Ezekiel 37:15-22

15-22. By this symbolic action, the last which is recorded of him, Ezekiel visibly pictures the reunion of Judah and Israel, the southern and northern kingdoms, into one nation. Judah with all the northerners who had settled in the south (2 Chronicles 11:12-16, etc.), together with the northern tribes who looked to Jerusalem as the spiritual capital (Benjamin, Levi, and a part of Simeon), was represented by one stick (compare Numbers 17:2), and Joseph (embracing the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh, Ephraim being the more powerful) and the other less influential tribes of north Israel, were represented by another which he joined “with it” (R.V., Ezekiel 37:19), “even with the stick of Judah,” and these two sticks were united as one in the hand (Ezekiel 37:17) signifying the future recovery of both these branches of the house of Israel from their respective captivities and their reuniting into one kingdom in their old home land (Ezekiel 37:18-22). All the prophets sorrowed over the disruption of the unity of the people of God, and looked forward to the time when all schisms should be ended and Jehovah’s people should be one. (Compare 1 Corinthians 12:25; 1 Corinthians 12:27; John 17:21.) That this prophecy had only a very partial fulfillment in the return from Babylon is undoubted. All Israel never returned to Palestine. This prophecy can never be fulfilled excepting by the ingathering of God’s spiritual Israel into their permanent inheritance the Christian Church and the heavenly Canaan. (Compare Ezekiel 34:22; Ezekiel 34:24.) It may not be that Ezekiel interpreted his vision as referring to the gospel dispensation, and a “better country” (Hebrews 11:16), but we know now that what he saw was only the “shadow” of the heavenly. (Hebrews 8:5.) Many seers have spoken better than they knew, and their sublime prophecies have been, not literally fulfilled, but very truly fulfilled, exceeding abundantly above all they were able to ask or think.

(See introduction chapter Ezekiel 40:0) Fairbairn says, “Thus, as the true David of the promise is Christ, so the covenant people are no longer the Jews distinctively but the faithful in Christ, and the territory of blessing no longer Canaan but the region of which Christ is King and Lord.”