Let us turn again, please, to Ezekiel chapter 37. We'd like to consider this part of God's Word that we read in chapter 37, 1 through 14, but we'll read again verse 3 at this time. Ezekiel 37, verse 3, and he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? So I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest." The prophet Ezekiel was asked to do many, many things that at least to us might have appeared strange. In chapter 3, he's asked to eat the scroll. I suppose, children, it would be like someone saying you or telling you to literally eat your Bible. In chapter 4, he is told to lie on his left side for 390 days, and that was to represent the sin of the northern kingdom of Israel. After these 390 days, he was told to turn unto the other side and to lie there for 40 days, and that represented the sin of the southern kingdom of Judah. In chapter 5, he's a prophet. He has a long beard. He's told to cut his beard off and to cut it into three parts. The first part, he is to burn with fire in the middle of the city. The second part, he's to chop up. The third part, he's to take and he's to throw it to the wind. But perhaps the thing that would have appeared strangest, most foolish to the natural man It's what Ezekiel is asked to do here in chapter 37. Here he is told to preach, to prophesy, to dry bones in a valley. The Spirit takes him in a vision, therefore we assume, He takes him and He places him in this great valley. And in this great valley, there are many bones, and they're very dry. And so it's a picture of a great defeat by a great army, lots of people, and they've been slaughtered, and they're dead, and there's no life here at all. And as Ezekiel, you can imagine Ezekiel looking around this valley of dry bones, a picture of total defeat, a devastating picture, a picture of death, and the extremity of it is found, is emphasized rather in these words that the bones are very dry at the end of verse 2. Low they were very dry. It's emphasizing just how completely dead they all are. You can imagine the horror in Ezekiel's mind as he walks among all these dead bones. But the Lord is impressing upon him the severity of this. There's very many bones, and they're very dry. And so, the Lord begins to give Ezekiel this picture And then in verse 3, you have this question that again would to us seem so strange. He said unto me, son of man, can these bones live? Can bones live? Can these bones live? Now, it's important here to to see what the question is not. We say this appears strange, but really it's only strange to unbelief because it's the Lord who's asking the question, and the question is not, can these bones make themselves alive? And the question is not, Ezekiel, son of man, can you make these bones to live? Really the title, son of man, is emphasizing, I mean, what is man? Man is flesh. Man is like the grass. He has no… he has such little strength in himself. Son of man. can these bones live?" But Ezekiel, hearing the Lord ask the question, turns, as it were, the question back on the Lord there at the end of verse 3, "'I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest.'" And so this indeed is not a… this is not a hopeless question. But then verse 4, Ezekiel is now asked again to unbelief, to ourselves, to the natural man. He's told to do what many would say is not just a strange thing, but a foolish thing. He's called to prophesy, to preach, to preach a sermon, as it were, to these dry bones. And children, you know that bones don't have ears. Bones can't hear, and yet the Lord is telling Ezekiel, prophesy to them, literally upon them, preach upon them, prophesy, go right up to where they are, right up, as we would say, to hearing distance and prophesy upon them. Oh, dry bones. Ezekiel is told what to say, "'O ye dry bones.'" Verse 4, "'Hear the word of the Lord.'" Verse 5, "'Thus saith the Lord God unto these bones.'" The Lord is speaking to these bones. And by the way, here you notice how Ezekiel's the one who's preaching or prophesying, and yet it tells us in verse 5, "'Thus saith,' not Ezekiel, But thus saith the Lord God." That's why we believe in the primacy of preaching. Yes, you hear a voice, a human voice, but in preaching the Lord Himself is coming, and the Lord Himself is speaking to you. Thus saith the Lord to you, and thus saith the Lord here to these dry bones. Behold, says the Lord," verse 5, "'I will cause breath to enter into you and ye shall live." The chapter before this we preached on a few weeks ago, the I wills of the covenant God. I will give a new heart. I will give My Spirit. I will cause you to walk in My ways. Here is another I will of God. I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live." Verse 6 then gives a description of what this is going to look like. I will lay sinews upon you. I will bring flesh upon you, cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live, and ye shall know that I am the Lord. So, what happens now? Ezekiel has been told this, but what does he do? Well, verse 7, he does what he's commanded. So, I prophesied to the dry bones, to the great number of very dry bones in this valley, I prophesied as I was commanded. That's what a prophet does. That's what a preacher does. What the Lord says, we are to say. What the Lord commands, we are to command. And as He prophesied to the bones, in fact, as soon as He prophesied to the bones, as soon as the Word is preached, it begins to take effect. Something happens. There's a noise, verse 7. There's a shaking. The bones, can you picture it in the valley here? The bones begin to join up. They move, they join one to another, they come together. And then the sinews and the flesh comes upon it, and then the skin comes upon it. And what would you say here? You would say, what power is here? You know, what majestic power is here? Now you've got not bones of the valley, not dry bones looking at you, but you see people looking at you. You see eyes and ears and they're looking at you and you would say, my, this is amazing, this is powerful. And then verse six comes with this, but, verse eight, I'm sorry. At the end of verse eight, but, Something's missing. Something's missing. But there was no breath in them. And you know, at this point, unbelief would come and unbelief would say, it was all a waste of time. This preaching to those who are dead, this prophesying to dry bones, it was all in vain. Yes, oh, there was noise. Yes, there was a coming together. Yes, there was a dressing up. Yes, there was everything that looked good on the outside. Now it looks like there's life, but there's no breath. It was all to no effect. It was close, but it was all in vain. But the Lord is not finished. Verse 9, then said He unto me, son of man. Ezekiel, you've prophesied to the bones. You've gone right up upon them, and you've prophesied. You've preached the Word to the bones. But now, Ezekiel, prophesy somewhere else. Preach somewhere else. Verse 9, "'Then said he unto me, Prophesy unto the wind.'" Now, the Hebrew word for wind is ruach, and that word ruach can be translated as wind. It can be translated as breath. It can be translated as spirit. It's the same word that we sang in the Psalter, thy spirit, thy ruach, O Lord, makes life to abound. The same ruach that hovered over the creation at the beginning. The same wind, the same breath, the same Spirit that after Christ had formed Adam from the dust of the ground, breathed into his nostrils, ruached into his nostrils, and man became a living soul. Prophesy now, Ezekiel, to the Spirit. Prophesy to the wind. Verse 9. prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, Son of Man, and say to the wind, thus saith the Lord God, come from the four winds, O Ruach, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live." Verse 10, Ezekiel once again does what he's told. He, "'So I prophesied, as he commanded me.' And the breath, the Spirit, the wind, the breath came into them, and they lived and stood up upon their feet an exceeding great army." This is stunning. This is awesome power. That which was dead is now alive. That which had no strength is now an exceedingly great army." And what do you say? What do you say here? Do you say, oh my, what a sermon this must have been. What a preacher this must have been. What eloquence Ezekiel must have had. Yes, he has a lovely voice, and he is one that has a lovely voice that they were saying in a different part. No, you don't say, what a great preacher, what a great sermon. You say, what a great God. That's what the Lord had said at the end of verse 6. The reason, the effect of this is that you will come and know at the end of this that I am the Lord, that I am Jehovah, that I am the God of power, that I am the God of glory, that I am the God who gives life from the dead. You stand back and you say, this is the doing of the Lord, and it is marvelous in our eyes. This is the picture that Ezekiel sees in the valley of dry bones. But what's the point? What's the point? Well, verses 11 through 14 give us the point. There are difficult pictures, as we said, in Ezekiel's prophecy, and we're not always told the point, and so you get disagreement among commentators. Maybe it means this, or maybe it means that, but there's no question here because the Lord tells us what this is. The Lord tells us what this means in verses 11 through 14. Verse 11, then he said unto me, son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. Behold, they say, our bones are dried, our hope is lost. We are cut off for our parts. Now remember the context that Ezekiel is in Babylon. He's part of the captives that have been taken away from Jerusalem and are now in