Abraham.
Other nations will also be present during this period, outside the land of Israel, and they too will have the opportunity to respond to what they see. (The precise structure of the nations during the Millennial Kingdom, and the final accounting at the Great White Throne Judgment, will be addressed in detail when the study reaches Daniel and Revelation.)
13. The Reach of God's Mercy
The material raises a question that cannot be set aside: what about those who have never had access to the gospel — people born into other religions, people who lived before Christ, people whose entire cultural framework gave them no path to Jesus?
Paul addresses part of this in Romans 1: creation itself testifies to the existence and nature of God. No one is entirely without witness. Every human conscience carries some awareness that there is a creator to be worshipped. People respond to that witness — or suppress it — independent of whether they have ever heard the name of Jesus.
The God who knows every individual heart is not bound by the limitations of human communication networks. He knows whether a person born into a religious tradition that has never encountered the gospel has a heart that is genuinely responding to whatever the name "creator" points to. The Imago Dei — stamped into every human being — means that the longing for God is not exclusively a Christian phenomenon. It is a human phenomenon. After the crucifixion, before the resurrection, Jesus descended and preached to the spirits in prison. Saints rose from the dead and walked through Jerusalem. These are not incidental details. They are evidence of a God who does not treat the accident of historical timing as the final word on anyone's access to him.
None of this dissolves the importance of the gospel proclamation. Paul's own logic in Romans 10 — "How can they hear without someone preaching to them?" — establishes that the ordinary means of grace matters enormously. The church exists to carry the message precisely because that is how most people will hear. But the God who is at the center of that message is sovereign over the boundaries of his own mercy. He knows every heart. He will not be unjust in a single case.
The appropriate posture before these questions is not confident speculation but humble trust — in a God whose judgments are unsearchable and whose paths are beyond tracing out, who has never failed to do what is right and will not begin to fail at the end of the age.
Key Scriptures
- Ezekiel 36:22–27 — God acts for the sake of his holy name; the promise of a new heart and new spirit
- Ezekiel 36:36 — The land restored so the nations will know that the Lord has done it
- Ezekiel 37:1–14 — The Valley of Dry Bones; the whole house of Israel
- Ezekiel 37:15–28 — The two sticks; one nation under one king; the covenant promises fulfilled
- Romans 9:6–23 — Election, the potter and the clay, God's patient purpose
- Romans 10:1–13 — Righteousness by faith; confession and belief; faith comes from hearing
- Romans 11:11–27 — The olive tree; the hardening of Israel; the fullness of the Gentiles; all Israel will be saved
- Romans 11:33–36 — The unsearchable wisdom and knowledge of God
- Zechariah 12:10 — They will look on the one they have pierced and mourn
These notes are part of an ongoing study and are intended as a companion resource, not a replacement for personal engagement with Scripture. All claims made here should be tested against the biblical text.