Sermon Transcript
Ezekiel 37:1-14. The hand of the Lord was upon me, and he brought me out in the Spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of the valley. It was full of bones, and he led me around among them, and behold, there were very many on the surface of the valley, and behold, they were very dry. And he said to me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, you know.
Then he said to me, Prophesy over these bones and say to them, O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones, Behold, I will cause breath to enter you and you shall live, and I will lay sinews upon you and will cause flesh to come upon upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live, and you shall know that I am the Lord. So I prophesied as I was commanded, and as I prophesied there was a sound, and behold, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. And I looked, and behold, there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them, but there was no in them. Then he said to me, Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath, Thus says the Lord God: Come from the 4 winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain, that they may live.
So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived and stood on their feet, an exceedingly great army. Then he said to me, Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel, Israel. Behold, they say, our bones are dried up and our hope is lost; we are indeed cut off. Therefore prophesy and say to them, thus says the Lord God: Behold, I will open your graves and raise you from your graves, O my people, and I will bring you into the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the Lord when I open your graves and raise you from your graves, O my people.
And I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you in your own land. Then you shall know that I am the Lord. I have spoken, and I will do it, declares the Lord.
One of the things that can happen when a woman is pregnant So I hear, okay, so I am told, meaning if it isn’t true, I’m trying to leave myself an escape hatch, okay. But one thing that happens at least sometimes when a woman is pregnant is what is called the nesting instinct. And for the record, Beth didn’t really do this, so I don’t know exactly how common it is, but there are websites and books dedicated to the topic, so it must happen at least occasionally. When the nesting instinct kicks in, the mom-to-be suddenly, and sometimes passionately, starts getting the house ready for the baby. For instance, even if she never really cared all that much about the color of the paint on the walls before, now it’s all she can think about, and the current colors are totally wrong.
Absolutely not suitable for a child whatsoever. And there needs to be new decorations and furniture, and everything needs to be rearranged, and the flow of one room to another must be rethought and rethought again. She may want an entirely new house. The current house just won’t do when baby arrives. She may want a new vehicle.
Before she was pregnant, she always enjoyed riding motorcycles up the coast. But now that baby’s coming, it’s minivans that have caught her eye, all to prepare a home for baby, to make the best possible environment for the child to thrive. And from what I hear, women don’t really decide to do this, it just happens. It’s part of her biology, maternal instincts. Men, conversely, of course, usually don’t nest or nest as often or as much because they aren’t as privy to the same hormone cocktail that ladies get.
Men’s biology doesn’t tell them to nest. But this idea of making a home ready, it is not only a hormonally driven phenomenon. It’s actually something that we see over and over again in Scripture. It’s what God does for us. God works to create a suitable home for us.
So ladies, if you had or if you have a strong nesting instinct, that’s fantastic. It means you are more godly, and you can tell your husband that when he’s complaining about painting the nursery. Just say, I’m just being like God, you know. You wanted a godly wife, Well, yet here I am, right? Because starting all the way back with creation, we see God working to make a suitable home for us.
When the Bible begins, the world is, it says, formless and void. And of course, the terms formless and void are not what anyone would put on a real estate listing, right? Formless and void are the opposite of what a home is. So God does something about it. Similarly, in the first verses of Scripture, it says God’s Spirit is hovering over the waters of the deep.
And most scholars agree and note that in ancient cultures, the sea or the deep, the waters, were almost always a reference to the unknown, to danger, to the uncontrollable. And the Bible opens with God’s Spirit hovering over those waters. So it’s chaotic. Creation at the beginning was a turbulent place. It was formless.
It was void. It was uncontrolled. And then out of that chaos, God brings order. He streamlines the flow of the room, so to speak. He makes all the fixtures of our world, the laws of physics, sends light into the darkness, creates the vast complexity of life that we see today.
And then lastly, he makes us. And he places us in the newly ordered non-turbulent garden that he created for us. He made us a home. And then he asked us to join him as he reorders the world. He says, name the animals.
