Bible Talks - Sunday Night Church
Series: New Preacher's Night · Talk No. 3
A reversal of fortune
Sunday, 11 June 2006
Audio
Listen Now (22:20)
Extras:
Outline (PDF)
Feedback:
Share using:
Post this to: Facebook · Delicious · Google · Twitter · Email
Intro – Lost, Beaconsfield and reversals of fortune
Good evening &c.
I wonder if you’ve ever experienced a reversal of fortune.
Now, I’m not just talking about having a bad day at school or work, or missing the bus to work, or finding a $5 note on the ground. I mean dramatic, defining moments, where things go from good to bad, or bad to good.
Whether or not you’ve actually been through such a change yourself, you can probably find examples in the books you read or the films you see. The idea of getting a break in the midst of misfortune, or of things going from good to bad to worse, is an arresting idea to any good novelist or scriptwriter…and obviously, Hollywood thinks so, too. Take Lost, for example. This is a story of a group of people from all walks of life who are passengers on the same plane – a plane that goes down over the Pacific Ocean. They wash up on an unknown island, completely out of contact with the rest of the world, and find that they must begin again if they’re going to work together to survive.
Or, for a dose of almost-reality, you can turn to the media and find the same thing. I guess the most obvious example I could think of was the story that dominated our newspapers and televisions a couple of weeks ago, the story of the two miners who spent fourteen days trapped in the gold mine following a rockfall which collapsed the tunnel they were working in. These men survived in a tiny space, almost a kilometre underground, unable to help themselves until the rescuers were able to dig an escape tunnel to lead them to safety.
The island-dwellers of Lost and the Beaconsfield miners are both victims of circumstance – the accidents which stranded them were beyond their control. But in the book of Ezekiel, particularly in chapter 37, God is speaking through His prophet about two different reversals of fortune. The first is the fall of His people, Israel and Judah, from their splendour under the kings to being scattered in foreign lands – a fall which occurred because the Israelites had provoked God’s wrath. But the second is a restoration, a promise of hope in the long night of exile.
But before we jump into chapter 37, let’s have a little lesson in Biblical history to set the scene.
A little history lesson
The visions which Lesley read to us earlier may sound cinematic and almost fantastic, but there are very real historical events behind these visions.
The prophet Ezekiel wrote this book in about 571 BC. Almost four hundred years before Ezekiel was born, the once-united nation of Israel, God’s chosen people, split in two: the northern kingdom, which called itself ‘Israel’, and the southern kingdom, which called itself ‘Judah’. The northern kingdom lasted about two hundred years before it was attacked and overwhelmed by the armies of Assyria. Judah, the southern kingdom, was left to fend for itself for a while, and then the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem and took the Hebrews with them back to Babylon. Ezekiel was one of those exiles, and he received the visions of which we’ve read tonight shortly after the Babylonian conquest.
Now, neither Israel nor Judah had been the godliest of nations – despite the fact that God had continuously blessed them with a land of their own; He blessed them with a line of kings including Biblical giants like David and Solomon, who brought in a golden age of prosperity and wealth for Israel; and He gave them victory over and allegiance with many other foreign powers – despite all this, worship of God and the living of godly lives was in serious decline. The people of both nations continued to visit the temple and make sacrifices, but they committed the serious error of pursuing the gods and idols of their neighbours. They allowed themselves to become distracted from serving the one true God; they wanted to be like all the other nations. Understandably, God was infuriated by this display of unfaithfulness, and after many years, we are told in 2 Kings that He allowed these foreign powers to decimate both Israel and Judah.
At the time of Ezekiel, the Hebrews languished under foreign rule. Imagine how difficult it would have been to believe that God was still in control – after all, His people had just been divided up and scattered amongst two very ungodly nations! They have gone from incredible splendour under the rule of David to utter dejection at the hands of the Assyrians and Babylonians. They have been ripped away from their promised land, and their identity has been shattered. It is to these dejected people that God is speaking, through Ezekiel – but unlike before, He is not about to pronounce judgement on His people.
A great resurrection (37:1-14)
So, let’s get into what Ezekiel has to say.
Chapter 37 opens with the Lord showing Ezekiel a valley of dried bones. We learn that the bones represent God’s people, Israel and Judah, who are wasting away in exile and without hope. Jump ahead to verse 11 with me:
“Then [the Lord] said to me, “Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is gone; we are cut off.’” (Ezekiel 37:11)
The valley of dry bones, this mass grave, is at once a powerful and terrible symbol of what God’s chosen people have endured. They have been crushed by the enemies God once promised protection from, they have lost the land God once promised them, and they have been separated from the magnificent temple in Jerusalem, which symbolised God’s presence amongst them. As they say, the Israelites and Hebrews are ‘cut off’. They really have hit rock-bottom – all hope of revival seems utterly spent. And yet this is not just a sign of what their enemies have done to them, but it is also a sign of how far they have fallen from their Heavenly King. Before God, His people are mere bones, spiritually dead. Their disobedience before God – their ignorance of His commands, their worship of idols and false gods, their forgetting of His mercy and love – has been a downward spiral. And now, before Ezekiel’s eyes, is God’s chosen people, a desolate mass of dry bones, not even joined one to the other in a recognisable form.
