Eternal Prosperity
“‘“I am concerned for you and will look on you with favor; you will be plowed and sown, and I will cause many people to live on you—yes, all of Israel. The towns will be inhabited and the ruins rebuilt. I will increase the number of people and animals living on you, and they will be fruitful and become numerous. I will settle people on you as in the past and will make you prosper more than before. Then you will know that I am the LORD. I will cause people, my people Israel, to live on you. They will possess you, and you will be their inheritance; you will never again deprive them of their children.”‘”
Today’s Text: Ezekiel 36:1-15 (Living Life Daily Devotional)
The LORD promises prosperity to the land, but is it really the land that the LORD is concerned about?
No. This prophecy is a promise to the people of God—the promise of an eternal inheritance and eternal prosperity. Clearly, given the struggles that Israel and the people of God in general have to endure in this world, that prophesy has not been fulfilled yet.
One interesting aspect of the prophecy is that, on the surface, it promises an inheritance here on this earth. And so it points to the future reign of Jesus here on this earth. But Jesus’s reign on this earth is not the complete fulfillment of the prophecy, either.
If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.
— 1 Corinthians 15:19
The complete fulfillment of the prophecy will happen when the Father delivers a new heaven and a new earth to us. At that time, the devil will be thrown into the lake of fire, as will death itself (Revelation 20-22).
The prosperity that we so desperately seek is not of this world. Whatever prosperity that humanity may attain in this life is fleeting. And that prosperity is fleeting because of the sinfulness of the human heart.
The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?
— Jeremiah 17:9
The word of God bears witness that it is perfectly fine for us to pursue prosperity in our lives. But the pursuit of prosperity must be subordinate to the pursuit of God’s purposes. In the pursuit of God’s purposes, we are pursuing eternal prosperity. And we will find it. God will deliver eternal prosperity to us when we follow Jesus Christ as Lord through faith and obedience.
Father, out of Your glorious riches, strengthen us with power through Your Spirit in our inner being, so that Christ may dwell in our hearts through faith. And may we, being rooted and established in love, have power, together with all Your holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know that love that surpasses knowledge—that we may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of You dwelling in our hearts. In Jesus’s name. Amen.
