-I’m sure you’ve all heard this song before.
-Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones
Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones
Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones
Gonna hear the word of the Lord.
Your toe bone connected to your foot bone
Your foot bone connected to your ankle bone
Your ankle bone connected to your leg bone
-Do you know what the song is about?
-It’s really about our Old Testament lesson for today {PAUSE}
-Ezekiel was a prophet during the sixth century B. C.
-Israel, the northern ten tribes, had already been conquered over a hundred years earlier by the Assyrians
-This of course made the southern two tribes, Judah, vulnerable to attack
-And that is exactly what happened
-Jehoiachin took the throne when he was only eighteen years old, after the death of his father, and reigned only three months and ten days before King Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, swept in and carried the best and the brightest off to Babylon
-That is where we get all the amazing stories about Daniel and Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego.
-After Jehoiachin is deposed by the Babylonians, his uncle, Zedekiah, is placed in power
-Ezekiel, a priest, stays behind in Jerusalem and is later carted off along with just about everyone when Zedekiah decides to rebel against the Babylonians
-When Jerusalem finally falls, the Babylonians destroy the city and the temple, they round up Zedekiah’s sons, kill them in front of him and gouge out his eyes and cart him off to Babylon along with everyone else {PAUSE}
-Obviously, you can imagine just what the people of Judah were thinking as they were carted off
-Think if that were to happen to our country
-You would wonder what went wrong
-You would question where God was
-Why did this happen?
-What’s going to happen now?
-What are we supposed to do?
-What are we supposed to learn from all this?
-What do we do now?
-Is there any hope? {PAUSE}
-You’ve probably all been there at one time or another in your lives
-You’ve felt like you were at the end of your rope
-That is how Linda and I began our marriage in a way
-In the year before and the year after we were married we really went through the ringer
-I kind of alluded to this late last year after our house on base flooded
-Maybe you have heard of the Holmes and Rahe Social Readjustment Scale
-I call it stress points
-It attaches a value to the amount of stress that a person goes through and encourages a person going through a lot of changes to not make unnecessary changes and to seek professional help if they are not coping well
-Right before we met, I had gotten out of the Army and moved back to my home town
-I had been told that a job with my old employer would be waiting for me when I got there but it wasn’t
-I was searching frantically for a job but was doing some volunteer work at our church and school
-My brother-in-law threw out his arm and had to undergo elbow surgery that ended up ending his baseball career so I had to fly down to Cincinnati to help my sister move down to Florida
-I came back to Wisconsin and had a couple of job offers
-I ended up starting a new job at my old employer but the atmosphere there had changed considerably
-Linda and I met and started dating
-I lost my father not long after
-I had to help my mom through that process and taking care of her property
-My pastor encouraged me to look into the ministry so we applied
-I proposed
-We did all of our wedding preparations
-We both quit our jobs and Linda looked for a new job in St. Louis
-We looked for a new place to live in St. Louis
-Linda lost her oldest sister a few months before our wedding
-We got married
-We lived in a brand new city, away for our families, living on one income while I was a student learning two brand new languages
-I totaled up our figures for those two years and our figures were in the several hundred
-According to the scale, we should have been dead or had serious health problems
-There were some not really so much fun times in those two years
-There were times that we probably felt that we would be better off dead
-I’m sure some of y’all can relate, having been in the military and moving around
-There is a lot of stress associated with that {PAUSE}
-That is kind of what the Israelites were going through during Ezekiel’s prophetic ministry.
-Listen to what God says what they say about themselves, “Our bones are dried up and our hope is gone; we are cut off.”
-God sends Ezekiel out into this valley full of dried up bones
-It seems like a scene out of a movie where a person gets dropped off someone in the dark and they find a flashlight or they light a match and then they realize that they are surrounded by the bones of dead people and they freak out
-Y’all remember the movie Jaws
-Do you remember the scene where Richard Dreyfuss and Roy Scheider see the abandoned boat and Richard Dreyfuss, who plays the marine biologist, jumps into the water to check out the damage and see if he can find a shark tooth?
-While he’s under the water looking through one of the holes that the shark made, the head of the dead boat captain appears in the hole
-Scared the dickens out of me when I first saw it and when I watched it on You Tube again it scared me
-It must have been a little scary or at least ominous for Ezekiel being out amongst all those dead bones {PAUSE}
-But then God tells Ezekiel to bring them back to life
-He tells him to prophecy or speak the word of God to the bones
-The bones came back together again, like the song goes, sinews and tissue and skin grew on the bones
-But the bodies had no breath in them
-So God tells Ezekiel to speak the word of God to them again and to prophesy that breath would enter them and they would come to life
-So he did and they came to life and it says they were a vast army {PAUSE}
-For the Jews, this was a great encouragement for them
-They had been a proud people who had conquered many a foe in battle
-To be likened unto a vast army helped them to reminisce about the good old days
-They had hope because God hadn’t forgotten them
-He was going to bring them back to their old land and return the glory of the days of David and Solomon, or so they thought
-But God had something bigger in mind
-This is one of the key texts for the Old Testament pointing to the resurrection of the dead
-God says through Ezekiel
-“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, will know that I am the LORD, when I open your graves and bring you up from them. 14 I will put my Spirit in you and you will live, and I will settle you in your own land. Then you will know that I the LORD have spoken, and I have done it, declares the LORD.’ "
-Some day we really are going to die
-We won’t just feel like we want to
-As they say, the mortality rate is still 100%
-And our flesh will decay as we lay in the graves
-But that isn’t the end of our story for Jesus’ sake
-It is nice having a promise but it is even nicer having a promise based on some reality
-As the apostle Peter writes, “19So we have)the prophetic word made more sure”
-Now that Jesus has arisen from the dead, our dead bones that will inhabit the earth will be called out of our graves by Jesus Himself
-He’ll say
-Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones
Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones
Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones
Gonna hear the word of the Lord.