captivity in the land of Babylon. And he's there beside the riverbank and they're singing, or they're not singing, they're sighing, not songs, but sighs to us belong. How can we sing the Lord's song when we're in a foreign land? We're cut off from our parts. I think what I understand it to be saying is that we're cut off from Jerusalem. We're cut off from the temple. We're away from the worship of God. The temple of God is in ruins. The glory of God has departed. We're cut off. We're completely cut off. We're cut off from our parts. And so, really what you have then is, in this picture and in this point, is here a picture of everything Ezekiel's been saying. This is his whole message. He's been saying this repeatedly since the beginning. Really, you can boil it down to these two things that the prophets, Isaiah before this, and Jeremiah in Jerusalem was prophesying the same thing. The Lord is coming. Because of your sin, because you have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and you've hewn out for yourselves your own broken cisterns, I'm going to cast you off like I said I would in Deuteronomy. And the Lord is coming to punish His people for their sins. He's going to bring them into captivity. And what was the response of the people when they had heard that message that the prophets had repeatedly told them? Their response was carelessness. The response was unbelief. They were saying, there is no way that that can happen to us. Yes, it can happen to the northern kingdom. They can go into captivity in Assyria like they did a century or so before. But this won't happen to Judah. They were saying to Jeremiah, the temple of the Lord, we are. The temple of the Lord are we. And what was the result of this response, this careless unbelief? The response was they were carried away to Babylon. The Babylonians came, they sacked the temple, and they carried them away to Babylon. Ezekiel was one of them, Daniel was another. Ezekiel's by the river, Daniel's in the palace, Jeremiah's back in Jerusalem prophesying there. So the Lord is coming to punish you because of your sins. But there was another part of the prophet's message. There was another part of Ezekiel's message, and that part was the mercy of God. There was mercy and deliverance with God. There would be restoration because of God. Now, what was the response then? The response then was the same. The response then was unbelief. Not carelessness so much, but more despair. It's hopeless. That's what they're saying here. The house of Israel are saying, our bones are dried. We are the dry bones of the valley. There's no hope for Israel. There's no hope for the house of Israel. In Ezekiel chapter 36, the Lord was coming with all these I will statements. I will give you a new heart. I will put My Spirit within you. I will cause you to walk in My ways. I will bring you back from captivity. And here He's saying, I will bring you out of your grave. And the response is, we're dry bones. Doesn't this teach us, congregation, that we need the Holy Spirit of God both to convince us of sin and also to convince us of righteousness or salvation? We need the Holy Spirit to believe the law, to tremble at the threatenings, and we need the Holy Spirit to believe the gospel, to believe the promises as well. The basic message is the same, before and after the captivity, hear the Word of the Lord. And so this picture then becomes a picture of Ezekiel's whole message. There's bones now. They were an army before. You think of David, you think of Solomon, you think of the kingdom then. Oh, what strength it had, what power it had, what army, what mighty men David had. But now it's just bones. Now our hope is gone. Now everything seems so despairing, gloomy. And the message is the same. Hear ye the Word of the Lord. Now, what's true here in terms of the national picture of Israel is true spiritually. It's true in the lives of individuals. It's true of churches. It's true of denominations. It's true of nations. It's true really at every level. And so, when we begin to ask, well, what does this mean for us today? We can certainly see that the danger of the wrong response is as dangerous for us today as it has ever been. the danger of carelessness, of unbelief, of saying, well, this can't happen to me or us, because of who we are and our heritage and because of what we have. We could never be cast away like this. This would never happen to us. The other danger would be that we despair. We look around us, we feel like the dry bones perhaps, and we end in despair and hopelessness. And the basic answer to both these dangers of carelessness and of despair is the same, hear ye the Word of the Lord. Prophesy to the bones, prophesy to the wind. This is what we need, the Word and the Spirit. We need both. And so, when we think of the church today, we