He says, cultivate the garden. He says, subdue the earth, tame it, bring it into order. He says, join me in this wonderful work of rearranging the world so that it is a place where you and everything else else can thrive. He was nesting, and he invited us to be part of that process with him. He says, come along as I make the world more cozy.
But we, unfortunately, you probably know already, we promptly do the opposite. It’s like we go into the nursery he was working on and we trash it. Instead of putting the final touches on the goodness of creation, we treat it it was demo day and just start smashing everything. We caused disorder instead of order. We did not join God, we rebelled from God.
Those are the first pages of the Bible. After the first pages, after the garden, humans go out and spread all over the world, but as we do, we continue our destructive patterns and the world goes from bad to worse. Corruption, hatred, brokenness, They spread everywhere as humans spread everywhere. And we may wonder if we’re reading Scripture, we’re like, I wonder what God’s going to do. Is he going to give up and walk away on us?
Is he going to work to restore us?
Eventually, God reaches out to a man named Abraham. And God says, I’m going to use you and your family to accomplish my massive, cleanup efforts. God says to Abraham, I’m not walking away from humanity. I’m plucking you, Abraham, out of humanity, and it will be through your family that the entire world will be blessed. It will be through your line that we are going to start to put this place back together, repair what humans have broke.
For instance, it’ll be Abraham’s family that knows how God wants to order the world. They will be the nation with God’s law. It will be Abraham’s family that shows God’s goodness to the world. They will be the the light in the chaos of darkness, a nation of priests that reunites the world with the God that the world left behind. That’s the plan anyway.
And Abraham does have many descendants. They do become a great nation. So it looks like there may be potential with this group of folks. You know, here’s a group of people who will redeem the earth from the chaos it’s fallen into. But again, just like our first ancestors in the garden, Abraham’s family did not join God’s mission in bringing order out of the chaos.
They were just as corrupt as everyone else before them. They chose to rebel against God, which means they chose to rebel against light and life and goodness. And if you turn away from light and life and goodness, where else is there to go but darkness and death and brokenness? That’s where they went. And instead of ushering in a home for humanity alongside of God, they what could have been home and chose exile.
Which brings us to our text. Ezekiel, the author, is speaking about the time period when Abraham’s descendants, who are the nation of Israel at this point, he’s talking about a time period when they will have so far abandoned God’s plan to create a home for them that they will literally be in exile. Another nation named Babylon will come in and conquer them and carry some of them away, like Steve talked about last week. At the time of Ezekiel’s writing, Ezekiel is already in exile and the rest of the nation is about to be in exile. So as we study this text, we will see first the consequences of exile and then God’s response, because again, we’d probably wonder, what’s God going to do this time?
Is he going to— how’s he going to react to the umpteenth time Israel chose to walk away. Will God finally walk away too? Or maybe he’ll double down on his promise to bring them home. What, what’s his response going to be? So we’re going to look at his reaction, and then finally we’ll look at why this isn’t a metaphor.
So first, the consequences of exile. Second, God’s response to those consequences. And third, why this isn’t a metaphor. So first, the consequences of exile, death.
In this text, there’s a valley of dry bones, and God says there, verse 11, these bones, this decay is the nation of Israel, meaning Israel has experienced some kind of death because of exile, which makes sense because again, if you turn away from the source of life, which is God, where else is there to go but death? And that’s where they were, dry bones. Now, at the moment, most of the nation of Israel is still breathing and walking around. So, at the time of Ezekiel’s writing, Israel wasn’t currently literally dry bones. There would come a day, of course, that they would literally become dry bones, like all of us will.
Again, there’s aspects to this image that are not metaphor. But another type of death, this is speaking of a spiritual death, cut off from God, cut off from light and goodness, cut off from our true home with him, and we can’t get back. That’s the implication. That’s the consequence. Death is irreversible, and being cut off from God is irreversible.
Israel can’t return home. Once they lost the goodness and wholeness, once that became polluted, You can’t go back. You can’t get the pea out of the pool. Once corrupted, always corrupted. It’s irreversible.
Like death is irreversible, we can’t get deceit and sin fully out of ourselves. It’s a permanent kind of tainting, and it means we can’t get it out of our world, which means we can’t make a suitable home for ourselves. We can’t nest ourselves. The consequence of exile is deep. Our issues are deep.
