Ezekiel was a priest in a country with no temple. He had been trained to minister in a building that no longer existed — and he was in Babylon, five hundred miles from home, watching his religion be ground down by his nation’s grief. And there, in exile, he received the vision that would answer the question his people had been asking for a thousand years: who can we actually trust?
Walter Kaiser Jr. ranks Ezekiel 36:25–35 alongside Jeremiah 31 as one of the twin peaks of Old Testament theology. Kaiser writes that the Ezekiel passage “comes close to matching the majesty and scope of Jeremiah’s new covenant.” The two prophets are saying the same thing from different angles. Jeremiah said God would write his law on the heart. Ezekiel said God would replace the heart. A heart of stone for a heart of flesh. An old spirit exchanged for a new one. And inside that new heart — “I will put my Spirit in you.” Not just done for you. Done in you.
“A New Heart”
A passage that comes close to matching the majesty and scope of Jeremiah’s new covenant passage is Ezekiel 36:25–35.
Look at what the whole canon has been building toward. In Eden, a promise: the seed of the woman will crush the serpent. On Sinai, a covenant: I will be your God. In the prophets, a vow: I will send my Servant. And here in Ezekiel, the landing: I will put my Spirit inside you. The promise-plan does not stay outside the human heart. It moves in. The God who has been faithful from Genesis forward does not stop at the threshold.
This is why the question Israel’s prophets kept asking — who can I trust? — finds an answer that is bigger than any one attribute of God. You are held by the Father who made you on purpose and refused to let you go when you deserved to be let go. You are held by the Son who paid what you could not pay so the covenant could come through. You are held by the Spirit who has moved into the new heart and will not be evicted. Three persons. One faithfulness. One unbreakable security.⁶⁹
Most of us live with a very small doctrine of security. We trust God for the next thing — the job, the health, the outcome — while quietly doubting he is with us in the deeper place where the real fear lives. Ezekiel 36 does not address the outcome. It addresses the place. God does not promise to arrange your circumstances. He promises to move in.
That is why the Security question — who can I trust — has an answer now that no circumstance can take from you. You can trust the God who created you because he wanted to. You can trust the Son who died so you would not have to pay. You can trust the Spirit who is already inside you, making the old stone into something that can be loved and can love. That is not a security you work up. It is a security you wake up into.⁷⁰
Where has your doctrine of security been smaller than the three-fold answer God has given — and what would it look like to wake up tomorrow inside a security that was already decided before you opened your eyes?
Someone in your life is exhausted from trying to trust God and failing. They have heard a thousand sermons telling them to have more faith. What they have not heard — or have not been able to hear — is that God has not been waiting outside for them to improve. He has been moving in.
Tell them Ezekiel’s news. Not as a formula. As the truest thing you know. The God who made them has already given them his Son, and the Son has already sent his Spirit, and the Spirit has already made a home inside a heart they keep apologizing for. That home is not coming. That home has been built. The Security question has been answered — not by an argument, but by a God who stood in three places at once so they would never be alone in one.
Who in your life is exhausted from trying to trust God — and how could you speak the answer (made, saved, indwelt) into the place where they are worn out?
The household of disciple-makers raises people whose security is not circumstantial. Not because circumstances are predictable, but because the God who lives inside them is not. Teach your household that the first question the human heart asks — who can I trust — has already been answered, three times over, by a God who is himself three persons working one rescue.
Teach them to name it. Made me. Saved me. Lives in me. That is not a creed to recite. It is a ground to stand on. When the people you love begin to stand there — really stand there — their lives start to look like Ezekiel’s promise: stone replaced with flesh, dry bones becoming an army, a people restored to the God who himself will dwell with them.
Who have you been trusting — really — to hold your life together, and what changes when you remember that God himself has moved into the place where your fear lives?
Write the three-part answer to “who can I trust?” in your own words — what the Father has done in your story, what the Son has done in your story, what the Spirit has done in your story. Be specific. Then read the three together, out loud, as the answer to your oldest question.
⁶⁸ Walter C. Kaiser Jr., The Promise-Plan of God (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008), Chapter 10: The Exilic Era.
⁶⁹ “A+ Answer: Security,” vimeo.com/kathykoch.
⁷⁰ “Security: Who Can I Trust?,” vimeo.com/kathykoch.