think of our own churches, then this passage speaks of the revival of the church. There's a beautiful picture here. Yes, it begins with bones. It begins with what's so gloomy and despairing and hopeless, but this passage speaks of the reviving of the church. Isn't that what you want? Isn't that what we desire, that there would be life in our gathering, that we wouldn't simply go through motion, but that we would have life in our churches, life in our congregations, life in our worship? Well, here is a picture, a prophecy. Now, of course, we have to say, too, that it's not an absolute picture. The church has never been, in terms of the visible church, all dry bones. The church has life. There are living members in it. There are those who are born again by the Spirit of God. Even when the cause is so low, there are those who are hearing the Word and by the power of the Spirit being united to Jesus Christ and effectual calling. It's always true, all that the Father giveth to me shall come to me and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out. It's always true that sons and daughters will be born in Zion. So it's not an absolute picture. But the church knows, and the church today surely knows, we are not what we should be. And the saints feel that in themselves. I'm not what I should be. And that's not a kind of blasé, pious statement. It's what we feel. I feel like the dry bones, the Christian can often feel. I feel hopeless in this situation and lifeless. And God's people are looking for days of power, for days of revival, for days of the Son of Man, days when people would come into places like this and hear the Word and the Word speaks to them. As they read it, they find the Word reading them and the thoughts of their heart being opened up and suddenly their whole life's picture coming before them, the reality of who they are as a sinner before a holy God, but the reality of who Jesus Christ is. And they come and they bow, says Paul to the Corinthians, they bow down and they worship and they say, God is in this place of a truth. That's revival. When God becomes the reality, when God is real and felt. days of the Reformation, days as there were in New England with Edwards and Whitefield, where people were flocking and knocking the minister's door and saying, you need to preach more to us, and calling upon the Lord and crying out to the Lord. Why? Because they wanted reality. They wanted life. They felt the deadness in themselves, and they had found life in Jesus Christ. And the Word was coming, not as the Word of man, but as it is in truth, the very Word of God with assurance and in the Holy Spirit. And you look around at your loved ones, at your families, your sons, your daughters, your grandchildren, maybe your great-grandchildren, and you look around and you see people and families and you look at them and you say, can these bones live? Oh, I've spoken to them so long, I've prayed for them so long, and you've been sitting here perhaps and you're saying, I'm the dry bone and you've listened and you've come here and yet there's no life. Can these bones live? Can these bones live? Maybe you look at the nation around us and you think, oh, what a picture. And you think, can these bones live? Canada's had the church for over a century now, for decades of the church speaking, not always as it should certainly, but nevertheless it's there. And you think, what's the point? Why speak anymore? They're not listening. And what's the Lord saying? He's saying, prophesy upon them. Preach to them, speak to them, and prophesy to the wind. Can these bones live? Do you believe it? Do you believe that the Lord can come with His power, with His Word, and with His Spirit, and give life to your own children, to your friends, to your neighbors, to the people in the streets around us that are without God and without hope in this world? They're bones, dry bones, very many of them. And you think, well, what's the point? We've tried. We've tried evangelism. We've tried canvassing. They don't listen. Can these bones live? O Lord, Thou knowest. But must we not as a church, must we not as a church examine ourselves? Why are there so many bones around us? Is it because there's so much dryness in ourselves? Judgment, says Peter, begins at the church of God. Why are we not knocking on the pastor's door saying, pastor, we need more preaching? We need more sermons. We need prayer. We need life. You must come and preach. We must hear the Word of God. Can these bones live? Yet here is such a glorious message of hope. This is the point that Ezekiel is coming to. The question when you look at the bones inside of us or outside of us, around us, the question is, is there a remedy? Can these bones live? How will Jacob rise when he is small?" the prophet asks. And the answer that Ezekiel gives is