They are unfixable on our end. Now, I know that’s not how we like to think of ourselves. We like to think, hey, I’m improving. You know, if you give me enough time, I’ll eventually get myself totally straightened out. And certainly, we can make all kinds of improvements.
And we should. But this text teaches us we won’t get ourselves fully straightened out. We won’t get the world fully straightened out, which again means we will never make a home for ourselves where we can fully thrive. I realize it’s much easier, or at least more palatable, to admit that the world at large will never be rid of all of its junk than it is to admit the about ourselves, but we should understand the world at large is just an aggregate of individuals, right? There’s not some other world out there that’s separate from individuals, and if everyone individually rid themselves of corruption and deceit and selfishness, then the world wouldn’t have any of those either.
So there’s no way to speak about the problems of the world without speaking about the problems of the human heart because the human heart created creates the problems in the world. So it would be unwise to say the problems I see in the world reflect nothing about myself to me. That would be unwise because what’s true of the world came from us as individuals. We are looking at ourselves when we look at the world, at least to some extent. And if we look at the world at large, it should be abundantly obvious that we will never rid it of its sin.
We have tried historically and failed many different ways. Various times in world history we have believed that we could solve the evil and suffering in the world. At one point we believed different forms of economic policy could be the answer. None of them have been. There was a time we believed technology would eventually solve everything.
It was called modernity. We thought the scientific method, if we had the scientific method and we did enough advancement, we will be able to rise above our problems. We weren’t, and then when we weren’t, we became disillusioned, so we moved into postmodernity. And right now it seems like mental healthcare is at center stage. We think if I get enough counseling or therapy, I will be free of my issues.
And don’t get me wrong, those are all wonderful advancements. There has been massive improvement to the quality of life for large percentages percentages of humanity because of better economic policies, because of technology, because of therapy. It’s wonderful. I’ve gone to counseling myself from time to time. It can be very helpful.
Praise God. Praise him for iPhones, fresh water, soft beds, medicine, all that. Fantastic. It’s easy to look around and see many positives in the world because they’re there, and we should rejoice over those. But because it’s so easy to see the positives, it would be easy to assume that this world is getting better and that one day we will arrive and we will make it so everyone can fully thrive in this place, that we will be able to manufacture our own return to the original goodness of creation.
It would be easy to think that if we only looked at the positives, but the positives are not the whole story, are they? Because at the same time of all of these advancements, at the same time as the advancements, the 20th century was the bloodiest one on record in terms of war. There are more slaves in the world today than there have ever been before, ever. We heard about that a couple of weeks ago. The number of shootings per year in this country continue to increase, not decrease, decrease, increase.
Part of that’s because the population increases. So with more people, there’s more shootings. But that just proves what we’re saying. More people add more problems, not less. Trying to put this world back together is a little bit like bailing water on the Titanic or trying to put a puzzle together with a toddler, right?
For every 2 pieces that you match, the toddler rips apart 4 of the ones that you already matched and then swallows them. It’s like we can’t get ahead, or if we make progress in one area, another area becomes drastically worse. So will we ever fix this place? Will we ever cultivate the earth God has given us to manage? Will we ever make a perfect home for ourselves where we will be able able to fully thrive.
God says, no, the problem is bigger than that. We are dry bones. We cannot bring ourselves back to fullness of life. There is something wrong that technology and medicine and psychology and economics and politics cannot fix. There’s something wrong that those can’t reach.
There’s something else going on. There are deeper issues that we cannot solve for ourselves. Can’t. We will not be the solution to our problem. That’s the consequence of exile.
Death.
Can’t return to goodness on our own. So what’s God’s next move? How does he respond to our plight? We can’t do anything, but will God do something? In the text, God actually asks that question.
He asks Ezekiel, can this valley of dry bones live? And Ezekiel Ezekiel said, you’re going to need to tell me because I don’t know what your next move is. Can bones live? Well, no, but it depends on what you’re going to do, God, and you alone know what you’re going to do. So, God, you need to tell me, can they live?
