AN EXPOSITION OF EZEKIEL 37 – PART 1
September 27, 2009
http://www.tribulationperiod.com/
The activities of nations in the past often determine their future conduct. We will take a look at one of Ezekiel’s prophecies from about 592 B.C. which has been, to a large extent, fulfilled in the last century, but still has future applications. In Ezekiel 37:1 we are told: “The hand of the LORD was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the LORD, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones.” And, in Ezekiel 37:11, we are advised: “Then he said unto me, Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel: behold, they say, Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost: we are cut off for our parts.” These two verses describe Ezekiel being carried to the approximate center of a valley filled with disarranged bones of countless men and women. The valley represents the world, and the bones represent “the whole house of Israel.”
In Ezekiel 37:2 he writes: “And caused me to pass by them round about: and, behold, there were very many in the open valley, and, lo, they were very dry.” In this verse Ezekiel is led to make an inspection tour of the bones.
He discovers two things as he passes through the valley representing the whole world: (1) the bones are “very many” (whole house of Israel); and (2) they are not just dry, they are “very dry.” This verse, coupled with verse 11, represents a prophecy that the day would come when the nation of Israel would not just be dead, but would be very dead, without hope, cut
off from all its parts. Ezekiel made this prophecy in about 592 B.C. It was fulfilled more than 600 years after it was written, during the period A.D. 70 to 135. In A.D. 70 the Roman General Titus led an Army of Romans, Syrians, and Arab Mercenaries against Israel, and the destruction was almost complete.
What was left of Israel as a nation was finished totally by the Roman Hadrian and his armies in about A.D. 135. From than time until May 14, 1948, there was no recognized nation of Israel in the great open valley of the world. For more than eighteen hundred years, the dead nation of Israel existed only as very dry bones scattered across the great Gentile valley known as the world.
In Ezekiel 37:3 the Lord poses a very interesting question to Ezekiel, as he asks: “And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest.” I appreciate Ezekiel’s honesty. It is apparent he does not have the foggiest notion, so he shifts the answer back to the Lord as he states, “O Lord God, thou knowest.” “As I am repeatedly faced with questions of life I cannot answer, I simply say, O Lord, thou knowest.
In Ezekiel 37:4,5 God answers his own question: “[4] Again he said unto me, Prophesy upon these bones, and say unto them, O ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.
[5] Thus saith the Lord God unto these bones; Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live:” The answer is Yes! God is going to transform these disarranged, very dry, dead bones in an open valley into a living nation of Israel recognized by most of the world’s nations. He speaks His Word to the bones, and as He
speaks they hear and obey.
Verse 5 gives a preview as to what the end result will be – a living, breathing nation of Israelites gathered home to the land he gave their father Abraham – the promised land of Israel. But this transformation from dead bones (a dead nation) to a living nation of flesh, blood, and breath was not to be done instantly, but rather in a series of stages as one would perform in building a human body over a skeleton frame
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)
The Jewish Cemetery at Newport
How strange it seems! These Hebrews in their graves,
Close by the street of this fair seaport town,
Silent beside the never-silent waves,
At rest in all this moving up and down!
The trees are white with dust, that o’er their sleep
Wave their broad curtains in the south-wind’s breath,
While underneath these leafy tents they keep
The long, mysterious Exodus of Death.
And these sepulchral stones, so old and brown,
That pave with level flags their burial-place,
Seem like the tablets of the Law, thrown down
And broken by Moses at the mountain’s base.
The very names recorded here are strange,
Of foreign accent, and of different climes;
Alvares and Rivera interchange
With Abraham and Jacob of old times.
“Blessed be God! for he created Death!”
The mourners said, “and Death is rest and peace;”
Then added, in the certainty of faith,
“And giveth Life that nevermore shall cease.”
Closed are the portals of their Synagogue,
No Psalms of David now the silence break,
No Rabbi reads the ancient Decalogue
In the grand dialect the Prophets spake.
Gone are the living, but the dead remain,
And not neglected; for a hand unseen,
Scattering its bounty, like a summer rain,
Still keeps their graves and their remembrance green.
How came they here
? What burst of Christian hate,
What persecution, merciless and blind,
Drove o’er the sea — that desert desolate —
These Ishmaels and Hagars of mankind
?
They lived in narrow streets and lanes obscure,
Ghetto and Judenstrass, in mirk and mire;
Taught in the school of patience to endure
The life of anguish and the death of fire.
All their lives long, with the unleavened bread
And bitter herbs of exile and its fears,
The wasting famine of the heart they fed,
And slaked its thirst with marah of their tears.
Anathema maranatha! was the cry
That rang from town to town, from street to street;
At every gate the accursed Mordecai
Was mocked and jeered, and spurned by Christian feet.
Pride and humiliation hand in hand
Walked with them through the world where’er they went;
Trampled and beaten were they as the sand,
And yet unshaken as the continent.
For in the background figures vague and vast
Of patriarchs and of prophets rose sublime,
And all the great traditions of the Past
They saw reflected in the coming time.
And thus forever with reverted look
The mystic volume of the world they read,
Spelling it backward, like a Hebrew book,
Till life became a Legend of the Dead.
When Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote “The Jewish Cemetary at Newport,” he concluded it with these lines:
“But ah! What once has been shall
be no more!
The groaning earth in travail and in pain Brings forth its races, but does not restore, And the dead nations never rise again. “
Longfellow penned these words in 1852, at a time when it seemed impossible that the dead nation of Israel could ever rise again. Little did Longfellow realize that among the lifeless Jews scattered around the world there was to be thrown the eternal spark of life. It was the spark of rebirth kindled by the message of Theodor Herzl in 1896 – the message of “The Jewish State.” For more than 1800 years the chosen people of God, the dead nation of Israel, wandered as forsaken corpses in the great wilderness of the Gentile nations. But the same God, who allowed this punishment of a rejecting nation to occur, has now caused a dead nation to be resurrected from its Gentile graveyard. Longfellow was wrong; God has lifted up a scattered corpse into a living nation – the risen nation of Israel. When the Great Tribulation Period begins on this planet, both unbelieving Jew and Gentile will personally feel the wrath of Almighty God.
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