(3) He must also be a man of prayer, depending upon the Spirit of God to use the Word. The prophet was commanded to call upon the breath of God to breathe upon the valley of bones, and, while he spoke God's word, God's invisible power moved upon the valley.
1 Phillips Brooks, Essays cmd Addresses, 472.
248 LIFE FROM THE DEAD
^j " The most striking thing of all in each day's work," says one of Professor Flint's students, — " the most impressive act of all — was the prayer with which he began the day's work. There we were — 130 of us or so, finding our several ways like the members of a great herd to our accustomed places, and having found them, chatting away about all sorts of things in church and state — sharpening pencils, preparing notebooks ; a hum, a buzz, a rustle over all. And then the retiring-room door opened ; a little, spare, alert figure hastened to the platform with exactly that shy sideways-looking expression in the Sir George Eeid portrait, so sideways-looking and uncertain in his walk as to give one at times the impression of lameness. The next moment we were on our feet with heads bent, minds waiting, ears straining, listening to the few short sentences of agonised and agonising pleading with which he cast himself and us all on the mercy of God in Christ. Pardon for our sins, strength for our need, the strength needful for this day and its duties : just a few short sentences, but they seemed to rise out of infinite depths of helplessness and of trust, the cry of a strong man in his utter weakness and absolute dependence upon God. It was an instruction to us that we should prepare the devotional part of our Sunday service before we took up the preparation of our sermon; we know that this was his own custom for each day's lecture. And as we ponder his precept and recall his example and think of our foolishness in the neglect of both, we get very near the secret, the greatest of all the secrets, perhaps, of our failure on the Sabbath day. His prayer was a wrestling with God and a prevailing; the hard won victory of faith over a stubborn wilfulness and out of the midst of a great weakness." x
III.
The Life-Giving God.
The dry bones stirred at the word of the Lord. They were not thereby vitalized or quickened, but they were stirred. Ezekiel describes the effect in one of the weirdest of visions. " As I prophesied there was a noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones came together bone to his bone." Under the urgent preaching of the prophet, the disseda membra — those miserable fragments of mutilated manhood — were stirred to shame at their condition, and they rallied into at least the appearance of an organized body.
aP. Macmillan, The Life of Robert Flint (1914), 288.
EZEKIEL xxxvu. 3 249
There was a " shaking " ; a movement all over the valley as the bones, recognizing their mutual affinities, glided towards one another; and there was a "noise" as they came together with hollow click, bone to his bone. And then over the naked skeletons flesh and sinew crept, and the skin covered them above. And that was all that the preaching of the greatest prophet of his generation accomplished, all that his urgent en- treaty to hear the word of the Lord effected.
There was still no breath in them. Any quickening of interest was a momentary reflection of light from his eager face, for they had no source of light within themselves. So, after prophesying to the bones, there remained for him another prophesying, to the wind — " Prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, son of man, and say to the wind, Thus saith the Lord God : Come from the four winds, 0 breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live. So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army." In preaching and in all great work for men, we come upon the same transition — from that which we can do to that which we cannot do, when we must lay down the instruments at our command, and seek another. All greater work requires them both.
1. Ezekiel's preaching had prepared the way of the Lord, and made His path straight ; the reorganized bones in which the saving grace of shame had been stirred were ready to receive the quicken- ing of the Divine power. And God is ready to give wherever men are ready to receive ; the valley of dry bones was to be the scene of a great manifestation of creative goodness. As it was in the beginning, so it was now. In that far-off day of creation God fashioned the dust of the earth into a human form, and it lay before Him, a masterpiece of Divine architecture. But it was dead ; it was unspiritual ; it was like the beasts of the field, only a little more elaborately planned, a little more delicately executed. But God had graciously purposed to make man in His own image, after His likeness. And, stooping over that masterpiece of clay modelling, He breathed into it His own Divine breath ; He said to it : " Eeceive the Holy Ghost," and now that animate clay was a living son of God. Just so, after the dead bones had come