And God does. He tells Ezekiel to speak to these bones and they regenerate as living, breathing people, just like like that. God’s response to our exile is He raises the dead. That’s what He does. What is impossible for us, what is irreversible for us, is totally effortless for Him.
As God breathed into the dust to make the first human, He breathes into these dry bones to bring them back to life. He restores Israel from the consequence of exile. He restores them from the consequence of death, but as you read the rest of Ezekiel 37, which we couldn’t read the whole passage in the service, you’ll see God cures their individual hearts from their corruption. Verse 23-24, God says these people will not defile themselves anymore with detestable things. He says, I’ll save them from all their backslidings in which they have sinned.
I will cleanse them. They shall be my people and I will be their God. They shall walk in my rules and be careful to obey my statutes. Statutes. He’s going to uncorrupt their hearts, which would go a long way to uncorrupting the world.
And then finally, God promises to place them in the land forever. He says, my sanctuary will be there, verse 25, I will be there. He’s giving a picture that He and they will be together in this uncorrupted land, never to be separated again someday, which means God will eventually complete His nesting project project. He and his people will live in a place that is ideal for them to thrive in every way. We will never get there on our own, and we will never get there without our hearts becoming new, but God promises to do the impossible.
He promises to raise the dead. That’s how he responds to our corruption. Now, before we move on to how this valley of dry bones is not a metaphor, we should do a preemptive strike on how sometimes people can react when they hear this very basic Christian message. The message today that we’ve been saying is just simply the world has fallen, the human heart has fallen, it’s beyond our ability to redeem it, but God promises to bring us and the world back to fullness of life exclusively through faith in Christ. God promises to restore us to the position that our ancestors left when they chose to exile and they chose exile instead of God.
That’s a very basic Christian message, okay? People can be inspired by it. I pray you are. But sometimes instead of being inspired, people can respond with a type of apathy which we need to try to prevent.
Christian believers can have it too and it sounds like this. They say, since parts of the world will spiral more into darkness and I can’t do anything about it, I’m not going to try to do anything about it. Or similarly, on the positive side, if God is going to come back and fix the world, I mean, great, but if he’s going to do it, then I don’t need to. I don’t need to be involved. I’m not going to work for the betterment of myself or the betterment of the world because God is the only one who can do it anyway.
Apathy. Now, praise God, that’s actually not a very common Christian reaction. Most Christians do not think that way. Research recently released in the last couple weeks shows that Christians give more in humanitarian aid per year than the entire U.S. government. Did you know that?
So in general, Christians are very active making the world a better place in tangible ways. So that’s most of us. But there are some who twist God’s redemption of the world into a justification motivation not to participate in that redemption ourselves. I’m sure no one here is leaning in that direction, but just in case anyone is less than totally motivated to get up and fight with everything you have in order to rid the world of its junk and to rid yourself of all the junk that’s in your life, just in case anyone is not turbocharged to participate in God’s restoration, when you hear the that God will restore, I pray this can be helpful. Your problem isn’t the message.
It’s not the message that’s making you apathetic. Your problem is that you don’t believe the message. If you really thought that God would liberate this world and liberate you from the corruption and return you home to be with him forever, where you would thrive forever and ever, if you really believed that was certain, you would jump up and get to work joining him. My kids, for instance, when they know that they are on the winning team, they are even more motivated to play the game. Beth and I often play games with our boys.
If it’s something like Scrabble, they want to be on her team because they know they will win if they are on her team. I never learned phonics, but if we— so it’s quite a mess if I try to play Scrabble. But if we’re playing something like dodgeball, they want to be on my team because I can throw a little farther and a little harder than Beth can.
Not necessarily more accurate. Beth can probably throw more accurate than me, but I can throw farther, so I can just stand at the back and not have any of the balls hit me, and then I can move along my way. But the real point isn’t that the boys want to be on the winning team. Of course they do. The real point is how they play if they believe they are on the winning team.
