Teaching Christianity (continued)
I will put my spirit in you, and make you walk in my justices and keep and carry out my judgments. And you shall dwell in the land which I gave to your fathers, and you shall be my people, and I will be your God, and I will cleanse you from all your uncleannesses (Ez 36:23–29).
You only have to notice that the bath of rebirth (Ti 3:5) is also promised here, something we now see bestowed on all nations, and you will be in no doubt that this whole passage is a prophecy of the new covenant, which embraces not only that one nation in its remnant, about which it is written elsewhere, Even if the number of the children of Israel is like the sands of the sea, only a remnant will be saved (Is 10:22; Rom 9:27), but also the other nations which were promised to their fathers, who are also ours.[72] And there is also what the apostle said, when he was putting forward the grace of the new covenant as surpassing that of the old: You yourselves are our letter, not written in ink but in the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone, but on the fleshly tablets of the heart (2 Cor 3:2–30); he is here looking back and observing that this comes from the very place where our prophet says And I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you, and I will take away the stony heart from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. A heart of flesh, of course —from which the apostle gets his phrase the fleshly tablets of the heart—he wished to be distinguished from a stony heart by its having life and feeling, and by feeling he meant intelligence. In this way the spiritual Israel consists not of one nation but of all, which were promised to the fathers in their seed, which is Christ (Gal 3:16).
49. So this spiritual Israel is distinguished from that Israel of the flesh, which is one nation, by newness of grace, not by privilege of race, and by attitude of mind rather than by nationality of any kind.[73] But the profundity of prophecy, while speaking about, or addressing itself to the former, will pass unperceived to the latter, and while it is still speaking about or addressing itself to this latter will still seem to be referring to the former. It does this, not because it is unfriendly and grudges us our understanding of the scriptures, but because it is giving our understanding some very salutary therapeutic exercise. Thus the text, And I will bring you back into your own land, and its repetition a little later, And you will dwell, he says, in the land which I gave to your fathers (Ez 36:24.28), should be taken by us as referring, not in a fleshly manner to the Israel of the flesh, but in a spiritual manner to the Israel of the spirit.
The Church that is to say, without spot or wrinkle (Eph 5:27), gathered together out of all the nations and destined to reign for ever with Christ, is itself the land of the blessed, the land of the living (Ps 27:13), and is to be understood as what was given to the fathers, when it was promised them by the sure and immutable will of God. This land which the fathers believed was to be given in its own time was already given them, as a matter of fact, in the very firmness of the promise or of God's predestining decision, as the apostle also says about the grace which is given to the saints, in his letter to Timothy: Not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given to us in Christ Jesus before the eternal ages, but has been manifested now through the coming of our Savior (2 Tm 1:9–10). He says that grace was given, when there was not even anyone yet for it to be given to, because in the plan and predestining decision of God, what was going to happen in its own time, which he calls being "manifested," had already happened.
These texts, though, could also be understood of the land of the age to come, when there will be a new heaven and a new earth, in which the unjust will not be able to live (2 Pt 3:13; Rv 21:1). And that is why it was quite right for the godly to be told that theirs is the land, of which not a single particle will belong to the ungodly, because it too was likewise given, when it was definitively confirmed that it