glorious. The answer is not in yourself. The answer is not in the church. The church cannot revive itself. You cannot stir it up yourself. You cannot engineer it yourself. preachers in themselves cannot revive the church. They must preach. They must pray. An unbelief comes in and says, it's vain to serve God. And we often or sometimes feel like Isaiah, Lord, who hath believed our report? You exegete the Word, you divide the Word, you set it out, you come, you pray, you, Lord, may they hear this Word. You preach, you realize you're an earthen vessel as you do so, but there's a glorious treasure here. But what's the effect? Oh, good sermon, pastor. Oh, very well, but what about life? What about Christ? Have you seen the glory? Have you seen God? We didn't lose religion in Eden. We lost God, and we need God again. And yet, prophesy, says the Lord to His servants, prophesy to the bones. Preach to them the message that I give you. Thus saith the Lord, you don't dare bring your own message. You don't dare try to take off the edges of His message. You don't blunt it. You don't change it. You don't make it more palatable. Preach the Word. As John Murray said to Tereth Atkinson years ago, go and tell the Dutchman that the bad news is a lot worse than they think, and then tell them that the good news is a lot better than they think. That's the truth. That's the reality. But here's the hope. Verse 12, therefore prophesy and say unto them, thus saith the Lord God, behold, O my people, I will open your graves. and cause you to come up out of your graves and bring you into the land of Israel. And so suddenly you see why the Reformation and the Bible itself, but the Reformation recovered this view of the preaching of the gospel as the primary means of grace. The Spirit makes the reading, but especially the preaching of the Word, an effectual means of convincing and converting sinners, and you see the order here. We preach. We preach the Word of God. We don't make up our own messages. We say, look at verse 6, look at verse 7, look at verse 8. This is what it's saying. This is what it means. We preach, and we must preach, and we use the means that God has given to us. We did not make them up, but it's the Lord who opens the grave. It's the Lord who gives conversion. It's the Lord who causes life. Ezekiel prophesies, Ezekiel prays, but the Lord says, I will open the grave. And that's your hope. That's why we believe in the primacy of preaching. That's why we believe the Lord can change Canada in a day. Isaiah says, a little one shall become a thousand, a small one, a strong nation. I, the Lord, will hasten it in His time. This is the hope the church has. We must keep using, when we look for the revival of the church, we keep using the means of grace, Word and Spirit, and we have nothing else. We have nothing else. Word and Spirit. Preach the Word. Pray for the Spirit to come and to bless. You pray for the Spirit. What would happen in this building if everyone before they came to the service would go to their room, get down on their knees, and say, Lord, do as Thou hast said. Thou hast said that if we, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto our children, how much more wilt thou not give the Holy Spirit to those who ask? Here I am asking, Lord, do as thou hast said. Bless the Word this evening. Bless it this morning. Make it come with power. Give us ears to hear. Give us life in our souls. Give us the reality so that we won't just go through the motions, so that we won't come here and go home like the way we came. You'll never go home the way you came. You'll either leave more hard or more soft. Pray for the Spirit to come and to bless, and we don't resort to gimmicks. In the 19th century, there was, as you know, revivalism movements. People would come and they'd say, well, how do we get people in? So they have these sort of tent meetings, they bring all these musical instruments, they make all these songs, very emotionally charged songs and music. And all of it has this sort of aim that affects the mind, and there were, we believe, conversions among it. But John Kennedy in Dingwall was writing to Horatius Boner, and he said, the method is wrong. The method is wrong. The danger of what you're doing here is that you're… You're dressing up the dry bones of the valley to make them think that they have life when they're still dead. Leave them, He said, in the grave and prophesy to them, and prophesy to the wind, Word and Spirit. That's the revival of the church. But there's also this lesson, or this application rather. There's the revival of the church. There's also, this is a picture of the regeneration of sinners from the dead. So we can talk about the world out there. We can talk about the church. We can talk about congregations. But my dear friend, what about you? Do you know