Today's passage comes from the Book of Ezekiel, one of the twelve prophets of the Old Testament. Ezekiel ben-Buzi is a Zadokite priest, meaning he belonged to the senior priestly line that had served in Jerusalem's Temple for generations. Nebuchadnezzar II exiled him to Babylon in 597 BCE, thirteen years before the Babylonian king destroys Jerusalem and deports its remaining population. During his years in Babylon, the Temple is reduced to rubble and Judah becomes a Babylonian province. The nations surrounding Israel are reading the catastrophe as proof that Israel's God lacks the power to protect His people. Ezekiel uses this passage to argue otherwise.
The stony heart, in Ezekiel's language, is the organ of law: Israel's relationship with God had been governed for centuries by a covenant made at Mount Sinai under Moses, an agreement in which God bound the people to a written law and held them to its consequences. The later chapters of Deuteronomy spell those consequences out: agricultural failure, military defeat, exile. The Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE was the covenant's verdict on Israel's failure. Against that verdict, Ezekiel sets a different promise: God will not restore the old arrangement but replace it. He will remove the heart of stone and give a heart of flesh, then put His own spirit within the people, so that the obedience the law demanded but could never produce will now come from God Himself. It is a promise delivered in the shadow of Babylon: hard times are coming, Israel is weak, but God's spirit will remain with the people.