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Restoration and Resurrection
Intro
This sermon series has been near and dear to my heart.
We have one more week of this series before we take a break for Christmas and begin John in January.
Back in 2013, I was blessed to get and visit England and Scotland.
On of my favorite parts of this trip was to get to visit old church buildings.
They are simply astonishing.
They were big.
They were echo-y.
They were certainly tourist traps.
Some of them even had gift shops.
(But that’s a topic for another day).
As unbelievable as they were in terms of architecture, on thing always stood out to me.
And it was the stained glass windows.
They were Amazing.
Now the spectacular thing about these stained glass windows is that they depict a story or scene from the bible.
Stained glass windows are typically made up of smaller panes of glass that are brought together to make a whole picture.
So if you zoom in you will see the individual pane, but when you zoom out you see the whole beautiful picture.
That’s what the story of the bible is like.
We zoom in and read individual stories of the bible story, but the scriptures are telling an overwhelmingly grander story.
And this is what this sermon series has been about.
Zooming into these little stories in the OT and zooming out to see how they fit into the story of Jesus.
Into the story of salvation.
Into the story and history of Redemption.
I hope and pray that this sermon series has given you an insight into the richness and depth of the Word of God.
And I pray that it spurs you toward a desire to learn and grow more in your knowledge of God and his revealed word.
With that being said, let’s jump into this mornings sermon.
This week I read about a Man that was training to be a minister.
Right before he was called into the ministry after years of training, his city was invaded by a foreign ruler.
This ruler raided the city and took all the all the best and brightest that the city had.
And unfortunately, this minister was one of those that was torn from his city.
He was forced to leave behind the only land he had ever known.
He was forced to leave behind his place of worship.
He was forced into service of this new ruler.
He was forced to move over 700 miles way from his home land.
That’s like from here to Springfield, Mo.
But God was Gracious and called him to minister to those in exile.
He called this man to preach the grace, mercy, and judgment of God to all those that were with him and to those who enslaved him.
Although he was faithful to God and to his word, his people despised him.
They hated him.
They rejected his mission.
He eventually gets word that his wife dies.
While he is separated from her and the land he calls home.
After over a decade of living in this foreign land.
Staying faithful to his calling.
This man gets word that his entire city has been leveled.
There is nothing left but ruins.
Everything he knows, loves, and hopes to return to has been destroyed.
Life seems hopeless.
That man, is who we are going to look at this morning in our text of Scripture.
His name is Ezekiel.
He was a prophet of God who saw some miraculous visions.
In fact, the vision we are going to read this morning is probably the most famous one.
If you have heard a sermon over Ezekiel it was most likely out of chapter 37.
So the immediate context of this passage tells us that the Israelites, God’s people are in Babylonian captivity.
They had disobeyed God’s commands.
They had rebelled against God’s design.
And the result is that God punishes them for Their disobedience.
This isn’t outside of God’s Purview.
God Tells them in Deut 30 and 31 that if they chase after other gods, and disobey his commandments that he will strip away the blessing of the land and scatter them among other nations.
And that’s exactly what happened.
And while some of them are exiled the city is conquered and the temple is destroyed.
Again we can feel the reality that all hope is lost.
But our God is a God of hope, grace, mercy, and peace.
So we know that this isn’t the end of the story.
So what we read in this text is a vision that Ezekiel receives from God.
Let’s pray
Valley of Death
In the book of Ezekiel, Ezekiel receives a total of 6 visions from God.
This is number five of Six.
God takes him to a valley full of dry bones.
One of the things we need to know is that valley’s are where battles are fought.
Next week we will go over David and Goliath, and that battle took place in a valley.
These are the battlegrounds of the Ancient world.
The armies would set up on opposite mountains or hills, and meet in the middle of the valley to fight one another.
And Ezekiel was brought to this valley by the hand of the Lord.
This is special language.
The Hand of the Lord or the Lord’s Hand is mentioned several times in Ezekiel’s book.
And it represents the power and presence of God.
So Ezekiel is whisked away in this vision by the power of the Lord and the Spirit of the Lord and placed down in the middle of a valley.
We should expect by this language that God is going to do or show something great here.
But we see that the valley is full of bones.
There seemed to be a battle here that was lost and the bones are dead.
And God leads Ezekiel to walk to and fro, back and forth, and all around this valley to see how many bones were there.
And one of the things that Ezekiel notices is that these bones are “very dry”
Essentially, Ezekiel is walking a vast, desolate, and violate field where death is king.
The imagery should stir up in our imaginations that Ezekiel is walking around a mass grave.
Here’s one thing we have to know about the Hebrew culture.
Not being able to bury a body after death is viewed as a curse.
It is absolutely an abomination.
And these bones have not be taken to their proper place of burial.
And they are old.
I like to listen to true crime stories and one of the things you know when listening to them is it takes time for a body to decompose.
Then it takes more time for the bones to dry out.
We should also be aware that because these bones on out in the open the flesh off of them was consumed by the birds of the air and the beasts of the field.
Which is seen as a curse upon those in the valley.
When I think about this scene, I think about all that death and carnage on the beaches of Normandy during WWII.
Just imagine if those bodies weren’t cleared off of there and they were left to rot, be eaten by animals, and waste away.
Nothing but dry, bleached bones left.
And here Ezekiel is walking to and fro in this valley, I’m sure pondering why God is showing him this.
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