So, when God says to Ezekiel, “Son of man, can these bones live?” in v3, it seems a bit of a preposterous question. ‘Son of man, can these bones live?’ Can these dried up, desiccated, utterly spent bones be made to live? Of course not! What a question to ask! What a thought to have when overlooking this mass grave of jumbled dead things!
And yet, in v4, God answers his own question by commanding Ezekiel to prophesy to the bones. He is to tell the bones that breath and life shall enter them again, and in their new life, they shall know that God is God – and, not surprisingly, Ezekiel does what he is told. He stands before the valley and prophesies to long-dead skeletons.
Well, what follows is a spectacle to rival any Hollywood special-effects sequence. In v7, we are told:
“So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I prophesied, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. I looked, and tendons and flesh appeared on them, and skin covered them. But there was no breath in them.” (Ezekiel 37:7-8)
Surely enough, the bones of the slain have been resurrected, but not quite to life again. In v9, the Lord tells Ezekiel to prophesy again, this time to the ‘breath’, and command it to come upon the bodies so they might live. And Ezekiel does so, the bodies come to life and stand before Ezekiel as, we are told in v10, ‘…an exceedingly great army.’
It might seem a bit bizarre that the winds are needed to make this army rise to life again, but the Hebrew word we have translated here as ‘breath’ can also be translated as ‘spirit’. It’s the same word used to describe the creation of Adam in Genesis 2:7, where God formed the man from the dust of the earth and breathes into his nostrils the breath, or ‘spirit’, of life. Here, in the valley of dry bones, God intends to enact a resurrection on a grand scale through His Spirit – even if they are painstakingly reassembled and given flesh and muscle and skin, the bodies of the Israelites cannot live without the life which comes from God alone:
“‘Therefore prophesy, and say to [the house of Israel], This is what the Sovereign Lord says: O my people, I am going to open your graves and bring you up from them. I will bring you back to the land of Israel. Then you, my people, shall know that I am the Lord… I will put my Spirit in you, and you shall live, and I will settle you in your own land. Then you shall know that I the Lord have spoken, and I have done it, declares the Lord.’” (Ezekiel 37:12-14 [abridged])
This is fantastic news for the Hebrews. God is going to restore them to life! Out of the grave of exile, out of the dust of spiritual death, even though they have done nothing to deserve His favour, the Lord will resurrect His chosen people and make them alive in His name once again, and it will be such a dramatic work that the Israelites will know that it was the Lord’s doing.
A great restoration (37:15-23)
But this is not all that God promises to do. Skip down to v16-19.
“‘Son of man, take a stick of wood and write on it, ‘Belonging to Judah, and the Israelites associated with him’; then take another stick of wood and write on it, ‘Ephraim’s stick, belonging to Joseph and all the house of Israel associated with him’. Join them one to another into one stick, so that they will become one in your hand. And when your countrymen ask you, ‘Won’t you tell us what you mean by this?’, say to them, This is what the Sovereign Lord says: I am going to take the stick of Joseph (which is in Ephraim’s hand) and of the Israelite tribes associated with him. And I will join it to Judah’s stick, making them a single stick of wood, and they will become one in my hand.” (Ezekiel 37:16-19)
This is the second sign God is sending to His people about the impending change in their fortune, and it’s an important one because for the last few hundred years before Ezekiel received this vision, God’s people had been scattered. But now, God is promising that a day is coming when they will all be gathered together again. To Ezekiel, living in a foreign land with what was left of his countrymen, this might have sounded almost as unlikely as the resurrection of the dry bones. And yet, in v22, God declares that He‘…will make them one nation in the land on the mountains of Israel. And one king shall be over them all, and they shall no longer be two nations, and no longer divided into two kingdoms.’
Again, this is powerful, wonderful news for God’s people: news that would have recalled the golden days Israel experienced under the rule of King David and King Solomon. This time, their Heavenly King is going to re-establish their identity as His people – this is what the joining of the two sticks represents: a reunification of the two kingdoms under God. And v23 makes it clear that this restoration of God’s people will not be like the Israel of old, where both the people and the kings did evil in God’s sight: ‘They shall not defile themselves anymore with their idols and their detestable things, or with any of their transgressions. But I will save them from all the backsliding in which they have sinned, and will cleanse them; and they shall be my people, and I will be their God.’ The Israelites and Hebrews will no longer worship idols or chase after other gods, which were the very things which so angered their Lord in the first place; instead, God Himself will restore His people to Himself and establish a new kingdom under His servant, where the Israelites will be holy in His sight.
