"A new heart and a new spirit". All God's gifts to us are for our own good: it is better for us to have real human hearts rather than "hearts of stone". At the same time, God gifts to us reveal God's holiness and manifest God's glory. Therefore St Thomas Aquinas declared, "God desires his glory for our sake, for our good."

Ezekiel seems the strangest of the prophets, with his exotic and extravagant visions. We wonder how his contemporaries understood him. We are more fortunate than they were: through our faith in Jesus as our crucified and risen Lord, we can see levels of meaning in the writing of the Old Testament that are revealed in the life of Jesus, in his ministry and most especially in his passion, death and resurrection. We may with a certain accuracy that Jesus' final ministry was the sending of the Holy Spirit, after accomplishing his earthly mission in his Ascension. That gift of the Holy Spirit, "poured out in our hearts", as Paul says (Rom. 5:5) fulfils God's promise of "a new heart and a new spirit," far beyond all human hopes and dreams.