Welcome to a year in the Bible with Daily Grace.

This year, we want to spend a few minutes with you every day walking through our study Christ and all of Scripture.

Each week we will dive deeply into two passages of Scripture, one from the Old Testament and one from the New,

seeing how they connect and point to Jesus.

Whether you are doing the study yourself or just following along with us here, we are hopeful

that through studying these passages each week, you will see how Christ is not only present

throughout the entire biblical story, but the center of it. Hi, friends. Welcome to a year in the

Bible. My name is Beth, and I'm here with my co-host, Alexa. Hey, everyone. Today we're going to be taking a deeper look at the Old Testament passage that we annotated yesterday, which is Ezekiel 36, 26, to 27. So, Beth, can you start us off by sharing where this passage fits in the overall story of Scripture? Yeah, so we're in Ezekiel again this week. And so if you remember from

last week, Ezekiel was a priest who was then appointed by God to also be a prophet. And so he was

tasked with speaking God's word to the people of Judah as they were exiled in Babylon. And since

their beginning, the people of Israel have been a rebellious, hard-hearted people.

We obviously have seen this as we've been tracing their history throughout this study, throughout this whole entire year.

This nation has already been divided due to their sin, but now both kingdoms, the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah, are in exile.

And so think of them like an extremely rebellious teenager. No matter how

much discipline they have faced, no matter how many warnings they've received, they just can't

seem to stop doing the wrong thing. Until one day, they end up in prison. And so exile is kind of

like prison for God's people. It's a large portion of Ezekiel's message is informing Judah of why they are facing this judgment, why they were sent to exile.

But like all of the prophets that we've studied so far in this study, surrounding these harsh words of judgment are messages of hope like the one that we're reading today.

And so there is hope for this rebellious people.

God was going to turn their hard hearts into soft hearts of flesh through his spirit that he's

going to give them. I love seeing how God provides hope for his people even in their disobedience.

And I'm excited to keep seeing how God provides hope for his people as we go through the prophets.

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