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Can these bones live?

Ezek 37: 1 — 14

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 09 Jul, 2006

IT IS all very well to point to revivals in the past and say, “How wonderful, that God did that!” But can we expect revival today? Many people say, “No!”

When I began talking seriously about revival, some people told me that revival is impossible in our day. They gave me sociological, religious and socio–economic reasons why we should not expect revival in our time.

People in this church gave me these reasons.

One person gently and caringly suggested that I focus on something else. She told me that revival occurred in times and places where people were connected in ways they are not connected today. They lived in villages where what happened at one end of the village very quickly spread to the other end, because people lived their whole lives together. If revival started, people were exposed to it on a daily basis until they, too were revived.

But today, we can live on the same floor in the same block of flats and never even know the name of the people in the flat directly opposite us. They might be worshippers of the Great Juju, and we would never even know.

This person was convinced that I was barking up the wrong tree — maybe, even, that I was barking mad.

Several other people told me that the Bible was against revival in our time. “These are the last days,” they said. “In the last days, men will be lovers of themselves rather than lovers of God. They will heap up to themseves preachers, because they will have itching ears, All we can expect is for the church to go into decline until Jesus comes and a remnant will be saved.”

“What about the revivals going on in Africa and Asia at this very time?” I asked them.

“They can’t be happening, because we are in the last times... people are responding to a false gospel if to anything. If people were really preaching the gospel, no one would respond.”

Of course, there are others who are really racists or just plain snobs, who think that revivals only occur among primitive people or among those who don’t know how to behave properly. These people are content if a revival occurs in New Guinea or in a Sydney slum, but could never abide such a thing in Castle Hill.

What does Ezekiel have to say to all these points of view?

You might be surprised. He accepts them, he takes them to God, and he lets God resolve the question.

Do you share these questions? Did you sigh last week and say, “Here he goes again!”?

OK. Let’s follow Ezekiel as he deals with the same kind of problem.

Ezekiel was not prophesying in Jerusalem. He didn’t walk among the grape farms of Jericho. He was a prisoner of war in a slave camp. And, in the midst of that hopeless situation, the vision of the dry bones came to him.

We must make decisions. Do we want to be a heap of dry bones, or do we want to be bursting with the life that only God can give?

The Israelites had been taken captive. You heard about that last Sunday night, when Lyle Southwell spoke about Daniel as a captive of Nebuchadnezzar. Ezekiel and Daniel were roughly contemporaries.

Although Nebuchadnezzar was an innovator who drained brains from his captive nations instead of killing off their leaders, there was no real hope for Israel, They were captives in a strange land.

Turn to Psalm 137 to see how the people of Israel felt.

^137:1 By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept

when we remembered Zion.

² There on the poplars

we hung our harps,

³ for there our captors asked us for songs,

our tormentors demanded songs of joy;

they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

⁴ How can we sing the songs of the LORD

while in a foreign land?

⁵ If I forget you, O Jerusalem,

may my right hand forget its skill.

⁶ May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth

if I do not remember you,

if I do not consider Jerusalem

my highest joy.

We know that the nation returned to its homeland. We can see some positives in this. They remembered Zion. They were ready to return when the time came.

But this is really a Psalm of absolute despair. They had no hope of ever getting back. All they had were the memories. It is like someone whose husband or wife has just died, and they are saying, “You may be gone, but I will never forget you.;”

The people are grieving over their losses. The nation is dead; it is without hope.

A few years before the First Great Awakening broke out in America, the Presbyterian Church commissioned a review of the state of Christianity throughout the new land.

The conclusion was that there was a high level of formal church attendance without any particular understanding of the gospel or commitment to Christ. The churches were struggling, often had uneducated pastors, had little impact on their communities and were on the verge of dying out.

Throughout history, God’s people have had bouts of being in a desperate condition.

And here is Ezekiel’s answer to this whole problem.

In a vision, Ezekiel sees a valley filled with dry bones.

We need to grasp what this means.

My grandfather was decorated for bravery on the Western Front during World War I. There had been an unsuccessful charge towards the German lines. The Australians were driven back, but suffered many casuaties. My grandfathermade it safely back to the lines.

From in the trenches, they heard cries out in no–man’s land.

My grandfather climbed back over the parapet and ran back towards the Germans. There, among the corpses of his fellow soldiers — some literally torn apart by the barrage of bullets — there lay one man, wounded but still alive.

My grandfather hoisted him over his shoulder, and ran back to the lines, dodging the German bullets once more.

The wounded man survived.

And that’s how it has always been in battles, when two armies line up against each other. Among the corpses, there will always be some who remain alive and may well survive.

What Ezekiel sees is a vision where that is absolutely impossible.

