“And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and you will keep my judgments and do them, and you will dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers, and you will be my people and I will be your God.”
Now quite unequivocally we have mention of the work of the Holy Spirit, God's Spirit. It was to be through God's Spirit that this great work would come about. It is He Who would cause them to walk in His statutes and keep in their hearts and in their lives His judgments. God's Spirit has been at work through all ages. He was at work in the time of Zerubbabel (Zechariah 4:6). When John spoke of ‘the Spirit' as being ‘not yet' (John 7:39) he was referring to the mighty experience in the upper Room and at Pentecost, but he was not denying that the Spirit was at work before that. For Jesus Himself had made clear that the Holy Spirit had already been available through His ministry (John 3:1-6; John 4:10-14; John 4:24; John 6:63; John 7:37-38; John 20:22).
Strictly speaking these words of Ezekiel are not parallel to such promises as Isaiah 44:2-5; Joel 2:28 where a great outpouring of the Spirit in the future is mentioned, although containing similar elements (but see Ezekiel 39:29). This is not so much a promise of such an outpouring, but of a steady work of the Spirit in men's hearts as men are cleansed by God. We must not, however, be too pedantic when dealing with such prophecies. The same Spirit works in all.
Mention is often made of the connection between the outpouring of the Spirit and the coming of the Messiah in the Messianic age. And that is true. But we must not limit the work of the Spirit to one event. In a sense Zerubbabel (Zechariah 4:6-14) was probably himself seen as a minor Messiah (before the Messianic idea had taken full root), and the Spirit was certainly seen to be at work through him, although of course the great fulfilment of the promises was at the coming of the Messiah, which resulted in Pentecost and after, when as the ‘drencher (baptiser) in the Holy Spirit' He ‘drenched in the Holy Spirit' those who were His. And it may well be that there will be a further pouring out of the Spirit in the final days of the age. But we must beware of being dogmatic about the latter. Things may not occur in the way that we expect.
“And you will dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers, and you will be my people and I will be your God.” This confirms that this work of the Spirit was to begin when the exiles returned in faith to the land of their inheritance. The words were spoken to the true Israel, the Israel within Israel, as Paul explains (Romans 9-11). Those whose hearts were true would be truly His and He would be their God.
It also has application to all Christians in that they have become citizens of Heaven (Philippians 3:20), residents in a better land, God's greater land, being His people and knowing Him as their God, something beyond the conception of Ezekiel and therefore having to be prophesied pictorially in the form of an idea (see on Ezekiel 37:26-28). He could not know then that the land of God's inheritance would become a heavenly land. That would be revealed in the future, and the final words are specifically applied in Revelation 21:3 to the new Heaven and the new earth