Ezekiel 36
v.17
“Son of man, when the people of Israel were living in their own land, they defiled it by their conduct and their actions. Their conduct was like a woman’s monthly uncleanness in my sight.
v.18
So I poured out my wrath on them because they had shed blood in the land and because they had defiled it with their idols.
v.22
“Therefore say to the Israelites, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: It is not for your sake, people 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.
v.24
“‘For I will take you out of the nations; I will gather you from all the countries and bring you back into your own land.
v.25
I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols.
v.26
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.
This is the spiritual transformation promised in the new covenant. Instead of the law working from the outside in, God promised a new heart to work from the inside out.
True religion begins, then, with the heart, and the heart is the ruling power of manhood. You may enlighten a man’s understanding and you have done much, but as long as his heart is wrong, the enlightenment of the understanding only enables him to sin with a greater weight of responsibility resting upon him.
v.27
And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.
In the ancient world the heart was the center for volition and the intellectual catalyst for feeling and action. A ‘heart of stone’ implied inflexibility and willfulness, while a ‘heart of flesh’ meant submission and compliance.
The Holy Spirit cannot dwell in the old heart; it is a filthy place, devoid of all good, and full of enmity to God. His very first operation upon our nature is to pull down the old house and build himself a new one, that he may be able to inhabit us consistently with his holy spiritual nature.