where revival begins? with you. It begins with individuals. You know, you look at the world around you and what do you see? If you saw it spiritually, if you saw it as God sees it, you would see a valley of dry bones. Well, they may be living in Canada. They may be in the true north, strong and free. They may have their cottages and their wealth and their money and their homes, and that's fine in its place. But they don't have life. They don't have God. They don't have hope. You hath He quickened who were dead in trespasses and in sins. They're in opposition to God. No faith, no love, no hope, no desire, nothing. They don't please Him. Well, there's plenty of activity, but there's no life. And what are we going to do? We preach to them, prophesy to them. This message from God is a message of power and grace and mercy. It's the message that has come to you. It's the message that's coming to you again and again. This message that has been sent to us in the everlasting gospel, which came into our ears, most of us, no doubt, since the time we were children. It's a word that speaks of a Savior who's powerful and merciful, who can make dead sinners alive, not what we must do, but what God will do, I will cause. There would be no gospel to tell the dry bones what they must do. We need a gospel of grace from beginning to end. But that's the gospel that God's servants have been commanded to speak and to hear, I prophesied as I was commanded. Can you picture Ezekiel as he sees this, as he sees the bones coming together, as he sees the flesh and the skin, but then suddenly to see breath, to see life coming into these people. But that's what happens in the preaching of the gospel. That's what happens when the Spirit of God takes the Word and unites a sinner to Jesus Christ. Then there's life. It's more than just the noise and the shaking and the movement. Then there's life. You see it throughout church history. This life, Nicodemus, remember Nicodemus in John 3, he's a teacher in Israel. He's the one, if you have a question about the Bible, children, you go to Nicodemus. Nicodemus is a teacher in Israel. He knows the Bible inside and out. And he comes to Jesus Christ, and the Lord says to him, "'Art thou a teacher in Israel, and dost thou not know that you must be born again?" Literally, anothen is from above. You must be born from above. It's not going into your mother's womb the second time. It's a different kind of birth. It's a birth from above. It's a birth from the Spirit of God. You must be born again. What was Nicodemus? Do you know what he was? He was a pile of dry bones, spiritually, that was looking good, that was dressed up. It looked good, but the Lord is saying, there's no life. You must be born again. You need the Spirit to come and to breathe into your nostrils. What does Jesus Christ, the greater than Ezekiel, do? He prophesies. He tells him and prophesies to him about Moses who lifted up that bronze serpent in the wilderness so that whoever was bitten with the snake bite would look unto this bronze serpent and would live. Even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, for God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life." What a prophesying to the dry bones that was. Nicodemus, by the end of the gospel, is coming to the Lord Jesus Christ at His death. with life in his own soul. There's Paul, Saul of Tarsus, dry bones. He thought he was alive. I was alive without the law once. Oh, I thought I had this righteousness. Religion, I had it all. You couldn't blame me for anything. I was blameless. I was of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of the Hebrews, touching the righteousness in the law blameless. But the Lord came and said, Saul, Saul, you need life. Why persecutest thou me?" And he comes to say, I obtained mercy. I was dry bones, but that Word spoke to me, that Spirit came, and there was life in my soul. The Lord is doing this, friends, with Nicodemus, with Paul, with sinners down through the ages, preaching the Word and the Spirit blessing it. And what about you? I always say, but you don't understand, Pastor, my dryness and how long I've been dry. Yes, I do. It's the same as here in Ezekiel 37, lo, they were very dry. Remember what the Lord said to Martha and Mary, and Martha said, he stinks by this time, Lazarus. Really, she's saying he's dry bones. Can these bones live? There's no use speaking to Lazarus. The Lord Jesus comes and He prophesies, He preaches to Lazarus, He prays to the Lord, and He prophesies to Lazarus, Lazarus come forth. And he that was dead came forth. And here you are as a sinner, and the Lord Jesus is coming in His Word this evening from this passage too, and He's saying, come forth from the grave. Come unto Christ and have life. Come unto Me and I will give thee life. Can these bones live, O Lord?