1. Ezekiel was prepared for his part in this resurrection from the dead. He was prepared in a twofold way.
(1) He had a vision of God. — In the first chapter of Ezekiel's prophecy we are told that he saw visions of God. He saw wings with human hands under them ; a vision of the Divine and the human — (the wing everywhere symbolizes Divinity, and the hand humanity) — the Divine controlling the human, for the wings moved the hands. He saw winged creatures with the face of a man symbolizing intelligence, the face of a lion symbolizing
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courage, the face of an ox symbolizing patience, and the face of an eagle symbolizing aspiration, all under control of the Divine wings. The need of every prophet of God is that his intelligence, courage, patience, and aspiration shall be linked with God and be completely controlled by Him.
(2) He felt the hand of God. — " The hand of the Lord was upon me." The hand of the Lord symbolizes His power, and to be under His hand is to be endued with His power. The Spirit of God is in every Christian for life, but every Christian is not under God's hand for power. The prophet responds to the touch of God and goes where He leads. " The hand of the Lord was upon me, and he carried me out in the Spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley ; and it was full of bones." He was willing to be led by the Lord's hand into the valley of bones. The temptation is for us to seek the garden with its flowers rather than the valley with its bones.
T| The sorrowful sense of the widespread deadness must enter into a man's spirit, and be ever present to him, in order to fit him for his work. A dead world is not to be quickened on easy terms. We must see mankind in some measure as God sees them if we are to do God's work among them. So-called Christian teachers, who do not believe that the race is dead in sin, or who, believing it, do not feel the tragedy of the fact, and the power lodged in their hands to bring the true life, may prophesy to the dry bones for ever, and there will be no shaking among them.1
2. Ezekiel began by facing the facts. It is always a false start in religion to begin by minimizing the tragedy that has befallen human nature — to make little of the sin that has filled the world with sorrow — and so reduce the cure which Christianity brings to the level of the merely " natural." Mr. Birrell declared once that the one doctrine of religion he had never any difficulty in believing was the doctrine of original sin. Human nature is depraved — totally depraved. That does not mean that there is no good left in it ; there is a difference between fallen humanity and devilhood ; there is left that to which the good can appeal and which responds to the appeal of the good. But sin has invaded human nature in its totality ; it has penetrated to every part and power. It has thrown its plague of darkness over the
1 A. Maclaren.
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understanding ; it has warped the emotional life ; it has vitiated our moral personality and inflicted unnatural disease on our physical frames ; our fall is complete, our depravity total. If we are to magnify the grace of God we must follow Ezekiel's example. He did not explain away the stern and awful facts, so fostering a false hope. No, he stood in the very midst of the valley gazing on the melancholy scene ; he passed by the bones round about ; he surveyed all the facts, and there was no getting away from them, there were very many, and they were very dry.
Tf That this world hath evil in all its parts, that its matter is in a corrupt, disordered state, full of grossness, disease, impurity, wrath, death, and darkness, is as evident as that there is light, beauty, order, and harmony everywhere to be found in it. It is as impossible that this outward state and condition of things should be a first and immediate work of God as that there should be good and evil in God Himself. . . . But now, as in man, the little world, there is excellency and perfection enough to prove that human nature is the work of an All-perfect Being, yet so much impurity and disease of corrupt flesh and blood as undeniably shows that sin has almost quite spoiled the work of God ; so, in the great world, the footsteps of an infinite wisdom in the order and harmony of the whole sufficiently appear, yet the disorders, tumults, and evils of nature plainly demonstrate that the perfect condition of this world is only the remains or ruins, first, of a heaven spoiled by the fall of angels, and then of a paradise lost by the sin of man. So that man and the world in which he lives lie both in the same state of disorder and impurity, have both the same marks of life and death in them, both bring forth the same sort of evils, both want a redeemer, and have need of the same kind of death and resurrection before they can come to their first state of purity and perfection.1