Dry Bones Ezekiel 36:26-27

Dry Bones – Ezekiel 36:26-27

Please stand for the reading of God's word.

“ And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.”

This is the word of the Lord.

Audience: Thanks be to God.

You may be seated.

It is Ezekiel’s birthday. He is 30 years old today, and for the past 25 years, he has been working his whole life to become a priest. And today would’ve been the day he was declared a Jewish priest and placed over a congregation. But as he sits next to the canal near the Israelite refugee camp outside of Babylon, he and others had been taken captive by the Babylonians 5 years earlier; it’s not a cake that he sees waiting for him or a surprise party. But the throne of God on a chariot of angels.

It was like nothing he had ever seen before. The chariot itself was made out of human and animal-like creatures whose wings never touched and, when they flapped, sounded like a thundering army or that of much rushing waters. The wheels were made of wheels upon wheels and covered in eyes, and when he looked to the top of the chariot, there was a blinding light, like that of sapphire, and fire enclosed every inch of it, with the appearance of a bow, that resembled the rainbow placed in the sky after it rains. It was overwhelming; it was suffocating, it was terrifying. So he did what we would all do if we found ourselves in a similar situation. He fell on his face in terror and chose not to look up in fear of the Lord and all his glory. But the Lord, seeing how afraid he was, said, “Son of Man” or Son of Adam, stand on your feet, and I will speak with you. And the Spirit of the lord entered into him, and stood him on his feet, and God started talking to him.

You see, the Israelite people had done what they had done from the very beginning. They said they would be a contrast community for the Lord to show the world who he was and what his kingdom people live and worship like, but they failed to follow through on their promises. Over and over again, they would say they would follow God but then choose not to follow him with their actions. New cultures would come in, and the Israelites would adopt the cultures and gods they worshiped. Egyptian gods and Tyre gods cheated on God with other gods. They chose not to follow his commandments and even worshiped other gods in his temple—the holy dwelling place of his presence.

Because of this, God allowed the Babylonians to take over the land of Jerusalem, the Holy City, where God’s temple was located, and take a whole bunch of Jews and put them in a concentration camp outside of the city.

And now here is Ezekiel, who was a priest to be, standing at the brink of a canal on his birthday, looking into the sky, seeing the Glory of God, the kavod(which means God was so important, so radiant, so significant, that his glory was felt as a heaviness) and he has fallen to his face in fear. And calls him to do something radical.

He calls him a prophet, a man to speak on God’s behalf and warn Israel of the future that awaits them if they do not turn to Yahweh once again.

A priest turned prophet in an instant. This isn’t the kind of romanticized missionary calling we tend to envision. You're at CIY, and the song hits that high note, and you think to yourself, I believe God has called me to be a missionary. And then you go on a mission trip, take all sorts of pictures of those less fortunate than you, and post them all over your social feeds to show how Christlike you are.

No, this isn’t that. Not at all.

Ezekiel was supposed to be a priest. He was supposed to have a warm office and a congregation to love and minister to. He had priestly duties he was supposed to fulfill in the temple, something he had waited his whole life to do. Now, after Babylonian oppression, God has called him to be a prophet to, as God calls them, “a rebellious house.”

God calls him, as we see in chapters 2-3, to be a spokesperson for him, but he tells him that the house of Israel will not listen to him. Ezekeil 3:5-7 “For you are not sent to a people of foreign speech and a hard language, but to the house of Israel— 6 not to many peoples of foreign speech and a hard language, whose words you cannot understand. Surely, if I sent you to such, they would listen to you. 7 But the house of Israel will not be willing to listen to you, for they are not willing to listen to me: because all the house of Israel have a hard forehead and a stubborn heart.”

God says look, I know you worked your whole life to be a priest. I know that you thought you would live in Jerusalem your whole life and get to be a priest in my holy temple, but the Babylonians are here. And my people are hurting, and they will hurt more if they don’t listen to me. So, I am going to send you a message to speak on my behalf. You will say to them, “Thus says the Lord.” And all that comes after that will be from my mouth. And here is the thing. I am not sending you to a place where they speak a different language than you, in fact these are people you know and love. You know their culture. You know their language. You know how they operate. This should be an easy mission for you. But here is the thing. They won’t listen. They won’t hear a word you say. They are stubborn, and they have hard hearts.

But “all my words that I shall speak to you receive in your heart, and hear with your ears. 11 And go to the exiles, to your people, and speak to them and say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord God,’ whether they hear or refuse to hear.”Ezek 3:10-11

Woof. What a hard ask. “Hey, do this really hard thing. Something you weren’t planning on doing, there are probably a million things you would rather do, and honestly, it won’t work a lot of the time. But I need you to trust me.”

You have no idea.

Ezekiel says yes, and God asks him to eat a scroll, he asks him to eat his words and ingest what he is going to have to say to these people. Then God tells him to go to his house. And that he will be bound thereby spiritual cords, and he will make him mute. “ But when I speak with you, I will open your mouth, and you shall say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord God.’ He who will hear, let him hear; and he who will refuse to hear, let him refuse, for they are a rebellious house.”Ezek 3:27

You will speak only when I tell you to. Otherwise, you will be mute and stuck in your house until I tell you otherwise.