If we’re playing dodgeball, and they are on my team and we say, ready, set, go, they never, ever just lay on the ground and say, well, since I’m on Dad’s team, I know I’m going to win, so why would I even play? Oh, I can’t change the outcome, so what’s the use of me participating? They never say that, ever. If they are on the team they believe is going to win, win, they spring forward and grab as many dodgeballs as they possibly can. They know even if they get hit, you know, I might catch a ball later and they can get back in.
They are all about playing the game if they are on the team they believe is going to win. You know when they don’t want to play? You know when they’re apathetic about playing? You know when they want to give up? You know when they say things like, it’s no use, I can’t change the come, you know, the only time when they might lay on the ground and do nothing, it’s when they’re on the team they believe is going to lose.
It’s when they’re on my team and we’re playing something like Scrabble. There’s lots of complaining and apathy then, but it’s never when they are on the team that they think is going to win. So, Christian, if you happen to be one of the few Christians Christians not involved in putting the world back together, or you aren’t dramatically motivated to get the junk out of your own life, why are you acting like you’re on the losing team? You’re on the winning team. Your efforts will ultimately be fruitful, so get up and play the game.
And if you aren’t a Christian and you’ve, you know, fallen in— of course fallen into hopelessness about the futility of to help the world because you’ve realized— the light bulb’s turned on— it’s like bailing water on the Titanic or putting a puzzle together with a toddler, and you’re now in despair over kind of the undeniable implications of your own worldview. If that’s you, switch teams. We have plenty of room left on the roster. You will enjoy being involved because you know your efforts are not in vain. You’ll be part of the victory.
Victory, which is actually part of what we were created to do in the first place, to cultivate the earth, subdue the world, bring order out of chaos, join God building this home where everyone and everything can flourish. Now, how we know this isn’t a metaphor, it’s because Jesus literally rose from the dead.
Jesus literally rose from the dead. The slide of our world toward corruption and death and exile that we see all over the place, it’s entropy basically, physical entropy and even social entropy where everything kind of moves toward decay. That can be, and it once was, overcome. The irreversible was reversed. Dry bones coming back to life is not only describing the spiritual state of Israel as they go into and come out of exile.
It happened for real in the physical world. Jesus’ body rose from the dead. And Jesus rising from the grave started a process where God is bringing all of His people back to life. And He will remake the world so that it is returned to fullness of life. That process is not yet complete, obviously.
That’s why we still see so much corruption, but the light is going win. The light has already won. Jesus conquered the grave. You better hope Ezekiel’s count of dry bones isn’t just a metaphor. You better hope it’s not a metaphor, because literal resurrection from the dead is what we are counting on for our eternity— that God will remake us and we will live with him forever in a remade world.
That is our hope. So who knows, maybe God fast-forwarded Ezekiel all the way to the end of time and he literally saw it happen. No idea. But what I do know is that we can have confidence that we will come out of our graves and return home because Jesus came out of his grave and returned home. We can have confidence that the corruption in this world and the corruption in our own hearts will eventually become conquered because on the cross Jesus absorbed all of our corruption and sin.
The incorruptible one became corrupted in our place. The one with eternal life died so that we can have eternal life. Then he rose to victory over that corruption so that we could be free from it forever. We can have confidence that God will breathe life into our decaying bones because when Jesus was on the cross, He breathed His last in our place. The breath that He gave up is the breath that we inherit.
We can have confidence that the light will win because the light won. We will return home through our faith in Christ and our trust in His work on our behalf. All the other returns that we see in Scripture, all the other homecomings, all the other redemptions are shadows of this real return, of this real resurrection, of the real world to come, the world that we will inherit and live in forever through our faith in Christ. If you are here today and you don’t know Jesus, we’d love to introduce you. There is no better place to put your trust.
Let’s pray. Father, thank you for breathing life into our dry bones. Thank you for never leaving us or forsaking us, even the many times that we have left and forsaken you, Lord. Thank you for continuing to pursue us. Thank you for raising us out of the mess that we have created for ourselves.
And thank you for the hope, the certain hope in the future that we will be with you in a remade world forever and ever because Jesus has already started the process. The irreversible was reversed. Death came back to life, and it will win. We celebrate those things in His name. Amen.
