"Therefore, thus says the Lord God: Now I will restore the fortunes of Jacob and have mercy on the whole house of Israel, and I will be jealous for My holy name. They shall forget their shame and all the treachery they have practiced against Me, when they dwell securely in their land with none to make them afraid, when I have brought them back from the peoples and gathered them from their enemies' lands, and, through them, have vindicated My holiness in the sight of many nations. then they shall know that I am the Lord their God, because I sent them into exile among the nations and then assembled them into their own land. I will leave none of them remaining among the nations anymore. And I will not hide My face anymore from them, when I pour out My Spirit upon the house of Israel, declares the Lord God." -Ezekiel 39:25-29
After long passages in which God told the prophet of His plans to judge Israel for her constant acts of apostasy, Ezekiel must have found these words both encouraging and astonishing. Judgment was not the end of God's plan for the Jews. Exile to Babylon was not to be the end of her covenant history. God had a plan for the salvation of this little race of people.
Let me start with saying what this is not. This is not a prophecy about the modern state of Israel. A certain theological school talks about the political state of Israel as if it is the culmination of all of God's purposes. Yet it shows not of the signs described here. Modern Israel is a completely secular sate, and her people are mostly secularized, many even atheist. The murder of the preborn is almost uncontested and sodomy is widely celebrated. The Messiah is known by a few, but only a tiny minority. Yet Ezekiel describes a people who are not in general unbelief but who have come in general to celebrate belief. They are a people upon whom God has poured His Holy Spirit (compare Isaiah 44:3 and Joel 2:29), so that they will turn to the Messiah whom they had rejected (Zechariah 12:10). That is not at all a description of today's Israel.
Whether this conversion will happen in what we now know as Israel or somewhere else, I cannot claim to know. Whether the gathering described by Jeremiah refers to geography or to the gathering into the church, again, I do not know. Either is possible, or a combination of the two. But it will be gathering not to a political cause but to their Lord Jesus Christ. Oh blessed day!
