Ezekiel challenges his readers to turn from their ways and to seek to live just and righteous lives. He encourages them to make for themselves a “new heart” and a “new spirit.” But we know, because the New Testament teaches it over and over again, that the fulness of this is only possible through the one who offers new life by laying down his own. It is only possible through an act of mercy and forgiveness through Christ’s atoning death. Nevertheless, when Ezekiel concludes this passage with the injunction to “turn and live,” it is a magnificent foreshadowing of the grace to come through Jesus who enjoins us to “repent and be forgiven.”