These are no longer corpses. These are piles of bones. These are the Cambodian Killing Fields, with their man–high piles of skulls. These are the river banks at Stamford Bridge, where the bones and the rusted weapons of dead Norsemen, killed a thousand years ago, are still dug up every year. These are the farmlands of the Somme, where the remains of the 20 000 died in one day still come up behind the ploughs. Here, the dead are dead, never to rise again.

Last week on Silent Witness, the story involved a man who had disappeared. He was found, having been buried alive three months previously.

These shows go for reasonable reality, and the corpse of the man was badly decayed, but they could still detect the marks of torture on his flesh.

There is no corpse, there is no flesh in Ezekiel’s vision. There is only bone upon bone, picked clean by birds, scraped down by maggots, bleached in the relentless sun.

And God asks him a question:

³ He asked me, “Son of man, can these bones live?”

And Ezekiel replies,

“O Sovereign LORD, you alone know.”

God asks Ezekiel his opinions on an impossibility, and Ezekiel gives him an answer of faith.

Perhaps you share some of the reservations I mentioned at the beginning. Perhaps you are saying, “Here we go again. Revival just won’t happen!”

We are not dead bones. We are not beyond all hope. When God points around the congregation and says to you, “Son of Man, Daughter of Woman, can these people return to life?” how do you reply?

We have only two choices. We can usurp God’s sovereignty and say, “Impossible!” Or we can entrust the situation into his loving hands, and say, “You know the answer, Lord.”

C.S. Lewis wrote that resurrection is always part of the Christian message. Just when the world is patting the earth down on the Church’s grave, new life bursts forth once more.

And that’s the vision God has for his people — a vision of new life bursting forth where once it seemed there were only dead twigs and dried bones.

How does that life return, though?

God tells Ezekiel,

“Prophesy to these bones and say to them, `Dry bones, hear the word of the LORD! ⁵ This is what the Sovereign LORD says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. ⁶ I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the LORD.’ “

Our world says, “Write a prescription, implant a receiver, fiddle with DNA.” It has to have a technological solution.

God’s solution is this: declare God’s message to the people. Tell them what God means to do. Urge them to listen and respond. Then they will return to life.

Why does this work? Because

Faith comes by hearing,and hearing by the word of God.

It’s what Martin Luther said. Someone asked him how he had achieved such a vast change in European life when he was an unknown monk in a back–country regional University.

“I just sat here and drank my Wittenberg beer, and the Word of God did its work,” he replied.

When the word does its work in willing listeners, the dry bones return to life.

Hear the word of God!

^37:7 So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I was prophesying, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. ⁸ I looked, and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them, but there was no breath in them.

God’s work happens when God’s word is preached to willing listeners.

Yet there has to be more than mere superficialities. We can have life on the surface, but not be truly alive to God.

They had flesh and they had all the mechanisms for movement, but they had no real life.

They were like the early Church on the eve of Pentecost. alive, but without the life of God’s Holy Spirit within them. Our salvation is never complete without the enlivening presence of the Spirit.

So God tells Ezekiel

^37:9 Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to it, `This is what the Sovereign LORD says: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe into these slain, that they may live.’ “

and he responds,

¹⁰ So I prophesied as he commanded me, and breath entered them; they came to life and stood up on their feet — a vast army.

The Hebrew word for Breath is ruach, which also is the word for Spirit.

You notice that, when the flesh came on these bones, it was when Ezekiel prophesied by telling the bones what would become of them.

As I said, on the authority of the Bible,

Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.

But when the breath of life comes on these corpses, Ezekiel speaks not to the ears which these bodies now have, but he speaks to the breath, to the Spirit of God.

Prophesy to the breath...

says God.

We Baptists too often want to keep prophesying to the people about the resurrection power of Jesus in their lives. We want flesh on the bones, but we don’t move on to ensure that there is breath in their mouths. We have to change the methods to suit the needs.

Jesus taught about his death and his resurrection; then he breathed on his disciples and said,

“Receive the Holy Spirit.”

We hear the word of God. We exercise faith in Jesus. We respond to the hope of resurrection.

But we receive life from the Spirit when we welcome him among us, and as he touches our hearts.

Our lack of revival is not a result of the end times. It is not a consequence of sociological changes. It is not caused by our being more modern or more sophisticated than people in other times and places.

Our lack of revival is the result of our failure to respond fully to the preaching of God’s word and our failure to invite the Holy Spirit to work in our midst.

Without the enlivening spark of the Spirit of God, we remain the slain. We have a name for being alive, but are dead. We are mere pretty corpses.

³ ...don’t you know that all of us who were baptised into Christ Jesus were baptised into his death? ⁴ We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.

Let’s respond to the Word, by all means. But then let us invite the Spirit to be present, and wait for him to come.

Holy Spirt, come:

Breathe your breath in my mouth

Fill me with new life and make me your own

That Jesus might be glorified in me and might restore to us all the joy of salvation.

Through Christ our Lord,

AMEN

© Peter R. Green 2006. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.)