Listen to what God tells him to do next. My summarization, not quoted exactly from scripture… In fact, I want you to get a tablet (not an ipad) but a literal tablet of material and draw on it a map of Isreal. And then, I want you to create a Barbie-sized war upon this city. Create a little army of people and have them place a siege on the city. Put camps around it and batter rams. And take an iron griddle between you and the city to symbolize that I will not save Israel from this siege. And I want you to do this in front of many people so that they can see this as a sign for the House of Israel.

After that, I want you to lay on your left side and stay like that for 390 days. A day for every year that the Israelites have rebelled against me since Egypt. After that, I want you to lay on your right side for 40 days and not get up. Facing the siege of Jerusalem, you made, and you can’t move to the other side until you are done.

And while you are doing that, I want you to take these ingredients and make bread out of them. But it won’t taste good. In fact, dogs won’t even it. You will only eat a siege ration amount, less than half a piece of bread daily. And you will only be allowed to drink barely enough water to get it down.

Oh, also, I want you to cook it over animal poop as your fuel for the fire.

This will represent the famine that the land of Israel will go through if they do not listen.

Once all of that is done, I want you to take a sword, and chop off all of your hair and beard.

And I want you to take thirds of all of your hair and spread it across the city. Some in the fire some amid the city, and some on the outside of the city. And when you throw it, I want you to take the sword and slash the hair into even tinier pieces.

This will represent that Jerusalem is even worse than all of the nations surrounding them, and these will be the places where I will allow the nations to take siege over you.

So, Ezekiel does all of these things. He doesn’t talk unless it is God speaking through him. He builds a Lego-sized city and plays war against it. He lays on his side for a total of 430 days. He eats crappy bread cooked over…crap. And chops off all of the hair on his head and face.

And no one listens. Not one.

But he continues on.

And a year later, God gave him another vision. This time, he is transported to the temple of the lord, and in it, the people worship other gods and do detestable things. Ezekiel looks up and sees the chariot God was on before leaving the temple.

God has left the temple. And No one is listening to him.

And yet, he still does what God asked him to do.

Let me ask you something.

WHY DID HE DO THAT? Why would someone voluntarily say yes to do those things? Why would anyone in their right mind lay on their side for over a year, let alone eat bread cooked over poop? You laugh, but im being serious! Like, who would do that? What would have come over them to make them do that? Why would someone not only do all of these things but say yes to them, even though all of the people he was doing this for had hard hearts and were unwilling to listen to what he said?

Why?

Because he knew that God loved him and was willing to surrender his will for the sake of others.

Did you hear me? He did it because he knew that God loved him and was willing to surrender his will for the sake of others.

Ezekiel knew that Yahweh was the one and only God. That this was the creator of the heavens and the earth. And that God, Yahweh, loved him and his people, and he trusted God because God met him in the middle of oppression by Babylon. And because he knew that not just through belief but through experience, he was willing to surrender what he wanted to do, his will, to what God wanted, for the sake of other people. He knew God loved him. That is why.

Ezekiel’s why was greater than his how. His why was more important than how he had to obey God.

His why was more important than his how. Are you with me?

His why was more important than his how.

If you are a high schooler, you know that this is the continuation of a three-part series that we have been working on for the past semester. So, if you are a middle schooler, or you just forgot what I poured my heart and soul into for the past few months, let me recap real quickly what we have been talking about.

We started off this year talking about “What” we believe in as Christians, and we did so by talking through the Nicene Creed, which was an ancient document written in 300 AD that talked through what Christians believe about the holy father, the Son, the holy spirit, and the church.

Then we went through the second part of a series called “Who?” Where we talked about who we are as Christians. We talked about who we are in the father, the son, the holy spirit, and the church, and what that means for us as Christians.

For two weeks, we started a series called “How?” that we are continuing today, where we will go through ancient spiritual practices of Christianity. Because you don’t mature by trying, you mature by practicing.

And every week, we have been saying this mantra repeatedly ( even though you forgot about it in front of Greg) because “What you believe makes you who you are, and who you are, determines how you live.”

And here we are. At the beginning of the year, after our Christmas break, stepping back into that series. But here is something I want us to understand before we get back into talking about spiritual practices and disciplines.

You will fail. It’s not if, it’s when. It is inevitable. Because this is all about practice, and this is a safe place to practice. Because at practice, you aren’t expected to be perfect. You are expected to do your best, and this church, this family, and this youth group can help pick you up when you fail.

I want you to know you will be inspired on the front end. You will want to try these. But you will inevitably fail. And that is okay. You just have to keep trying.

Recently in my counseling, I have come to understand that I have a tendency, to see what I am doing wrong and try and correct the behavior. This isn’t a bad thing, except that before correcting the behavior, I do not figure out why I am making a mistake. I go straight from telling myself a lie, to trying to fix the behavior that comes from the lie I have told myself.

But here is the thing… You can't skip to the action without knowing the why.

An action a practice without the why is empty and not sustainable. If I try and read my bible, just because I feel bad about reading or not reading my bible, I will inevitably fail and feel shame.

