Israel's Inglorious Past and Their Glorious Future (Ezekiel 36:16-38).
As we consider this section we should pause to consider the nature of Biblical prophecy. A Biblical prophet was not a foreteller like Nostradamus is seen as being, who declared events that would happen in the future so that people could mark them off and satisfy their curiosity about particular future historical events, he was rather one who declared what God was going to do. In his prophecy he was concerned with ends rather than specific historical events, except is so far as those events brought about the ends. Thus he would describe processes and then the end result, and the processes might occur at different points over periods of time, and the ends would not necessarily all occur at the same time. There were partial fulfilments followed by deeper fulfilments.
God does not split history into time periods (‘ages') like we do, He sees the whole process going through from beginning to end in a continual line. Thus to the Apostles the time that they were living in was ‘the end of the ages' (1 Corinthians 10:11; Hebrews 9:26-28; 1 Peter 1:20), ‘the last days' (Acts 2:17). There was nothing beyond but eternity. And His way of salvation was always the same, obtained through grace, by faith, and revealed by response to Him and seen as resulting from the work of the Spirit (Ezekiel 18:31; Psalms 51:10-12; Psalms 139:7; Psalms 143:10). That the outward manifestation of that faith altered through the ages is true, beginning with the primitive worship of Adam and Seth (Genesis 4:26), continuing with the family worship of Abraham (Genesis 12:8), moving on to the covenant worship resulting from Sinai, and then the Christian worship resulting from the new covenant, but at the heart it was the same and through it men came to God in responsive faith.
Thus prophecy took in all elements of this activity of God. And as the prophets looked forward, guided by the Spirit, they saw that certain things must be because of Who and What God is. But they did not attempt to present them chronologically, or in a time scale. What mattered was that they would happen, not the sequence or time schedule in which they would happen. Some they saw clearly, others they described pictorially, because they prophesied of things that were beyond their ability to put into words or to fully appreciate. They had no concept of Heaven, or of an afterlife, or of eternity. They saw the future as life continuing for ever as it was in the present, but at a different level. And they prophesied in those terms. It was the New Testament writers who were able to take those descriptions and demonstrate how they dealt with ideas that the prophets could not even have dreamed of. This will come out in the passage we are now to study.