God Versus The Zombies pt. 2
Last week we began a series of messages on God vs. the zombies from Ezekiel 37 and said that we would divide it into 3 messages:
The Placing of the Prophet
The Predicament of the People
The Power of Proclaiming the Word
Today we will be talking about the Predicament of the People
We mentioned that zombies were walking dead, and that there are a lot of people who are living on the outside but dead on the inside. We talked about how wonderful it is that we serve an awesome God who goes to the graveyards of life and brings the dead back to life!
We talked about how God sometimes puts us in places where we are outnumbered and where we can feel very alone in our Christian walk.
God puts us there for several reasons:
1. First so that we can see God's compassion for hurting people.
2. Second so we can make a connection with their suffering
Php 2:4 do not [merely] look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others.
Php 2:5 Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus,
3. Third so we can be a catalyst for change
Ezekiel 37:1 The hand of the LORD was upon me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the LORD and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. 2 He led me back and forth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry. 3 He asked me, "Son of man, can these bones live?" I said, "O Sovereign LORD, you alone know."
11 Then he 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.' 12 Therefore prophesy and say to them: '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.
The Predicament of the People
The Process of Becoming a Zombie
Illustrated in the life of Jacob
Ge 47:7 Then Joseph brought his father Jacob and presented him to Pharaoh; and Jacob blessed Pharaoh.
Ge 47:8 And Pharaoh said to Jacob, "How many years have you lived?"
Ge 47:9 So Jacob said to Pharaoh, "The years of my sojourning are one hundred and thirty; few and unpleasant have been the years of my life, nor have they attained the years that my fathers lived during the days of their sojourning."
Jacob should have been shouting for joy. His dead son is alive!
Lu 15:23 And bring hither the fatted calf, and kill [it]; and let us eat, and be merry:
Lu 15:24 For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found. And they began to be merry.
Listen to how he describes his life:
Few and unpleasant, and they are pretty much over. He lived another 17 years, gaining property and a larger family.
Jacob had become a very negative person. He was a zombie. A whited selpuchre, full of dead men's bones.
How do people become Zombies in life?
1. Like Jacob they suffer from self inflicted wounds.
Jacob suffered tremendously from self inflicted wounds.
Wounds of lying to his father. The way you treat your parents may come back to haunt you, and it may haunt you when you can do very little about it. They have passed on, but memory remains. Self inflicted wounds are naggers. They will nip at your feet. They will bite at your heels. They will bark at you in the corridors of your mind. They will taunt, and they will hurt. The most hurtful words you will ever hear, are the hurtful words you say to yourself, and sometimes you deserve them.
Wounds of cheating his brother. He cheated him out of his inheritance. He lived in fear of his brother for the next 20 years. He had a wound that nagged him for 20 years.
Wounds of failing to live a proper example before his children. Put away your household idols. Said after Dinah was raped and the men of Shechem killed. Apparently Jacob had allowed his children to have idols!! Perhaps when his sons committed the murder of the men of Shechem, his mind taunted him that it was his own fault because he failed them as a father. Every parent has failed their children in some way. There are no perfect parents, but when they fail because of our shortcomings we suffer from self inflicted wounds.
Self inflicted wounds hurt us in two ways, the direct results, and the law of sowing and reaping.
He cheated his family, he family cheated him. His father in law changed his wages 10 times.
He lied to his family, his family lied to him. Is this Joseph's coat?
He failed to love his wife, his wife failed to love him. Reuben committed incest with one of Jacob's wives. I am not justifying her immorality but simply stating Jacob's failure to love his wives other than Rachel may have helped open the door to her moral failure.
He suffered tremendously from self inflicted wounds.
The 2nd major reason Jacob became a zombie was because of catastrophic losses.
Lost his home to lying. He had to flee.
Lost his sons to selfishness. He only seems to have cared for the one son of Rachel.
Lost his son to lying.
Lost his wife in childbirth.
Lost his son to sorrow. He never really did much with Benjamin, probably blamed him for her death. How do you grow up, knowing your mother died bringing you into this world?
When your life is marked by sorrows you will become a zombie.
We read of Rachael refusing to be comforted, in the New Testament, because of the murder of the children by Herod. There are people who refuse to get over there sorrows, when your discussion of your life is always centered around your sorrows it will turn you into a zombie.
Ge 37:34 And Jacob rent his clothes, and put sackcloth upon his loins, and mourned for his son many days.
Ge 37:35 And all his sons and all his daughters rose up to comfort him; but he refused to be comforted; and he said, For I will go down into the grave unto my son mourning. Thus his father wept for him.
Jacob never seems to have gotten over his sorrows. He chose to focus on all that went wrong with his life, and forgot about all that was right.
He could have rejoiced that he had Rachel in the first place, he could have thought that he was one of the most blessed men to have ever lived for he got to marry the woman of his dreams. What happened to the guy who worked 14 years to get her, and to him they seemed as but a few days? Why was his memory of life the things he lost, and not of the things he had? Why was he so sad? He had just discovered his lost son to be found, his family on the brink of starvation miraculously provided for, and he himself being afforded the dignity of royal treatment in the court of Pharoah. He should have been shouting for joy. He could have loved all his children, he could of focused on what he had, not on what he lost. He lost Rachel, he had Benjamin. He seems to have ignored the joy of a new son, and focused on his loss of a wife. All his children were aware of there seeming insignificance to him. He would one day rejoin Rachel, she was only lost but for a season. He lost his wife to death, and his joy in life because he focused on what he didn't have, instead of what he did have. Your focus affects your disposition. Happiness often is a choice, so is sorrow.
The 3rd reason people become Zombies is hard providence's.
Besides what he did to himself, and what others did to him, he still had to deal with hard providences in life. For example what drove him to Egypt was a famine. He probably spent a good deal of time bemoaning the famine, and wondering why God made him have to deal with that also. God was doing a miracle and Jacob probably saw it as a dirty deed.
The cure for Zombies.
We need to remember that no matter how bad life gets zombies still have ears!
How shall they believe if they have not heard. If we stop speaking they won't hear.
No matter how dead a person seems, one thing God doesn't allow them to lose is ears that can hear words that can bring them life again. In our nation the word of God is being chased off our money, our courts, our national parks, everywhere and anywhere the word of God is under attack. The enemy knows the power of the Word. The danger for us is that, we who are to be a catylyst for change, get to a place where we become convinced people are so dead or so lost, it will do them no good to hear the Word, and so we are silent.
No matter how lost someone may seem to us, God is still able to open dead ears to hear a living word. It is not our job to figure out who can hear, and who can't hear, it is our job to sow seeds everywhere we can.
God's word will not return to him void.
The cure for Zombies is the same one it has always been: speak the word to them, and they will come to life. They need to hear a word other than the negativity they have been hearing. The dead bones they are surrounded by don't have the words they need to hear, but we as believers do.
Close:
Pray for self inflicted wounds.
Things done to family
Failures of parents
Those who feel they are zombies, full of dead men's bones.
