Page 196 - NOTES ON EZEKIEL

190 NOTES ON EZEKIEL.
humbling thought is that Christians could question
what is here meant Only one thing explains it all—the
-deep and wide-spread departure of men in Christendom
from an adequate or indeed any real sense of their own
blessings. From the peace and joy proper to the
Christian, they have through judaizing and the influ­
ence of Babylon slipped away into doubt and darkness
and error; and in their lack of comfort in the Holy
Ghost, through unbelief of the grace in which the
Christian stands, they are tempted to covet their neigh­
bours’ goods to the ruin of truth and to the confusion of
relationship with God, whether of the church now or of
Israel by-and-by. The issue of the prophecy is of so
plain and positive and glorious a nature that the very
heathen shall know that Jehovah sanctifies His people,
when His sanctuary shall be in their midst for ever.*

* It is to the shame of Christians that they who know the truth
and grace of God in Christ should be so beguiled, in reading the
prophecies at least, as to be justly rebuked for their dark unbe­
lief by a Jew—himself so prejudiced as Don Balthasar Orobio.
I am indebted to another for the following extract:—
“ If it he Israel mentioned in the passages they quote, it is the
spiritual (that is, the nations who have embraced the Christian
religion), and not the temporal, or in other words the Jewish seed
of Abraham. If the text affirm that Israel and Judah shall return
to the land of their fathers to possess it for ever, they uphold that
this land is heaven, and those who have acknowledged Messiah
are Israel and Judah. The wars and desolation of which the pro­
phet speaks are also taken in a metaphorical sense. We must be­
lieve, according to them, that it is the struggle of vice with virtue
— impiety with justice. Thus to annihilate the proofs which we
-expect will mark the fulfilment of the Almighty’s promises, they
confound heaven with earth, this world with paradise, the holy
city with the assemblings of Christians; Israel, Jacob, and Judah,