But if I know my why. If I understand that I should read my bible or practice other spiritual disciplines because God loves me and wants to spend time with me, then whether I fail or not, that why is still true. Do you see what I am saying here? You can’t move from how you feel negatively to changing how you act without reminding yourself of the truth first.

You can’t guilt yourself into spending time with God. You have to do it because you want to. Not just to feel better.

Not just to make your guilt go away but so that you can know God more.

You don’t spend time with your best friend because you feel guilty; you do it because it gives you life to know them.

Your why has to be more important than your how. Over these next few months, I want you to know it’s less about how and more about why.

We have to know that the why is more important than the how.

Why?

As Christian psychologist David Benner once said, “What God desires is the submission of our heart and will, not simply compliance in our behavior.”

He doesn’t just want us to change our habits. He doesn’t just want you to read your Bible more. He doesn’t just want you to pray more. He doesn’t just want you to take a sabbath or serve the church or the needy. What he wants is our hearts to be changed. He wants our hearts to be softened. He wants us to do it because we want to. Because we want to spend time with him. Rather than it being willpower and just trying harder, God wants love to be the motive, the motivation behind what we will and what we do because willpower will deplete. You can’t just try harder. It won’t last. It will eventually fail. But if your heart is as hard as stone, how can you ever even begin to love God?

Twelve years into the exile of the Jews from Jerusalem, Babylon, does the unthinkable. They destroy the temple of God. And to be honest, everything looks pretty bleak. No one has been listening to Ezekiel. Things have just gotten worse. People continue to disobey God and worship other gods. They continued to do detestable things, and now Babylon has destroyed what the Jews believed to be God’s dwelling place with them. This was their holy temple, where God met them, where they would make sacrifices for their sins, and where God chose to abide. And now it’s gone.

God tells Ezekial that even the shepherds do not take care of their sheep anymore and that they only feed themselves. They don’t strengthen the weak, or bound up the wounded, or seek the lost. So God makes a promise. He says in Ezekiel 34:23-24 “And I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them: he shall feed them and be their shepherd. And I, the Lord, will be their God, and my servant David shall be prince among them.”

Maybe you have caught on already, or maybe you haven’t, but what God is promising is that he we will one day, send his son Jesus, who calls himself in John 10:14-18 “I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and my sheep know me— 15 just as the Father knows me and I know the Father—and I lay down my life for the sheep. 16 I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen. I must bring them also. They too will listen to my voice, and there shall be one flock and one shepherd. 17 The reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life—only to take it up again. 18 No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from my Father.”

Jesus is the good shepherd, and he laid down his life for you and me so that we could be in a relationship with God. So that we could know that God loves us. So we could have a “why” that was sustainable.

But The issue was that the Israelites' hearts were hardened. They were not willing to hear or receive what God was telling them. They had chosen to figure thing out on their own and define good and evil forthemselves, and it was killing them. Things had only gotten worse for them, and instead of turning back to God, their hearts just became harder towards him.

So God said he would do the unthinkable. Our anchor text this evening , Ezekiel 36:26-27 “I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. 27 And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.”

God says I will give you a new heart. I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you.

The great recuse plan, the story of God and his people, the story of the creator of all, from the very beginning, no matter how much sin and death taints his children, will restore them. That has always been God’s plan, and that is always God’s heart. No matter how far you have gone. No matter what you have done or what has been done to you, God wants to restore you. Because you are his child, you are his son. You are his daughter. And he will put his life-giving spirit in you because he loves you.

God takes Ezekiel to a valley, and as Ezekiel looks around, he sees that there are hundreds and hundreds of bones from dead people everywhere. And these aren’t just like recently dead people. These are dry bones. They have been here for a long time. These people aren’t people anymore, just the skeletons holding their flesh up.

And God says “I want you to prophecy to these Bones.” And Ezekiel is like huh? You want me to speak on behalf of you to these dirty, dry, dead, bones?

And God says, in Ezekiel 37:4-6, “Say to them, O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. 5 Thus says the Lord God to these bones: Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. 6 And I will lay sinews upon you, and will cause flesh to come 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 Ezekiel did. Ezekiel 37:7-10 “And as he prophesied, there was a sound, and behold a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. 8 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 breath in them. 9 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 four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain, that they may live.” 10 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.”

God’s Spirit, just as he had done in the very beginning when he breathed life into Adam and Eve in the garden, brings life out of dust. Just as God had done in the very beginning, he breathed life into us. And just as God did from the very beginning and did through Jesus Christ our lord and savior, he brought death back to life.

Friends, that is our why. We serve a God who loves us so much that even when we are nothing but dry bones when we are so spiritually dead, and one day even physically dead, that he will bring us back to life. That he will restore us to his original design. He, since the very beginning, had planned to restore us by sending his one and only son to die on the cross and rise again three days later and send his spirit down to breathe life into us so that we could be restored and be a part of the restoration process as we allow the holy spirit to work in us.

That is our why.

So, as we spend these next few months figuring out how let us not forget our why.

Because we will fail, we won’t do these practices perfectly. But God doesn’t care. He wants to be with you because he loves you so much.

Pray moment of silence