A great relationship (37:24-28)
And so, we turn to God’s intentions for how His people Israel will live in relationship with Him, in v24-28. Here, we read of an everlasting covenant of peace, a promise or a contract between God and the Hebrews, where God is promising that His people will be at peace with Him for all their days. And God’s chosen servant is going to rule over the people as they dwell together, with God’s sanctuary set amongst them. In the Old Testament days, that meant that there was a temple in Jerusalem where the Ark of the Covenant (a box with the Ten Commandments inside) sat, representing God’s presence among His people. Their relationship with God is characterised by a new closeness and unity.
Notice the contrast between how Israel had lived and how they were to live – they were spiritually dead and ‘cut off’ because of their disobedience to God, but in this new relationship, they would walk in God’s ways and obey His commands. It is a wonderful picture of how man was created to live in relation to God – it is the kind of relationship where man submits to God’s authority and lives for the Lord and not himself. It is the kind of relationship where such a change in behaviour can only be the result of the Lord’s work – in v28, we are told that Israel will be so different that the nations will know that it was God’s power at work in them. This is a change that will make the other nations sit up and take notice! The nations will look at Israel and know that God is with these people.
In v24, and again in v25, God mentions that David, His servant, will be king over this new Israel. In fact, v25 mentions that David will rule over them forever. We might ask, ‘How can this be?’, for even David did not live forever – by Ezekiel’s time, he had been well and truly dead for over four hundred years. Though Ezekiel didn’t know it yet, God was not promising that David himself would rule, but that his offspring would.
The King of the Resurrection
And you’ve probably guessed who the offspring is referring to – it is, of course, Jesus Christ, whose earthly father was a distant descendant of David, and who is the ultimate King over God’s people. And when we consider that Jesus is to be the king over God’s people forever, the covenant of peace, and indeed the rest of Ezekiel 37, makes sense to us today, because while the prophecy was made to the people of Judah in their exile, God’s promise to return them to their land was never really fulfilled. Persia invaded Babylon and conquered it shortly after Ezekiel was authored; though the Hebrews were permitted to return to the Promised Land, they were never permitted to govern themselves as a nation again, and remained under the rule of Persia for many years afterwards.
So, it is in Jesus that these promises to God’s people find fulfilment.
We ourselves were dead in our disobedience to God before we knew salvation in Christ. We were like the Israel and Judah from this vision, ‘cut off’ from God because of the sin in our hearts. Spiritually, we were nothing more than dry bones. And, like the Hebrews, we did not deserve to be rescued from this in any way. But in the death and resurrection of Jesus, the way was made open for us to return to life in Him – God gave us the biggest reversal of fortune we are ever going to see. In fact, God loved us to the extent that He was willing to send His own Son to death, so that we could taste life.
Thanks to the Word of God and the Holy Spirit – or ‘breath’ – we can have forgiveness in Christ and be counted as God’s people, cleansed from our sin and living under this new, eternal covenant of peace. And our identity as God’s people doesn’t rest on our genes, or on our family history (as it did for the Hebrews), but it rests in our identity in Christ, and it is in this way that all Christians are regarded as the people of God. Ephesians 2 talks of this, of how “…in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ…For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.” How much greater is this relationship between us and Christ than the relationship that Israel of old has with God? Unlike them, we don’t have to worship at a temple and offer sacrifices to a loving but ultimately unapproachable God – instead, we are brought near to our God, so near that we can call Him ‘Father’ as well as ‘Lord’. Truly, in Jesus, we have all that God promised to His people in this prophecy, and more. We have been brought to life and given identity as God’s people under our King, Jesus Christ. And we look to the day when Christ will return and judge the nations – a time when He will take His people to paradise.
But while Ezekiel 37 contains words of great comfort, I wonder if it doesn’t contain a challenge as well: a challenge for us to be constantly checking our behaviour, our speech, our thoughts, to see where we deviate from living God’s way. Israel so angered God with their godlessness that He brought down severe punishment on them – perhaps this should serve as a warning to us, too. Where are we being seduced by the lies of the sinful nature? Are there ‘idols’ which we are serving? They may not be statues of stone or wood, but might be more cunningly disguised – like money, work, entertainment. What aspects of our lives reflect us trusting in things other than Jesus for our life? In what ways are we ‘backsliding’, and hence falling into the same trap that Israel and her kings did time and time again, rather than seeking God’s goodness? Instead of becoming complacent in our self-centredness, we should be spurred on by this portrait of God’s goodness to seek How we may serve him more and more.
Conclusion
For the unbeliever, the valley of dry bones is a grim image of their spiritual condition – without life, without hope, helpless before God. However, for the Christian, there is immense comfort and hope to be found in this reversal of fortune. The overwhelming message is that God loves and cares for His chosen people, His children: for the original audience of Ezekiel, this would have been a source of comfort for them as they lived in foreign lands, far from the place they had been promised. For us today, it is a powerful reminder that we have been made alive and pure in the resurrection of Jesus – even when it appears that we are separated from God by a great divide, we should strive to remember that He has kept His promises to us. May we seek to serve Him all the more as we remember this.
